I spent the day yesterday at The Lex Factor, the latest Legal Futures conference.
When I first got there and sat down for the first session I did in fact tweet saying that there seemed fewer people than usual and questioned whether it was conference apathy or tube problems. Thankfully it was the second of those two and 20 mins later it was standing room only at the back of the room!
Yet again Neil Rose and his team put together a great panel of speakers with the ex-lawyer, ex-Coffee Republic founder, Sahar Hashemi as the keynote speaker. Having read her first book (Anyone Can Do It) it was great to finally see her speak in person and she got the longest, loudest round of applause of any Legal Futures speaker EVER. She told bits of her Coffee Republic story and related some items to the challenges in the legal sector. She also promoted bits of her latest book (Switched On) which I have now ordered on Amazon!
The speakers from the legal sector was a great cross section of regulators (Des Hudson, Law Society & Antony Townsend, SRA) through to practitioners (Tim Aspinall, DMH Stallard and Ann Harrison, Stephensons). And is it just me, or does Des Hudson have a tone of voice that should see him reading the news on the BBC at 6 or 10pm?
I was surprised (or was I really??) how few practitioners were at the conference which to me is ridiculous when you have people like Patrick Allen, Hodge Jones Allen, opening his kimono and basically telling the audience just about everything about the finances of his business, how they measure things, what bonuses they offer, including everyone's favourite the "Mystery Bonus". Other law firms can learn LOADS of information from such people and yet they seem to not jump at the opportunity.
I won't bore you here with comments on every session, but as always if you want to see my take on each session, then download the relevant mindmap below, or the entire Xmind file (but you will need to download the (free) program from http://www.xmind.net.
See you at the inaugural Manchester event on 10 September!