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I spent last week at ILTACON, the annual convention of the International Legal Technology Association. With nearly 3,000 attendees, it was the third largest ILTACON ever – a significant milestone, especially since we’ve been unable to leave for three years due to the global pandemic.
ILTACON is an opportunity for legal technologists of all stripes – from users to developers to vendors to investors – to come together and learn, share and network. Masks were few and far between, after-parties were packed, and it all felt surprisingly familiar.
In addition to its simple gathering function, ILTACON is an ideal place to host the activities of the legal technology community to gauge the themes that drive product development. From my conversations with presenters, presenters, and audience, I kept seeing certain key themes recurring in one form or another.
Here are the top five themes I heard at ILTACON:
1. Platform fatigue
ILTACON participants mostly come from medium or large law firms, and one fact seems very clear: lawyers working in these firms suffer from stage fatigue.
Platform fatigue is a symptom of constantly switching from one app or window to another. TechRadar describes the problem well:
“To get work done correctly and on time, you have to divide your time and attention between different windows, screens, data sources, files, alerts, displays, programs, etc. There are too many places to go and too many windows to check, a situation that practically guarantees you’ll miss something.”
In addition to missing something – a serious concern for lawyers and other legal professionals – there is efficiency and effectiveness in learning and switching between multiple applications, interrupting work processes and extending the time it takes to complete any task.
Fortunately, ILTACON emphasized that suppliers are increasingly aware of this problem and are responding in different ways.
2. Platform
If platform fatigue is a problem, one answer is the platform. Think of a platform as a technology ecosystem, offering multiple applications within a single platform. Not only can it facilitate workflow integration and reduce platform fatigue, but it can also increase security when the platform is an established service provider.
2018’s Most Important Legal Technology Developments I’ve written about platformization in legal technology so far in 2018, citing CRM company Salesforce as a classic example, which opened up its platform to third-party developers by launching the AppExchange. At the time, I mentioned NetDocuments with the App Directory and Clio with the App Directory as examples in the legal industry.
At ILTACON it was clear that many companies will continue to embrace and expand this approach. As recently reported here , NetDocuments has launched PatternBuilder, a native version of Afterpattern, the product it acquired last year, for building applications and automating legal documents and workflows, now available as an add-on. NetDocuments offers a product.
Following this platform is relativism. It, too, has its own App Hub that offers apps built directly or by third-party developers, integrated with the Comparable platform.
But the company is taking a more direct approach to extending the platform’s capabilities beyond standard e-discovery. One example of this that Relativity is showing at ILTACON last week is Relativity Patents, an app designed to speed up the process of prior art searches.
Just today, Relativity took another step in this direction, contract review company Heretik, a product already built on the Relativity platform by third-party developers, but now as an add-on directly integrated into the RelativityOne cloud platform.
3. Interaction
Another is the interaction that presenters are taking to solve the problem of platform fatigue. Interoperability allows different products, applications or systems to communicate with each other, especially to share data seamlessly. The most common way to achieve communication is through application programming interfaces, or APIs, which are software that allow one application to talk to another.
At ILTACON, one company that made a big push for API interoperability was LexisNexis. As previously reported, last March, LexisNexis announced the new API Developer Portal, a self-service portal that allows law firms to access 99% of LexisNexis content – raw content and metadata – to incorporate into their own workflows and applications. Integrate it with their own internal and third-party data.
Last week, LexisNexis announced an API partnership with two prominent legal technology companies as part of what Jeff Pfeiffer, chief product officer for Canada, UK and US, described as a step toward “creating a connected world” for legal professionals.
The first of these, Courtroom Insight’s knowledge management product, enables joint customers to access Lexis+ and Lexis Contextual Analysis content about jurors and expert witnesses alongside the information already provided by Courtroom Insight.
Another API integration is with TRG Screen Product Quest, which is a query management system for research and data teams. With integration, when a lawyer submits a request to pull a document, the lawyer will be presented with options for cases with this number and when the lawyer selects one, pull that information from Lexis or Lexis+.
Also on the topic of interoperability, there was a good talk about the Sally Alliance – short for Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry – and the recently released version 2.0 of the Legal Matter Standard Specification, an attempt to create a common data set. Legal industry standards for interaction between clients, legal service providers and technology.
On my LawNext podcast, I recently interviewed one of the lead developers of these standards, Damien Riehl, and at ILTACON, Riehl was part of an amazing panel to talk about the development of these standards and their applications, Enable SALI Standards Data Insights. Legal industry.
Others on the panel included James Hannigan, director of legal project management at Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass; Chief Business Development Officer at Kelly Harbour, Goulston & Stores; and Toby Brown, Chief Practice Management Officer of Perkins Coy.
Another example of collaboration at ILTACON is InfoDash, a product I first wrote about last January that uses APIs to create a highly customizable “cloud-first” intranet and extranet platform for law firms that integrates data and information from financial information, firm directories, calendars, news, client and The company’s other systems and platforms, including case data and more.
4. Automation
The one word that came up in every product conversation I had last week was automation. Lawyers need technology that frees them from repetitive tasks so they can focus on the high-level analytical and intellectual work of serving their clients.
One direct example of this that I saw at ILTACON last week was Bundledocs, a product that does what its name suggests and does it well – assembling and organizing collections of documents into booklets that are numbered, indexed and segmented – and thereby eliminating the manual step.
In business in the UK and Asia-Pacific regions since 2019, Bundledocs is now pushing into the North American market, bringing in former Ticket executive Peter Zever to lead the push as VP of revenue and operations in North America.
Whether it’s litigation, business transactions, family law matters, real estate negotiations, or anything else, the product automates any type of document wrapping.
5. Ease of pricing
Another theme I’ve heard repeatedly over the past week involves simplifying pricing. While several panels have covered the issue of pricing legal services, I am referring to the pricing of legal technology products. Customers of these products are tired of vague, nebulous, complex and confusing product pricing methods.
Some sellers are hearing this and responding. Relativity last week announced its new subscription plan, RelativityOne, which bundles all user fees into a single data rate. Relativity made the change because many of its customers were addressing broader use cases such as cyber breach response, data subject access requests, third-party subpoenas and internal investigations, but separate user fees were a barrier, he said. You use RelativityOne for those use cases.
One vendor that wants to be completely upfront is pricing, a contract AI company spun off from Kira after it was acquired by Litera last year. The price of Zuva is directly stated on the website, buyers can directly register to buy it.
CEO Noah Weisberg, Kira’s former CEO, told me last week that Zuva wanted from the start to simplify the buying process for potential customers. Not only the price on the website, but anyone can try for free and buy without having to talk to a sales representative.
And by the way, speaking of interoperability, Zuva is an API-only interface designed to allow other app developers to easily embed Contract AI — the same AI that Kira’s underpins — into their apps. That means Zuva’s customers are not end users, but software vendors, system developers, and other companies developing applications themselves.
Other aspects
By no means are these the only ones seeding ILTACON. Ahead of ILTACON, Doug Austin at eDiscovery Today created a word cloud that provides an overview of ILTACON session topics and key themes. Not surprisingly, e-discovery, AI, security, litigation and governance are emerging frequently.
Another word I hear a lot is partnership. In line with the themes of platformization and interdependence I mentioned above, many vendors are expanding their networks of partners—other providers of technology and services that complement or enhance their own products.
One example I spoke to last week was Quislex, which, as an alternative legal services provider, regularly uses a variety of software products related to e-discovery, contract review and other services, and has made a big push for partnerships over the past year. Those products.
Mark Wilcox, Global Vice President, Business Development, as ALSP, QuisLex is technology agnostic. But through partnerships, it can show its customers how connected it is with all these suppliers, and help suppliers market sales and marketing.
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