Every year we take a risk in the current economic climate and continue to run our annual conference in October in the beautiful city of Bath. It is a risk because I and my fellow trustees worry about the attraction of an event that starts around midday on Friday and runs until lunchtime on Saturday.
However, we persist with the conference because we think it is a great opportunity over a day and a half to give effect to our philosophy of being a “community”. There are far more opportunities to network informally and to learn from others than at our other events.
We also continue to theme the event and are in 2011, when the risk of data loss is repeatedly making the headlines (Sony recently suffered the loss of data belonging to 77 million on line user accounts), addressing the risks that technology brings along with the undoubted benefits.
And this conference is about risk in the widest sense from such data loss through contract risk to the challenges facing legal practices as they contemplate fundamental business change like Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO). We have a great programme this year with a variety of excellent speakers drawn from private practice, in house departments and the academic world.
We are also continuing our practice of making the sessions as interactive as possible. If you have not heard of the World Cafe before then come along and find out how this works.
If this is still not enough to tempt you to join us in the West Country in the autumn then let me share a personal story with you. Every year my wife asks me, well before we have formulated the programme, when are we running the SCL conference? Sadly she does not ask about any of my other professional activities, well not at least on a regular basis. I fear that it is not the event itself however that attracts her but the pool and the seven (7!) types of sauna at the Bath Spa Hotel plus the shopping and other attractions of the city like the theatre and Roman Baths.
So please do come along, make it a weekend out and help us prove once again that it is worth the annual risk of holding a conference on law and technology over two days in Bath.
The full programme is available at http://www.scl.org/site.aspx?i=ev20746
Clive
