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kennethmjoyner · 5 years

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#ILTACON19: Post-Mortem Notes, Musings and Observations

Home now from ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association. It is five frenetic days of seminars, exhibitors and networking by legal technologists and vendors from all over the world. Here are some of my somewhat-random thoughts about the event.

Let’s start with what many were thinking: Orlando in August? I mean, WTF? But, guess what – the weather gods cooperated and kept any significantly stifling heat at bay. The threat of thunder showers was persistent, forcing the opening night reception to move indoors, but even the rain mostly held off.

I heard some griping about the hotel, the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin – mostly about the outdated rooms and the walking distances. The Swan and Dolphin are separate hotels connected by an outdoor walkway. It takes no more than five minutes to walk from one to the other, but with programs in each, the back-and-forth-and-back-again trek ensured attendees easily got in their daily 10,000 steps. For those uninclined to walk, golf carts sponsored by Litera and Traveling Coaches provided rides between the buildings.

The Swan and Dolphin resort.

Personally, I liked the hotel as a conference venue. The registration area, exhibit hall, and most meeting rooms were easily accessible. And the main hotel, the Dolphin, had a large lobby bar that served as the always-buzzing center of networking, well into the late evening. Both hotels had a variety of restaurants and fast-food offerings, so pretty much anything one might need to survive the week could be found on premises.

Attendance made it the largest ILTACON ever. Advance, full-week registration was 1,785, and ILTA expected that to meet or surpass 1,800 by final count. Adding in single-day registrations, ILTA said the full attendance would be 1,850. Last year’s total was 1,715. Eight hundred of this year’s attendees were first-timers.

On top of that, there were another 1,700 registrations by “business partners,” a category that includes vendors, members of the press, and others who are not ILTA members. Two-hundred companies had booths in the exhibit hall.

In an effort to make the conference greener, ILTA banned plastic water bottles and provided each registrant with a stainless-steel cup and plenty of places to refill it. As far as I could see, ILTA did not embrace #gagtheswag, as the exhibit hall’s 200 vendors offered plenty of swag to bag.

Speaking of the exhibit hall, for the second year it included a Startup Hub highlighting eight legal tech startups. I was glad to see two companies there that had also participated earlier this year in the Startup Alley I help organize for ABA TECHSHOW – Connective Counsel, whose client-facing app ConnectIVITY I wrote about earlier this week, and DocStyle, which automatically converts PDF files and styles word documents.

Others in the Hub were: AcuityKM, which provides AI-powered tools to enhance applications law firms already use; Canopy, which offers data mining for incident response; Infinnium, which uses AI to help organizations better manage their data; Lunar, which offers sales and marketing technology; MeasuredIn, which offers automated tools for managing M&A transactions; and Scissero, which says its AI technology can review, analyze and draft contracts.

A highlight for me was participating on a panel of legal tech journalists to discuss trends in the industry. If you’ve got 90 minutes to kill, the audio of that panel has been posted by ILTA. The panel was moderated by Gina Passarella, editor-in-chief, ALM Media, and also included Caroline Hill, editor-in-chief, Legal IT Insider; Zach Warren, editor-in-chief, Legaltech News; and Roy Strom, reporter, Bloomberg Law.

At work in the press room, Bloomberg Law reporters Roy Strom and Sam Skolnik.

When the journalists were not prognosticating on stage, they could be found in the press room that ILTA provided. The room was much appreciated, as it gave us a place to meet with company executives for briefings and demonstrations. And the fact that ILTA kept it stocked with snacks made it all the better. But next year, ILTA, give us coffee!

Also on my wish list for next year: A podcast booth. I recorded one interview there for my LawNext podcast, but lacking a quiet place, I was forced to record it in the press room, among a hubbub of background conversations and the decision by hotel staff to at that moment disassemble tables and chairs.

Keynote speaker Josh Linkner.

Apart from that, I regret to say, my schedule was so full of meetings that I made it to only one other session, the opening keynote by author and entrepreneur Josh Linkner, who spoke on harnessing innovation. There should be a special place in heaven for keynoters at large conferences, because it can be a thankless task – except of course for the large speaking fees some of these folks command.

Judging by the twitter stream and people I spoke with, Linkner won over the audience with his entertaining style and engaging stories of innovation across industries, including the crowd-pleasing tale of how a social media hoax about a public book burning saved the public library in Troy, Mich.

But Linkner suffered the fate of so many generic innovation speakers at legal conferences – he never connected the dots to the legal industry (even though his mother and stepfather were both lawyers). Instead, he offered platitudes, such as, “Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it,” and then closed with two “action items,” one of which was to subscribe to his daily email and the other to “discover one fresh idea” every day for a week.

In terms of the technology on display, probably the most talked about company was Reynen Court, which is often described as creating an app store for legal. Its mission is to make it easy for law firms and legal departments to adopt and manage cloud-based software without having to trust firm or client content to the cloud. During the conference, I interviewed founder Andrew Klein for my LawNext podcast, and we will be posting that episode soon.

This reflect the continuing interest in a trend I wrote about in my 2018 wrap-up, The 20 Most Important Legal Technology Developments of 2018, and that is the platformization of legal tech – an extension of the model that made Salesforce so successful, turning itself from an application to a platform. As I noted then, this is a big part of the going-forward strategy for both iManage and NetDocuments, and is behind such recent acquisitions as Thomson Reuters of HighQ and Intapp of OnePlace.

Of course there were over-the-top parties.

For me, perhaps the most memorable aspect of the conference was not a product or an event or an exhibitor. Rather, it was the palpable sense of an organization reinvigorated.

The fact is, it had been a tough three years for ILTA, and the bad news always seemed to drop just as the conference was about to start.

To recount: In 2016, just a month before the conference, ILTA was rocked by news that its long-time executive director Randi Mayes would retire. Then, in 2017, just days before the conference, ILTA reshuffled its top management, replacing several veteran executives. In 2018, it was déjà vu all over again, as ILTA announced – again just days ahead of the conference – that the CEO who had replaced Mayes would be leaving. Dissatisfaction over the 2017 reshuffling led some longtime ILTA members to break off and form an alternative group, the Association of Legal Technologists.

So this conference was the first in three years that did not kick off with last-minute news of executive reshufflings. In fact, quite the opposite occurred. Last October, ILTA brought on Joy Heath Rush, a former Litera vice president, as interim CEO, and then in February, it named her permanent CEO. Rush is widely respected and liked in the industry, and she and ILTA’s leadership have been working hard to restore a sense of spirit and camaraderie that some felt had been diminished or lost.

Joy Heath Rush welcomed attendees to the “family reunion.”

Rather than a staff shake-up, this year’s conference started with an opening session that had Rush on stage, standing in an apron at a barbecue grill and framed by a background screen that depicted a backyard, and enthusiastically greeting the crowd, “Welcome ILTA to our annual family reunion!”

In place of formal opening comments, Rush welcomed a variety of “old friends” to her faux barbecue – such as the VP in charge of ILTACON Dawn Hudgins and conference co-chairs David Hobbie, KM director at Goodwin Procter, and Julie Brown, director of practice technology at Vorys – each coming one by one on stage and offering brief remarks in the form of a conversation at a friendly backyard barbecue.

It was an opening that set the tone for the entire conference. In the end, ILTACON is all about networking. And even with 800 first-time attendees and a total crowd of some 3,500 people, it somehow managed to feel like that family reunion Rush alluded to. For a family that had been through a few squabbles in recent years, it was good to get back to enjoying the barbecue.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/08/iltacon19-post-mortem-notes-musings-and-observations.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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americanfreighttrucking · 5 years

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Connective Counsel Unveils ConnectIVITY Mobile Client App for Law Firms and Announces Worldox Integration at ILTACON 2019

Secure Cloud Platform Connects Clients to Lawyers by Providing Law Firm Branded Access to Documents, Client Communication Tools, and More

CLEVELAND–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#ILTACON19–This week at ILTACON 2019 in Orlando, Connective Counsel unveils ConnectIVITY, a new mobile client-facing app for law firms. Officially launching in early 2020 and currently in beta testing, ConnectIVITY is a secure…

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americanfreighttrucking · 5 years

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ILTA Announces the Next Era of ILTACON

Evolves INSIGHT as ILTACON Europe

CHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–lt;a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ILTACON19?src=hash" target="_blank"gt;#ILTACON19lt;/agt;–The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) announces today it will expand the ILTACON legal technology conference to feature two global destinations annually. In 2019, the 43rd annual ILTACONconference will be held in Orlando,…

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kennethmjoyner · 5 years

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#ILTACON19: Post-Mortem Notes, Musings and Observations

I heard some griping about the hotel, the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin – mostly about the outdated rooms and the walking distances. The Swan and Dolphin are separate hotels connected by an outdoor walkway. It takes no more than five minutes to walk from one to the other, but with programs in each, the back-and-forth-and-back-again trek ensured attendees easily got in their daily 10,000 steps. For those uninclined to walk, Litera-sponsored golf carts provided rides between the buildings.

The Swan and Dolphin resort.

At work in the press room, Bloomberg Law reporters Roy Strom and Sam Skolnik.

Keynote speaker Josh Linkner.

Of course there were over-the-top parties.

For me, perhaps the most memorable aspect of the conference was not a product or an event or an exhibitor. Rather, it was the palpable sense of an organization reinvigorated.

The fact is, it had been a tough three years for ILTA, and the bad news always seemed to drop just as the conference was about to start.

Joy Heath Rush welcomed attendees to the “family reunion.”

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/08/iltacon19-post-mortem-notes-musings-and-observations.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

#law #legal

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kennethmjoyner · 5 years

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In Advance of #ILTACON19, CloudNine Rolls Out Upgrades Of Its E-Discovery Technology

Prepare for an onslaught of legal technology announcements, as ILTACON 19, the massive annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, is set to begin Sunday in Orlando.

First up: CloudNine, which today is announcing new versions, features and performance upgrades to its suite of e-discovery products, which is composed of its on-premise products CloudNine Explore, LAW and Concordance, and its cloud-based Review.

The Houston-based company also announced a new product for release later this year, which it will preview at ILTACON.

According to today’s announcement:

CloudNine Explore 7.2, a tool for early case assessment, has been upgraded with a multi-core, multi-threaded processing capability across multiple machines to make it significantly faster and more scalable for larger projects. The product also now connects more seamlessly with the LAW pre-discovery production software to enable greater organization and data export options, the company said.

CloudNine LAW 7.2, a tool for data importing and exporting, now has more controls for organizing data and its Turbo Import feature now imports and analyzes data 73% faster than in the prior version.

CloudNine Concordance Desktop 1.07, a tool for document review, now has 70% faster import speeds, the company says, and also adds administrator tools, improves document and email text extraction, and provides new organization and management functionality to optimize both database and unstructured data. Also on view at ILTA will be forthcoming viewer and redaction capabilities.

CloudNine Review 2019, the company’s cloud-based review platform, has been enhanced to improve speed, performance and user experience, the company says. Also in the works for the product are new family tagging and field grouping features.

The new product, called Office 365 Connector, will extract data from Office 365 and automatically load it into CloudNine Explore. It will be released later this year, the company said.

In May, CloudNine named a new CEO, Tony Caputo, who had previously held executive positions at e-discovery companies Recommind, CaseCentral and as CEO of Omnivere. Over the coming year, he said, the company is looking to significantly expand its partner network and expand its sales among corporate law departments.

At ILTACON, you will be able to find CloudNine in booth 624. Also, Doug Austin, vice president of products/services and author of the eDiscovery Daily Blog, will be speaking at the conference’s Litigation Support Day on Wednesday, Aug. 21, and will present a program on predictive coding processes on Thursday, Aug. 22.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/08/in-advance-of-iltacon19-cloudnine-rolls-out-upgrades-of-its-e-discovery-technology.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

#law #legal

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