{"id":28739,"date":"2022-10-20T15:48:05","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T14:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/?p=28739"},"modified":"2022-10-20T15:48:41","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T14:48:41","slug":"almost-a-love-letter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/almost-a-love-letter\/","title":{"rendered":"Almost A Love Letter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Envy isn’t anything I’m particularly prone to. But right now, I can hardly help it. I mean, it takes some serious work.

Let me explain.

In email newsletters and LinkedIn posts firms are starting to write about their presence at the annual IBA conference that’ll start on 30 October. Teams are being presented. Dates confirmed. This will only pick up and likely dominate my feed in about a week’s time.

When I was still a partner at one of those firms, the IBA used to be at the same time incredible fun and hard work. In the years that I went, I actually didn’t even obtain my official credentials. And if I did (maybe once?), I definitely didn’t use them. IBA was always equivalent to long days full of back-to-back-to-back meetings with firms from jurisdictions we didn’t cover ourselves. A crazy-efficient team half behind and half in front of the scenes filled up our schedules – and off we went. Often we met with colleagues from firms I knew very well and had close relations to, sometimes for years. And sometimes it was just about riding shotgun for a colleague who was meeting with lawyers from a specialty or a jurisdiction I had absolutely no clue of.

The great thing about it: The worst of these meetings were open, interested, interesting and kind. It never got worse than that. And the best were outright hilarious, more like meeting long-time-no-see friends that by accident one did business with. I found it so helpful that everybody was there for the same reason: maintain, create, build and develop relationships. Learn about other firms, their markets and what they were considering. Few phones rang in those meetings. And usually the sign-off was a promise to see each other at some evening-event or other.

And from a business perspective, it always appeared to pay off.

I don’t think there is – or ever will be – a real equivalent or substitute to meeting people somewhat regularly in person. To share a room, if only for an hour. Or better yet, to eat, drink and laugh together. Particularly, if everyone knows that their only task right now is to do exactly that.

It seems that right at this juncture that kind of relationship fostering, social glueing and bridge building is something we could all – both in the micro and in the macro – use a bit more of.

Of course, I had it particularly good – being part of (or at least partially adopted into) the Nordic crowd was SO MUCH FUN!!! And, quite frankly, many of those relationships are still going as of now, all these years later. Which I am immensely grateful for.

So.

To those of you going: Enjoy the heck out of it!

And of course there is absolutely no need for pity. I knew what I was leaving behind when I made the jump. But then there is this weird little feeling in my gut…<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I’d love to hear from you.\u00a0<\/p>

If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>

And if you know somebody else, who might also be interested, please share.<\/p>

All the best,
Malte<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Envy isn’t anything I’m particularly prone to. But right now, I can hardly help it. I mean, it takes some serious work. Let me explain. In email newsletters and LinkedIn posts firms are starting to write about their presence at the annual IBA conference that’ll start on 30 October. Teams are being presented. Dates confirmed. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized-de"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malteholthaus.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}