The closed room
In-house only, one per company, no panel and nobody at the front.
Chatham House: what’s said stays, what you learn leaves with you. The room we run most often, and the one the other formats are built out of.
Table Talk · the room we run most often
Titles get you in the room. This one is built for what happens after.
One subject, one room, and in-house voices doing the talking. Sometimes behind a closed door, sometimes in front of an audience — and always with something worth staying for afterwards.
The engineFirst edition
Why FutrGC exists
The relationship comes first. The business follows.
The best conversation at any event happens after the agenda ends, once the titles drop and people just talk. We stopped treating that as a happy accident and built the whole thing around it, through experiences people remember and want to repeat. Three things follow from that.
Assembled
A world-class room, built one name at a time, on the biggest change the profession has seen in a generation. Not a delegate list and not a headcount — the people whose decisions are the change.
Captured
Thought leadership filmed rather than written. Human moments rather than staged ones, and the pauses where somebody actually stops and thinks. Nobody forwards a webinar.
Remembered
Work has always been won through relationships, and relationships come from the person, not the position. Get it right and they are still talking about it in ten years.
The two shapes
Same rules. Different door.
The open room
Three or four in-house voices in front of an audience, taking questions rather than presenting at them.
Built with a host — a university, an association, a venue, a business — for a room we couldn’t fill on our own. The panel is in-house. The audience is whoever the host brings, and we say so rather than pretend otherwise.
Why it works
In-house lawyers talk differently to each other than to anyone else in the room.
Put the same person in a room with clients, with private practice, with a supplier, and they manage the conversation. Put them in a room with only their own kind, on one subject, and they stop managing it. Your clients are in it, and so are the people you would like as clients, sitting together with a coffee and talking about something other than legal spend.
What comes out of the room afterwards is a written account — what the room was worried about, the language it used, the question nobody could answer. Non-attributed, always. That is what makes it worth having.
The morning
Three hours. In and out before most people have started.
08:00
Arrive, breakfast
A private room. Nobody wears a badge and nobody is introduced by job title.
In-house only
08:30
The question
One subject, put to the room by somebody in it. Chatham House rules: what is said stays, what you learn leaves with you.
In-house only
10:00
It runs until it stops
Small enough that everybody is actually heard. One person per company, so nobody arrives with a colleague to hide behind.
In-house only
10:30
The mixer
A stated, capped number of our supporters are there for coffee. Same room, same table, nothing set up.
Everybody
Some rooms run as a working lunch instead. The session itself does not change: in-house only, unrecorded by default.
The evening
The conversation is the reason. The evening is why people come back.
A room that ends when the questions do is a webinar with chairs. Every Table Talk is built with something on the other side of it — sometimes just coffee and an hour nobody is rushing, sometimes the thing the host does better than anyone else.
A screening room, then the film and a drink. A stadium, then the game. A quiz, badly, with people who have spent the last hour being serious. The conversation earns the evening, and the evening is what makes the next invitation easy to accept.
What it is
One question that is actively changing the work.
Cost, artificial intelligence, insourcing, whatever is live at the time. In the closed room, run under the old Chatham House rule: no panel, no slides, no one at the front. What’s said in the room stays there; what you learn leaves with you.
Sessions are named by their subject, never by the seniority of the people invited. Some rooms are built for general counsel; others for the lawyers five to ten years in who run the pilot and brief the firm. Both are peer rooms, and they are worth different things.
The room takes different shapes depending on the group. Some are a short working lunch, where the conversation happens and everyone’s back at their desk within the hour. Others are built with a local business for the evening: the conversation happens first, then the room moves into whatever that host does best. Picture a discussion held somewhere built for it, a screening room say, followed by a themed evening to match: a quiz, cocktails, the kind of night people actually want an invitation to.
What doesn’t change whichever shape the room takes: the conversation itself stays in-house only, unrecorded, off the record.
Build one with us
Bring us a room and we’ll build the conversation.
Table Talk is built to fit different organisations rather than the other way round. Universities, associations, venues, businesses with an audience of their own — if you’ve people worth getting in a room and a reason to get them there, there’s a version of this we can do together.
You bring the room, the audience and whatever your organisation does better than anybody else. We bring the subject, the in-house voices and the rules that keep it worth attending. Those don’t move for anyone we build with: no speaking slot, no say over who else is invited, no list afterwards.
The boundary
One seat per company applies to the panel and to every closed room. In an open room the audience belongs to the host. What doesn’t move either way: nobody in front of the room is selling, no session is named after a company, nobody who paid supplies a speaker, and no list leaves the room.
In a Contest the game is the format. In a Table Talk the evening follows the conversation.
In short
- Format
- Small, in person, one topic — a morning, a lunch or an evening
- The session
- In-house only. Peers, no one presenting at you
- The room
- Ours, or a local business we’ve built the evening with
- Afterwards
- A mixer — a capped number of our supporters are there for coffee
- Recording
- None in the session, by default
Where it stands: the most frequent thing we run, and the room the other two are built out of. The first session runs once ten in-house counsel have said yes to a stated subject.
One ask, and only one
Ask for an invitation.
Tell us who you are and which subject you’d want the room to take on. There’s no membership fee — every seat is decided, not sold or signed up for, and that’s what keeps the room worth being in. A person reads every one.