2014

This panel is for participants who are either solo or small-firm practitioners and will include such topics as paperless offices, trust funds and accounting, managing workflow, and the implications on the office in the event of a natural disaster.

A panel of younger lawyers and financial professionals will talk about the issues and challenges of working for senior lawyers and will suggest ways to improve the working relationships between senior and junior lawyers.

This panel will provide helpful guidelines for creating clear client expectations, adequately defining work scope and managing fees when engaging FAs and expert witnesses. We have all had cases where clients were unhappy because work product didn’t meet expectations or fees were significantly higher than expected. This panel will help the practitioner learn how to use financial professionals more effectively to decrease the risk of having an unhappy client.

This panel of Midwestern judges will discuss some of the common mistakes that they are seeing in consumer cases, and how those mistakes can be avoided.

This panel will present the current trends in the industry, where the work is and isn’t, and where it may be in the future.

This panel will discuss what business development and office-management techniques have worked for them — with the understanding that everyone does things a little differently.

In a series of vignettes, two litigants will argue motions to compel before the bankruptcy court that are designed to explore the various types of evidentiary privileges that arise in bankruptcy practice — including attorney/client privilege, joint-defense/common interest privilege, Fifth Amendment and spousal privilege — and how such privileges may be inadvertently waived.

This panel will explain how to critically review tax returns and financial statements and address the issues and items a bankruptcy lawyer representing a debtor or creditor (both for consumer and business cases) should look for when reviewing financial statements and tax returns.

A panel of judges will discuss recent bankruptcy cases that impact business practitioners.

Selling financially distressed hospitals, nursing homes, senior living centers and other health care providers, including acute care hospitals, critical-access hospitals and continuing care retirement centers, presents many unique challenges not found in most “typical” bankruptcy cases. Identifying these important differences, and executing plans to deal with them, can make the difference between preserving the enterprise and being forced to liquidate. Legal, financial, political and regulatory traps abound. This panel will provide an overview of these considerations and highlight how to address these matters in relation to their particular significance within the Midwest region.