What's Happening: Virtual Conferences
Last week, I attended (and spoke at!) Litera’s The Changing Lawyer Live virtual conference (#TCLLive). As the first significant conference on the legaltech scene to go virtual during COVID-19 in 2020, I was keen to attend not just to re-connect with the legaltech community but also to see how the conference would work. Though I had meetings scheduled periodically throughout the day, I attended as many of the sessions as I could, as well as the “happy hour” at the end of the day.
Below is my verdict in notes, for those who were unable to attend but are interested in knowing what our conference landscape might look like this year:
Platform of choice? Zoom. In spite of all the bad press it’s had lately, no one can dispute the ease-of-use of the Zoom platform. Litera had speakers enter a Zoom waiting room 15 minutes early. At the start of their session, they were then “promoted” or admitted to the “main stage” - the public-facing Zoom arena. It worked well, with a seamless hand-over from one moderator to the next ensuring smooth transitions between sessions.
Session interludes. In between longer panels of between 3 to 5 people, Litera scheduled shorter one-on-one conversations. These served to break up the day, and presumably eased the burden for Litera in moving from one multi-person virtual panel to another. I quite liked the format - it was like having smaller fireside chats interspersed with deeper content and discussion.
The panels held attention. Some were concerned in the lead-up that it would be hard for this entirely virtual format to hold people’s attention. I found that the panels were high enough quality with sufficient speakers to successfully engage me for an entire 45 minutes. This bodes well for other conferences this year, especially major ones such as ILTACON that run over several days.
Well selected topics. A virtual conference that did not touch on the current remote WFH environment would not have worked. The panels were engaging because they dealt with the reality we are all currently facing. Lesson for future 2020 conferences: make it topical.
High profile keynote speakers. Litera smashed it out of the ballbark with its keynote speakers. Gretchen Reuben of the Happiness Project was a perfect selection for a COVID conference, and who didn’t want to hear (and see) the real Molly Bloom? The multiple keynote line-up was a clever move by Litera. In a reality where in-person networking is not available, my guess is that conference organizers will need to dig deeper for high profile talent to draw the right sized audience.
Inexpensive and charitable. Attending #TCLLive this year cost $25, and all proceeds went to the CDC Foundation’s Emergency Response Fund. This was a great way to draw an audience, but it also felt right. It will be interesting to see whether conferences later this year are able to be as successful attracting attendees in a purely virtual platform with a higher price-per-entry.
No sponsors. Litera being Litera, and not an event organizer, it required no sponsorship. Again, this felt right, but I could imagine a conference organized by an association making the virtual environment work with sponsorship, too. Sponsors could provide moderators, perhaps, or they could handle the “interlude” sessions as well as post ads around the virtual “stage”. It’s hard to tell, though, how much value the sponsors will get out of the virtual platform compared to an in-person conference. I imagine that sponsorship rates will need to be adjusted accordingly.
The Stage! Litera built a “stage” on the webpage for the conference. It was simple enough but added a nice touch of design flare that made #TCLLive feel special and different from one of the many regular video calls we all now attend.
Happy Hour. Attendance at the conference bought you a ticket to happy hour, hosted by EY’s Joe Borstein. This was initially somewhat awkward, with 40-50 people on screen. Joe had discussion topics which worked to kick things off but what worked particularly well was a tactic of sporadically breaking the bigger group up into virtual “rooms” of just five people, randomly assigned, for discussion and chat. I met some new people and by the time we got back into the larger group for the second time everyone had relaxed and the happy hour felt more genuine.
Overall, I thought the conference worked really well. Here are a few things I think might add to the success of future virtual events:
Audience participation. In the absence of being able to chat with actual people during breaks between sessions, it would be interesting to add a chat feature that could enable attendees to interact and respond in real-time during sessions - perhaps a panel to the side of the “stage”. Twitter effectively serves this purpose during many conferences, but it would make sense to bring that feature into the arena of the conference itself.
Sponsor demos. For larger conferences, I can imagine multiple rooms and streams, some led by sponsors and allowing live audience participation and demos. The coordination will be intense, especially to ensure that it’s not confusing from a user perspective to understand where to go, when. However, I am hopeful after #TCLLive that a larger conference could pull this off and I’m even a little excited to see what this might look like.
“Doing”. It’s an irony of this COVID period that it hit just as conferences were starting to make the shift from pure talk to actual doing. This has been evident over the past year at events like Legal Design Geek and Inspire Legal, and I got the sense that we were all keen to see more of it. It would be a pity if the COVID-imposed virtual reality has the effective of halting this progression. Seeing how the break-out rooms worked during the happy hour event at #TCLLive made me think that we could manage to get some interactive “doing” type activities into even a virtual conference. I’m eager to see what this might look like in practice - we may all have to bulk order our own post-it notes on Amazon in advance!
The Verdict