NJCCA President's Message

by Valerie Camara

To the Membership,

Well the month of September was very busy and flew by.

We started the month by delivering the backpacks we prepared as part of our Build-A-Backpack Community Service Project that were being donated to the Kindergarteners at McKinley Elementary School.

We had a flurry of activity going on behind the scenes in preparation for our Seventh Annual Full Day Conference on September 24th.  It was a jam packed day beginning with breakfast and a Career Development Networking Forum hosted by the Career Management and In-Transition Committee and ending a with a cocktail reception and performances by Natalie Toro and Matthew Friedman.  Our exhibit hall was lined with displays for the attendees to take in during breaks.  The programs ran from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm with four tracks having six programs running simultaneously, in addition we had a keynote luncheon address by Michael Chertoff and plenary session.

As part of the conference we launched our NJCCA social networking group on Martindale-Hubbell Connected with this goal in mind LexisNexis had kiosks set up to help our members sign on to website.

To actually make an event like our full-day conference happen, we engaged the help of over 40 sponsors to provide robust programming and an exhibit hall for sponsors to demonstrate and/or discuss the services that their company/firm provides to in-house counsel.  I would also like to thank on behalf of the board those in-house counsels that shared their perspective with us on the numerous panels we had.

To close out the year we have been scheduling a number of half-day programs for our members and putting the final touches on the agenda for our Annual Dinner Meeting on November 19th.  The evening will begin with an optional wine tasting at 5pm and then at 6:00pm a cocktail reception followed by dinner.  The evening will include in addition to our business meeting to elect new officers and board members, a cocktail reception with magic acts by two roaming performers, a keynote address by Frederick Whitmer, noted litigator and the author of Litigation is War, and a raffle drawing.  Look for your invitation to the Annual Dinner meeting later this month.

The board will also be hosting a face-to-face Committee Leaders Forum on October 7th at Merck's Corporate Headquarters in Whitehouse Station with all of our committee leaders.  The goal of the meeting is to share best practices across the committees with the hopes of invigorating our committees with an infusion of new ideas that might enhance the programming offered by the committees for our members.

There is still time to sign up for the ACC Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, which runs from October 18th-21st.

Thank you to all for your contributions to making this a productive month for NJCCA!

Valerie Camara
NJCCA President