This year, I come to the ACC Annual Meeting with a new perspective. Having stepped down in June after 20 years as ACC president, the past few months gave me an opportunity to reflect about the meeting and what I learned during my time with ACC. When a professional organization like ACC — or any business for that matter — consistently achieves the following three goals, it will enjoy significant success.
- Makes an experience easy (convenient) to have;
- Provides value (as the member defines it); and
- Makes an experience fun (or memorable in a positive way). Generally, this holds true when working with your board of directors or your members.
Consider the ACC Annual Meeting: Through careful planning and strategic use of technology, the staff works diligently during the year to improve the registration process, streamline access to the sessions and make CLE credits more accessible.
They work to enhance your experience on site with signs, rest areas and an Exhibit Hall that becomes a learning experience on its own. In short, they do everything possible to make it easy to attend and to participate once you arrive at the conference.
Second, more than 2,000 in-house counsel from around the world who will attend the meeting in Denver (the largest ever) will receive exceptional value. As ACC consistently emphasizes in another context, the member (or client as we note in the ACC Value Challenge), defines value, not the service provider. ACC surveys its members, diligently reviews program evaluations and constantly seeks feedback from all participants (and potential registrants) about how to make this meeting the best it can be for in-house counsel. Equally important, ACC members provide the leadership, direction and much of the planning for the meeting itself. The result is a “by in-house counsel, for in-house counsel” experience that is second to none. Participants at the ACC Annual Meeting find value in at least three different areas:
- Education — The excellent program sessions and CLE improve your ability to practice law and better serve your clients;
- Networking — Chapter and committee activities, as well CLO sessions and informal hallway conversations, build a professional network that will serve you well over time; and
- The Exhibit Hall — The location provides access to virtually every type of legal or professional service in-house lawyers will ever need during their careers.
This meeting helps you prevent problems before they occur, or enables you to promptly solve them after they do.
Finally, attending this meeting can be fun as well. Admittedly, I have a different perspective given my change in status — I will attend this meeting because I want to and not because it is my job as ACC president. Nevertheless, here is one of the things I’ve observed over my 20 years at ACC Annual Meetings: We have a large number of people who return year after year. Yes, they recognize the quality of the program sessions and the wealth of information to be gathered in the Exhibit Hall. However, we frequently hear that this is a chance for our members to make new friends or re-connect with old ones. For many, the professional colleagues they first met at an ACC meeting have become life-long friends. For me, it has been an enriching and rewarding experience.
The ACC Annual Meeting is a place where in-house counsel go to connect! Why? It meets all the goals I mentioned: It is easy, it provides value and it is fun. I look forward to Denver just as I have looked forward to other meetings in the past. But, this time will be different, as I will have a totally new perspective. I hope to provide some of my thoughts and observations in a future column and through Twitter.
See you in Denver.