Well it’s been a week since I returned from my first International Legal Technology Association conference in Washington DC. I tweeted during the conference and some specific sessions I attended but I wanted to pull together some overall observations of the event and the ideas racing around the conference halls.
Previous conferences have always fuelled my learning and understanding of the challenges and solutions faced by law firms and technology companies. I was excited to see how my virtual experience differed to being there in person. It was always exhausting trying to consume the volume of relevant information that was produced and distributed from across the pond using twitter and similar tools and I thought doing it physically would be nigh on impossible – I can now confirm this is true. Not only is the event on a massive scale physically (the hotel atrium was very impressive) for each session you attended you missed at least 4 or 5 others. I must have missed so much great content because I was ‘working’ and wasn’t able to keep an eye on the great content being produced.
As I was working I attended very few sessions but a stand out for me was ‘A look at emerging technologies” #ETPG6 [Click on link for tweets during the session] in which @beaum @bburney and @jeffrey_brandt discussed emerging technologies. The topics covered included cloud, mobility, predictive coding and all but briefly information and email overload. It was great to listen to 3 clever people with nothing to sell but experience and ideas. The subjects probably are influencing or affecting the majority of the conference attendees and as such it was a packed session. Listening to Beau talking about the new Microsoft Surface and how his firm already have a few in circulation was impressive. Interestingly Beau doesn’t think the Surface will kill the desktop pc for all users. It looks an interesting device and certainly one that will gather momentum and be beneficial for the end user.
It was interesting how Beau’s team build most of the integration pieces and are starting to build the relevant iPad apps themselves rather than rely on vendor apps. Perhaps rightly because they know what their lawyers need, but this model doesn’t work for everyone and there will always be that discussion regarding buy vs build. Things like large scale bespoke SharePoint implementations require an army of staff to build, maintain and administer them. Some firms just don’t have the skills or the financial resource.
The topic of information overload was raised right at the end when somebody pronounced “Email is killing me”. Interesting most #LegalIT vendors help manage email once it created, they don’t reduce the volume. Jeffrey felt that the answer lies in leveraging an enterprise social collaboration network for reducing the volume of email traffic by using tools like wiki’s and blogs to replace email. This is something we at HighQ agree with (not just because we have a product) but it just makes sense though we appreciate the cultural changes required to make a dent in email volumes. Interestingly during the conference collaboration was mentioned very few times and mostly in direct context with collaborating with clients. I agree this is important but perhaps law firms need to learn to walk by collaborating internally prior to running with their clients.
The other two key sessions I attended were, Beyond Extranets! What clients really want and Social Networking in the Enterprise. Both included great content and dialogue.
In the first contained discussions and ideas from Meredith Williams, Scott Rechtschafen and Lynne Simpson from Dupont. I won’t go into too much detail as my colleague Stuart wrote a post and the session was also covered by Mary Abraham in one of her impressive posts. During the rest of the week we spoke to many in-house lawyers interested to know more about our thoughts on the subjects raised.
The second highlighted something that is of interest to me at the moment. It also relates back to the point raised by Jeffrey regarding information and email overload and how internal social networks could ease the burden and assist with daily grind of ‘getting stuff done’. It was fascinating to hear Scott Reid from the JAG Corp and how they have embraced social and elements of gamification to improve knowledge sharing and the challenges of getting stuff done across such a large organisation. Lots of people have spoken of the potential impact of ‘social’ within the enterprise, but it’s important to remember it isn’t a silver bullet.
Outside of the sessions I attended I heard a number of other topics discussed in and around the event including LPM and AFA’s which are now no longer buzzwords but have gained a dramatic amount of traction. I discussed at length the changing role of IT staff (and other business services) as it seems the trend of outsourcing the business service staff is on the up. Interestingly I have experienced this first hand twice and I’m still not convinced it’s the only answer but seems peoples first option.
This is something I saw doing the rounds yesterday on twitter but here again is a link that contains lots of recordings and slide decks from the sessions.
After attending once I can safely say that for me, ILTA is about the people. From the organisers, the volunteers (who were awesome), the thought leaders, the bloggers, the technologists, the beer drinkers and those just attending.. Looking forward to seeing you all in Vegas next year..
A special mention to those people I have stalked for years on twitter and who I finally got to meet in person.. @VMaryAbraham @jeffrey_brandt @sapreston @mlwilliams77 @KMHobbie @gnawledge @rmcclead @ronfriedmann
