Dear Members –

Dear Colleagues of the Management Board –

Dear Supporters and Advisors –

Dear Readers and Followers –

Looking back, we can indeed be proud. The year 2017 was a year of success and growth. Surely, we all do remember the moment clearly when we set our signatures under the bylaws on March 4th 2017. Who could have foreseen that now, only a few months later, we would have already surpassed our goals?

Over the last year we published synopses of cognitive dynamics influencing the legal profession on a weekly basis. As of December, the number of followers has reached 448. We have garnered readers from more than 44 countries from all over the world – including every continent but the Antarctic. This emphasizes that the topic we are devoting ourselves to is universal and the need for easy access from all over the world has not yet been satisfied.

We also built a strong community of interdisciplinary members. Among us are lawyers, law students, public relations experts, venture capitalists, neuroscientists, med students and PhD students from areas such as Legal-/FinTech and Finance. Currently, our Members are spread over Germany and the United States. By launching our own community on “Workplace” we started to get all our international members back into the family to share their thoughts and the latest developments in their countries all over the world.

Feedback has been great over the last months. I spoke with many legal professionals from different countries – scholars, advisors, partners at law firms, judges, state’s attorneys and recruitment managers – each of them emphasizing the huge potential of the idea behind The Rational Think Tank and the enormous benefit our non-profit organization adds to the worldwide legal community.

As we see: We can indeed be proud of ourselves.

The coming year is a year of potential. We will have the opportunity to capitalize on this by breathing life into fresh ideas. Whether it is external potential, such as the Symposium of 2019, the start of our podcasts and first academic publications; or internal potential, as growth of our community and collaboration within the virtual platform on Workplace. We are in talks with two different scholars for joint research projects and some of our members themselves are forming ideas for their very own research projects – in January, a workshop lead by our CSO will provide our members with further research skills conducive to elevate the quality of our publications further.

Over the last twelve months, I have spent countless hours with my executive colleagues, our local members and our followers and supporters. I can hardly imagine a team that could replace the motivation, skill and dedicated minds of the Rational Think Tank members.

The future is exciting – and behavioral science will help to illuminate it. Thank you all for your contributions. Without you, this project could not come to fruition; without you, there would be no excitement.

Happy New Year

Philip Hattemer