May Edition 2020

25 Nira Poran As a global legal association promoting the professional and business interests of in- house counsel, ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) strives to anticipate, understand, and guide in-house lawyers through information, education, networking, and advocacy. We caught up with Nira Poran , Executive Director of ACC’s Israel Chapter, the only organized source of information and network in Israel dedicated to in-house counsel, to find out how members are handling the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic. What have been the most pressing concerns for ACC and in-house counsel since the Coronavirus outbreak? Nira: ״ ACC’s main activity is daily seminars hosted by law firms for in-house lawyers so the banning of large gatherings could have been a serious hit for our organization and did initially caused some concern. A few days into the pandemic, we fully understood that this was going to be a big issue. At first, when law firms asked to cancel their event, we thought that they were overreacting, fearing that without our seminars, there would be less work and no revenues for a few months. It was devastating. However, we responded quickly and within 24 hours we were developing and driving forward the idea of live webinars. We approached one of the largest law firms in Israel, Herzog Fox & Neeman, and their excellent Labor department to host the first webinars at no charge. We immediately understood the great potential to our members, who understandably had a lot of questions across many disciplines, and we then initiated webinars every other day. ״ How do you feel GCs are coping, personally and professionally with remote working and changes in working practices? Nira: ״ I feel that webinars are the new revelation that will change our way of working from now on. Apart from the lack of personal networking, this new way of working will save so much time for GCs that for sure they will want to have webinars in the post-Corona era. However, it remains to be seen whether the law firms themselves will see ROI in this approach. It is also a great opportunity for medium size and boutique law firms that could previously not afford to host a live ACC seminar with those extra hosting expenses. Now, they can meet our members, their prospective clients of the future. ״