I’ve always said that the law firm world is one of “Monkey See… Monkey Do.” Turns out that the big legal publisher world follows that same mantra. If you look at a cached list of Lexis Librarian Relations Consultants, you’ll see the list has six names on it that don’t appear today. Seems that Lexis is following Westlaw (AKA Thomson Reuters Legal) in cutting the number of staff they have that work as library liaisons between the clients and the company. We reported on the cuts in the Westlaw Library Relations team back in January of this year.

Alright… this sort of cut doesn’t really surprise anyone (other than it took Lexis five additional months to pull the trigger trimming the group.) Times are hard… subscriptions are being cut… overhead is being reduced as needed… since these folks are considered overhead, it was probably inevitable that they would be given the ax just like their counterparts at West did a few months back.

I’ve got an email out to some of the remaining Consultants to see if they can put out a statement about the apparent layoffs.  One other little thing that caught my eye was the fact that on the “old” list of Consultants, Lexis didn’t list the Team Leads, but do on the “new” list. Perhaps to offset the length of the list as to not make it look so drastic?

UPDATE: Here is the response I received from Lexis on the re-alignment of Librarian Relations Consultants:

Carol Lyons Weber, Vice President of Customer Consultants at LexisNexis:

“As part of an overall re-alignment of resources to meet the changing needs of customers, LexisNexis has streamlined its team of Librarian Relations Consultants. 

The company remains committed to law librarians, and has expanded its diverse set of tools and resources to provide product training, continuing education and on-going customer support. We recently introduced a new Librarian Innovation Team, comprised of law librarians to provide feedback on development of new products and services for librarians, and the LexisNexis InfoPro online site offering educational programs which conveniently update, inform and interact with law librarians on an ongoing basis.

We are supporting affected employees as they pursue new opportunities – both inside and outside the company. Customers who will work with a new LRC will hear from our team within the next week.”