Live-Blogging from the ABA Forum's Annual Meeting, Day 1

Coming off our Southwest Flight there is a strong smell of sweet confections.   Is it Mrs. Fields cookies opposite the jetway, the pretzel factory, Ethel’s chocolate confectionary, or the iCandy store featuring, Godiva, Jelly Belly, M&M, and Sees branded candy, pre-packaged candy, bulk candy, nostalgic candy, sugar-free candy, and cotton candy?  Hard to tell, but there is an overwhelming sense of chemical, sugary, sweetness in the air. It permeates the entire terminal.  Coffee aroma from five Starbucks on the way to the airport shuttle can’t cut through it.  Forty million passengers pass through this airport annually, sixty-seven times the population of Las Vegas.

There are more than 200,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas.  Occupancy rates for hotel rooms hover near 90 percent.  The Bellagio alone offers 3,933 rooms.   Eight thousand guests, eight thousand employees, and eight notable restaurants: the Bellagio is a good size city. 

A couple of hours after arriving at this resort-city-gaming-Mecca I experience another overwhelming sensation of smell: cigarette smoke.  Stale smoke is thick in gaming rooms, it lingers in corners, and remains in nominally non-smoking guest-rooms.  “Don’t worry, I’ll call room services and they’ll come spray it,” says the house staff.  They are used to this. It's enough to give me a mild headache and burning eyes. 

The annual gaming revenue of Clark County is $9.2 billion.  According to my knowledgeable Forum source, $1 billion of this is dropped at the Bellagio.  Registration for the annual meeting is a great success; approaching 500 attendees.  However, I’m afraid we will drag down the average gambling statistics.  Nobody likes to gamble less than lawyers.   As a profession we’re obsessed with avoiding downside risk. 

This place flirts with gaudy, but it pulls it off because it is well done and on a grand scale.  The pool setting the hotel back from the strip is 8 acres, with a graceful, sweeping entryway.  There is great stone work throughout.  

The Chehuli’s in the lobby are as impressive as they were at the DeYoung museum.  The Bellagio is to the Waldorf Astoria what St. Peter’s Basilica is to Notre Dame.  

Tomorrow, we’ll put all these distractions out of mind--flamingo girls posing in their feather suits with happy tourists, Germans, Brits, Italians, and Chinese moving about in groups with their roller bags—because the Forum has got another great program on tap!