A successful example of collaboration between Eurojuris members shows how it is possible to share knowledge in a friendly environment.
Wim Heethem (EJ Belgium), from the Racine & Vergels lawfirm, chairs the “insolvency” practice group. This group took an interesting turn when it decided to expand its field. According to Wim, this is definitely an important thing to add dynamism to a practice group: “Our topic, insolvency, was otherwise too narrow and too specific. We extended it to restructuring and banking.” What is restructuring? “It's what you do when you change the legal shape of a company, or its seat, or its activity, or its size, etc. For us it was interesting, because these fields come up very often when you work on insolvency.”
This is the interesting concept for anyone involved in a practice group: expanding your field of work to other domains, those that may look only remotely connected to your topic, but which actually always relate back in your work.
“To make things more interesting, I also look for a speaker to come to our reunions. It doesn't take that long to find one, really! Everyone should do it because it's not that much work to find a speaker, and it brings a lot to your group.”
Wim and his group colleagues view their collaboration as more than a simple title like “insolvency specialist”: they aim to communicate about it, to advertise it. “I want to stay realistic,” he explains. “But I really want us to be more visible, not only inside Eurojuris and towards other members who may need our services, but also towards anyone else. We plan to publish our work online so that any Internet user looking for our expertise could end up browsing our website and potentially contact us. We did it already once, and we will have more in January and March. If we have good feedback, we will evaluate the possibility of using social networking websites, too.”
Wim's group is thus very active, and he is very positive when he speaks about it. His advice to anyone wanting to create such an active group? “Motivate members! One meeting per year is not enough to keep morale high. Publish things in advance, communicate towards potential members so they may join your group. Our group meets twice a year but I try to break the silence inbetween: emails are already enough to keep the group going all year long and to advertise future themes in advance”. Now you know how to get started!
Do you have advice to give on how to manage such a group? Do you agree with Wim? Write to us at journalist@eurojuris.net
