Week 13 Guest Writer this week is Scott Alexander

Last week saw the last of our annual reviews completed - the Stillorgan Park hotel in Dublin on Tuesday and the Ramada in Shaws Bridge, Belfast, on Thursday. The evaluation returns from delegates are great, so we must have done something right!

There's always a sense of finality when the last review is gone but we still have loads of follow up work to do: feedback to delegates and speakers, meeting anyone who would like to speak at other events in 2010, requests for a free trial of the employment law email update service, putting the stage in cold storage, sending out notes to non-attenders etc. It's easy to take your eye off the ball but we can't if we want to continue to be successful. Details are important.

Last week also saw us collect our Investors in People Award. The above photo has Jayne Finlay, Events Director, and Barry Phillips, Managing Director at Legal-Island, receiving the award from Sir Reg Empey, Minister for Employment and Learning. Congratulations to all of us! It's not easy investing in people in the middle of the biggest recession since the 1930s. We done to all of the other recipients.

This week is the second our our own in-house training weeks at Legal-Island. We have two weeks a year where we try to put most things to one side and concentrate on planning for next year and "up-skilling" as an organisation through lots of group training sessions. This week we have sessions on finance, performance reviews, mind mapping, marketing and conference procedures amongst others.

Most of us will be attending most of the training events, so we won't be out of the office too often but Scott will be attending the Tribunal Users' Group at the new tribunal offices at Belfast's Gasworks on Thursday and will be meeting solicitors from Carson McDowell beforehand. They sponsor our HR Conference on 22 April 2010 and we have to discuss their topics.

Julie Lynn, our email service manager, becomes Julie McCloskey on Saturday when she gets married. Congratulations to her and Peter for the day when it comes.