Dear Members of ACC Israel, Participants, Sponsors and Guests:

Welcome to ACC Israel’s Sixth Annual Conference, the theme of which is “The Evolving Role of In-House Counsel: Lawyers as Trusted Business Advisors”.

My name is Liz Cohen Yerushalmi and I was honored to be nominated as ACCI president as of November 2007. I wish to take this opportunity to thank Aviram Gavish, ACCI prior president, for his excellent work and contribution.

Personally I believe that being a member of ACC is a MUST for any in-house counsel, whether in high-tech, low tech, traditional industry or any other type of industry. ACC offers the professional tools each of us requires on a daily basis, including an elaborate legal library, practical tips, worldwide networking, webinars, articles, newsletters and of course our intimate support group with whom we can share our little secrets and dilemmas. This is our little “Members Club”.

ACCI’s annual conference is a terrific opportunity to reflect upon our achievements and to consider our future challenges:

Legal Seminars

Development of new programs and seminars is top priority for ACCI. Since the beginning of 2008 we held several seminars focusing on attorney-client privilege for in-house counsels, open source licensing, trends in Israeli and US labor law, and obviously this Annual Conference. Our tailor made education programs would remain top priority for ACCI.

Business Oriented Seminar

We have cooperated with the Kellog-Recanati International Executive MBA program of the Tel-Aviv University and created an effective and innovative Mini MBA program for in-house counsels in the last two years. Following the excellent feedback we received from members who participated in this program we intend to continue this tradition this year too. We also consider offering other various business oriented seminars to our members as an integral part of our curriculum.

Members Contribution

We strongly believe in the importance of members’ contribution and involvement; the more involved you are the more effective we become, the more effective we become the stronger in-house counsels become and thus a “magic cycle” is created. We encourage each and every one of you to take part, make suggestions, share your knowledge, be active, and take responsibility for certain ACCI projects. I can assure you that you will soon find out that by contributing to ACC you’re actually contributing to yourself. Cooperation with partners We believe that generating and strengthening relationships with various partners will contribute to ACC’s, influence, impact and exposure in Israel. We therefore encourage cooperation, such as the one we have with America Israel Chamber of Commerce, Kellog-Recanati, local legal websites and more.

Career Opportunities

We are working these days with various local HR recruitment companies to introduce to our members new career opportunities in Israel.

Membership

Although we have significantly increased the number of ACCI members, we still have many challenges ahead of us. There are still many Israeli in-house counsels who are not familiar with ACC and we need to ensure that we are better positioned and familiar. In order to make an impact we need to be bigger and stronger.

I would like to thank all of our sponsors for making this conference possible: Fulbright and Jaworski L.L.P, Denton Wilde Sapte L.L.P., Gross, Kleinhendler, Hodak, Halevy Greenberg & Co., Command Financial, Glawbal, Xioma Solutions, Escrow Europe, the Israeli Private Court System, 4Balance and Command Financials.

I would also like to thank Professor Zohar Goshen Chairman of the Israel Securities Authority for taking part in our conference.

And last but definitely not least, I would like to thank the wonderful members of the board of ACC Israel, whose hard work and dedication throughout the year makes ACC Israel the success it is: Vice-President (Programming) Tal Cohen Patron of Dessault System, Vice-President (Finance) Michael Galai of Telit, Aner Berger of Israel Chemicals, Hila Hubsch of Cedar, Vered Raviv-Schwartz of Radware, Noam Levi of Evergreen, Avital Rosenberg of OTI Global, Ziv Glickman of Sundisk who recently joined ACCI board and, Maura Rosenfeld who is simply always there for us.

Yours sincerely,
Liz Cohen Yerushalmi, President
ACC Israel
Legal Counsel – AudioCodes Ltd.
Email: Lizco@AudioCodes.com
Tel.: +972-3-9764352