AALL 2025 - The Highlights

We’re all back and fully recovered from a great few days at the AALL (American Association of Law Libraries) 2025 conference in Portland, Oregon. There was a great atmosphere this year, and everyone seemed excited to chat about everything from the potential of AI to the ethics around it.

AALL is certainly a highlight each year for the team at Vable - an opportunity for us to meet with old friends, talk to new people and discuss the upcoming trends in the law library sector.

Key Highlights

We had some great conversations over the four-day event, and were bowled over by the number of people heading to our booth to chat specifically about our guides, our self-service user platform MyVable, and our CEO Matthew Dickinson’s recent appearance on The Geek In Review Podcast (more about that here).

With Information Professionals expected to do more with less, MyVable proved a key topic of conversation. The platform is designed specifically for lawyers to access the information they want, when they want it, all curated via the back-end by the administrators. It can ease the load of alerts by ensuring lawyers have access to content as soon as it becomes available.

Emerging Trends

Unsurprisingly, AI was a key theme we heard again and again. We’ve talked before about how AI is perfectly positioned to help knowledge professionals and library teams with the ‘drudge work’ of their roles, helping them focus on the valuable work. Nevertheless, a fear remains that AI will eventually replace the skilled library teams at some law firms.

However, interestingly, much of the talk at AALL this year centred around an interesting talk by Kate Irwin (Wake Forest Law) and Leland Sampson (Maryland Thurgood Marshall State Law Library) called Resistance Is NOT Futile: Strategies for Integrating a Critical AI Perspective in Libraries.

It focused on the ethical questions surrounding AI, including the environmental costs, copyright issues, privacy/confidentiality, worker exploitation, labor displacement, bias, and unequal access. They argued that law librarians need not be passive bystanders to the implementation of AI but can push for a more thoughtful and equitable AI integration.

Other key themes at the conference included the evolution of the law librarian in the face of improving technology (including the aforementioned AI), and the risks this brings to copyright and licensing. As tech improves, and law libraries are now mainly digital, the skills required by information professionals need to evolve - part of this evolution will be ensuring quality remains inscrutable.

Thanks to AALL

All in all, it was a fantastic event and gave us a lot to consider for the coming year. We’d like to thank the organisers, fellow exhibitors, and - above all - the fantastic and friendly attendees for making it what it was, and we’re already looking forward to AALL 2026!

If you didn’t get a chance to speak to us during the event, we’d love you to get in touch. We’d be happy to discuss anything laid out here, give an introduction to the company or run through a demo. 

What’s Next?

With all the changes in the legal technology landscape, the next 12 months are going to be exciting and will help us predict the longer-term outlook for law librarians. We’ll see you at the next event, but until then:

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