ELLN Chair’s Newsletter and Join us at the February ACC Employment & Labor Law Teleconference Meeting Tomorrow!
As readers of this blog know, I have the honor of serving as the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Employment & Labor Law Network (ELLN) for the 2019-20 year. This post is an open invite to in house counsel who are not already attending our ELLN monthly meetings to join us! My Chair’s newsletter appears after the monthly agenda.
If you are an in-house counsel, and you are not an ACC member or an ELLN member (or even if you are and you haven’t joined us recently), we would love for you to attend our monthly teleconference and join our active community.
Join ACC here: https://www.acc.com/membership/become-a-member
If you haven’t joined our calls recently, or have never heard of ACC or ELLN, now is a great opportunity to check us out. Each month before our meeting, I will post our agenda here and elsewhere in social media as encouragement to join our merry bunch on the first Wednesday (generally) each month at 3 p.m. Eastern time.
Joining the call is as easy as clicking the big red button below and logging in or registering.
ASSOCIATION OF CORPORATE COUNSEL EMPLOYMENT
& LABOR LAW NETWORK (ELLN) MONTHLY
TELECONFERENCE
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
(3:00 – 4:00 pm Eastern Time)
- Opening Business
- Welcome – Doug Hass, ELLN Chair (Lifeway Foods)
- Roll – Doug Hass (Lifeway Foods), Secretary – please report your attendance to ELLC@accglobal.com if you haven’t logged into the webinar.
- Approval of minutes from the previous monthly meeting on January 8, 2020.
- Announcements and Staff Report – Irene Meroka, ACC
- Sponsor Report – Doug Smith, Jackson Lewis / Doug Hass, ELLN Chair (Pro Bono Kickoff)
- Legal Quick Hit Presented by Jackson Lewis P.C. – Joseph Lazzarotti, Principal, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. Employers collect and store lots of personal information about employees. In many cases, the collection and storage of that information is required, but often it is not required. Either way, as privacy and data security laws emerge nationally, employers should be thinking more carefully about their data collection and storage practices. In this Quick Hit we will discuss critical risk management and compliance issues, as well as some best practices.
- Charter Revisions/Updates
- Subcommittee Reports
- Policy
- Absence and Disability Management
- Communications and Forums
- ERISA and Executive Compensation
- International
- Labor, Health & Safety
- Membership
- Programs
- Webcasts
- Task Forces
- InfoPAKs
- Library Archives
- Pro Bono
- Other Old/New Business – Comments/Items from Leaders
- Next Teleconference – Wednesday, March 4, 2020, 3:45 p.m. (Eastern Time) – SPECIAL TIME!
- Adjourn
This month, I would also like to share my Chair’s newsletter with you:
February has arrived, which means baseball is almost here. I am a believer in Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby’s (alleged) winter activity, “People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” These days, baseball season means coaching softball and Little League for my daughter and son. My kids are young: 7 and 5. One of the highlights of coaching those ages has been the space to teach the building blocks of the game. Neither of our leagues keep score for 6 and under leagues. There are no outs, no score, no context, just fundamentals and FUN. Even in the 8U league where my daughter will play, the desperate need to keep score and think about all-stars and the “travel team” tends to ruin the thrill of watching kids play and learn the joy of this game I love.
As in-house counsel, we are insulated from some of the “keeping score” that happens at law firms, but not all of it. Sure, in-house counsel offer potential cost savings and earn or save revenue, too, but we offer more important benefits that ideally should mean more. In-house counsel are an institutional advantage! We are senior leaders who can serve as strategic and legal advisors as our organizations consider initiatives and changes. We engage in critical thinking about opportunities and risks to help shape the direction of our operations. We provide thoughtful analysis and counsel on a range of topics that confront our employers. One of my goals for 2020 is to better measure and highlight those intangibles for my teams, so that my score isn’t focused totally on dollars. Nobody is tallying up the number of dollars we earn or save our employers to display on some work scoreboard. Enjoy the practice of law like kids learning to play baseball. Here’s to an early spring for those of you staring down a cold February.
Finally, congratulations to ELLN’s own Alexis Pheiffer, Senior Counsel – Employment & Litigation at Sprouts Farmers Market, who was honored this past month with a 2020 Arizona Corporate Counsel Award for large public company in-house counsel. Congratulations, Alexis! Please let us know of major personal or professional milestones or accomplishments in your career. ELLN would love to recognize you.
We are very glad to have had you as members of this great Network and look forward to more of your great contributions and to recognizing you again in years to come! On behalf of ELLN, thank you! The names and affiliations of this month’s honorees appear below.
We hope to see you on the call at 3 PM Eastern time tomorrow (Wednesday).
