As Littler's Senior Director of Research Services, Cynthia Brown leads a team of research librarians, assistant librarians and interns to provide the firm’s lawyers and clients with the research resources they need to succeed.
Cynthia is part of the firm’s knowledge management leadership team and is involved daily in the Knowledge Management Department’s efforts to develop innovative systems, procedures and work flows. She reports directly to the firm’s Chief Knowledge Officer.
She manages and creates roadmaps for the collection of critical data, sifting of data for relevance and preparing that data to be pushed out to the right people at the right time. She also oversees all of the firm’s research-vendor relationships, utilizes analytics to determine which tools are needed to maintain the relationships and gathers important data for negotiations. In addition, Cynthia investigates new research and technology tools to ensure that the firm has cutting-edge resources.
Cynthia started Littler’s legislative tracking team in 2010. The team feeds Littler GPS, the firm’s client-based flagship service. Thousands of bills are reviewed daily via a custom built system to provide Littler’s attorneys and clients with insights about pending and enacted labor and employment legislations on federal, state and local levels.
Cynthia leads the team that created the KnowledgeDesk, a resource that enables Littler’s attorneys to connect to subject matter experts and a vast collection of databases, print materials, practice group information, internal work product and proprietary data collections. The KnowledgeDesk team efficiently searches to locate the exact nugget of knowledge that attorneys need.
Via the KnowledgeDesk, attorneys are connected to law firm librarians who are perfectly suited to liaise between attorneys and a legal KM department. With adept archival, research, organization, analysis and synthesis skills, Cynthia’s team takes the guesswork out of determining who to contact, where information resides and determining which external or internal resource best addresses an attorney’s need. During its first year the KnowledgeDesk proved to be extraordinarily successful taking in over 18,000 requests, with 26,000 requests expected in its second year.
Prior to joining Littler, Cynthia served as head librarian at a full-service regional law firm and as general counsel at a privately held company.
*Not licensed to practice law in California.