Rob Hyndman Click here to see full sized version.

As with most great ideas, it began with beer. About three years ago, around February 2006, Rob Hyndman, a technology business lawyer in Toronto, met four friends at The Paddock bar: Mark Evans, director of PlanetEye Inc., an online travel guide; Mathew Ingram, a tech and business writer for The Globe & Mail; Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks Online Invoicing and Stuart MacDonald the founder of Expedia, an online travel and hotel booking service. Over drinks, they discussed the nascent online business and social media community in Toronto and bemoaned the lack of opportunity to network and attract venture capital. During the course of the conversation one of his buddies blurted out, “why don’t we create a conference.”

Less than 90 days later, mesh – Canada’s premier Web conference – was born. 

Within two weeks of walking out of the bar, the keynote speakers, the sponsors and the venue were all lined up, Hyndman recalled in an interview with The Lawyers Weekly. He added that the first conference sold out, without spending “a dime on advertising or marketing.”

On May 21-22, Hyndman and the four other conference co-founders will be holding the third installment of mesh at the MaRS Collaboration Centre, Canada’s largest incubation centre for scientific research, discovery and commercialization.

The conference features four streams of content: the web and society, the web and media, the web and marketing and the web and business.

Mesh has succeeded in attracting stellar speakers from a constellation of disciplines including: Lane Merrifield, one of three co-founders of Club Penguin, one of the most popular and fastest-growing virtual worlds for children; Ethan Kaplan, the head of technology at Warner Bros. Records; Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and an copyright law guru and activist; Mark Kingwell, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, media gadfly and best selling author and David Usher, a Canadian pop star and teen idol who has sold over 1.3 million records.

This time around, they will also be adding a full-day of intensive workshops on the design, development and management of Internet start-ups, which they dubbed “mesh U.”

For Hyndman, who devotes much of his practice to helping startups and established technology businesses succeed, mesh is his perfect medium.

Not only does Hyndman advise technology entrepreneurs, he has also embraced technology in every facet of his life as a sole practitioner.

To invoice clients, he employs the online billing platform FreshBooks, which allows clients to check their account status in real time.

To collaborate with clients, he has tried Basecamp, an online project management program that permits users to create password protected extranets.

To communicate with clients, he has used Skype for long distance calls, instant text messaging and Twitter, a new platform that sends out status updates to all of your contacts.

To create and edit documents, Hyndman has turned to “cloud computing,” which refers to a wide range of web-based applications, such as Google docs.

“I more or less live on the web,” Hyndman confided. He also admitted that he’s “surgically attached” to his BlackBerry and he goes everywhere with his laptop.

Before deciding to fly solo Hyndman – who is 48 years old and has an MBA and LLB from Dalhousie University in Halifax – worked as general counsel for a software company and as a corporate lawyer for two large Bay Street firms.

“I didn’t feel challenged by life at a large organization,” Hyndman said. He added, “I was constantly feeling frustrated” and he was aghast at the “extraordinary amount of overhead.”

For Hyndman who says that he’s “allergic to overhead” going solo and embracing technology has allowed him to be nimble and serve his clients better.

Technology is both business and pleasure though. Hyndman has also achieved recognition as a blogger, an activity which he does mainly for fun. His blog www.robhyndman.com won an award at the 2007 CLawBies, “Canadian Law Blog Awards” for best Canadian law blog.

“I don’t really blog about the law,” Hyndman said. “Not too many people want to know how sausages are made.”

Beyond satisfying an urge to write, the chief benefit from blogging, Hyndman continued, is the friendships he’s formed online.

“I’ve met hundreds of people all over the world through blogging.”