Liftoff in Houston – Starting an ALSP Chapter

Interview with Khrys McKinney

The Houston Chapter of ALSP is off to a tremendous start, averaging over 65 members for its first three meetings. Khrys McKinney, President and CEO of NewLaw, Inc., is an ALSP board member and has been active in helping launch the Houston Chapter of ALSP. ALSP Update interviewed her about the process of starting the Houston ALSP chapter.

Getting things started. Several of us in the Houston area thought there was a need for a Houston Chapter. We formed an informal steering committee to provide interim leadership and management. The initial steering committee included Patrick Kennedy of Baker Botts, Karen Jensen-Clark of Howrey and myself. One-by-one others volunteered to assist us, including Bob Penny of Scarab, Shawndra Roy of NewLaw, Julie Zamarripa of Capitol, Mike Stevens of Thomson West Puplishing/Westlaw, David Greetham of Hill Schwartz Spilker Keller, Sam Sierra of Digital Legal, Nita Horn of Chevron and Mike Snyder of Franklin Data. We are proud of the diversity of the steering committee as a representation of the diversity of the organization.

We took advantage of the experience of the Buffalo and Detroit chapters. We also worked closely with ALSP headquarters staff which was very supportive. ALSP has a monthly conference call for people who have started or who are starting local chapters and that’s another great place to share ideas and find out what’s worked elsewhere.

One of the first things we did was to use SurveyMonkey.com to poll prospective members about their potential interest in joining the Houston chapter and to determine what days and times of day would work best, what locations would be the most convenient and other specifics.

We had an e-mail list of ALSP members from ALSP, plus a number of other lists that had been developed by individual steering committee members. I had over 500 e-mail addresses for litigation support professionals in South Texas and thousands nationally from my seven years in the placement business. Patrick Kennedy of Baker & Botts had a list of vendor-related e-mail addresses. The local Houston ALSM was also very helpful in getting the word out.

After reviewing the SurveyMonkey results we decided to have the meetings at noon on the first Tuesday of every month. We used eVite.com to send and track invitations. So far we have had three meetings:

The first meeting was an organizational meeting – we reviewed the purpose of the chapter and provided information about ALSP and national headquarters. We had door prizes donated by vendors and had a very good response – 72 people attended.
The second meeting featured a presentation by an assistant litigation support manager from Fulbright & Jaworski on Marketing Your Department In-house. This meeting was held away from the downtown tunnel complex in Houston and drew only 52 people.
Third meeting featured Karen Jensen-Clark, a senior litigation support project manager at Howrey, who spoke on case budgeting. 71 people attended that meeting which was exciting in consideration of the 4th of July holiday falling in the same week – we were expecting a low turnout.

After the initial meeting, we expanded the reach of our e-mail list by asking the vendor members who had lists of law firm and corporate client members to invite their clients. We kicked off a new door prize program for those vendors at the third meeting by which they can invite their clients to meetings using a doorprize drawing card for which only the invited guests will be eligible.

Press release/publicity. We had drafted a press release to help get the word out about the Houston Chapter but we got an unexpected boost from Howrey. Karen Jensen-Clark showed the press release to Howrey’s business development department and they were so excited about the concept that they had Howrey’s PR firm edit the release and helped distribute it. As a result, the story was picked up by the Houston Business Journal and was featured on National Public Radio. Both the HBR and the NPR stories are available online at www.alsponline.org/Chapters/HoustonChapter. Several attorneys who saw or heard the PR pieces commented favorably on the development of the local Chapter.

Sponsors. Thus far we have been able to offer free lunch by having vendor sponsors for the meetings. We keep the cost of lunch to less than $10 per person to keep the costs manageable for the sponsors. For sponsoring the lunch, sponsors receive:

Name in the meeting invitation
recognition at the start and at the end of the meeting
Opportunity to set up a display table at the meeting

Future Topics. Future meeting will be on the following topics:

August: Attorney’s Meet & Confer
September: The Litigation Support Professional’s Preparation for the Meet & Confer
October: Conducting a Vendor Request for Information (RFI)
November: The Online Attorney Review Process

Special interest groups. One concept we’ve tried to promote is the formation of special interest groups so that members who have an interest in specific area have a way to network with and learn from their colleagues who have experience and knowledge in that area. So far we have SIGs for

Attorneys in Litigation Support

Career Change into Litigation Support

Sales in Litigation Support

Tools

Forensics in Litigation Support

Litigation Support Department Leadership

Dues. We are not currently charging separate dues for members to belong to the Houston chapter. Once the paperwork is finalized to have a separate legal entity created, we will probably have some local dues. ALSP headquarters has been very helpful in setting up the corporate form which, by the way, is done without separate charge to the Houston Chapter.

Cooperation with Dallas. When we had responses to our e-mails from litigation support professionals in Dallas we forwarded them to Jason Parks who was starting the Dallas Chapter, and when he received responses from Houston he forwarded those on to us. We have started work with the Dallas Chapter to coordinate a regional event for Texas in the spring of 2008. We expect to collaborate with Dallas and other state chapters that are being formed.

Helpful resources:

Survey Monkey

Evite system

Info on current ALSP Chapters

If you would like additional information about starting an ALSP Chapter in your area, or if you are interested in joining a local ALSP Chapter, contact ALSP headquarters.

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