From the Secretary-General, December 2011

Dear IPBA Members,

 

As the year draws to a close, it is in our nature to reflect back on the year that has gone by and look ahead to the year that lies ahead. Another year has flown by, and 2011 turned out to be a year which will not be easy to forget.

 

11 March 2011
The Host Committee for the Kyoto Annual Meeting and Conference was working hard to put the final touches on its annual conference when the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami hit Northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011, causing unprecedented damage and destruction. The Host Committee and the officers of the IPBA struggled to decide whether or not to proceed with the conference which was scheduled only a month away. In the end, the 20th Anniversary Conference was held as scheduled, and despite cancellations by some registrants, the conference turned out to be an enormous success with more than 800 in attendance.

 

The Mid-Year Council Meeting for the IPBA was held on 2-4 September 2011 in Hanoi, Vietnam. The various meetings of the leadership of the IPBA were completed with little to complicate their schedule, except for the fact that a seminar scheduled for 5 September had to be cancelled due to licensing issues that could not be resolved in time. It must be noted that the meeting was originally scheduled in hanoi in November 2008. But another naturla disaster - torrential rains that flooded Hanoi, much like the rains that ravaged Thailand this fall - forced the cancellation of the originally scheduled meeting.

In Hanoi, the Council decided to hold the Mid-Year Council Meeting for 2012 in New Zealand. Membership in New Zealand has been declining the last few years, and the IPBA hopes that the Mid-Year Council Meeting and a scheduled seminar will help to boost its membership in New Zealand. In the shadow of the disaster in Japan, it may be easy to forget, but Christchurch in New Zealand was struck by a major earthquake in February which caused major damage and destruction.

 

The New Delhi Host Committee is finalizing its planning for the 2012 Annual Meeting and Conference to be held in New Delhi, India from 29 February to 3 march 2012. The topic of the conference will be Legal Trends, Thoughts and Times. If you have not registered for the conference yet, you are urged to do so and not miss another exciting annual conference.

 

You may recall that the theme of the annual conference in Kyoto was Innovation. An individual who was a true innovator, Steve Jobs, the founder and former CEo of Apple Inc., passed away in October 2011. He was not an attorney, but the innovations that he brought into the world truly changed the way we live and work. More innovations will be forthcoming, and we, as attorneys, will need to keep up with innovations as we continue to be effective in the digital world.

 

Some of us older members can remember that when the IPBA was formed in 1991, we were still communicating by land lines on the telephone. If you were out of our office overseas, we had to find a telephone, pay the long distance charges and call another land line hundreds or thousands of miles away. The common use of cell phones and smart phones was still some time away. Now we simply pick up our iPhones or Blackberrys wherever we may be and dial, or rather touch, the numbers to call whomever we want anywhere in the world.

 

Faxes have now been replaced by e-mail and PDF documents. Where we used to store document files in file cabinets, many law firms are going paperless and filing documents online. Soon cloud computing will become the norm, and we may no longer need to keep servers in our offices.

 

You will note that IPBA membership dues are now paid online. Paper reminders are sent as a secondary notice. The IPBA membership directory is also available exclusively onlin,e although a few analog members have asked if hard copies of membership directories can be printed. The registration for the annual conference in Delhi is handled online. Please go to the conference website (www.ipba2012.org) to learn about the many programs being offered and register for the conference - online.

 

Despite natural disaster and other obstacles that may come our way, the IPBA will continue on its path of innovation to continue to provide its members with benefits that will make your membership worthwhile. We can certainly do with fewer natural disasters in 2012, and we look forward to 2012 as another fulfilling year for the IPBA.