 Hello, this is Kim Dority, and I am the career advisor for the iSchool program. I am happy to introduce you to the person who will be joining us in today's career podcast, and that person is a practice department research liaison for a law firm called Troutman Pepper. And one of the things I want you to notice there is that he is not called a law librarian. Again, his title is a practice department research liaison. So I am going to ask Ryan a number of questions and get his feedback on what his career has been like and what this field is like, so we can give you the broadest possible field to explore if you think you may even remotely be interested in law librarianship because it is actually quite a fascinating and dynamic and diverse field. So with that, I am going to start asking Ryan some questions here. So Ryan, your first job in the law library world was as a library technician in the law library at Hewlett-Packard. Did you have an interest in corporate librarianship as you were going through grad school, or did you have an interest in law librarianship, or was the Hewlett-Packard job more of a stepping stone to other types of special library jobs for you? Well, I definitely had an interest in corporate librarianship, and a big reason why is I had done some office work prior to my experience at the iSchool. I worked in a market research firm for a couple of years, and I just knew that the office environment is something that really suits my personality. It's an environment where I'm comfortable. So I knew that the corporate aspect was something that I was definitely interested in and definitely wanted to go into some kind of corporate library, some kind of private corporate library. As far as law libraries versus other business libraries or any other kind of corporate library, I really wasn't sure, although I did kind of always have some interest in the legal world. I flirted with the idea of law school for a brief time, even going so far as to taking the LSAT. But ultimately, yes. Ultimately, I decided that my personality, the way my brain works, and the way that I see myself in the working world is much more geared towards a librarian kind of position. So in any case, I was interested in a corporate position. I was interested in a law position. And as far as the stepping stone issue goes, yes, it definitely was a stepping stone into something, into a career in law librarianship. And that was very much something that was on my mind. At the time, I had been unemployed for a few months, and I wasn't sure where I really wanted to go in terms of my career after I finished the high school. And I wound up having, as is often the case when you're unemployed, I wound up having two job opportunities at the same time. One of them was at the Hewlett-Packard Law Library, and the other was at a museum. And the museum was definitely going to be the better short-term option. If I remember correctly, the pay was a little bit better. And I definitely remember they were offering me benefits where the Hewlett-Packard job was a contract job that wasn't going to come with benefits. And those benefits would have been really helpful at the time. But I really thought that this was more of an opportunity for something that I would have wanted to do long-term. And if I could step in and respond to that, that is an incredibly strategic career move. Because when you're straight out of grad school, it seems like what you want to find is the perfect job, wherein reality, what you really want to find, is the perfect job opportunity. And that opportunity is going to then position you for the opportunities of the future. You made a great choice there. That's some really good thinking. Thank you. And it's funny because I do look back on that sometimes and think the exact same thing. Like, wow, I've really made a good decision long-term. I aced it. OK, so shortly after your work with Hewlett-Packard, you took position with law firm Baker McKenzie, where you worked for over 13 years. That's a long commitment. So what courses did you take in grad school to help prepare you for this type of work? I mean, clearly you flourished in this position. Also at Baker McKenzie, you were first a research librarian, then a resources librarian, then a research librarian supervisor. So could you tell us both about courses that you think help prepare you for this? But then also, could you tell us a bit about the difference between those positions? Sure. So as far as courses go, there are three that really jump out as ones that really made the most impact on my career as it stands today. I took a class in business librarianship. I took a class in law librarianship. And then the third was online searching. Those three, I think, really prepared me for what I do now. And I don't think any of them really, especially the business librarianship and the law librarianship, I don't think they were necessarily geared towards a lot of the specifics of what the job ultimately entails. But they really helped prepare me for a lot of the general things that I do. You know, just searching for information and things like that. I remember getting credentials to be able to use Lexis and Westlaw and Dialogue and all of these really high end research resources that, you know, I'd never heard of before. I never experienced before. And these are things that I use all the time. And I will especially point out that online searching class. That was something that I had seen in the course catalog semester after semester. And every semester, I would kind of roll my eyes, go, well, I know Google. I can search things, you know, you learn Boolean logic and things like that in the introductory courses. So why should I really do this? Well, it wound up being probably the most influential course that I took while I was at the high school. Just so much about really specific kinds of searching. And even in Google, you know, we we use Google every day. And it's it's such a user friendly, easy to use kind of tool that you don't really think of a lot of the advanced options that are there. And, you know, maybe maybe nowadays the kids know about a lot of the advanced searching options in Google. But, you know, back then a lot of these things were new to me. And then, of course, you know, they're teaching me about using Lexus and Westlaw dialogue and all these really specific tools that I had never used before. And, you know, even though I wasn't searching for the same things that I'm searching for now, just getting that experience with those tools really, really helped a lot and still helps to this day. That's a really good point, because if if I could build on and and agree with what you're saying as someone who has done research and writing for my entire LIS career, which has been decades, one of the things I think that's invaluable about a course like online searching is that it teaches you how to think about the process of doing research and to your point, Google is different than Lexus than dialogue than Westlaw. But what you learn in that online searching course is how to approach a topic. And yes, yeah, I I have I took a course in online searching as well and thought, you know, I'll probably never use this, but I just was interested in research and then it was sort of defined the entire rest of my life. And I think almost all LIS professionals could benefit from understanding the research process, even if they don't use it in a detailed manner in their day to day job. That's that's a great recommendation. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then to speak to the different roles that I had at Baker McKenzie, the first two are kind of the big ones, right? The research librarian and the resources librarian. Traditionally, law firm libraries have had two main branches, the two things that we do. One, we have researchers, research librarians do the work for the attorneys. The attorneys come to us and say, hey, can you find this piece of information? And, you know, we go out and we do the research. And then the other folks in the department are the resources librarians. Law firm libraries are a very unique department in the business world, not just in the law firm world, the entire business world, in the sense that our biggest expenditure is not payroll. It is resources. If we're thinking about all these different resources, Lexis Westlaw, Walterskluwer, all the others, all the very specific ones, too. These things aren't cheap. You know, there's a lot of information there. They're incredibly powerful tools and incredibly huge tools. They're not cheap. So these departments, these law firm library departments, need to have folks who are on top of those those tools and understand what they're used for, understand what the needs are of the different practice groups that work within the firm. And, you know, even it can go way deeper than that, too. A lot of law firms try to recover the costs for these research resources. So, you know, the people who are using them are going to put in, you know, what client that they're using them for. And OK, I was on this tool for 20 minutes and that represents, you know, X percent of our contract price for this month. So, you know, there's going to have to be somebody from the library who takes that information and then communicates it to accounting. So accounting can then charge the client back for that. So and that's just one example, right? There are a lot of different things that the resources librarians do. But can I stop you for just a sec, Brian and ask you this question and you don't need to be specific about what resource you're talking about and you don't need to be specific about which law firm you were working at when this was the case. But one of the things that absolutely stunned me years ago was finding out that at that point, what was called US West had a resources budget that and if they were acquiring or licensing things like Gartner Group market research tools, one resource could cost them $50,000 a year. Yeah. So when you're talking about these very expensive commercial databases, could you name a range or a figure to give students an idea of of the kinds of dollars we're talking about here? And again, ranges or don't you don't need to be real specific. But I'm thinking when somebody when you say they're expensive, a student might think, oh, my gosh, they might be $5,000 a year. That's definitely not the case. Yeah. Yeah. So I probably can't give very specific numbers partially because, you know, I don't know a lot of the specifics of, you know, the exact contracts and and also, you know, it's it's I know different firms pay different amounts. And a lot of that is because, you know, there are so many different options that you can get within these tools. Right. So, you know, if one firm is ordering, you know, 10 different things within Lexus, it's going to be different than another firm that has, you know, 30 different tools within Lexus, that kind of thing. But like you said, it's it's not even close to $5,000. It's, you know, and I can't say the exact amounts, but, you know, certainly, you know, far above that. And you know, big numbers. Yeah. And it can be a little bit intimidating when you're seeing these big numbers. But, you know, you just have to tell yourself, this is this is what we do. You know, this is this is we have to pay this amount of money so we can have access to this information. We can't do our jobs without this information. And and the firms know that and they understand that. And it's just kind of the cost of doing business in a law firm. Right. Right. OK. And then Research Librarian Supervisor. Yeah. So so basically my experience in the law firm world has generally been, like I said, these two branches, you know, the Research Librarian and Resources Librarian. And and we're going to put a pin in that and come back to it a little bit because there are some some new and exciting changes that have been developing pretty recently. But, you know, traditionally, what I would say is when you want to grow your career in the law librarian world, you're either going to go to, you know, a supervisory role, a management role, or you can go into a more specialized role. And I went into a supervisory role for a couple of years at Baker McKenzie. And it was basically just I supervised a small team of research librarians. I did a lot of the research work myself. And I still wound up doing a lot of the resources work myself. And I should also point out that no matter what role I had, especially when I was at Baker, I was wearing a lot of different hats. When I was a researcher, I was working, you know, with resources management a lot. When I was in resources, I was doing research for people a lot. When I was supervising a research team, I did a lot of research on my own. I was working with the resources team at that point, you know, given my level of expertise and experience with those resources and trying to, you know, help them and coach them in what they were doing with the resources. So, yeah, ultimately, that's what I wound up doing when I was at Baker. I, you know, moved up a little bit in the research area of the law librarianship world and and eventually moved on to a new role, a new firm. All right. So and then we will segue from there into you're now with Troutman Pepper, which is another private practice law firm. And I'll probably ask you to define private practice law firm better than I would. But you were a research librarian there for your first about year and a half. Was that work similar to what you were doing at Baker McKenzie as a research librarian? Yes and no, it certainly was in the sense that I would, you know, be there and ready for attorneys who'd come to me with with research questions. But the big difference is the attorneys, you know, at different law firms are always going to have different practice special piece. So can I stop you there and ask you to clarify a little bit what a practice is within a law firm? Because some law firms will focus in one area, water rights or intellectual property rights. But a a practice within a law firm, if you could explain to our listeners what that that is. Sure. So typically, the law firm library, the law firm library role is going to be in a large corporate law firm, you know, so a lot of the smaller law firms aren't going to have a library and working for them. The big corporate firms are going to have them. And within the big corporate firms, you're going to have different practice areas. You're going to have practice areas that work with litigation. You're going to have practice areas that work with specialized litigation, you know, say insurance litigation or employment litigation. You're going to also have folks who do like tax planning, you're going to have attorneys who work with with corporate law and securities law. Lots of different types of practices within the law. And what you see a lot of times with these big corporate law firms is these practice groups, these practice areas are all separate. They're all individual, but they do work together sometimes. You know, you might have a client who, for example, is, you know, the attorneys will have, I shouldn't say, a librarian would have a client. I don't work directly with clients, but the attorneys will have clients who, for example, will be working on, you know, some kind of merger, corporate merger, corporate acquisition. And they're going to be all sorts of tax implications of that acquisition. So you're going to have the corporate attorneys who are, you know, writing the securities filing about the merger. And then they're going to have to work with the tax attorneys who are going to have to do the tax planning related to the merger. So you do see a lot of that and even involving litigation sometimes, too. You know, you might have an employer, a client who, you know, is you're working with on one thing and they have some employment issue. And now all of a sudden you are their employment litigator, too. So yeah, different practices, they tend to all be unique. They tend to all be, you know, self managing, but they do work together a lot of the time, too. OK. And so your job as the research librarian at Tratton Pepper versus at Baker McKenzie, how did those differ? How did those rules differ? Yeah, so, like I was saying, the, you know, you're still there answering questions for the attorneys or for the paralegals who might have questions for you. But there are going to be differences in the practices. So, for example, at Baker McKenzie, I worked with a lot of different practice areas there. But one of the practice areas that I worked with a lot, one of the the practice groups I worked with a lot was an international tax planning team. And so I would be, you know, doing research work related to laws for transfer pricing and these other concepts that have to do with, you know, big multinational companies that are, you know, doing one thing in one country and are based in another country. And then I got over to Tratton Pepper. And for example, we have a big insurance litigation group here. And I would get questions about, you know, can you find case law precedent dealing with this specific insurance litigation issue and, you know, totally something new and different than what I had done in the past. But still, you know, my main job at both at both of these firms, at least when it came to research, is how do I find this information? What tools are going to have this information there? And so there was still a lot of, you know, natural, you know, a natural segue from one to the other. Right. All right. And so now you're a practice department research liaison. How is that? How does that role work? Right. So like I was saying before, there's generally always been these two arms of the law firm library, right? There's been the resources team and there's been the research team. And one of the things that a lot of law librarians are talking about right now, law firm librarians talking about right now is we want to, you know, work more efficiently with the attorneys. There are times where, you know, we get just an enormous amount of research questions in a given day. And the whole research team is just overwhelmed and just slim. And this isn't something that's unique to our firm, I think. I think there are other firms that are exploring different new ways of doing the law firm library, of managing a law firm library. But what we're trying to do is start working more directly with the practice groups. I'm going to be working directly. And this is a brand new role. It's only been around for about a month or so now. But I'm going to be working directly with the corporate practice group and the tax practice group and a couple of other practice groups, making sure that they know how to use the tools so that they can use the tools when they need to, making sure that they know who to talk to if they have questions, maybe having some kind of dialogue when a new matter starts. Hey, I see that this new matter just came in and it's going to be dealing with this issue and that issue and the other issue. These are things that we typically do for matters that deal with those stakes. What can we start getting going on those now? With the idea of being we no longer have to be so reactive. And so, hey, this question came in and they need the response within a matter of, you know, minutes or hours or whatever. Well, if we start working with them from the get go, maybe that's going to help out our planning in the long run. We can kind of say, hey, you know, you're not going to need this for the next few weeks, so we're just going to put it in the queue now and, you know, get started on it sooner rather than later. So that's kind of one of the big things that we're seeing as a new change in the law firm library world. And it makes so much sense because one of the challenges in any kind of corporate or business or even small business setting is to be able to staff up to meet the moment. And what you're doing with this research liaison rule is it's almost like onboarding a new hire. But instead, what you're doing is onboarding a new project. Yeah, it and it makes so much sense. That's a really smart approach. And it sounds like a lot of fun for you, too. Yeah, and it's going to be a new challenge. It's going to be a very interesting thing. And we're really looking forward to getting this new thing going. OK, so this is where I get to ask you, what do you most enjoy about this position and the work that you do? Although it's so new, you may not know the answer to that yet. Yeah. Well, the thing that I'm looking forward to the most is doing a little more specialized research and more high end research throughout my career. It's always been, you know, sometimes a lot of the same things, you know, legislative histories, regulatory histories, you know, looking in litigation, looking for case law precedent, a lot of things like that. I'm really looking forward to getting more deeply involved with specific practice areas and learning more about those practice areas and also, you know, really developing relationships with the the folks who manage these practice groups and the folks who direct these practice groups and just kind of say, hey, look, we would like to be, you know, essentially a part of your team and we want to be involved in your meetings and things like that. We're ready to, you know, present to you about the different tools we have. And we're ready. You know, you mentioned about or providing orientations to new hires. I mean, that's a big part of what we're trying to do now is when we do get new hires in these practice groups that, you know, people like me in this, you know, practice department research liaison role can meet directly with those new hires and say, hey, look, these are the different tools that you have. This is what I can do for you. This is what my colleagues can do for you. And we're really hoping that this is going to be a much more streamlined approach. And if I could, again, build on what you've said, what you're talking about there is much more of an embedded team member. Role and that's when you become proactive rather than reactive. The other thing that you mentioned, and I think it's just incredibly smart and useful, no matter what kind of a library you're in, is the building over the relationship. So you were saying that you wanted to build relationships with the practice heads. That's similar to being in an academic library as a liaison and building a relationship with the faculty you're going to be working with. It's just such a smart and strategic way to let librarians and information professionals actually do what they do incredibly well. So way cool. Congratulations on your new role. That sounds like fun. Thank you very much. All right. So now I'm going to ask you a little bit about career pathways in law librarianship sort of big picture. So one of the things that's always fascinated me about being a law librarian is that this rule can be found in so many different environments, for example, academic law librarians supporting a J.D. program, a law program, public law libraries, state and federal courthouse libraries, government agencies, private practice libraries, such as Trout and Pepper. Law library is located in major corporations with large legal departments. From my perspective, this is one of the things that makes law library in such a cool, dynamic career path. Could you speak to that? Yeah, absolutely. So my experience has largely been in the law law firm library world. You know, I did for about a year and a half work in a corporate law library, but I don't have that experience in the academic law libraries or in public libraries or anything like that. But I do get to meet a lot of these folks at professional gatherings and professional organizations and things like that. And, you know, of course, when I was looking into these roles, I was, you know, researching them and seeing what, you know, when I was looking into this kind of role, you know, however many years ago it was now, you know, I'm thinking, well, maybe I'll be happier in an academic law library. Maybe I'll be happier in a public law library. And I knew that when I was an undergrad and even when I was a graduate student, I really loved studying in the library. One of my favorite places to be was just sitting in that library and doing my work and you can tell how cool I am when I say that. But I'm sure that so many of the people listening to me right now would agree. So we're all together here. But anyway, the academic law library was definitely one that I thought about. And when I started looking into this and started researching it a little bit, I was realizing that, hey, wait a minute, academic law libraries typically require a JD. Public law libraries typically require a JD. Law firm libraries typically do not require a JD. So unless I wanted to spend another three years in grad school and get a JD, law firm libraries is probably going to be, you know, a pretty good bet. And also I should mention that law firm compensation tends to be pretty competitive. So if that's something you're thinking of, then, you know, the law firm might be a good option rather than the academic or public law library. Those are really good insights. And I did not realize that about the JD requirement not being a part of being in a private practice law library. That's good information to know. Wow. OK. All right. So building on that, how would you recommend students or grads of the high school program get involved in law librarianship? The first thing I would say is get in touch with staff firms. One of the things that I was that I did when I was in grad school was I worked with with Catherine Ghent at Taylor and Associates and with with AIM, Advanced Information Management, I think is what it stood for. And these were staffing organizations and they, you know, placed me in temp jobs. And that's, you know, when I was working at HP and I had a temp job at a corporate law library during that time, too. And they helped me get in the door. One of the challenges that we have right now in the law firm library world is that when, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, when there were so many more print resources in our libraries, there were these entry level positions that very much aligned with the print library. There were these library technician roles like when I was at Hula Packard, the mail would come in, I would check in the mail, I would stage everything for the filers, I would stage everything for the catalogers. I would go through the invoices and, you know, process the invoices and keep records of the invoices and send the original invoices to a county so a county could pay them, you know, things like that. And now where we have so few print materials and likewise, far fewer invoices and far fewer, you know, individual small things for the library to deal with. We don't have as many of these, you know, introductory roles. Right. So one of the things that I've been thinking of a lot and talk with some of my colleagues about is how are we going to get folks in the door? And one of the things that we're tossing around a lot is, hey, we are these really busy research librarians and we get a lot of ready reference questions that are coming in. So we're trying to get a lot more roles opened up to to temps and to interns where they can do those ready reference questions where it's like, hey, can you pull a docket for me, a case docket? Can you pull a case decision for me? Can you pull an article for me? These relatively simple tasks that can sometimes take a good amount of time. And, you know, the researchers might not necessarily have the band with cut, you know, a half hour out of their day to look for, you know, you know, some case docket in a small obscure court somewhere. But that's one thing that I've been pretty particular about lately. And I'd really like to see more of these, you know, introductory roles be introduced in the law firm library world. And any idea and and you can be making this up or you can actually say, I've seen this or whatever. Any idea what kind what title that kind of a job might carry. So a student would know what to look for. You know, I don't know. I wish I could have a better answer for you. But, you know, I think first and foremost, if if the students can get in touch with staffing organizations like Taylor and Associates or other ones that might have access to those roles, they would be great resources for that. The other thing that I should mention is the professional organizations often have job boards, too. A lot of times those are, you know, the permanent positions. They might not be the temp roles or the intern roles, things like that. So you might not see these introductory roles there. But, you know, worth looking at. Definitely worth keeping an eye on. OK. And and what what would you think about a student or a recent grad interested in, say, one of these kinds of entry level jobs reaching out to one of the librarians on staff and asking them, you know, where would I start? Do you have these kinds of jobs? I'd like to, you know, volunteer or intern or whatever. Would it be appropriate ever for someone to essentially do what amounts to a cold call to the head of the the library? Well, speaking for myself, I would be absolutely open to it. I can't really say how open to it. Other folks might be the one kind of hitch could be. A lot of times, you know, you go on a law firm's website and you'll find all the names of contact information of all the attorneys at the firm. But you're not going to find librarians, unfortunately, so it might be a little tough to to get our contact information. But I know, speaking for myself, I would, you know, be thrilled to talk to graduate students who are interested in this and try and help them out or give them some advice or anything like that. OK. So this this enables me then to make a pitch for how important it is to join professional associations. And then that throws my question over to you. One of the reasons I recommend that high school students join professional associations while they're in grad school is that they have access to the membership list. So if students were trying to figure out who is the library, the law librarian, say, at Baker MacKenzie, the likelihood is, am I correct that that person would have membership either in the American Association of Law Libraries, AALL, or the Northern California Association of Libraries, which is not surprisingly, N-O-C-A-L-L. Yes. Yeah. So first and foremost, I would absolutely encourage anybody who's interested in this role to join those professional organizations. There is a discounted membership for students, so it hopefully is going to be pretty affordable for folks to to join them. In my experience, just about everybody in Bay Area law firm libraries are part of of of no call Northern California Association of Law Libraries. Double A double L, American Association of Law Libraries. Also, you know, a lot of us are members of that, but not. I think maybe more with no call than with double A double L. And I think with with no call, you know, you you will find a lot of that contact information. And again, if folks reached out to me, I would have no problem with it. I would I would love to to chat with with grad students. You know, again, I can't speak to anybody else's preferences, but I will say law librarians and all librarians tend to be nice, friendly folks and we're always happy to help out what we can. I mean, that's our jobs, right? We're to help people and try and give them the information that they're looking for. And and I would have to second that. I mean, that's been one of the true joys of working in any kind of librarianship or information work is how breathtakingly open and supportive and encouraging fellow librarians are. And and so that's good to know, which take my next question was going to be, would you be open to doing informational interviews with students who hear this discussion and would like to reach out to you personally? It sounds to me like that was a yes. Yes, period, full stop. OK, so another question. What advice do you have for students who may not have originally considered law librarianship because, honestly, they just felt intimidated by it? Well, it can be a little intimidating. I mean, that's just the reality of things. You know, you're you're working for lawyers to have a lot of pressure on them to bill hours to client to a lot of hours to clients. But. It is interesting work and it is very rewarding work. It is it's so frequent where I, you know, work hard all day. And then at the end of the day, you know, maybe a little stressed out, maybe a little headache, but I feel good about myself. I feel like I've accomplished a lot that day. And generally speaking, the attorneys who I work with are very supportive of me. And they, you know, whether or not they're feeling a lot of pressure to bill their hours or whatever else, they always, you know, work with me well and and work, you know, they're always polite and they're always, you know, good people. So they're appreciative. They're absolutely appreciative. I mean, it gets to the point sometimes where I'm like, man, you don't have to use so many exclamation points. It's OK. It's my job. I'm happy to help you out. But it's it's true. They are almost always very, very appreciative because and I think because they do have a lot of this pressure to get this work done and then they go, oh, gosh, maybe I can send this one piece of my work to, you know, this, you know, this librarian who's, you know, part of our support staff and they send the request in the library team. I pick it up. I do the work for them. I send it and they go, oh, my gosh, that would have taken me, you know, an hour, two hours, whatever to do this work. So now I'm freed up to do this other stuff. And not only that, if it took them, if it was going to take them two hours to do that job, it might take me only one hour to do that job because I've, you know, I'm so used to using these tools and I'm so used to, you know, understanding where what parts of the research tools I should use and how to search or how to browse to get to the information I need. And ultimately, I would think the clients are happier with me doing the work because I'm a lot cheaper than literally every lawyer out there. You know, one of the things with the corporate law firm is everybody builds their time. So the lawyers will, you know, bill a certain amount of money for every hour of work they do for the clients and the librarians and a lot of law firms do the same thing. And the librarian billable hour rate is way lower than the first year associate rate. They're not billing you out at three hundred and seventy five dollars an hour. They're not. All right. So wrapping this up. And oh, my gosh, this is such fascinating information. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and then just sort of open it up to what you want students to know. So those questions would be what would you like students to know about law librarianship, what makes it a career that you love? What do you want to say here to encourage more students to consider law librarianship and to get them to feel more confident about applying for jobs? What I would say is if you like team environments, if you like working with the team, if you like accomplishing things as a team, if you like accomplishing things individually, if you like, you know, kind of a fast paced environment, you know, oh, gosh, just one thing that I worked on today was really tough. But you know what? It's it's all done today. Tomorrow, it's going to be something different. If you like doing in depth research, if you like learning lots of new things and a variety of new things within the legal world, if you have an interest in the law or if you have an interest in just in depth research, if you want to challenge yourself, if you want to have that sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, this might be a really good and rewarding career path for you. I I think that you have summed that up beautifully, Ryan. Everyone I know who's a law librarian absolutely fits within those parameters. And quite frankly, they thrive on it. They they and it sounds like you do too. I can hear it in your voice. I can hear that enthusiasm. And and you make a really good point. Long librarianship isn't for everyone, but for people who thrive on all of these different characteristics, there's nothing that is more fun and more rewarding. So thank you for sharing all of that wonderful information with us, Ryan. And I would reiterate to everyone, Ryan is very willing to chat with you to do informational interviews with you. And I have Ryan's email with that. We will wrap up today's interview. And thanks again, Ryan. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor.