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News From The IBAInternational
Bar Association 2000 Conference
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April sees the publication of the preliminary programme for the IBA 2000 Conference to be held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This will be the biggest event of the IBA year and a meeting place for 3,000 lawyers involved in international legal practice. Klaus Böhlhoff, partner of Hengeler Mueller Weitzel Wirtz and IBA President, takes the opportunity to reflect on the wide-ranging work of the Association.
The International Bar Association occupies a unique role as a global meeting point for lawyers of all descriptions and specialities from all around the world. By providing its international service, the Association helps lawyers to meet the challenges posed by the continuing progress of technology, to understand the intricacies of conflict of laws and to cooperate with each other across national boundaries. In serving international clients, membership enables lawyers to call on a network of over 16,000 individual lawyers as well as 178 national Bar Associations and Law Societies.
The Association’s activities are wide and varied - they include its human rights work, its liaisons with the United Nations and other international organisations, its work to harmonise laws through agreements and resolutions, its front-line involvement in testing professional issues such as professionalism versus commercialism, the role of the WTO and the ongoing debate about multi-disciplinary partnerships and the place of lawyers within them. There are also the many specialised conferences organised around the world on particular legal topics or regional issues which are valuable dates on the calendars of many an international practitioner. The Association is also an active publisher: producing many journals, newsletters and conference papers each year.
Amsterdam Conference
Of all these activities, perhaps the most ‘high profile’, and visible to the outside world, are the large International Bar Association and Business Law International conferences held each year in different venues around the world. Recent years have seen events in New Delhi, Vancouver and Barcelona. This year’s big conference is the IBA conference in Amsterdam. In the programme which is now available, you will find details of the 120 or so working sessions planned to deal with current issues of law and practice. There is something there for every lawyer who ever has dealings with the law in a jurisdiction other than his or her own. It would be quite a challenge to think of a topic of working law that will not be at least touched on in one of the Amsterdam sessions.
Amsterdam itself is a marvellous venue for such a conference. It is a city with a ‘humane’ atmosphere, where it is always possible to forget for a moment the hustle and bustle of working life - you are never far from trees or canals in Amsterdam. Yet at the same time, it is at the very heart of business in Europe. A recent report ranked it as one of the top four most attractive European business locations. The number of major foreign companies with bases in and around Amsterdam has doubled in recent years. There are approximately 1,400 foreign companies in the Greater Amsterdam area alone. More than 700 multinational companies have chosen the Netherlands as their European centre. Dutch banks, including ABN Amro, ING and Rabobank operate in all international financial centres. In the field of international telecommunications and data communications, PTT Telecom Netherlands holds a dominant position. Dutch companies such as Unilever, Philips, Akzo-Nobel and Shell were the first to develop truly multinational identities and are household names across the world.
Corporate Counsel
Corporate counsel and in-house lawyers will find themselves particularly welcome at this year’s event. With so many large companies within easy reach of the conference, it is expected that we will attract a high number of corporate counsel. At a time when more and more companies are developing their own in-house legal capacity and seeking increased specialisation within their own departments, and when in many states, in-house lawyers represent between 10-15% of the total legal profession, it has never been more important that this growing sector of the profession avails itself of the benefits that an organisation like the International Bar Association can bring. The Corporate Counsel Committee of the Section on Business Law currently has around 1,100 members and is active through its own conferences, newsletters and pages on the IBA website (www.ibanet.org).
Asia-Pacific Interests
Lawyers from Singapore and the Asia-Pacific region may be particularly interested in the following sessions and events:
IBA Website
The IBA website (www.ibanet.org/Amsterdam) has rapidly become a central element of the Association’s activities, allowing members and non-members 24 hour-a-day access to information about the Association, its conferences, publications and Directory of Members. Visit the site now to see the preliminary programme in full. The Amsterdam conference sees another step forward in our utilisation of the website with a special discussion forum devoted specifically to the conference available online. Speakers’ papers for the conference (for those speakers who submit their material in the proper form) will be available on the site from 1 September 2000.
I look forward to seeing many of you in Amsterdam.
Klaus Böhlhof
Hengeler Mueller Weitzel Wirtz
President, IBA