Where Are the Law Librarians?

In recent years, the number of law librarians in public sector and academic roles has declined. Most notably, the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General (MAG) has reduced the staff of its Toronto-based law library to the point that, as of sometime in 2025, it no longer has a professionally staffed law library.^[2] In other words, no actual librarians work at the law library of the Ministry of the Attorney General.^[3] This deprofessionalization took place quietly and gradually, with no public announcement, no discussion in the legislature, and no opportunity for public scrutiny.

The MAG is not the only place where the roles of professional law librarians have been diminishing. At the 2026 Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference, Annette Demers, a librarian at the University of Windsor Law Library, described how, as of May 2026, only nine of 23 academic law libraries in Canada have full-time directors, compared to 17 out of 20 law libraries in 2003.^[4]

This contrasts with large Canadian law firms, which continue to professionally staff their internal law libraries. A comparison of the staffing levels at six of the largest Toronto-based firms finds that the total number of law librarians at these firms has slightly increased compared to 30 years ago.^[5] At the dawn of the AI age, the number of professional librarians working at the large Toronto firms is equal to or higher than the number 30 years ago at the dawn of the Internet age.^[6]

What does all this say about the continued role and importance of law librarians and law libraries? Writing in 2005, at a time when it was becoming clear that most legal research could be done from one’s desk, without having to visit a physical law library, Bob Berring asked:

If law libraries can no longer be defined as buildings, and can no longer be viewed as synonymous with the collections of information that they contain, and are no longer the institutions that define legitimate information, then what is their true nature?^[7]

Berring answered his question by describing how “the soul of law libraries consists of law librarians” and the work they do.

This post will consider the work that law librarians do and consider how the loss of a professionally staffed library may impact the work of MAG. The intention of this post is not to criticize MAG’s current approach to staffing its library, as staffing decisions involve financial trade-offs and other considerations that the author is not privy to. Rather, the aim is to highlight the possible consequences of this particular approach to staffing. Because the deprofessionalization of the MAG library might have broad implications for all Ontarians, this specific example deserves to be scrutinized more closely.^[8] As the largest “law firm” in Ontario,^[9] how do the services at the current MAG law library compare to kinds of library services that the lawyers at large private law firms in Ontario enjoy? What effect will a librarian-free library have on the quality of legal services that MAG provides the Province and, by extension, on the public interest generally?

The Largest Law Firm in Ontario

The Ministry of the Attorney General’s mandate is to “[administer] the justice system in Ontario and protect the public”. It is also one of the largest employers of lawyers in the country. Only the federal Department of Justice, sometimes described as “the oldest and biggest law firm in the country,”^[10] is a larger employer. With approximately 1600 lawyers, MAG employs more Ontario lawyers than any of the large Canadian law firms.^[11] For example, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, which has the largest count of lawyers in Canada, employs over 850 lawyers nationwide, with over 300 of those based in its Toronto and Ottawa offices. The firm with the largest number of lawyers in its Toronto office, McCarthy Tétrault, employs over 800 lawyers nationwide, with just under half of those based in its Toronto office. If the federal Department of Justice can be described as Canada’s largest law firm, then the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General is easily Ontario’s largest law firm.

The MAG Library

As the largest employer of lawyers in Ontario, MAG has maintained a law library at its 720 Bay St location since it moved there in 1989, expanding from its prior 18 King St. W location.^[12] To meet the Ministry’s legal information needs, the MAG library has employed professional staffing, rostering at least three professional law librarians for most of its existence. Following a few years of declining professional and para-professional staffing, the MAG library was reduced to one librarian by 2022 and to zero librarians by 2025.

In a 2023 job posting for a law librarian position, MAG described its library as:

[P]rovid[ing]…reference, research and inter-library loan services to the legal staff of the Ministry of the Attorney General, geographically dispersed in more than 50 locations across the province. In addition, the Library maintains a print and electronic collection of legal texts, journals, law reports, legislation, etc., to support the legal information needs of the Ministry.

The posting went on to spell out the roles that library professionals are best placed to carry out. Roles which were clearly relevant to the work of MAG at the time. These included:

• “Confidential reference/research services”
• Provision of “legal research training to articling/summer students and new Counsel”
• Development “of legal research guides and training materials”
• Identifying general trends to ensure that the MAG library is current and relevant
• Analyzing user requirements and trends
• Reviewing the collection to “ensure it is relevant, comprehensive and current”
• Collection development of Canadian, U.S. and international resources
• Cataloguing, acquisitions, subject analysis, classification, serials control, indexing and circulation, according to professionally accepted library standards

These responsibilities align well with the kinds of responsibilities professional librarians have in large law firm settings, as well as at the Law Society of Ontario’s Great Library, courthouse libraries, and academic law libraries across the province.

Less than two years after this job posting, no law librarians were employed at MAG to provide any of these services.

Why deprofessionalize?

In the absence of any public announcements, we can only speculate on the factors that went into the decline of the MAG library. However, there are a number of “standard” answers that libraries have experienced which can give us a reasonable guess.

When faced with financial pressure, it is common for administrators to see librarian roles as overhead. A hiring freeze has been in place in Ontario since 2018 for “non-essential” public service positions as part of the Ontario Government’s “Public Services Delivered More Efficiently” approach. Because law librarians are not the MAG’s core business, it is easy to see how reducing or not filling law librarian positions may be easier to justify, especially if decision-makers are not actively involved in the legal research process and do not understand the full scope of a librarian’s role. Another recent example of lost librarian positions where the justification was explicitly described as driven by “efficiency” was the elimination of all librarian positions at the Nova Scotia Community College in May 2026.^[13]

Another common argument for deprofessionalizing libraries is the idea that most needed resources are online and therefore easily accessed. In recent years, the Ontario government has closed or significantly reduced several ministry libraries, including those at the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, Northern Development and Mines, and the Office of the Chief Coroner. No doubt widespread digital access to many of the materials required by these units informed these decisions. Legal information is of course also primarily accessed digitally. It is not a stretch to imagine that broad (and sometimes free) access to digital law played a role in the deprofessionalization of the MAG library.

The emergence of generative AI creates new challenges to perceptions of the utility of law librarian roles. While the “it’s all online” argument still leaves room for law librarian expertise in conducting research, organizing legal information and training students and associates, the extreme version of the generative AI argument assumes that the task of working through, synthesizing, making sense of and applying the fruits of research can now be largely outsourced to the machine. In the four years since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, Generative AI has penetrated all aspects of legal work, including legal research. This rapid adoption, of course, raises a number of issues, including concerns around hallucinations, the ethics of undeclared use, the corresponding problem of the need to verify the outputs of generative AI (the “verification paradox”),^[14] as well as pedagogical issues around how law students and new lawyers learn about the law.

At this early stage of AI adoption, it seems premature, if not dangerous, to eliminate the roles of a profession whose primary competency is assessing and working with complex legal information sources, including, of course, the sources required to verify generative AI outputs.^[15]

What is lost?

As a provincial ministry that is “protecting the public by delivering a wide range of legal services”, what impact will the deprofessionalization of the MAG library have on the public interest?

A) Reduction in Legal Research Quality

Legal research is a complex enterprise.

This complexity arises from the jurisdictions covered, the variety of sources available, their historical organization over time, and the research tools developed to navigate them.

…

Legal information is further complicated by the variety of players in the marketplace, which includes governments, non-profit content providers, and particularly, the legal publishing industry. The industry is competitive and evolving. Legal information is costly, and available in many places, and not all content is available from all providers.

…

Overlaying artificial intelligence on this complexity makes the work of the legal information professional even more critical in today’s legal information landscape.^[16]

In large law firm and academic settings, law librarians regularly perform complex legal research – particularly research that is historical and/or interjurisdictional or international. This is because the skill sets law librarians possess make them the most likely people in any organization to have a broad understanding of all the sources of legal information, as well as how to use them appropriately.

Given that all of the large Ontario-based law firms have professional law librarians in their ranks, it is reasonable to expect that without this role that MAG is placing itself – and therefore the interests of Ontario and Ontarians at a disadvantage when facing these law firms.

A potential counterargument is that complex legal research is uncommon and that the tools available to lawyers simplify the process to the extent that the expertise of law librarians is less needed. While it is true that tools have improved, they are not designed to perform tasks such as, for example, i) tracing a statute and all its amendments back to its pre-Confederation origins, or ii) identifying what protections exist for industrial designs in each common law African jurisdiction. And of course, any AI tool that provides an answer to these questions would need to be checked against traditional sources (the verification paradox), a skill that not all practicing lawyers possess.

B) Training of Articling Students and New Lawyers

Connected to the complexity of legal research, a key role of law librarians at law firms and law schools is to instruct students and associates in the methods and strategy of legal research. This instruction includes complex legal research but also supports the learning of more basic research skills that new lawyers are still developing. Because in practice settings, articling students and junior associates do much of the research legwork on a matter, well-supported students and juniors will lead to overall better outcomes. Again, it is reasonable to assume that in the absence of professional library staff to provide high-level, expert instruction, training, and ongoing support, the quality of work of summer and articling students and early career associates will suffer, which will have a lasting effect throughout their careers.

Writing in Slaw in May 2026, Theresa Leach reflects on practicing law at the City of Toronto:

And then there were the librarians. Watching them work was a quiet education. They didn’t simply retrieve sources. They helped lawyers articulate half‑formed questions, redirected research paths before they became dead ends, and supplied context that made doctrine usable. In retrospect, what they were offering looked very much like mentorship…

A potential counterargument that the MAG may have, and one that has been communicated to me and to a number of other academic law librarians, is that law schools already do the work of training students in legal research and can continue to support their students through their articles. This is an unrealistic assumption. Law school librarians are already busy supporting their own communities of students and faculty and do not have a mandate or capacity to offer free support to government ministries. Most law school research instruction occurs in the first year of law school. As law firm librarians know all too well, law school research instruction needs to be significantly supplemented (or retaught) by law librarians in the workplace. Academically focused research instruction is not a substitute for the timely and contextual instruction that firm librarians offer.

C) Management of Collections 

In addition to supporting the research process, law librarians are experts at building and maintaining digital and print collections. The materials needed to support a full-service legal practice are scattered across dozens of sources, some free, others requiring complex license negotiations to purchase or “rent” for a limited time. A well-resourced library with access to all the relevant digital resources takes significant experience to create and maintain – work which is essentially invisible from the library user’s perspective. For example, in 2026 the Times Higher Education ranked the Lincoln Alexander School of Law in Toronto as “second in Canada for research quality”. Whatever the value of such a distinction, the credit for this accomplishment will and should go to the faculty who are doing the researching and publishing. What is less visible is the considerable experience and knowledge of professional librarians required to assemble the research resources – i.e. library resources – that allowed a six-year-old law school to compete at the same level as established law schools.

Losing the expertise required to manage and build collections will not only cost MAG in the long run but will also impact the quality of research when important sources of legal information are unavailable. We are not working in an environment where access to Lexis, Westlaw or CanLII plus a little AI can cost-effectively meet all the needs of a complex organization. It is unrealistic to assume that generative AI, with its hallucinations, lack of exploration, and open questions about security and privacy, can fill the research gap for MAG.

D) The Duty of Competence

I do not believe that there is a reasonable argument to make that the deprofessionalization of the MAG library will directly impact a lawyer’s duty of competence as expressed in Rule 3.1 of the Rules of Professional Conduct. A large percentage of lawyers in Ontario work in environments where they do not have immediate access to a law library or the expertise of on-staff law librarians (although they do often have access to courthouse, county, and academic law libraries). The lack of a properly staffed library alone cannot therefore be determinative in meeting the requirements of the duty of competence.

What I am suggesting is that, as the largest law firm in the province, MAG has a responsibility to the public interest to ensure that its lawyers maintain the highest standards. MAG is not a sole practitioner working in a narrow area with a narrow set of resources. Large law firms, including MAG, deal with a much higher order of complexity in the work that they do. The largest private law firms continue to value librarians contributing to the competency of their lawyers. This is particularly relevant in an uncertain AI environment where the Law Society of Ontario requires that “Licensees should take time to familiarize themselves with the generative AI tool that they intend to use so that they are familiar with the software’s capabilities, risks and legal implications”^[17]. As noted by librarian Charlie Amiot, “[t]he lawyers who know how to use these tools carefully are, in a meaningful number of cases, the ones who received genuine legal research education from people who cared about getting it right. That instruction doesn’t happen without adequate staffing, and law library staffing has been moving in exactly the wrong direction for years.”

While there is clearly enough expertise in MAG’s ranks of 1600 lawyers to ensure that its work is done at a level of competence, the lack of professional library staff will, in the long run, chip away at the quality of work done, and the long-term impact is difficult to predict.

Private Law Firm Libraries

As noted at the outset, the one sector where law librarians have maintained their strong presence is at the large private law firms – private, profit-driven enterprises that see a benefit to maintaining a professional library staff. The value of a law library staff’s research expertise, their management of a complex information environment and the training and support they offer continues to be a necessary part of their operations.

It is instructive to consider how the large firms staff their libraries. Between them, six of the largest firms in Ontario (Davies, Goodmans, McCarthy, Osler, Stikeman and Torys) have 26 librarians on staff to work with their approximately 1700 Ontario based lawyers.^[18] In contrast, MAG’s roughly 1600 lawyers now work with exactly zero law librarians.

Assuming that MAG continues to be an outlier with respect to library staffing when compared to other large law firms, will we see a longer-term impact in the outcomes of matters where MAG is across the table facing one of these better-resourced firms, who have more resources to train their students and associates with, and better managed sources of information collections to draw from in constructing their arguments?

Looking ahead:

In deprofessionalizing, MAG has eliminated the part of the law library that is most relevant to its future success. If we only think of a law library as a physical space and a collection of print materials, then we miss what Bob Berring described as the most important element of the library:

“[T]he soul of law libraries consists of law librarians…From Langdell’s days onward it has been librarians that animated libraries and made them work. Librarians have long played the role of the intermediary between information and the person who needed it. It was the librarian who explained how to use the card catalog, how to find the desired information, where to find the needed book, and how to use and understand it once it was in hand…Librarians helped introduce LexisNexis and Westlaw to skeptical patrons. Librarians have toiled long and hard to bring the Internet into the lives of legal researchers. Librarians have served as the intermediary between information entrepreneurs and lawyers and law students.^[19]

We could add today that it is librarians who continue to assess, evaluate and work with legal information in all its forms, whether printed in the English Reports or generated by a proprietary AI tool.

Given the foregoing and having operated without professional library staff for over a year, MAG must consider the implications for the quality of research support, training and resources of its current approach and work to reinstate professional roles in its library. This is especially critical as MAG moves into its 483 Bay St. location along with a likely reduction in space for a physical library. MAG would be wise to work with professional librarians to properly develop a plan for a digital-first collection. In this effort, MAG can take its cues from law firm and academic law libraries who, while being digital-first, continue to maintain a professional staff to manage collections and offer research support and instruction.

____________________

[1] I would like to thank my colleague Sara Klein at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law Library for her review and suggestions on how to improve this post. I also want to thank the many colleagues who have helped with ensuring that the facts I describe here are accurate. Any errors in this post are mine alone.

^[2] For the purpose of this article, a professionally staffed law library is one that is staffed by at least one librarian. According to The Canadian Federation of Library Associations, “In Canada, a Librarian holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Studies from a program accredited by the American Library Association.”.

^[3] As of August 2026, the Ontario Government’s employee Directory lists three staff in its law library – none of them librarians.

^[4] Annette Demers, “Reinvigorating Academic Law Library Standards 2026” (Canadian Association of Law Libraries Annual Conference, Moncton May 26, 2026). This measure reflects the fact that most Canadian academic law libraries are now managed by the University’s central library as opposed to the usual standard which was a librarian reporting to the Law School.

^[5] From 20 law librarians listed in the 1996/7 Toronto Association of Law Libraries Directory to 26 law librarians as of August 2026.

^[6] Using the Directory of the Toronto Association of Law Libraries, I compared the 1996/7 numbers of librarians on staff at six large Bay Street firms (Davies Ward & Beck, Goodman Phillips & Vineberg, McCarthy Tétrault, Osler Hoskin & Harcourt, Stikeman Elliott, and Tory Tory DesLauriers and Binnington) with the current level of staffing of the same firms (Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg, Goodmans, McCarthy Tétrault, Osler Hoskin & Harcourt, Stikeman Elliott and Torys) and verified the current number with staff at each of these firms. These specific six firms were chosen because their total number of lawyers practicing in Ontario today (Toronto and Ottawa) is roughly equivalent to the number of lawyers working for MAG – around 1600-1700. The 1996/7 to 2026 comparison is not a perfect measure as each of these firms have different lawyer counts than they did 30 years ago through growth and/or mergers, and librarian counts may have grown in proportion to the size of the firms. Regardless, what this comparison does demonstrate is that librarian counts have not decreased in the last 30 years.

^[7] Robert C. Berring, “Deconstructing the Law Library: The Wisdom of Meredith Willson”
(2005) 89:5 Minn L Rev 1381 at 1402.

^[8] The author has worked in law libraries since 1995, first at firm libraries and later at academic law libraries. While I am not directly impacted by how library services are staffed at MAG, it is nonetheless important to highlight this situation and draw out the possible implications for the administration of justice in Ontario.

^[9] Law Society of Ontario, Rules of Professional Conduct (Toronto: Law Society of Ontario, 2022) ch 1.1-1 defines a “law firm” as: “…one or more lawyers practising;
…

(d) in a government, a Crown corporation, or any other public body” [emphasis mine].

See also John Mark Keyes, “Loyalty, Legality and Public Sector Lawyers” (2019) 97 Can Bar Rev 129, “The Supreme Court in Krieger v Law Society of Alberta held that public sector lawyers are subject to these codes, and the Model Code defines “law firm” to include lawyers practicing “in a government, a Crown corporation or any other public body.” at 134

^[10] Deborah MacNair, “The Role of the Federal Public Sector Lawyer: From Polyester to Silk” 50 UNB LJ (2001) 125 at 143; Almost a decade later, Adam Dodek wrote that “Canada’s largest law entity is actually the federal Department of Justice and not one of the national law firms…. With over 2,700 lawyers, it is more than twice the size of the largest law firm.” (Adam M Dodek, “Lawyering at the Intersection of Public Law and Legal Ethics: Government Lawyers as Custodians of the Rule of Law” (2010) 33:1 Dal LJ 1 at 4.

^[11] According to the LinkedIn profile of the Association of Law Officers of the Crown (ALOC) “ALOC has approximately 750 members located in legal service branches across government as well as in various agencies, boards and commissions.” Its sister organization the Ontario Crown Attorney’s Association (OCAA) “represents over 850 Assistant Crown Attorneys and Crown Counsel”. I have chosen 1600 lawyers in total as an estimate based on the membership of these two Ontario associations. (Both sites last visited 17 August 2026).

^[12] Maria Cece, “Justice in Ontario: Who Does What?”, (1989) 9 TALL NEWSL.

^[13] Nova Scotia Community College Press Release, “NSCC budget balanced: operation efficiencies, role reductions” (6 May 2026). For an excellent analysis on how this cut is relevant to a Canadian legal professionals see Hannah Rosborough, “The Legal Cost of Cutting Librarians” (2 June 2026).

^[14] See Joshua Yuvaraj, “The Verification-Value Paradox: A Normative Critique of Gen AI Use in Legal Practice” (2026) 52 Monash University Law Review (forthcoming). For a critique of this “paradox” see Mitch Kowalski, “GenAI, the Verification-Value Paradox – a Critique” (20 November 2025).

^[15] See generally, Canadian Association of Law Libraries, “Competencies of a Legal Researcher in Canada” Endorsed by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Executive Board on January 22, 2025.

^[16] Annette Demers, Yemisi Dina, and Gian Medves, “Trends in Canadian Academic Law Libraries: Report on the Reinvigorating Academic Law Library Standards Survey, Part One”, 2025 CanLIIDocs 1371 at 2.

^[17] Law Society of Ontario, “White Paper on Licensee Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence” (April 2024) at 9.

^[18] Together these six firms have 38 staff members working in their libraries (26 librarians and 12 library technicians).

^[19] Supra note 7.