Welcome to the 2014 ACC Annual Meeting
This post was written by Bernadette Bulacan, director of market development at Thomson Reuters
The great American author, Tennessee Williams, once proclaimed, “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” This week, Thomson Reuters will be at the 2014 Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Annual Meeting in “The Big Easy” – New Orleans, and test this hypothesis. Three thousand corporate counsel attendees from around the globe will have the opportunity to network with their peers, listen to the city’s jazz music, and maybe eat some authentic Creole cooking on Bourbon Street. Here’s what you’ll be missing if you are not attending:
- Moonlight & Moonshine. On Tuesday evening, Thomson Reuters will kick off the annual meeting with a customer appreciation event, Moonlight & Moonshine, at Calcasieu, home of James Beard Award-winning cuisine. Yes, we will feature local, tasty morsels like blue crab beignets and baby mufalettas. And yes, as the name suggests, there will be moonshine.
- Connecting practice, manage and comply. Need tools to practice law more efficiently in your legal department? Within the exhibit booth, corporate legal departments will find WestlawNext, Practical Law, Business Law Center, Concourse Legal Hold and Drafting Assistant-Transactional. Need better ways to manage your outside legal spend and legal matters? Visit the Serengeti and Concourse Matter Room demo stations. And for the first time, the booth will feature compliance tools Accelus and WeComply.
- Let the good times…spin. The famous New Orleans saying is “Laissez les bon temps roulez” or “let the good times roll.” We’d prefer they “spin” as the famed Thomson Reuters prize wheel will make a re-appearance in New Orleans. If an attendee completes four demos within the Thomson Reuters booth, s/he will be entered into a raffle for the opportunity to spin the prize wheel. If it’s anything like our previous ACC conferences, we expect the booth to be crowded with hundreds of corporate counsel, all vying for their chance to “laissez les bon temps…spin.”
- Continuing legal education. In addition to the networking events, one of the principal reasons corporate counsel flock to the annual meeting is for the wide breadth of CLE programming. Various tracks address issues facing in-house attorneys: compliance and ethics; litigation and dispute resolutions; global legal issues; law department management and technology, to name a few. The securities and compliance track will feature Thomson Reuters Senior Vice President and Associate General Counsel Marc Gold, who will be on a panel discussing important SEC developments and the recent 2014 proxy season.
So, “laisses les bon temps roulez”…or spin. And while I can’t share the beignets and moonshine or the live scene on Bourbon Street with you directly, you can still follow our experience through posts on Legal Current and social media. Follow me on Twitter – @InHouse_Bern – for the latest and greatest occurring at the ACC Annual Meeting in New Orleans.
