ILTACON always has an impressive array of content each year. As a longtime participant and attendee, I can confidently say this year is no exception. During the first portion of the conference, I focused on meeting with clients and focusing on discovery and information governance insights. Some of my initial observations…
On Monday, the Discovery and Litigation Support Roundtable: From TAR to Generative AI showed that we are well past theoretical debates regarding the use of generative artificial intelligence in practice. TAR is still an essential part of the toolkit, but across the board, teams appear to be actively testing and refining generative AI in review workflows.
Additionally, agentic AI concepts are moving into active testing phases for discovery tasks such as search, classification, and triage. Hearing about how innovative lawyers are incorporating these technologies in actionable ways was inspiring. It gave me a new sense of enthusiasm for how my team can continue to partner with clients in these endeavors.
Discussions during another interesting session, Kids' Meal Ediscovery: Shoestring Solutions for Small-Scale Projects, proved the notion that a complete enterprise platform is not always necessary to deliver a defensible and cost-effective discovery process. This is something we know and practice at FTI Technology: every matter is unique, and projects of any size can have significant challenges that require customized methodologies to solve. Small-scale matters aren’t always low stakes, but cost pressures can be more prominent, which is why it’s so important to leverage innovative workflows, flexible teams, and the right technology mix. It was encouraging to see a formal discussion on this topic, with more of the legal community recognizing the importance of tailoring approaches to the attributes of each matter.
Additional takeaways from various sessions and discussions include:
- Search capabilities are shifting from static document retrieval to interactive and AI-augmented knowledge extraction.
- Data structuring is becoming a top priority as clean and consistent inputs significantly improve AI-assisted review and analytics.
- The concept of garbage in, garbage out is alive and well. Data engineering and quality control on source data are increasingly being recognized as essential before AI can add real value.
- Litigation response playbooks and repeatable workflows are reducing downtime and stress when new matters arise. This is another point consistent with our approach at FTI Technology and one I’m encouraged to see catching on.
- Collaboration between information governance, litigation support, and security teams is tightening to ensure defensibility and compliance alongside speed. I’ve seen firsthand the benefits this kind of proactive collaboration can have on improving outcomes and reducing risk.
All in all, AI is dominating many of the conversations, but it’s far from the only topic being prioritized throughout the conference. I’m looking forward to hearing and learning more throughout the week.