The ILTA sessions are held on day 1 of the ALM LegalWeek Conference, which was a unique and different experience.
As one grew tired of peeking through cracks in the doors on the 2-4th floor of the Midtown Hilton to catch glimpses of the impressive booths under construction for the Tuesday opening of the Exhibit Hall, one’s focus turned to the many educational sessions and the significant amount of networking and collaboration activities filling the venue -- and beyond -- on opening day of LegalWeek.
The scene reminded me, a touch, of a week I recently spent in Fort Myers, Florida. With a key element of the venue not available (in Fort Myers that was the beach due to the hurricane and red tide while on Day 1 at LegalWeek it is the Exhibit Hall), the participants were drawn to other areas to congregate, collaborate and learn. The LegalWeek equivalent of downtown Fort Myers were the many informative gathering areas of the Hilton with spillover into venues like the Conrad, Sheraton and Cafe 53 for demos, product discussions and the like.
Of course, some elements of the conference were consistent with the norm. Without diving into details, which are too numerous to enumerate, there was no shortage of announcements on legal tech acquisitions, new product features, additional Series A funding rounds, launches of professional services units, integrations and/or new API capabilities, and lastly integration of new technologies into the SALI Alliance industry standards boards marked the beginning of the conference. Not surprisingly, the fairly obvious number one overall theme was all things AI and ChatGPT.
From a skills development perspective, it was apparent that at Day 1 of LegalWeek, the educational sessions were a resounding success. By and large, all eight of the get-togethers (multiple offerings provided by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA International) and the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) were standing room only, with legions of conference attendees turned away from many of the gatherings.
What was the big draw? In my view, it was the exceptional content. Seminars focused on different elements of digital transformation, change management and cross-department collaboration best practices were held. Additional talks offering advice on how to evaluate and sell projects from a financial perspective were available, as was a targeted panel, including ILTA President Joy Heath Rush, on post-pandemic leadership advice. Multiple offerings on information governance were provided by ARMA, and an ILTA session on security/authentication (on which I served as a panelist) -- which included a gamification element mirroring March Madness where “Security Access Training” won the fictitious national security title -- rounded out the slate.
It was also the case that networking and collaboration was a huge component of Day 1 for many of the attendees. Gaggles of groups were ever present in the main venue and, not unlike computer networks expanded by the WFH trend, opportunities to collaborate extended to additional venues dotted up and down 53rd and 54th Street. I was even engaged when speaking to a colleague at Café 53 about eDiscovery and a recent Master conference by an attendee of the conference I did not previously know. It was a great series of invigorating conversations, and by all accounts, most vendors and legal professionals I spoke with enjoyed a full state of meetings with colleagues eager to learn about new industry prognostications, trends, offerings.
My experience on this front was overwhelmingly positive, as the opportunity to discuss ideas in a collaborative manner without the presence of a booth and computer screen was a welcome respite from demo fatigue and a method I found to be a more creative and productive method of exchanging ideas.
To close out the day, although I could not attend due to previous commitments, the LegalWeek Leaders In Tech cocktail hour, dinner and awards presentations were held. As well as various socials including one hosted with the International Legal Technology Association, which was booked to capacity.
All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable and content-rich day. To me, the big takeaways were the content available in the educational sessions and the ideas I explored in a freeform manner with many of my legal technology peers and colleagues. Kudos to ALM for a highly successful opening salvo to kick off LegalWeek.