Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Managing virtual meetings for lawyers: agendas, chairing skills, secure technology, etiquette and troubleshooting

Published by a LexisNexis Practice Management expert

Practice notes

You can run virtual meetings by phone, on a video call or through dedicated online platforms and software, often saving considerable time and money compared with in-person sessions. Yet chairing (or merely joining) a virtual meeting is not the same as doing so in a face-to-face setting. Treat it like a conventional meeting and you risk, at best, irritation and, at worst, disorder and delay. This Practice Note sets out advice on planning and running virtual meetings, highlighting tricky areas and practical ways to navigate them effectively. It concentrates on the most problematic elements and the smartest ways to work around them in practice.

This includes:

why they differ from in-person meetings
the value of nailing the fundamentals
how to craft an agenda
essential chairing skills for virtual sessions
the technology behind virtual meetings
preventing frequent pitfalls
managing distractions, and
helping your team extract maximum value from every online meeting

Why virtual meetings are different

Participants may see and/or hear one another online, yet that does not make them equivalent to meeting in person...

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Beth Pipe , FCIPD

OnLive Learning

Beth is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (FCIPD) and has spent over 25 years specialising in Learning and Development. During that time she has worked across a broad variety of different industries and has, for the past 15 years, worked closely with a number of well known law firms; this has involved putting in to place systems and structures to encourage, enable and track the effectiveness of learning activities. Adept at face to face course delivery, and always enjoying excellent feedback, Beth is also accomplished at online delivery and created OnLive Learning in response to the challenges presented by the 2020 Covid-19 restrictions.Beth has written extensively for LexisNexis on subjects such as Performance Management, Managing Change and Stress Management. Away from her training delivery she is a published author writing about local history, hiking, wildlife and the outdoors and is...

Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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