As 2022 approaches, meeting planners still are grappling with the changes the pandemic has wrought on the events industry. For this podcast, Jonathan T. Howe Esq., president and founding partner of Chicago’s Howe & Hutton law firm (and NMG’s longtime legal expert), spoke with Northstar Meetings Group managing editor Sarah Braley about three main contract trends that meeting planners need to note for the coming year.
 
The three trends we are tackling for this podcast are:
 
Flexibility: making sure all parties can modify or terminate agreements when situations change (starting at 1:35 of the recording)
 
Performance details: specifying in contracts what each party expects from the other (starting at 8:15); and
 
Shifting risks: how the risks for events — which should be spelled out in the agreement — have been changing, as responsibility moves between the host organization and the hotelier and sometimes to the attendees themselves (starting at 13:50).
 
The podcast ends with a discussion of the negotiation landscape between planners and hotel salespeople.