2019 Futures Conference Faculty*
Speaker
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Biography
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Kris Ahrend: Kris currently serves as the Head of U.S. Legal Shared Services for Warner Music Group (WMG). He previously served as President of U.S. Shared Services and oversaw the creation of Warner's Center of Excellence for Shared Services in Nashville. Prior to moving to Nashville, Kris held several different legal and business affairs positions in the music industry, including roles with Rhino Entertainment, Frank Sinatra Enterprises and Sony Music. He began his career serving as a law clerk for two different federal court judges and then working as an associate at the New York-based law firm, Simpson Thacher. Kris holds a bachelor's degree in Environmental Studies and Theatre from Binghamton University and a law degree from Washington & Lee University's School of Law.
Session: In Tune With the Future |
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Robert J. Ambrogi: Robert Ambrogi is a lawyer and legal journalist who has been writing and speaking about legal technology and the Internet for more than two decades. He writes the award-winning blog LawSites, is a columnist for Above the Law, hosts the podcast about innovation in law LawNext, and is publisher and editor-in-chief of LexBlog.com. In 2011, Bob was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” In 2017, he received the Yankee Quill award for journalism from the Academy of New England Journalists and was honored by the ABA Journal as a Legal Rebels Trailblazer. Earlier, he was editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.
Session: The Future of Law's Ink-Stained Wretches |
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Mo Zain Ajaz: Mo is a COLPM "Class of 2019" Fellow-Elect. He is an intrapreneur working for National Grid plc as a GC and COO as well as the founder of LEx360, a legal optimisation consultancy. As part of his consultancy work he has helped numerous GC's undertake strategic reviews, efficiency and people development programmes, process optimisations, legal technology deployments and outside counsel best practice reviews. In addition, he has helped law firms in client journey improvements, alignment of service delivery, process optimisation, what clients want, and pricing strategies. Mo received the Legal 500 Individual of the Year (2018), was selected as one of six in-house role models for the Financial Times (2018) and has received numerous other awards for his many contributions to the profession.
Session: Collaboration as a Competitive Advantage |
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Nicole Nehama Auerbach: Nicole has disrupted the legal industry – twice. She did so first when she helped pioneer the alternative fee movement. She did so again when she co-founded ElevateNext Law, a new model, majority woman-owned firm that sits alongside the global law company Elevate Services to provide customers with a one stop solution that includes the practice of law. Prior to forming Valorem, Nicole practiced as a litigator for 15 years at an AmLaw 100 firm. She was named one of the "Notable Gen X Leaders in Law" and one of the "Most Influential Women Attorneys in Chicago." Nicole is a Fellow of the College, a member of the Dean's Advisory Council for DePaul College of Law and the Board of Managers for Novus Law.
Session: Company Law Company |
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Renee Branson: Combining 20 years in education, counseling and nonprofit management, Renee's passion and purpose is helping individuals, teams, and organizations cultivate resilience. As a Certified Resilience Coach (CReC), she provides clients with immediately usable tools to increase resilience, well-being, and optimism in the workplace. She works with lawyers, legal marketers, business professionals, nonprofit leaders, and others to help them understand and incorporate resilience in their own professional lives and in the teams they lead.
Session: Resilience and the High Performance Culture |
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Connie Brenton: Connie, a Fellow of the College, is the Chief of Staff/Sr. Director, Legal Operations for NetApp, Inc. She was named to the 100 Women of Influence in Silicon Valley in 2014 and a top ten deputy general counsel in California in 2012. In June 2015, she was also recognized as LegalTech's Law Department Operations Manager of the Year. As the trusted advisor to the general counsel, she guides a global team in creating a wide variety of tools, programs, policies, and processes, including eBilling, matter management, operational dashboards, legal spend management, vendor management, and contract management. Her position enables her to use cross functional teams including inside/outside counsel, third-party providers, managed service providers, and technology to exceed goals.
Session: Client Centric Legal Marketing |
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Toby Brown: Toby is the Chief Practice Management Officer for Perkins Coie. In this role he works with firm partners and clients in developing pricing arrangements and service delivery models that drive successful relationships. This includes practice management, pricing, legal project management, lateral partner acquisition, practice innovation, and alternative staffing approaches. Toby is a COLPM Fellow, founder of the P3 Conference, and founding President of SALI. He has published numerous articles, along with the book, Law Firm Pricing: Strategies, Roles, and Responsibilities and was named to The National Law Journal’s 2013 list of Legal Business Trailblazers & Pioneers. Toby received his BS and MS in Economics from the University of Utah, and he maintains the ABA award winning 3 Geeks and a Law Blog with three colleagues.
Session: Standardizing Legal Services Delivery |
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Richard Burcher: Richard is a Fellow-Elect and former New Zealand practicing lawyer and managing partner with over 40 years' experience. Following masters-level post-graduate study in pricing-related disciplines, Richard has been based in London since 2012 as the founder and Managing Director of international legal services pricing consultancy Validatum®. He is also the founder and managing director of the Legal Pricing Academy® and legal pricing software platform, Virtual Pricing Director®. A regular speaker at national and international conferences, his legal services pricing research and commentary have been widely published or cited in Commonwealth Law Journal, Global Legal Post, Managing Partner, and the Pricing Journal amongst others. Validatum® has worked with over 300 law firms in 22 countries with turnovers of £10 million ($US15m) to £900 million ($US1.5b).
Session: Bridging the Buyer/Seller Divide |
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Jeffrey Carr: Jeff is a race car driver. He is a College Fellow and serves as the Vice President and General Counsel of Univar Solutions, Inc., a Fortune 500 global chemical and ingredients distributor and provider of value-added services. At Univar Solutions, he serves on the executive committee and has responsibility for enterprise risk management, compliance initiatives, and legal functions. Prior to joining Univar in 2017, Jeff built up more than 35 years of legal experience, most recently as President of ValoremNext LLC. Prior to that role, he was Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of FMC Technologies, Inc., where he held various roles with increasing responsibility since 1993. As FMC Technologies' General Counsel, Jeff was the recipient of numerous awards for outstanding performance and innovation.
Session: Company Law Company |
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Felicity Conrad: Felicity is the Co-founder & CEO of Paladin. Paladin's mission is to increase access to justice by helping legal teams do more and better pro bono. Paladin works with leading law firms, Fortune 500s and law schools to easily staff, manage, and track their pro bono work on a centralized platform, as well as visualize engagement and impact. Before founding Paladin, Felicity was a litigator for Skadden Arps (New York). An alumnus of NYU Law, McGill University and Sciences Po Paris, she previously worked at the United Nations on International Criminal Court issues and has worked in international law around the world. Paladin's work has been featured in numerous publications, and Felicity has received many awards for her contributions to the profession.
Session: Legal Problem Solving and Improving Access to Justice Using Design Thinking |
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Kunoor Chopra: Kunoor, a College Fellow, is VP of Legal Services at Elevate. She leads teams that design and implement solutions for litigation, contracts, M&A, compliance and IP, combining people, process, and technology in innovative ways, empowering customers to modernize and optimize operations. Her vision has always been to create a platform that provides effective and efficient options to obtain, manage, and perform legal services. Kunoor has been instrumental in the industry's transformation, from the early days of legal process outsourcing to helping build one of the leading law companies, Elevate. Kunoor and her team meet the unique needs of complex customers by providing the right resources for efficient service delivery, specialized domain expertise, and process efficiencies and visibility into the comprehensive details of services being delivered.
Session: AI in Action in the Legal Industry |
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Tim Corcoran: Tim, a Trustee and Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, is a former CEO, Hall of Famer, and Past President of the Legal Marketing Association and a Committee Chair with the Association of Legal Administrators. He delivers keynote presentations, conducts workshops, and advises legal business leaders through the profitable disruption of outdated business models.
Sessions:
- Pitch Perfect!
- Incentivizing the New Normal in Lawyer Compensation |
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Patrick DiDomenico: Patrick is the Chief Knowledge Officer for Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C., an international labor and employment law firm with 900 attorneys in more than 50 offices. He also serves on the firm’s Technology Strategy Committee, Research & Development Council, and Innovation Summit Committee. Before his knowledge management career, he was a practicing litigation attorney in New York City. Author of the book Knowledge Management for Lawyers, published by the American Bar Association, Patrick has been in the legal knowledge management industry since 2005. He is a Fellow in the College of Law Practice Management, the recipient of the 2013 ILTA Knowledge Management Professional of the Year Award, and a frequent speaker on KM, legal technology, and legal innovation topics.
Session: AI in Action in the Legal Industry |
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Christopher Ende: Chris leads Goulston & Storrs' strategic initiatives relating to pricing, legal project management, practice innovation, and profitability. He collaborates across all firm legal practices and professional departments to deliver increased value to clients through innovative fee arrangements, process improvement, and data analytics. Chris works directly with clients to deliver tailored pricing solutions and service delivery models that align incentives and facilitate successful outcomes. He has deep experience in the business of law. Chris previously led the outside counsel spend management program for a Fortune 15 company and held a senior leadership position at an alternative legal services provider. Chris, a College Fellow, built and led the global pricing and project management program at an AmLaw 50 law firm.
Session: Standardizing Legal Services Delivery |
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David Freeman: David helps law firms grow revenue by enhancing leadership, business development, and client service. For 25 years, he has trained and coached thousands of lawyers and leaders from nearly 200 firms, including 45% of the AmLaw 200. He is a multiple best-selling author and for three consecutive years was voted the best business development consultant and coach in National Law Journal surveys, resulting in his induction into the NLJ Hall of Fame. David is an attorney, a Trusted Advisor with the Professional Development Consortium, a COLPM Fellow, CEO of the David Freeman Consulting Group, founder of Law Firm CultureShift®, creator of Culture Xray® (an internal business development culture assessment), and developer of technology that automates cross-selling coaching for lawyers (Cross Serving®).
Session: Law Firm Business Development 3.0: Comprehensive Approach for Turning Lawyers into Rainmakers |
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Ron Friedmann: Ron is Chief Knowledge + Information Officer for LAC Group. He focuses on moving research from traditional formats to deliver insight and answers and helps clients and LAC find, use, organize, and re-use know-how. Ron has three decades of experience improving law practice and legal organization business efficiency with knowledge management, artificial intelligence, outsourcing, legal project management, process improvement, and practice technologies. He has worked for two large law firms, two legal software companies, two legal consulting companies, and two legal outsourcing companies. Previously, he was an econometrician and management consultant. Ron contributes to the legal market via his blog (Strategic Legal Technology), Tweets, conference presentations, and published articles. He is a former College Trustee and organizes two private knowledge management groups and meetings.
Session: Visual Intelligence |
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Dean Alberto Gonzales: Judge Gonzales became Dean of Belmont University College of Law in 2014 and presently holds the Doyle Rogers Distinguished Chair of Law. As Dean, he teaches Constitutional Law, First Amendment Law, National Security Law and Separation of Powers. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, he received his bachelor’s degree from Rice University and a juris doctor degree from Harvard University. Judge Gonzales served as the 80th Attorney General and as Counsel to the President of the United States. He was previously a partner at Vinson & Elkins, held numerous state (Texas) government positions (Supreme Court Justice, Secretary of State and General Counsel to the Governor) and served as a Visiting Professor and minority/veteran recruitment consultant at Texas Tech University.
Session: College of Law Welcome |
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Lori Gonzalez: Lori is the President of the The RayNa Corporation – a company designed to assist law firms and solo attorneys with billing, efficiency, and office operations. After receiving her paralegal certification in 2002, she worked in several firms filling many roles, including practice management software training and coordination. She is a frequent speaker for the Tennessee Bar Association on law firm management needs. Lori’s adaptability, knowledge of current technology and ability to evaluate systems are what give her the ability to not only work within any system, but to improve it. She spends her free time volunteering to improve access to justice and increase knowledge and use of technology in the legal field.
Session: Ubering the Guild |
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Susan Hackett: Susan is the CEO of Legal Executive Leadership and a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management. She has three decades of experience helping law departments (and those who serve them) deliver distinguishing value and improve the way they work. She founded LEL after serving for 22 years as SVP and GC of the Association of Corporate Counsel, where she created/executed ground-breaking initiatives in law department management and operations, outside counsel relationships, innovative professional development and engagement projects, advocacy coalitions, and the profession’s first corporate pro bono, public service and diversity/inclusion initiatives. At LEL, she applies her experience in practical settings, helping clients change behaviors, improve operational processes, drive demonstrable client results, and move confidently from traditional practice toward legal executive leadership.
Sessions:
- Company Law Company
- Bringing the Future to the Present |
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Bill Henderson: Bill is on the faculty of Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he holds the Stephen F. Burns Chair on the Legal Profession. His research focuses on the empirical analysis of the legal profession and legal education. In 2015 and 2016, Bill was named the Most Influential Person in Legal Education by The National Jurist magazine. His innovation initiatives include the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP, “i-flip”), an education nonprofit that combines sophisticated training in modern law practice with paid internships for law students; Lawyer Metrics, an applied research company that helps lawyers and law firms use data (acquired by AccessLex in 2015); and Legal Evolution, an online publication focused on successful legal industry innovation.
Sessions:
- Ubering the Guild
- Data-Driven Management
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Patrick Lamb: Pat is a Vice President of Elevate Services, a global law company, and a founding partner of ElevateNext Law LLP, the law firm he and co-founder Nicole Auerbach created to work in alignment with Elevate Services. Before beginning his adventure with Elevate in 2018, Pat and Nicole founded Valorem Law Group. The firm became well known for its use of non-hourly fee arrangements for complex business litigation. Valorem and Pat have been frequently recognized for exceptional customer experience, a topic about which Pat has blogged since 2005. Pat has authored two books on alternative fees and has written widely about change in the legal industry. He was named an ABA Legal Rebel in 2009. Pat is a Fellow and serves as a College Trustee.
Session: Company Law Company |
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Stewart Levine: Stewart is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an attorney, mediator, management consultant, and coach. He creates resolution and agreement in the most challenging circumstances. He has written and spoken extensively before legal professionals for over 35 years. He is the author of the best-seller Getting to Resolution: Turning Conflict into Collaboration.
Session: Resilience and the High Performance Culture |
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Luke Liss: Luke is Of Counsel in the Palo Alto office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He is a member of the firm's litigation department, focusing on mergers and acquisitions litigation, securities class actions, shareholder derivative suits, appraisal actions, and complex commercial litigation. Luke represents companies with regulatory investigations, internal investigations and corporate governance matters. Luke serves as Pro Bono Counsel for the firm, leads pro bono teams, and assists with developing the firm's pro bono and community service partnerships. He also serves as the coordinator of the firm's U-Visa and Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) pro bono program. The firm was recognized by Community Legal Services of East Palo Alto as Law Firm of the Year (2014) for its extensive work in the program.
Session: Legal Problem Solving and Improving Access to Justice Using Design Thinking |
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Tim Lupinacci: Tim is Chairman and CEO of Baker Donelson and previously served as chair of the Financial Services Department, a member of the Firm's Board of Directors, and office managing shareholder for Birmingham. He serves on the Firm's Diversity Committee and previously served as co-chair of Baker Donelson's Women's Initiative Pathways to Leadership Committee. Tim's practice of more than 28 years has focused on helping financial institutions solve complex issues arising in restructuring throughout the country with extensive experience with workouts and bankruptcies involving defaulted health care loans. He has primarily represented financial institutions, REITs, special servicers, indenture trustees, banks, and asset-based lenders in loan workouts and insolvency, with an emphasis on health care defaults, bankruptcy, and restructuring.
Session: Leaders Lead and Lawyers Lawyer |
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Catherine MacDonagh: Catherine is a Fellow and well-known for continuously breaking new ground. A former corporate counsel and law firm executive, she now focuses on helping others with strategy, collaboration, efficiency, and delivering more value to their teams and organizations. She is CEO of the Legal Lean Sigma Institute LLC, where she invented Legal Lean Sigma® and the award-winning Legal WorkOut®. She consults in her practice, FIRM Guidance, is Chief Enthusiasm Officer of Mocktails LLC, and is a founder of the Legal Sales and Service Organization. Catherine is an adjunct professor at Suffolk Law School and George Washington University (Master’s in Law Firm Management program). She authored Lean Six Sigma for Law Firms, co-authored The Woman Lawyer's Rainmaking Game (with Fellow Silvia Coulter) and The Law Firm Associate's Guide to Personal Marketing and Selling Skills (with Fellow Beth Cuzzone), and contributed to six books (and counting) on process improvement and project management.
Session: Collaboration as a Competitive Advantage |
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Adam McHeffey: Adam McHeffey graduated with a B.A. from State University of New York Purchase College in 2010 with a focus in Arts Management. He has since worked with hundreds of clients on a diverse range of projects. Currently, Adam enjoys the Director of Marketing role at Artiphon, a music-technology startup. When he's not busy with marketing and content creation, he also enjoys illustrating children's books and seeing live music. Adam currently resides in Nashville, with his wife Kari and daughter Emmy June.
Session: Change Never Sounded Better |
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Caitlin ("Cat") Moon: Cat is a Class of 2019 Fellow-Elect and the Director of Innovation Design for the Program in Law and Innovation (PoLI) at Vanderbilt Law School and Director of the PoLI Institute (innovatethelaw.com), which provides executive education to legal professionals. She co-founded Vanderbilt's annual Summit on Law and Innovation (SoLI), bringing together practitioners across disciplines in collaborative legal innovation projects. She currently teaches Legal Problem Solving, a course in human-centered design for law, Law as a Business, Blockchain, and Smart Contracts and Legal Operations at Vanderbilt Law. Cat speaks and facilitates workshops globally on the application of human-centered design, creativity, and technology to realize innovation across the legal profession and legal education. Before joining her alma mater Vanderbilt Law, she practiced law for 20 years.
Session: Legal Problem Solving and Improving Access to Justice Using Design Thinking |
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Heather Morse: Heather is a senior legal marketing professional partnering with lawyers on business development strategies and the business of law. She is the Chief Business Development Officer for McGlinchey Stafford. Heather is a College Fellow, member of the California State Bar’s Task Force on Access Through Innovation of Legal Services; editor of The Legal Watercooler; and administrator/founder of LME. Heather is a fan of the Oxford comma and a single space after a period is the correct mode of punctuation. She spent 10 years as a Girl Scout Leader, hawking cookies and even camping in a tent, and resides in New Orleans with the Sports Dude and two teenagers.
Session: Ubering the Guild |
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Ronda Muir: Founder and principal of Law People Management LLC, Ronda is one of the country’s leading authorities on lawyer personalities and on implementing behavioral science research in the legal workplace. Ronda’s expertise offers business-savvy, psychologically sophisticated, and real-world solutions to both the traditional and emerging people management challenges that are unique to the legal industry. Nationally recognized for her identification and assessment of contemporary industry trends, she is a frequent speaker, an award-winning author and publishes www.LawPeopleBlog.com, a valuable resource for the legal community. Muir’s book Beyond Smart: Lawyering with Emotional Intelligence, an American Bar Association best seller, is the first comprehensive guide to understanding, using and raising emotional intelligence in the context of the practice of law.
Session: Resilience and the High Performance Culture |
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Merry Neitlich: Merry, a Fellow of the College, is the founder and managing partner of EM Consulting, a leader in law firm marketing and business development solutions. With over 25 years of experience, Merry provides clients with tools to grow relationships and successfully identify, court, and convert targets into clients. She consults with law firms wishing to overcome resistance and implement successful legal operations programs. Merry has extensive experience coaching attorneys in business development in order to grow their practices. She has interviewed hundreds of in-house counsels across the country for law firm clients in order to enhance relationships and client satisfaction. Merry offers training programs in business development, legal operations, client retention, and satisfaction programs. In 2017, Merry was inducted into the LMA Hall of Fame.
Session: Collaboration as a Competitive Advantage |
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Mike O'Horo: Mike O'Horo is known by lawyers everywhere as The Coach. He has helped more than 5,000 of them generate $1 billion in new business. Mike has integrated human coaching with online education (Dezurve) and interactive training (RainmakerVT) that teaches practical business development skills. These tools also enable firms to identify which lawyers are serious about learning, and which will contribute to the estimated 80% waste of your training budget.
Session: Law Firm Business Development 3.0: A Comprehensive Approach for Turning Lawyers into Rainmakers |
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Raphael Pooser: Dr. Pooser received a PhD in Engineering Physics from the University of Virginia. He is an expert in continuous variable quantum optics, and many other things, including quantum sensors and quantum computing. His interests span almost the entire field of computing, including supercomputers, accelerators like GPUs, and the technologies that we're going to be adopting as the end of Moore's law approaches. He currently leads a large laboratory directed research and development project on neuromorphic computing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Session: Law's Quantum Leap |
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Elonide Semmes: Elonide is the President of Right Hat, a brand consultancy that helps law firms and legal service providers create powerful brands. Elonide likes nothing more than helping organizations move from simply designing new communication tools to creating entire brand experiences. In the legal space, this requires looking at every touchpoint in a brand from ads, websites, service offerings, proposal responses, and approach to technology. Elonide was a founding member of the Legal Marketing Association Mid-Atlantic chapter and has served on the Board of Directors of both the Mid-Atlantic and New England chapters. Elonide has been inducted into the Legal Marketing Association Hall of Fame. She is a member of the College of Law Practice Management and joins its Board of Trustees in October 2019.
Session: Client Centric Legal Marketing |
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Adam Severson: Adam is the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Baker Donelson. He is responsible for the strategic direction and execution of the Firm's business development and marketing initiatives, and collaborates with the Firm's lawyers and professional staff to maintain a client focus, increase marketplace awareness and facilitate cross-office and cross-practice collaboration. Adam is the former president for the Legal Marketing Association and was recently inducted as a Fellow into the College of Law Practice Management. He has received several industry awards including recognition as the #1 Business Development & Marketing team by Marketing the Law Firm and as CMO of the Year by the Nashville Business Journal. Adam speaks internationally on law firm strategy, marketing and business development, technology, and competitive intelligence.
Session: Leaders Lead and Lawyers Lawyer |
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Silvia Hodges Silverstein: Dr. Silverstein, a Fellow of the College, is executive director of the Buying Legal Council, the international trade organization for legal procurement, and adjunct professor at Columbia Law School. Silvia co-authored the Harvard Business School case studies GlaxoSmithKline: Sourcing Complex Professional Services on the company's legal procurement initiative and Riverview Law: Applying Business Sense to the Legal Market on the new model law firm. Silvia wrote The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics' I didn’t go to law school to become a salesperson, the South Caroline Law Review's What we know and need to know about Legal procurement, the Legal Procurement Handbook. She also published Winning Proposals – The Essential Guide for Law Firms and Legal Services Providers.
Session: Bridging the Buyer/Seller Divide |
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Teresa Walker: Teresa joined Nashville-based Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, LLP, in 1977 and has helped grow it to 240 attorneys. She is CEO of Tennessee Private Trust Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Waller, and is developing Legal Solutions and Innovations, to be co-owned with Waller. Teresa is a member of the Waller team that established TokenizeTN, a nonprofit created to realize the full potential of emerging technologies to drive a new era in Tennessee. In addition to being a Fellow, Teresa serves on the Executive Committee of the College, has served as President and Board member of the Association of Legal Administrators, is Vice Chair of ALA’s Professional Development Advisory Committee and belongs to Large Firm Administrators Caucus. She was appointed to the Board of Global Legal Blockchain Consortium in July 2018.
Session: Pitch Perfect! |
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* As of October 22, 2019
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