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Monthly Pizza Hour

Aug 16, 2019 | Life at HG | Jeffrey H. Ingerman

Haley Guiliano Monthly Pizza Hour

At 3pm Eastern Time on the third Tuesday of every month, the attorneys, patent agents and technical advisors of Haley Guiliano LLP gather for a bit of pizza and professional development. Welcome to the Haley Guiliano Monthly Pizza Hour, or just “Pizza Hour.”

Pizza Hour began life at our predecessor firm as the “IP Coffee Hour,” where a member of the group would present on a topic of interest — a practice tip or an interesting and topical legal issue — while we all drank coffee or soft drinks and ate cookies. Eventually, the novelty of Coffee Hour wore off and attendance waned. So we switched it up and offered pizza instead, because “who doesn’t like pizza?” Attendance boomed, and the rest is history.

You can always learn something at Pizza Hour, but the learning has always been secondary. The real goal of Pizza Hour is to teach young practitioners to speak extemporaneously in a group setting. Therefore, while the speaker can have notes, audience materials of any kind — handouts, PowerPoint presentations, etc. — are strictly prohibited.

It’s all pretty informal, but there is no such thing as a free lunch, or a free afternoon snack. So it is a “rule” of Pizza Hour that between the speaker’s own presentation and any discussion engendered by that presentation, the speaker must keep the group engaged for at least half an hour to “pay for the pizza.”