Nine delegates attended the Women in Interlaw session which preceded the Regional Conference in Edinburgh.  This was the first opportunity for the European Women in Interlaw to meet face to face and the agenda was designed principally to allow all the delegates to get to know each other and each other’s firms.

Bev Weise updated us on the activities of the Americas group and encouraged us to attend the Women in Interlaw session which will precede the global conference in October this year in Mexico City.

After a round table session introducing ourselves the group worked through a typical session of Morton Fraser’s “Making a Difference” initiative.  This is a project which involves all staff working in their teams identifying how they do their jobs with clients and looking at what we call “Moments of Truth”, when the experience the client has can profoundly influence the way they feel about their lawyers, whether in a positive or negative way.  The purpose of the initiative is to deliver excellence in client service in addition to excellence in legal advice.

The client experience which we looked at as an international group was that of giving an instruction for a new piece of work and our discussion ranged from what happened if the lawyer the client wanted to speak to was not available to how we approached feeing.  It was interesting that common themes and experiences arose in all the discussions but there were a variety of suggestions as to how people dealt with different situations and everyone attending the session went away with some new ideas on how to improve client service.

We also discussed the advantages of connections being made among Interlaw member firms at another level by membership of this group and all women lawyers within member firms are encouraged to participate in future.

The session and conference as a whole produced an interesting list of topics for future tele-conferences and face to face meetings.

26 May 2005