The Politics and Effective Uses of Planning Groups

This panel will be led by two attorneys who have, between them, nearly 50 years of experience working with planning groups – at bar associations and major national universities. They will discuss defining your goals for using planning committees, from developing sponsors and growing sponsorship dollars, to generating topics and finding speakers. But they will also discuss the many pitfalls when topics and speaker assignments mix with sponsor dollars. The panel leaders will discuss how they have successfully managed these sometimes conflicting relationships before, during, and after the pandemic.

The panel will also discuss how to inculcate a legacy of excellence among planners, sponsors, and speakers – and how to change the culture so that it does not become static. This will include migrating from familiar speakers and toward a much more diverse set of speakers. Rather than being general in nature, the panel leaders will discuss actual case studies of achieving speaker diversity in practice areas that are demographically not diverse.
The panel leaders will also discuss what’s next? How do you find younger attorneys to pick up the baton and carry on the tradition of deeply rooted programs or institutes and how new leadership may need to change existing models.