CRIV CONNECTION

Author: Deanna Barmakian, Research Librarian, Harvard Law School Library 

We’re hearing from Alexa Robertson from the Practising Law Institute about what it’s like on the other side of the exhibit hall table. We’ll be discussing how PLI prepares for conferences, their experience once there, and other insider info AALL members will be interested to know.

Getting to Know You 

Thanks for connecting with us! What is your role and how many years have you been with PLI? 

Thanks Deanna! It’s wonderful to connect with you and the AALL community. I’m the vice president of PLI Press. I have been at PLI for almost 17 years now, and have been lucky enough to work with librarians throughout my career. I got my start in legal research as a reference librarian for the New York County District Attorney’s Office. When I joined PLI as a library relations manager, I saw an opportunity to develop a centralized resource for electronic access to all PLI publications and helped bring this idea to life leading the team that built the legal research platform now known as PLI PLUS.

My role today covers our PLI Press teams more broadly, including taxonomy, legal information services, and publishing. It’s been wonderful to be involved with all aspects of PLI Press, including our authors who are the backbone of all that we do.

The Nuts & Bolts of Exhibiting

About how many conferences does PLI participate in each year? Which do you normally attend?

PLI regularly attends conferences related to the legal community, professional development, law schools, CLE, and of course, legal publishing and law librarianship. We exhibit at roughly 25 conferences per year. We also attend smaller regional conferences such as LLAGNY and ALLUNY, and participate in various law school research fairs and other events.

AALL is the biggest conference for PLI Press. It is an opportunity for us to connect with legal librarians in person and to showcase PLI PLUS in front of its core users, who give us valuable feedback that helps us improve the platform.

The AALL community is incredibly important to us. You may be surprised to know this, but we time major announcements, products, or enhancements to align with AALL’s Annual Meeting & Conference. For example, we launched our Practising Law Librarian podcast at AALL 2024, the PLI PLUS redesign in 2017 and 2022, and the iOS mobile app in 2015.

What goes into preparing for a conference, specifically the AALL Annual Meeting?

In addition to the exhibit hall booth, we also host an annual Lunch & Learn, which is our way of showing our appreciation for law librarians by providing a meal to share with colleagues and a chance to learn about all the new resources PLI has to offer.

The preparation for both the booth and the lunch begins three to four months ahead of the event. The library relations team holds a brainstorming meeting to come up with a theme for our booth and giveaways. We try to support the local economy by tying the theme to the city hosting the conference. This year we are leaning into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame theme to tie into the location of Cleveland. Last year, we drew on Portland’s coffee and outdoor culture by featuring local coffee for our raffle prizes giveaways and branded tin camping/coffee mugs as our booth giveaway.

We work with PLI’s in-house creative team to create marketing materials. Since PLI is committed to keeping our community Ever Current, these materials must reflect that, with up-to-date book images and screenshots of the results pages. Increasingly, we forgo brochures and flyers in place of QR codes and landing pages, as that is becoming the preferred way to consume information. Then, it’s a lot of logistics like renting furniture for the booth, printing and shipping materials, ordering the AV equipment, and of course selecting the menu for the lunch.

The Booth Experience

What tends to be the most common question or interaction at the booth? Are there any questions that would be better handled outside of a conference setting?

One question that we receive often is “Tell me what’s new.”  We know that librarians are busy, and this event gives them an opportunity to learn more about PLI and the other exhibitors in one place. While we all receive emails and do our best to keep up with the various blogs and substacks, a conference is a perfect event for questions and answers, as well as a chance to dive deeper in order to understand enhancements relevant to our customers’ unique needs. We always have kiosks that allow us to demo the new enhancements to the platform in a one-on-one capacity.

I’m guessing you field suggestions about the database. What happens with this feedback after the conference? Do you have any examples of a suggestion being implemented?

We welcome and receive all manner of suggestions in any form. Every piece of feedback we receive gets logged and considered for future enhancements. Many of our most popular features on PLI PLUS, such as Search Alerts, Collaborative Bookshelves, and our Ever Current links, are the result of librarian feedback. We have also implemented services such as MARC records for PLI PLUS subscribers in response to direct librarian feedback. The exhibit hall booth provides a great opportunity for us to converse with our customers, which is where a lot of feedback originates. Our product managers attend AALL because it gives them the opportunity to hear directly from customers.

How does a vendor evaluate a “successful” conference? Is it based on formal metrics, lead generation, or relationship building?

For PLI, the voice of the customer is key to all that we do, so I’d say success at conferences is measured by our ongoing relationship-building and having the conversations I described earlier. PLI Press and our PLI PLUS platform are well-known in the community, so it is always a pleasure to meet people who are new to what we do and to be able to generate leads—but for us, it’s really about connection and the mutually beneficial relationship we have with this community.

For Fun

What has been your favorite product/feature you’ve gotten to demo for librarians in the past few years?

Search Alerts is a feature that I love to show because once someone sees it, they start using it and find it to be a time-saver.  It also was a large project to implement, so it’s rewarding when you work on something so complex behind the scenes and then see it benefit customers.

The burning question: Who picks the booth swag? What’s been PLI’s most popular memorable giveaway or promotional event?

Booth swag is a team effort with our Library Relations Managers and Marketing Team.  Since PLI is all about providing our customers with practical resources, we want our swag to be practical too, so we always look for items that are useful, and wherever we can, we try to tie it to our theme. For example, when we launched the PLI PLUS mobile app we promoted “research on the go,” and gave away bento lunch boxes. We have found that certain items are tried and true such as tote bags, moleskin style notebooks, or reusable straws, so we often fall back on those.

Our most memorable raffle prize was a kayak.  PLI PLUS (then known as Discover PLUS) won the New Product of the Year Award in 2013. The conference was held in Seattle that year, so we found our way to an outdoorsy theme, and our raffle prize was a branded REI kayak because we wanted to go big in our celebration.

Logistically, it was challenging.  We tried to bring it to AALL but ran into issues with how to display it. It was too large to easily fit inside our booth, so we went so far as exploring if it could be hung from the ceiling!  Eventually we settled for photos at the booth and shipped it directly to the lucky winner.

Thanks so much for speaking with CRIV! 

The Practising Law Institute (PLI) is a nonprofit learning organization that provides accredited continuing legal and professional education programs and produces podcasts and video series, delivered by expert volunteers. Through PLI Press, PLI also publishes a comprehensive library of treatises, course handbooks, and other publications, available through the PLI PLUS online platform. Visit pli.edu to learn more.