Nothing promotes de-cluttering one’s office like a move or new furniture. A colleague is retiring; I bought his table and standup desk, and gave up the humungous thing they gave me when I showed up. It meant tossing lots and lots of stuff I never look at anymore (and goodbye hundreds of reprints – may you recycle into something far more valuable).
I found the notes from a talk I gave in Chicago to a 2004 meeting of the firm then called Piper Rudnick – a combination of Piper Marbury of Baltimore and Rudnick & Wolfe of Chicago soon to absorb Gray Cary, and thereafter to merge with Dibb Lupton of Great Britain to become the behemoth DLA Piper.
At the time I was the general counsel of Great Lakes Chemical Corporation. Piper had done a lot of our work under the various EPA-administered statutes that regulated household and other chemicals – TSCA, RFRA (the one dealing with rodenticides and fungicides, not the one dealing with religion), etc. It had succeeded in securing more work through a “Preferred Provider Program” our terrific Associate GC, Joanne Smith, organized. In Chicago, I was on a panel with the general counsel of AON, a senior lawyer from Boeing, and one other I can’t recall now. I do remember it was a big room with a lot of people in the audience.
Ten years later, there isn’t much here that I’d change – other than I wouldn’t have notes on lined paper but would instead have used the Speeches app on my iPad. A reconstruction of the talk from my notes follows the break.
[Cross-posted at PrawfsBlawg and Legal Profession Blog]