ELLN Chair’s Newsletter and Join us at the October ACC Employment & Labor Law Teleconference Meeting Tomorrow!
Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 7 is the regular monthly teleconference of the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Employment & Labor Law Network (ELLN), where I have served as Chair this year (my term ends this month). 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 below.
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 3:00 p.m. EST.
Joining the call is as easy as clicking the big red button below and logging in or registering.
Hello ELLN Members!
Tomorrow (Wednesday) is our monthly ELLN teleconference at 3 p.m. EDT. Thank you in advance for attending and please be sure to continue to visit our ELLN forum/message board at https://community.acc.com/. We continue to have some great discussions about timely coronavirus-related issues, politics in the workplace (our Legal Quick Hit topic this month), and lots of networking with members helping members with everything from law firm suggestions to advice to sample forms and templates.
Here is the registration button for tomorrow (ELLN leaders, check your invite for your specific link):
I’ll talk more about the LQH in a moment, but I don’t want to bury the lede. I am proud and excited to announce that ACC has given us a dual honor this year: ELLN will be named Large Network of the Year and Jackson Lewis will be named Sponsor of the Year (we believe for the tenth time in all, which is unprecedented and well-deserved). This is really a team effort. Jackson Lewis makes all of this possible, and makes our ELLN team look even more world class than we are. I will give some additional color to what we accomplished at our annual business meeting on October 21, but here is a summary.
As you know, the ELLN is committed to supporting and developing in-house attorneys and is therefore dedicated to providing practical, top quality resources to its members and the broader ACC community. Our Network leaders spend immeasurable hours, many of them year after year, providing useful information, documents, programs, networking, and pro bono opportunities for our members. The ELLN always has been on the leading edge of Network activity and engagement, and we believe that no other Network can match the unparalleled breadth and depth of the ELLN’s offerings and activities.
This year, the ELLN did not rest on its prior successes, but viewed them as a starting point for growth. The ELLN challenged itself to build and improve on our foundation, and we succeeded by taking our engagement and service efforts to another level. In short, the ELLN had an outstanding year: a new strategic plan; an updated charter; a new pro bono task force that delivered substantive legal services for a major legal aid organization; a 60% increase in monthly meeting attendance; more than 50 new resources added to ACC’s resource library, including our first foreign language resource; and 23 Legal Quick Hits, Webinars, and co-sponsored events, all while celebrating and maintaining the diversity that remains one of our core virtues. Woah! We had an awesome year together, moving forward as a team in the most difficult of years. Congratulations and thank you for your support.
This is my last newsletter as your Chair, and for the last several weeks, I have been thinking most about those last two sentences. In March when all of this began in the U.S., and ever since, I have kept reminding myself that life has not paused during the pandemic. We did keep plodding forward, we have made our adjustments (and keep making them), and we continue to find our way through a world that has changed dramatically and permanently. We all get through it hour by hour, day by day, because that is what we have to do. Congratulations for that. Keep it up!
Particularly under these circumstances, I am amazed by and grateful for you and all of our ELLN team. You are the reason we keep being recognized as Network of the Year. Thank you for letting me do my part to lead this great group. I look forward to what Darryl and the rest of the incoming leadership team will accomplish with the foundation you have built for us.
Our Legal Quick Hit this month could not be more timely! It comes from Jackson Lewis Principal Felice Ekelman, a Principal in Jackson Lewis’s NYC office. In 2020, politics permeates the workplace against the backdrop of social justice movements. Employers should anticipate election-related and social movement issues regardless of whether their LLC workplace is open, remains virtual or falls somewhere in between. Organizations need to be prepared and this Legal Quick Hit will discuss proactive approaches to consider now. Related issues such as state laws requiring time off to vote will also be covered. Please join us!
Congratulations and stay healthy!
Doug Hass
Chair, Association of Corporate Counsel Employment and Labor Law Network
