How to Hold a Meeting on the Internet

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 123-129

123

How to Hold a Meeting

on the Internet

No matter what type of law you happen to practice, at some

point you will have to attend a meeting. You might think first

of client meetings, but you also meet with staff, colleagues,

co-counsel, expert witnesses, consultants, the court, and oth-

ers. A meeting can be an expensive proposition, especially

when you meet with people in other cities or even on other

continents. The client typically ends up shouldering the costs

of these meetings, which include travel expenses as well as

the billable hours spent by lawyers and others in traveling to

the meeting. Other, more intangible costs also are involved—

usually involving time. For example, the time spent traveling

is often wasted because it can usually be spent more produc-

tively back at the office. Even more frustrating is that the actual

time spent in the meeting frequently pales in comparison to the

amount of time involved in travel and logistics.

For a long time, lawyers and their clients accepted trav-

eling long distances for meetings as a necessary evil and an

unavoidable cost of doing business. The financial crash in 2008

changed that dynamic for a lot of lawyers—suddenly travel

budgets were slashed, as firms fought to reduce costs. About

this time, the Internet truly came into its own as a collabo-

ration tool, and more and more lawyers and businesspeople

found it easier, cheaper, and more efficient to hold meetings

online rather than in person.

Surprisingly, this turns out to be the case even where

long-distance travel is not involved. Where once the parties

would have to spend hours (and sometimes days) traveling

to and attending a meeting—and sometimes coordinating the

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