Results of the UnConference for the Southern Trial Lawyer's Fall Retreat.
Last weekend, Howard Spiva and I put together and moderated an UnConference for the Southern Trial Lawyer’s Fall Retreat. It was based on the open space ‘unconference’ that Matt Homann and Dennis Kennedy used at BlawgThink!.
I’m pleased to announce that the unconference format worked even better than I thought it would. We had about 25 attorneys and some of the topics we discussed were:
- ATLA’s name change, Our Image and the Future of the Profession
- Mistakes we Have Made and What We’ve Learned from Them
- Daubert Challenges in a Medical Malpractice Setting
- Focus Groups and Mock Trials, When to Use Them
- Negotiating
What was interesting to me was that at BlawgThink, there were about 100 attendees with many different backgrounds. At BlawgThink, about 25 topics were suggested and we broke up into sessions with about 6 different groups per session.
At our Fall Retreat, there were about 25 people that were all plaintiff’s attorneys. While there was a mix in the areas of law, the size of the firm, amount of specialization and size of the city the attorney practiced in, it was a fairly homogenous group. There were about 5–6 topics suggested in total and we decided to keep the whole group together for a big group discussion.
Same format, totally different way of handling the situation, but we did it by consensus, got everyone’s input and everyone got something of value out of the day. Neat stuff.
Fantastic! Glad it went well.
