Panel discussion

Along with computer-based training and continuing professional development, the panel discussion — jammed between workshops at an all-day conference as cheap filler, like those dreary Inside Africa fillers that run on a loop on CNN for business hostages at the Singapore Hilton — is one of the great blights of a corporate life quite overwhelmed with them. This is not to say the keynote sessions either side are a whole lot better, but hearing an assemblage of junior partners, industry association counsel and random change management consultants mumble about the impact on market stability of MiFID trade and/or transa —

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As we move into the millennium's second decade, a new genre of career has emerged, through LinkedIn’s oily midwifery: the panel discusser. These are people who spend most of their working lives attending, moderating or speaking on panel discussions. Now, for a junior partner in an offshore law firm it might be a quick way of burnishing credentials within the community of corporate agency and trust services professionals. But for the middling executive director in an in-house legal function, let alone one in the Legal COO team, it is harder to understand who lets them out so often — for that matter pays them — much less, why.

No topic is too arcane, no minutia of the regulatory landscape too wretched, no panel-member selfie too prostrating of one’s self-esteem to be beyond the siren call of the LinkedIn timeline, to which they will upload awkward selfies several times a week, tagging co-panellists as they gurn awkwardly on a low stage in front of thirty bored associate directors. “Great panel discussion today about the EMIR refit! So thought-provoking!”

What do panel discussers imagine their network will make of their news? Do they expect it to be flooded with envy, or jealousy, or remorse at the sparkling debate it now discovers it has missed?

The JC was meant to appear in a panel discussion recently on the topic “compliance challenges of reg tech” — a topic about which he knows, and cares, very little. As it happens, he clean forgot to go – neatly illustrating the “compliance challenges of meatware”, a subject about with which he is a lot more expert.

See also

• LinkedIn
• LinkedIn influencer’s advice on how to hold a great panel discussion I mean shoot me.
• More LinkedIn Influencer advice on how to hold a great panel discussion
• Yet more LinkedIn Influencer advice on how to hold a great panel discussion
• You’re not going to believe this, but here is some more LinkedIn Influencer advice on how to hold a great panel discussion
• Continuing professional development
• Computer based training