Extract from Doug Austin’s article “Takeaways from Last Week’s Legalweek Conference”
Last week was Legalweek and, for many people, it was their first in-person conference in over two years (since Legalweek 2020, if not longer). Let’s see how it turned out in terms of attendance, attitude, and session educational content with discussion of two terrific IPRO sessions.
Attendance and Attitude
There was reason to be optimistic about the attendance going in with the fewest current COVID cases since the pandemic began two years ago. Representatives of ALM stated that the final official attendance was a little less than 5,000 total attendees. That’s lighter than most years and the Grand Ballroom was about two-thirds full in the keynote interview with Dan Abrams on the first full day.
But the attitude was terrific at the conference and people were enthusiastic about being at their first in-person conference in months, if not years! I met people that I referred to as “Zoom faces” – people that I had only ever met via Zoom or Teams – in-person for the first time, even though I had worked with some of them for nearly two years! Based on feedback from people I spoke with, meeting schedules were full and while traffic in the exhibit hall and in the sessions was down from previous years, there were still plenty of attendees in both places throughout the week.
