We started the process of organising our Catastrophic Injury and Occupational Health conference at the beginning of May. In the space of approximately three weeks we organised 41 speakers and 40 different sessions from our UK insurance team along with colleagues in France and Australia and our Connected Services division. As we are ambitious we took the decision to use Microsoft Teams Live which, at that point, was completely new to DWF and with support from our IT and Event coordinators we pulled together the presentations, trained some complete Luddites on a new software platform and delivered the first virtual legal conference.
To view any of the recorded sessions, or for further information please provide your details here
I see in the news today at Slater & Gordon have announced that they are quitting their new London premises and their London staff will be entirely working from home going forward. The landscape of how each of our businesses evolves and changes both during and after the current pandemic presents interesting challenges and opportunities.
It seems that many businesses are already talking about reducing their physical footprint. In the short term that seems difficult to achieve given the need to socially distance but in the long term I rather suspect that the traditional office environment that we have all been used to will change quite significantly. Whether many of us will go to the extreme of the example set by Slater & Gordon (London) remains to be seen but if offices become more of a hub which we all frequent on an occasional basis (compared with every day) then it will be interesting to see whether we can retain and develop the social element that we all enjoy in work whilst at the same time allowing for, and indeed encouraging, greater productivity.
When I said in my closing video that we had fun delivering this conference I meant it. We brought together a cross-section of people from across the Firm and [awful expression] 'bonded' on a virtual platform. There was an incredibly supportive atmosphere, we genuinely had fun: gif-off competitions led by individuals that I would not have expected to even know what a gif was four weeks ago!
I do think the world as we know it has been changed forever but I am hopeful for the future. I am humbled by the number of you who attended our Conference and we are all determined to put on another conference which listens to your feedback and, once again, sets the benchmark.
In the meantime we have lots of exciting ideas for new content so sign up for updates and watch this space…
Thank you all for attending , thank you all for listening and for those of you who have read this far thank you for your stamina in doing so.
Stay safe, be well
