Winter 2016 Newsletter
Building CMCP’s capacity to serve its members is a priority. In April 2016, we hired our first Director of Member Relations and Development, a new position designed to increase our ability to engage meaningfully with members and grow our membership base. You may have already noticed a bigger social media presence for CMCP. We are also investing in making changes to and updating our website to make it easier for you to access information from desktops and mobile devices. You will be seeing more developments in the coming months. The reception following our June Board meeting and retreat broke the pattern of our Meet the Board events and instead featured Board members leading discussion groups on building strong business relationships. Other new programs covered advice for minorities in lateralling between firms, and “intrapreneurialism” in career planning. The 2016 Annual Business Conference was one of our largest events ever with more than 500 attorneys in attendance. GC panels at the opening and close of the conference provided great insights on the complicated business issues of diversifying the legal field. It was a great moment to unveil the CMCP Ambassadors Council, an outstanding group of young lawyers who were already hard at work even before the conference organizing gatherings, and providing substantial help with conference programs including the very successful Dine-Around, the Bosses and the No Bosses Lunches and the Business Development Coaching Café. The 2016 Conference Planning Committee and an amazing line-up of speakers did an outstanding job. Sessions ranging from government investigations to networking to implicit bias and micro-aggressions were informative and thought-provoking and in many cases standing-room only. The inaugural Legal Department Diversity Summit of in-house counsel was a unique opportunity for candid and productive discussion on ways for in-house counsel to work together on diversity initiatives that will lead to specific actions in the coming months. We were very proud to feature continued strong participation by CMCP member corporations in the 2016 rendition of Corporate Connections, and to introduce some new Corporate Connections participants including Airbnb, Amazon, Bio-Rad Laboratories, eBay, Electronic Arts, Exponential, Fair Financial, Hearsay Social, LendingHome, SolarCity, SolarFrontier, SugarCRM and Tawa Supermarket, plus repeat appearances by PayPal and Uber Technologies. Continued on next page…
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