Guest writer: John Hardy

It's summer holidays time and a few lucky members of staff are jetting off to exotic places, others have returned from (not quite) exotic places, and a few of us havent been anywhere at all- unless you count tropical Legal Island!. None the less, the work continues in the Legal-Island office, albeit at a more relaxed pace.

Although they are not for another few months, planning for the Annual Reviews is in full swing and they will be taking up a lot of the staff's time today and tomorrow, especially for Heather and Kerry our Conference Managers.

In the Marketing Department, Peter and Pamela are very busy putting the final touches to the brochures for our second season events which may be landing on your desk any time soon! Peter is taking care of the brochures for the NI events, whilst Pamela is looking after the southern events. Check out the events taking place in our second season in Northern Ireland here and Republic of Ireland here.

If you still haven't gone on your holidays, or are back in the office and would like to get away for a day, why not take your board meeting, training or networking event to our Training Centre which offers a top-quality venue at very reasonable prices.

Happy holidays!

Monday 18th July 2011: Posted by Phyllis

What a weekend for Darren Clarke. The weather was terrible but he battled on and after 20 years of trying he has won his first golfing major - The Open Championship.

Poor Jim in The Apprentice didn't quite make it to become Lord Sugar's business partner - but he did very well to be in the final 4.

Here on the Island we are preparing for the second season of events and everyone is working hard to ensure it will be as successful as ever packed with everything that you our delegates require.

Staff movements this week include:-

for Jayne on Wednesday – BNI breakfast meeting at Ramada Encore, usual internal meetings this week and then off for a week on Friday.

Scott is meeting at PwC and the Belfast Telegraph on Wednesday and will be meeting solicitors from A&L Goodbody at the Legal-Island Training Centre on Thursday. Scott hopes to be working from home on Tuesday and Friday.

Pamela has the monthly marketing meeting on Tuesday at 10am.
This week also sees the beginning of our performance reviews. Peter and Pamela from our marketing department will be meeting with our Marketing & Sales Manager Ainsley on Tuesday afternoon.

To finish we just want to let Jacqui from our accounts department know that we are thinking of her and look forward to having her back to work when she can.

Guest Writer - Jayne Finlay

So training week is over, our brains are well and truly filled to capacity and after our defeat in the latest Abacus vs Legal-Island Challenge at crazy golf (which by the way we were robbed in) we are all now looking forward to a day's rest on the 12th July, and for the majority of staff the start of well deserved holidays.

Vanessa is finishing up for 2 weeks today, while Debbie, Barry and Ainsley have pipped her to post by heading off on their holidays at the weekend (not together I might add).

For those of us still struggling on until the sunshine of America and Spain greets us here are the movements this week...

Donna will be busy working on her Performance Reviews, Heather and Kerry will be busy finalising details for second season while putting their brains to good use by thinking creatively for Annual Review. Peter will be snowed under finalising brochures with the designer while Arnold will be keeping the place looking ship shape by tidying up the paint job in the training centre. All NI and ROI second season events are now available for booking online and the Annual Review programme will shortly be publicised so keep an eye out!!

I, meanwhile, will be working away in the office until Thursday when I meet with Lyndsey from BITC.

Have a fantastic short week everyone - let's hope for some sunshine!!!

4th July, Guest Writer Heather, Conference Manager ROI

Review, Refresh and Revise

Is our theme of the week in Legal-Island, it's our 6 monthly training week. This is where we get the opportunity to brush up on new skills such as networking, Customer Care with Penny Thornberry of P Thornberry Solutions and managing stress with Stephen Wray of Carecall. To refresh all the staff we will have a short health review from the Ulster Cancer Foundation.

We like to review our working practices during our training week and so have a session built in to look at new ways of doing things, this can be anything to do with Legal-Island at all. It will be interesting to see what new ideas we come up with.

This week started out on a major high for Kerry, our Conference Manager for the North of Ireland, who got a ride in the Legal-Island hot air balloon, lets hope that's all the hot air there is for this week!

And finally to the climax of the week, a challenge like no other, a rivalry to rival all others its the Legal-Island v Abacus challenge day returned for another year. Now I do feel it important to point out at this stage that we are the currently the victors, but can Abacus take it back this year.....who knows?? (But I'm fairly confident we have have it in the bag!)