In case you’re glossing over this thinking “Hey, I’m just a lawyer with a liberal arts degree. I did my LL.B/JD because words and persuasive reasoning are my strengths — not Newtonian physics and circuit boards” please hold on a sec. You don’t have to be an IP lawyer, consume medical reports for breakfast, or impeach cyber-forensic experts to consider the impacts of STEM on law and the delivery of legal services. You don’t even have to be at a big law firm (who are under increasing pressure from non-traditional competitors such as tech-savvy accounting firms) to see that legal service delivery is increasingly becoming tech and data driven.

At some level, every lawyer is a business (or is some firm/department/employer’s business) so even if your files have nothing to do with STEM subject matters, there are mounting STEM factors that influence your viability/competitiveness as a service provider: online marketing, productivity software, document automation, etc. And quite apart from the slick tools that can help your bottom-line, there are STEM-driven standards that influence people’s opinions about their lawyer’s professional competency — take encryption for example (how well do we protect a client’s communications and information).

So what does any of this have to do with a law library like CLBC? For starters, we are an accessible gateway to the many CLEBC course materials that have been published with your technological competence in mind. Send us an email (librarian@courthouselibrary.ca), come on in, or call us and we’d be happy to help you out.