P2P

54 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | F A L L 2 0 2 1 afford me the opportunity to plan an event that reaches across hundreds of outside organizations and attracts thousands of attendees. It's the kind of thing that I could only do by volunteering for ILTA. It's forced me to stretch outside of my comfort zone and learn important lessons along the way. Learning to work with and lead volunteer groups prepares you for future leadership positions in your own firm or corporation. You'll bring valuable insights back to your work to help solve your problems. ILTA is all about helping our members find solutions to their business problems. By working with your peers in different volunteer opportunities, I guarantee that you will stumble across the answer to a problem that you've been trying to chip away at on your own. Meeting and working with your peers naturally surfaces our common pain points in conversation. If you've attended a conference like ILTACON, you know you normally come back with a list full of ideas to take home. Volunteering is very much like that, but those ideas continue to come at a regular basis thanks to the ongoing interaction and conversation with your peers. Remember that network I mentioned earlier? Now when problems do come up, you have a long list to reach out to and see what they're doing for the same issue. Just this year at ILTACON I was getting lunch with a good friend and was talking about our ongoing evaluation for a new financial system. They performed the same upgrade in the past couple of years and shared that they had issues with performance of their SQL databases which took weeks to resolve and required the collaboration of their business partner, Microsoft support and their own IT department. Within an hour I had in my inbox a message that detailed the SQL server settings that ultimately resolved that issue. That kind of magic happens all the time in ILTA. You'll have enormous support for your work. When you're an ILTA volunteer, you are supported by a broad network of professionals. You'll get support not only from the volunteers with which you're working directly, but also in turn their own larger network. You'll also receive support from ILTA's world-class full time staff. ILTA staff are not only experts in their respective areas of responsibility within the organization, but they also know exactly who you need to talk to for getting the answers that you need. No one comes into a volunteer position knowing everything and everyone they need to go it alone. It's a group effort, and that group will support you every step of the way. You'll gain confidence and defeat 'Imposter Syndrome'. If you're not familiar with Imposter Syndrome, it's not about the game 'Among Us' and who is 'sus' (their lingo for suspicious) and who isn't. It's that nagging doubt in the back of your mind that you're not really that smart or good at your job. It's the belief that you're just faking it and no one seems to notice while everyone else is genuinely amazing at their job. Ironically, it's usually those who are genuinely amazing who tend to feel this way the most. Volunteering for ILTA will help you realize just how good you are at what you do. When volunteer groups get together it's not to brag about how perfect things are at their firms or departments. It's an opportunity to share what is difficult for all of us and think about ways that those pain points can be addressed. Seeing others struggle with the same issues that you have is a great reminder that it's not you, it's the job and lots of others are trying to figure it out too. You'll meet others who have been legal technologists for years and for whom you may have a huge level of respect and you'll see them scratch their head at the E X T R A S

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