The session started out as a typical discussion panel of in-house and outside counsel. The venue was the offices of Stinson Leonard Street in Minneapolis. The subject: the survey that our parent company’s research arm had worked on with the firm, focusing on what keeps general counsel up at night. After the group received a summary of the survey results, the panel tried to work through what it meant.
The discussion was lively. There was good coffee, a decent amount of questions from the audience, and speakers with personality. But it didn’t really take off until someone talked about getting outside counsel to return phone calls. Suddenly the breakfast get-together started to sound like an encounter session, with in-house lawyers and their outside counsel chastising each other for not returning calls fast enough. You got the feeling that there was a lot of pain there.
