Top 5 Conference Tips

I attended the Canadian IT Law Association annual conference last week. It is IMHO consistently the best continuing ed program for IT law.

Some general conference observations:

1. Pay attention to speakers even if they are covering topics you are familiar with. No matter how well you know the topic, something new / useful will come up.
2. Conference materials in the cloud are the way to go. Much more convenient than on physical media.
3. Hotel / conference centre AV equipment won’t always display your presentation the same as on your work computer, especially if it includes animation or video. It’s a good idea to bring the presentation and any separate video files on a jumpdrive, and test it out before the session just in case it needs to be tweaked.
4. Conference room wifi can be mystifying and inconsistent. Why bother password protecting wifi on conference floors?
5. Hotel room wifi may require a leap of faith and an ad hoc legal analysis (promissory estoppel, ostensible authority, parol evidence rule, burden of proof…) when you are told at the check-in counter “Just accept the agreement to pay [insert outrageous daily rate here] for wifi in your room – we won’t actually charge you for it.”