To be sure we have had some growing pains. As the demand for online conferencing increased, the technology improved. Book clubs, classes, get-togethers with friends and family that used to occur in person, have gone online within the last 10 months. Areas of growth include attorney-client meetings, medical visits, court appearances, social gatherings, CLE courses, depositions, trials, arbitrations, mediations, and, of course, interactions with family and friends.
We have learned to adapt successfully to all manner of things being handled through videoconferencing, instead of face-to-face meetings at both personal and professional levels. We have seen that growth and expansion in many areas, but most significantly in the use of videoconferencing. Rather, we focus on how quickly our ability to adapt to online activities has grown in the course of the last 10 months. We will, however, give you a few hints later in the column by telling you about the trends we see developing.įrom our perspective, the most significant insight from this year’s CES has little to do with what products we saw. Accordingly, we will not use this space to write about specific products we have seen. We will write about many of them in the course of the year as product reviews and in connection with the annual gift guides we prepare. As always, we have found some interesting new products at CES this year. To do so, they scaled it back from approximately 5,000 exhibitors to approximately 2000: a necessary but unfortunate reduction. Instead, this year the organizers pushed the date back a week and put the entire event online. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 marks the first time in history that CES did not take place live in Las Vegas. For those of you unfamiliar with CES, it serves as the annual jumping-off point where vendors and developers can introduce their newest offerings to retailers, wholesalers, and the media in the hopes of generating great consumer interest and greater sales in the remainder of the year. It has traditionally taken place at the beginning of January in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Convention Center and smaller hotel convention centers. We have regularly attended CES for many years. The rest of this article will focus on one of the changes wrought by the pandemic that, in itself, has far less significance than other events, but we think serves as a harbinger of things to come.įor the last several days we have jockeyed back and forth between watching CNN broadcasts about the January 6 fallout and attending the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). That crisis has forever changed the world in which we live. History will likely record 2020 as a year that will live in infamy due to the COVID-19 pandemic that gripped the world. Less often a whole year stands in infamy.
Sometimes certain days stand out as infamous in our history.
It was just a catchy first paragraph to grab your attention and set the stage for what comes next! Instead, we will talk about another effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and how we believe it foreshadows things to come in the future. While most of the news broadcasts and much of the newspaper ink, as well as television and Internet coverage has focused on the storming of the Capitol, notwithstanding the first paragraph of this article, we will not focus on those.