It was an energised crowd that turned up to a sold-out Legal Geek conference in East London on 28 and 29 September, with the usual emphasis on high fives, good coffee, street food and quick-fire educational sessions. This year the larger vendors notably went all out on making their stand the most fun or appealing, with the likes of space invaders, basketball and wind machines competing with prosecco and cake and ice-cream.
In addition to talks from vendors, thought leaders and the odd celebrity, law firms such as DLA Piper held smaller workshops, with ‘change maker’ Jana Blount and her team talking about being unafraid to experiment; learning from experiments; and evolving ideas.
The celebrity that got people talking was Joe Wicks MBE, the fitness coach who most of us in the UK woke up to during the pandemic, who urged children in schools across the country to stay fit by working out in their living rooms. Wicks had the Legal Geek audience jumping around, and talked about the importance of looking after your mental health, which resonated with a number of Legal Geekers on social media and culminated in a queue of enthusiastic converts lining up to meet Wicks after his talk.
Emma Sharpe, former GC at Unilever turned strategic C-suite adviser said of Wicks’ talk on LinkedIn: “I wasn’t going to go. I was at #legalgeek to make new professional connections, strengthen existing ones and learn about innovation and trends in the legal environment, wasn’t I? I hadn’t come all this way and taken time out of my week to go talk “another” talk about mental health. Especially not one by a “celebrity”. But I didn’t escape quickly enough from the previous talk, so I was stuck near the front. And I was captivated. Joe Wicks’s eloquent, personal and genuine talk was a surprise highlight of this year’s conference. His latest book might even make its way to friends and family as Christmas presents. And now I’m going to take his #1 recommendation and get an early night!”
Legal Geek notably attracts both law firms and in-house counsel to attend and speak, with Maria Passemard, global head of legal operations at Johnson Matthey talking about how, regardless of the size of your business, you need to get the basics right before you can operate efficiently, meaning that you know where your contracts are stored and can find them easily; that you know what you are spending on legal fees; that you can find templates and precedents to avoid reinventing the wheel; and that you know where your legal team is spending most of their time.
The conference is quite unusual in bringing together law firms, inhouse legal, and vendors. It has an opportunity to expand the types of content it provides to perhaps widen the net out to CIOs, who typically do not attend.
Having said that, one of my personal highlights of the conference was being asked by the IT manager of a major law firm to introduce him to Nicole Bradick, founder of legal technology design agency Theory and Principle, because he loved her talk on how your website should not be boring. I believe he liked, among other things, the fact that Bradick dropped the odd swear word. Commenting on the talk on Twitter, Helen Burness, director of Salmarsh Marketing and CMO of She Breaks the Law, said: “Design content for the way people read. Images are optimal. Font and colour matter. Visualisations are superior. Organise your information. Design for how people think, see and read. Stop being ugly, boring and serious. Brilliant from @NicoleBradick.”
Networking at this pace can become exhausting after such a long break, but a shift to the bar across from the conference venue and a bit of fresh air was just what was required on day two, and it was nice to see so many familiar faces. Kira Systems founder (now Xuva founder) Noah Waisberg, who when he last spoke at Legal Geek attacked a pinata with an axe on stage, took this hilarious-for-so-many-reasons selfie. Left to right front row: Nicole Bradick (Theory and Principle); Emma Griffiths (Legal IT Insider); Caroline Hill (Legal IT Insider); Christian Lang (Reynen Court); Haley Altman (Litera) and Noah Waisberg (Xuva).
Well done to Jimmy Vestbirk on another cracking event. If you haven’t seen it already, here is a video summary of the first day, including a short excerpt of me looking every inch the serious journalist by trying to catch bits of flying paper in my jumper in a wind tunnel.