Technology

Part Of Trusting Science Is Trusting In-Person Events Again

Are you ready to see people again?

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We recently learned that the first major in-person legal tech conference since the beginning of lockdown will take place in late August. Technically, ILTACON is running a hybrid model allowing remote attendance in addition to the in-person show, but the point remains that we’re actually going to get a chance to see people face to face in a few months.

I’m excited about the opportunity to have real human conversations again. Zoom has kept us from completely losing touch, but there’s something about being in the same room that technology can’t capture.

But it turns out, there are a lot more people still uneasy about the idea of live events. During the last Legaltech Trending News group chat on Clubhouse (Wednesdays 12:30 Eastern), we were discussing ILTACON and the Legal Marketing Association conferences and a lot of the audience expressed reservations about physical conferences even in late 2021. The mood was summed up by a concern that “we’ve been hearing this pandemic was three weeks away from being solved for a year now.”

Except the invention of multiple vaccines seems to be a critical intervening event since armchair prognosticators were musing about summer heat killing off the virus. There are reasons for continuing concern. Herd immunity is going to be an uphill battle in certain parts of the country as white Republicans refuse to get vaccinated. Variants could eventually develop that escape the vaccine though to date the vaccines are performing well against everything evolution is throwing at them. However, all in all the process is working.

Which brings us back to the upcoming conferences. If you trusted the science on the front end of this pandemic and strapped on masks, stayed home, and washed your hands repeatedly, then you need to trust the science on the back end when it’s telling us that we have high efficacy vaccines. One of the biggest incentives for vaccine adoption is the promise that you can start venturing back into society after you’re done.

So, more than vaccine numbers, I’m going to be using conference attendance as my metric for how successfully we’ve embraced the science.

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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