Legal Village, over at Legal Week, has a useful article on conference call etiquette. It includes one of my personal bugbears - punctuality!
It seems that there is an expectation that people will be late for conference calls and so the real time for the call is 5 or 10 minutes after the scheduled beginning.
But why continue with this fiction? If we all just turned up on time, then we wouldn’t have to spend the first 15 minutes calling around to see where everyone was…
In my opinion, it really shows a certain level of arrogance in those that arrive late - their work/meetings/calls etc are so important that they cannot possibly build in the time to be on time, unlike those that they expect to wait for them. Internal meetings are the worst, where a number of lawyers will be sat around waiting for some time before the protagonists arrive, wasting cumulative hours of chargeable time. Now, does that make good business sense for the firm?
