By all accounts last Wednesday’s Senior Session in Toronto was a big success. Chaired by Sugarcrest’s Felice Wagner and billed as one of the key events at the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Annual Conference, Senior Session brought together top legal marketing professionals from the United States and Canada for an intensive ½-day session on a hot topic: what it takes to be a player in the high-tech arena.

If you missed it, imagine yourself as a legal marketing secret agent. Your mission: work with a team of 8-12 of your colleagues to rescue a law firm (a.k.a. “Law Land LLP”) from legal marketing hell. Don’t use technology for technology’s sake. Instead, use it as part of a well-orchestrated plan of action. Then, share this plan with the rest of the record 120 attendees. That was the premise.

The fictional firm’s challenges were all too familiar to many of the attendees: scattered and disconnected offices; a yet-to-be integrated acquisition; disparate cultures; lack of knowledge sharing; no common identity; inconsistent use of technology; and much more.

It was enough to make the most ambitious legal marketer think twice about accepting the mission. Fortunately, this was just a fictional case study in the friendly confines of Fairmont’s Royal York Hotel—a far cry from a dirty battlefield.

As the four-hour program unfolded, there were no talking heads and no increasingly weary audience members. Just a room filled with energy and ideas. The program concluded with a panel of attorneys and legal marketing experts sharing with the group the technological solutions that they had developed to solve similar problems at their own firms.

The creative format, the dynamic interaction and the valuable substance of the discussions set the tone for the entire conference. You can read about Senior Session and the LMA Annual Conference in greater detail in our next issue as well as in the next issue of Strategies: The Journal of Legal Marketing.

David J. Goehl, a former practicing attorney, is president of Sugarcrest Development Group, Inc., a D.C. firm that gives seminars and training programs throughout the country on business development and client loyalty. He can be reached at (202) 462-3188 or dgoehl@sugarcrest.com. Want to see how you measure up as a rainmaker? Take the Rainmaker Reality Check today!