USC Law School Names Chief for All That Information
The USC Law School has become the first of its kind in the country to appoint a chief information officer.
The new post highlights the growing importance of information technology in the legal profession, said USC Law School Dean Scott Bice.
“The past decade has seen a revolution in the way legal information is gathered, stored and disseminated,” Bice said. “Today’s legal information has become a major mix of multimedia, in addition to the traditional books and periodicals.”
Many companies have appointed chief information officers, or CIOs, to oversee their information technology resources, but USC’s Law School is the first to join them. The information technology functions of a law school are traditionally handled by law libraries. In recent years, a handful of schools have put information management in the hands of law professors, as USC is doing, albeit without using the CIO moniker, said Bernard Hibbitts, a professor and associate dean for communications and information technology at the University of Pittsburgh Law School.
“Putting a regular faculty member in the [information technology] driver’s seat suggests that the time for computers to be somehow segregated in the library has passed,” said Hibbitts, who is also director of Jurist: The Law Professors’ Network (https://jurist.law.pitt.edu). “They’re tools for all of us, and it’s perfectly fitting for someone on the regular teaching and research faculty to be leading the technological charge.”
The chief information officer post at USC will be held by Albert Brecht, a professor and associate dean. The John Stauffer Charitable Trust donated $500,000 to the school to endow the position.
