The right conference at the right time.

• Author: Eliadis, Gina
• Position: 23RD ANNUAL LMA CONFERENCE

"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less."

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THOSE ARE THE WORDS OF RETIRED U.S. ARMY GENERAL ERIC SHINSEKI, who may take the prize for quote of the decade. Of course, Shinseki was referring to the U.S. military and its engagements overseas, but he may as well have been talking about, well, just about any institution or industry--especially ours. We marketing types certainly understand the truth of Shinseki's remark. After all, we have all felt the pressure of the economic and technological changes that have been nipping furiously at our heels.

And as bewildering and overwhelming as some of these changes are, we understand that we must learn and adapt in order to come out as winners, or at least survivors, in the marketplace.

I've been in legal marketing for 12 years, but in all that time I have never attended an LMA Annual Conference. This year was different. From the moment the announcement arrived in my inbox bearing the apt title "Change ... Now What?" I knew this was the right program at the right time, and that I needed to be there.

The past year seems as if it has been filled with nothing but change: changes in the way we get our messages out, in the way we allocate our marketing dollars, in the way we seek out new business. We've been pummeled with messages about social media, the recession, going green and countless other new phenomena. I, for one, arrived at the conference a little battle-weary, but I'm happy to say that I left feeling recharged and full of new ideas.

Keynote co-speaker James Carville perfectly set the tone for the 23rd Annual Legal Marketing Association Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center just outside Washington, D.C. When asked how he would brand a law firm, the political strategist responded with fantastic insight, "Tomorrow is not going to look like yesterday. Everything is going to taste different when this is all over. We're never going back. A law firm's message should be that we're innovators. We're taking you to the world that is going to exist."

Like the keynote address, session after session offered not only a sophisticated look at how the industry and, indeed, the world are changing but also how the new reality fits into the old one. As brand-new LMA Hall of Fame inductee Ann Lee Gibson put it, we need to do old things in new ways. [see "Gibson and Johnson Join LMA Hall of Fame," p. 14]

As a former Web developer and current...