Over the past couple of weekends, I attended two conferences, one in Nashville and one in the suburbs of Chicago. One was legal. One was not. Both were small events with less than 200 attendees. And while they were both different substantively, they both had the same informal, sharing type feel where real conversations can and do happen.
FailureCamp
The first conference was put on by the Summit on Law and Innovation (SoLi) sponsored by Vanderbilt Law School’s School of Law and Innovation. If you don’t know SoLi, it’s the brainchild of Cat Moon and Larry Bridgesmith. If you don’t know these two, go to Twitter and follow them (@InspiredCat; @LarryBridgesmith). They always offer excellent and insightful comments about the practice of law and innovation.
“It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.”- JK Rowling
According to the SoLi website, “the annual Summit on Law and innovation(SoLI) exists to bring together people passionate about innovating across the legal spectrum to #makelawbetter…SoLI is about creating a moment that will lead to a movement that (we hope) will ripple across legal practice, legal education, and legal technology”. Tells you all you need to know, actually.
The conference was Soli’s 3rd and the theme this year was a failure, vulnerability, and how to learn from it. Larry and Cat deemed it “FailureCamp” hoping to give the conference (or “unconference” as they called it), a distinctive, summer camp-like feeling: SoLi2019 was “designed to explore our human relationship with the fear of failure, the power of intelligent failure, its (necessary?) role in driving innovation across the legal industry, and more.”
The conference was divided into two sections: storytelling