Where Else Can You Find Singing Attorneys, Flying Drones, and New Orleans Jazz?
The AAPA Port Administration and Legal Issues Seminar held April 7-9 in New Orleans was an outstanding and sometimes amusing program full of content on timely issues. Mike Rubin of McGlinchey Stafford in Baton Rouge spoke expertly on ethics restrictions in negotiations in a presentation replete with Star Wars references, call and response with the audience, and capped by a song written especially for the event summarizing his key points. Flight Guardian’s session on authorized and unauthorized use of unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drones) in and around ports concluded with a live demonstration, a drone hovering over the meeting room. Host Port of New Orleans treated seminar goers to a reception complete with a New Orleans jazz band.
AAPA Environment Committee members, who were meeting in New Orleans at the same time, were invited to join the program for two sessions, one on Corps of Engineers permitting and the other, moderated by Environmental Committee chair Heather Woods, on resolving environmental and related insurance claims. Other sessions addressed real estate issues, ever evolving employment and human resource issues, record retention, the role of attorneys in community relations, Shipping Act regulation, insurance and loss mitigation, terminal productivity and operations, and anticorruption and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.