MinterEllison Digital Partner Forum

Work in collaboration with MinterEllison and Sprintr by AV1 to deliver the law firm’s annual internal Partner Summit virtually for the first time for 280 attendees.

The event needed to operate in a fully virtual environment although many of the firm’s partners gathered within their offices in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra to join the event in groups. Some overseas stakeholders also participated from London, Hong Kong, China and Mongolia.

The event was made up of plenary sessions, including a session where panellists were joining from separate locations, and industry breakout sessions with up to five separate streams running concurrently. There was also a dinner during the event for which AV1 streamed speakers to guests located in MinterEllison offices around the country and joining remotely from home.

Using ExpoPlatform set up by the Sprintr team, AV1 delivered a highly branded event that, at its busiest, involved bringing in 35 presenters via live streams across a single day, including five streams running simultaneously.

With each live stream having its own director in addition to a virtual stage manager and at least one AV operator (who monitored the feeds delivered to the event as well as monitoring the whole virtual platform from an attendee perspective), there were up to nine AV1ders working behind the scenes to ensure the best possible experience for the client and attendees.

Delivery involved having back-ups and redundancies built in at every possible point from WiFi spanning several networks for the best connection to secondary live streams.

AV1 collaborated closely with MinterEllison’s Marketing and Events team all the way through pre-production and delivery to ensure everything stayed on track and key objectives were met. The team also collaborated with the firm’s IT team to ensure the in-office streams going both in and out (several presenters were internal) were delivered smoothly.

AV1 even provided a conference room set-up, including a technician, to MinterEllison’s new Canberra office which opened the week of the event so partners in Australia’s capital would have optimal access to the event in their new digs.

One of MinterEllison’s primary concerns was, with Zoom fatigue setting in after a year of virtual meetings, that a virtual event might not hold the attention of their audience. It turned out this worry was unfounded.

In most ways, the event “exceeded our expectations” says Fiona Glendinning, MinterEllison’s Chief Experience Officer.

“AV1 gave us assurance of delivery. Just with the complexity of doing it across so many different locations and being able to stream it into offices, they had the ability to work that through with our guys and make sure that we delivered it in as seamless a way as possible.”

Of the collaboration, MinterEllison’s Marketing and Events Manager Kate Crouch said; “We relied heavily on the expertise of AV1 and Sprintr to deliver our Digital Partner Forum. Their ability to work with our IT and Marketing and Events teams to manage the many complexities of multiple presenters and partners in locations across the world meant peace of mind for the project team.

“Everyone worked extremely well together and having worked with AV1 and Sprintr on prior occasions we were confident in their understanding of the firm and the high standard of delivery required.”

As for next year, Fiona says they’ll “take some of the best of what we did this time and bring it into the physical delivery”. The firm is now also considering alternating the event between physical and digital every other year.