Legal conference coordinators : Time to step up to the plate
One of the reasons the legal profession lags on the innovation front is the manner in which many legal conferences are put together.
- Sponsor stranglehold. Conferences understandably take huge sponsorship monies from the well entrenched dinosaurs of the legal industry. Two come to mind. This results in conference coordinators being hesitant to invite speakers who talk openly about products and services, sponsors bumping previously invited speakers they don't like from conference agendas, and sponsors putting their own employees who have little domain expertise on panels.
- Inane rules prohibiting 'consultants and vendors' who often have the most domain expertise and follow innovative trends from speaking. It's understandable you want to prevent selling from the podium. But good companies who are truly looking to serve the legal profession don't do that. If you get a company that's going to have a stooge tout their service, don't invite them back. They're also going to be crucified for you by audience members using Twitter.
- Member perks and politics. 'Gee we have this good speaker with excellent domain expertise presenting, let's put some members of the association on the panel for all they have done for the association.' Politics are everywhere in organizations. But why 'dumb down' a panel for legal professionals paying thousands in tuition and travel monies to attend your conference? Why make it difficult for a panelist with industry expertise to give the most valuable presentation? Especially if the presenter is picking up their own travel expenses to help you and your membership.
- Law firm participation at all cost. 'We need to get some lawyers and law firm personnel on the panel to round it out.' Legal professionals are lemmings who follow each other, even if it means off a cliff. Limiting a presentation to someone from outside a law firm with a different perspective and sees the successes of innovative law firms can be a great thing.
There are some great legal conferences out there. I've had the honor of speaking at them, some within the last couple months. But I've personally experienced the above problems on numerous occasions over the last six years. The last three for conferences coming up this summer and fall.
Take the easy way out and call me a prima donna. But I've wanted to be a lawyer all my life. I practiced law for 17 years driven by one question, 'How can we help more people?' It pains me to see our legal profession being held in such low esteem by the public. For lawyers to be the butt of jokes for being so self centered and lagging in innovation is not something the proud in our profession should take lying down.
I am not alone in my feelings. I talk with other presenters who feel the same way. We know the organizations who honorably stand for offering the best at their association's legal conferences. We also know the associations who place other interests first at their conferences.
Sure, as presenters with a company we know we advance our positions as thought leaders in our field by speaking at your conferences. We all know that's in the best interests of our companies. But, believe it or not, as leaders of honorable companies built on a mission of service, we're going to put the interests of your attendees first.
We can do better as a profession. One place it can start is with legal conferences and their sponsors. Take your obligation to serve our legal profession, the legal professionals it employs, and the public we serve seriously. It's possible to serve others and make a buck.
Let's put petty issues aside and propel the legal profession forward in a positive and noble way. We owe to ourselves and the public at large.
Kevin,
You raise some good points - but I'm not sure as to the appropriate solution. The problem is that putting on a conference can be expensive and sponsorships help defray those costs and enable the organization to make a profit so that it can continue to serve members in the future.
Believe me, I was always a huge critic of conferences, complaining about the high costs, until I helped organize one first hand for the global marine energy conference here in DC this past April. We selected an inexpensive venue, took low bids on all food service items, outsourced conference website development, payments, on site registration, audio and video taping to an event organizing company (which charged 75 percent less than what our predecessor organizers had paid for similar services). The two day conference cost between $495 and $595 and we had over 400 people - but without sponsorships, our profits would have been around $5000 - and for a group of our size, it simply would not have been worth it to do the conference for that kind of return. And yes, we were beholden to our sponsors; putting a representative from those companies on panels though fortunately, in most cases they were also well qualified. But it was a choice we had to make.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Conference planners could charge people more to attend conferences to compensate for not having sponsors, but that would just make it more difficult for people to get access to any information. They could ask anyone who speaks on a panel to kick in money to speak, beyond their own expenses and travel - but that would only further deter speakers.
I think that the only equitable way to keep sponsors off of a conference panel is to ensure that their competitors can't serve on a panel either. So if a practice management company sponsored a conference, it would be barred from being on a panel- but so too would its competitors.
As for having people from the bar events on the panels, the solution there would be to allow them to moderate but not to speak if they don't have background.
Right on. Whenever I speak at or attend non-law conferences, I am always shocked at how much better they are than law ones, for pretty much the reasons you have given. They even tend to have better food!
Dan, Kevin-
It may be true that non-legal conferences are better than law ones, but it doesn't answer the underlying question as to who is footing the bill. For smaller conferences like state bar events and even national law conferences (even a huge operation like Total Attorneys only had around 200 attendees at the end of the day), the only way that they can generate revenue is from sponsorships. And because the conferences are small, no sponsor is going to want to pay $5k or $10k or whatever the cost is to sponsor unless they can get some face time on a panel - because the traffic to their vendor tables won't be worth it.
Believe me, I have sat through many a presentation that I could have done a better job of delivering myself and I am sure that the same is true for Kevin as well. But Kevin, you've said yourself here at your own blog that you've built LexBlog into a profitable company without any advertising - and while I know that while your success is due in large part to word of mouth because LexBlog is a great product, I am sure that other sales do come from your conference presentations. In short, because conference slots are coveted "alternative advertising," it's understandable that sponsors would want a spot for ROI.
Carolyn
Kevin, I've had the same disappointments when attending law conferences, more so since discovering TED (see ted.com).
TED's talks are so, so much better. Not only does TED invite the most inspiring thinkers and doers in their respective fields, the brief too is to give "the talk of your life". How many speakers at a law conference can honestly say they have just given the talk of their life?
The solutions are for conferences to be bigger and charge more per attendee to counter the loss of sponsors following their decline in control over the programme, made possible by the increase in quality of the speakers and content on offer.
Have you experienced a diffrence btwn Plf and Def bar conferences? Since I've left corp practice, I go to TTLA CLE and confrences- more practical, informative, and provacative (entertaining speakers).
Carolyn, thanks for your comments. You raise good points about sponsorship.
I'm afraid what you're saying is get used to the status quo in the case of many legal conferences. A status quo of inferior quality because of the points I mentioned above. I can't except it. Legal professionals deserve better.
Sponsorships and great conferences are not mutually exclusive. I've gone to a lot of conferences where sponsors kicked in a whole lot more than $5,000 to $10,000 and had no speakers or seats on any panels. They had no say as to who was invited to speak. Why? Because it was a kickass conference offering tremendous value to attendees. The sponsor wanted attendees to know that without their support the conference would not have been possible.
As to Total Attorneys, they were prepared to take some losses with their conference, and I expect they did. The result was an outstanding conference that is going to draw more attendees next year and in years to come. Sponsors will line up to get their name in front of attendees and the thanks they as sponsors will receive in front of a hundreds of influential lawyers. That's the ROI you speak of Carolyn, not having often under qualified sponsor company presenters embarrass themselves and their company as well as let down attendees.
There's some great legal conferences and great speakers from conference sponsors. My post addresses conferences where that's not the case - and there are many of those conferences.
No question me and others are recognized as thought leaders and innovators, in part from presenting at conferences. Not sure what that has to do with the points I have raised - that many legal conferences need to raise their game.
In general, I've found legal conferences to be a poor way of sharing knowledge or innovating. They tend generally to be a waste of time. If I go, I'm rarely going for the substance.
One big problem I notice (and this hasn't changed for recent conferences) is that there's a practice-based conference (CLE-type) and a process-based conference (get a life, etc). The two don't seem to meet.
Another big criticism is that for all of the tech. hoopla, none of the conferences seem to take advantage of technology to encourage participation by those who aren't physically there. Of course, there's no real incentive to do so, because then a lot less people would show up.
Face-to-face contact can't be beat but we live in a very large country. The elephant in the room of course are the conferences themselves. Virtual conferences online could reduce costs sufficiently that you could earn a profit without sponsorship influencing content (i.e., the sponsors buy ads at relatively low cost, not speaking slots at high cost). Just a thought.
Kevin, we definitely agree that the very real obstacles Carolyn raises are not insurmountable. Simply keeping the focus on the primary goal of conferences, which should be benefit to the membership and not profit, will go a long way toward addressing the concerns you raise. I've posted some more in-depth thoughts on this philosophy and how it played out in the planning and execution of Get a Life on the Total PMA blog.
Venkat, our Get a Life conference in May was streamed live, and hundreds of participants from around the country joined us virtually, not just watching the sessions as they were presented but discussing concepts and sessions in real time via Twitter. The broad-based participation was exciting and definitely added a dimension to the conference.
I want to address the fourth issue you've identified: "law firm participation at all cost."
As the co-chair of the practice management committee for my local chapter of the Women's Bar Association of the State of New York, I organized a CLE program this spring entitled "Show Me the Money: How to Increase Revenues and Cut Expenses in Your Law Practice." The panelists were a marketing professional, who discussed how to go about determining what to charge in an alternative fee arrangement; a practice management consultant, who discussed how to mine your practice management software for the financial data you need to make wise business decisions; and the president of a credit card merchant processor, who discussed how to improve your cash flow management using ACH check processing, remote check deposit, automatic recurring billing and more.
Each panelist's materials were highly educational. Nevertheless, a few weeks before the program date, the my chapter CLE liason told me that the program couldn't be CLE accredited because New York had recently revised its CLE rules to require that every program include a presenter who is a lawyer (I did not research the rule change myself). To save the accreditation, I added myself as a presenter and quickly compiled some program materials consisting primarily of copies of NY ethics opinions concerning accepting credit cards. At the beginning of the program, I explained that I would not be speaking, even though I was now listed as a panelist.
I wonder how many other states also require that a presentation include at least one lawyer as a presenter in order for the presentation to be CLE accredited.
Kevin, thanks for a great post on a topic that needs more attention.
I think Lisa has hit on one of the problems - CLE requirements. That may be why Venkat (and others) have noticed that there are some conferences that are for CLE credit and others that don't offer credit, but often are more practical and innovation-oriented. If I'm not mistaken, the Get a Life conference happened to be one that offered CLE credits while providing practical content as well. But it isn't always easy.
Lisa, I am aware of the NY rule that at least one lawyer must be involved if CLE credits are going to be offered, in part because we have bumped up against it in trying to put some programs together for my local bar association on occasion. But that isn't the only rule that can sometimes be an obstacle to presenting the kinds of programs that many lawyers are craving. Many states don't give CLE credits for programs revolving around practice management or business development/marketing issues, even if those programs are focused on clients. Sometimes if there's a discussion of ethics, that will help, but not always, and not in all states.
Unfortunately, it isn't just conference organizers and CLE accreditation boards that are stuck in these old ways of thinking. Too many lawyers object when they see a panel or program being given by 'vendors' or paid consultants and not lawyers. While there are certainly vendors and consultants whose presentations contain more of a hard sell than valuable content, good rules and planning can prevent most of the worst offenders from getting involved.
I don't think that profit and providing value to members need to be mutually exclusive in presenting a conference. Certainly there are challenges involved when trying to obtain sponsors, but there have to be ways to improve what's being done now.
I don't think the problem with these legal conferences is whether there are sponsors. As several commentors pointed out, sponsorships are necessary to cover event expenses. I have no problem with those sponsors have the ability to put on seminars that market their products, in fact, that would be a useful exercise. However, let's have some transparency about the choice of panels.
I was particularly disturbed at the recent CA State Bar Convention where I was unable to get CLE credit for Stephen Fairley's 3-hour marketing seminar that was, hands-down, the most valuable information received all weekend. Yes, he was obviously a sponsor (he had a booth in the exhibit hall) and he is not a lawyer. However, other panelists for sessions which were CLE-credits were obviously from other sponsors and had much less useful information. And let's not kid ourselves, even those who were lawyers are there as part of marketing efforts for their law firms.
How about having CLE credit for seminars that are helpful and useful to lawyers, having substantive content, whether or not the speaker's company or law firm is a sponsor of the event? Just disclose that fact and let the attendees decide.