INTA’s first AI-driven event overcomes pandemic

The 2020 International Trademark Association (INTA) Annual Meeting and Leadership Meeting went fully virtual with 3,339 registrants from 115 countries participating, following a Herculean effort to restructure the format from its usual face-to-face format.

The pandemic had pushed the event from the initial plan for Singapore in April to its first artificial intelligence (AI) assisted virtual platform in November, and, despite some obvious challenges, the hard work paid off.

Ayala Deutsch, INTA’s 2020 president, who is currently executive vice president and deputy general counsel at NBA Properties, steered the association through the unprecedented change. Her efforts bore fruit, with leaders, policymakers, in-house counsel and top gun practitioners from all over the world coming together virtually for the two weeks of the event.

“We had 340 government officials from 74 countries and 17% of all the registrants were in-house professionals from companies, while the remainder were from law firms,” she told China Business Law Journal. “We had good attendance, both in terms of where people worked, and where they were from in the world.”