One seat per company.
Nobody is outnumbered by their own supplier, and nobody arrives to find three colleagues already in the room.
About FutrGC
World-class rooms, assembled one seat at a time.
Thought leaders and industry leaders in the same room as the senior in-house lawyers who need them — by invitation, at a scale where everybody is actually heard.
What we bring together
Outside insight, and the peers you’ll actually call.
Speakers living the change the profession is going through, alongside a peer group small enough to be a real network rather than a delegate list. The format does the introducing, so nobody has to work the room.
It matters more than it used to. The legal industry is changing faster than it has in years — new tools, real pressure on cost, and roles and responsibilities shifting from the top down faster than any one person can track alone. FutrGC’s answer is two-sided: bring in the people who can actually explain what is changing, and build the kind of trusted peer network you lean on to make sense of it yourself.
Because nobody teaches you how to run a legal function. You learn it from people who have already done it, or you learn it slowly and expensively on your own. A day spent with senior in-house leaders is the shortest route to the first of those that I can think of.
How the room is kept honest
Three rules, published.
Not a tone of voice. Three things written down in advance, the same for everybody, that a larger organiser cannot match without selling less.
Nobody in the room is selling to anybody else in it.
Whoever paid for the day, the working part of it is not a sales floor. Everything else about how we work follows from this one.
The invitation is ours to give, and it is never for sale.
Every place is decided rather than bought, and every room is built around the people in it rather than the number of them.
Published rather than negotiated. If you are in the room, those are the three you can hold me to.
What we run
Three kinds of room.
The roundtable
Serious talk, memorable rooms.
Local rooms on a subject the room chose for itself. In-house only, unrecorded by default.
The contest
Competitive, not corporate.
In-house counsel and private practice on opposite sides, teams drawn rather than entered.
The expedition
TED Talks meets a great adventure.
A handful of the sharpest minds somewhere that has nothing to do with the office.
Why I built this
I’m not a lawyer. That’s sort of the point.
I’m Chris Muir. I spent eight years at Mondaq working in legal data and content, mostly with global law firms and the bodies that serve them. Mondaq did not produce content — it measured other people’s, at scale, across thousands of firms, which is a strange vantage point. You sit between the firms paying to reach in-house lawyers and the in-house lawyers deciding what to open, and you see exactly what gets opened and what does not. Along the way I worked briefly with two of the large North American legal associations, which is where most of what I know about the in-house world specifically comes from.
It also meant a lot of conferences. The thought leadership was often genuinely good, and I don’t think the structure is the problem. But it was at the lunch breaks that I watched what people actually wanted: time with the keynote speaker once the microphone was off, or simply the chance to talk shop with somebody else in their field, name badge forgotten. Once that badge came off and the awkward introductions were behind you, a level of trust showed up that the agenda had not built. That is the moment I have spent the years since trying to build a whole day around, instead of leaving it to happen by accident in the ten minutes before the next session.
Two conversations turned that into a business. One of my team — sharp, driven, one of the best people I have worked with — wanted to know what people in her role were doing at other businesses, and to hear from the leaders who had built the career she wanted. She wanted peers, and conversations that were not filtered through somebody else’s interests. We had none of that to give her, and I am not certain the market had much for her either. Then a friend of mine, a senior lawyer at one of the world’s most recognised technology companies, came back from maternity leave to find that in a little over a year everything had moved. What she said next is the part that stuck.
I’m also not a lawyer, and I think that helps rather than hurts. What I find genuinely interesting isn’t the law. It’s the person behind the title — why they chose that career, what it took to reach the seat they’re in, and the mark they’ve left along the way. That curiosity is the whole reason FutrGC exists.
Two sides of the same gap
Most rooms in this industry are built to reach in-house lawyers. This one is built for them.
One person was trying to develop a team and one was trying to develop herself, and both of them were reaching for the same missing thing. The reason it is missing is structural rather than anybody’s fault. A firm has a budget for hospitality and training because reaching in-house lawyers is how it wins work. An in-house department has a training line that competes with headcount, panel reviews and whatever landed that morning. So one side builds the room and the other side gets invited into it, and the arrangement is so old nobody argues with it.
Somewhere in working out what to do about it, I sat down with a friend who lives for travel and sport, and he made a point I have not been able to shake since: the two easiest ways to connect with a stranger are travel and sport, because both give you something to talk about before you have to talk about yourselves. It is why the vehicle for FutrGC is a round of golf and a walk into a mountain range, rather than another stage and another set of chairs. The format is the icebreaker, not the excuse for one.
That is why the first fixture is a contest rather than a room of peers with suppliers quietly seeded through it. Two practice lawyers against two in-house lawyers, drawn rather than entered, so nobody is up against the firm that already acts for them. The afternoon sessions are in-house only, there is no fee for the in-house seat whether you play or not, and everybody is told in writing what their place is worth and who paid for it.
“For advice, I go to my peers and the managers who came before me. And when a client needs a recommendation, it’s still my own network I trust first.”
“A room that’s solely in-house, with the outside influence removed, is where I feel comfortable enough to actually discuss things and take in what the room knows. But the rooms I keep coming back to are the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously — the ones I actually enjoy, where everyone feels comfortable.”
Quotes from the in-house community.
Sitting down with in-house lawyers to understand what a valuable room actually looks like for them — what they look for in a client, how they value their own network, and what makes them want to show up and build a new relationship — is how FutrGC was born.
The next step
Ask for an invitation.
A few quick fields — first name, surname, position, company. Nothing is on sale, so nothing takes payment. I reply personally from my own address within a week.
Declining costs you nothing and the invitation stands next time. You will not be added to a mailing list either way.