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Lawyers do not have time to take a week away from the billing grind to learn about all the cutting edge tools being built to make their lives easier. Well run firms and legal departments have technology professionals on staff (or consultants on retainer) who do their level best to keep their organizations on the right technological track, but at the end of the day these folks aren’t the end users and a technology strategy is only as good as the buy-in from attorneys.
This is the fundamental issue with ILTACON every year. The show brings together around 3000 attendees — from the IT side and the vendor side — for one of the best peer learning and market intelligence gathering events out there.
But legal tech is a three-pronged stool and the missing leg represents the lawyers out there who write the checks and ultimately have to use all this fabulous tech. And there are vendors and tech professionals out there doing a magnificent job of gleaning what lawyers need and building the attorney support needed to ensure adoption, but the fact that one necessary piece of the legal tech puzzle is always already absent from these conferences guarantees that even the most successful show ends incomplete.
The legal press are basically the “lawyers by proxy” at any show, talking to the vendors to convey the narrative the lawyers need to hear. Which is a little different — and probably the source of the show’s sometimes rocky relationship with the press — because conferences always understand their core audiences but with ILTA the challenge is stepping outside that box.
Articles like this one — and the many more that will follow over the next few weeks — are about showing a junior partner that there’s a better way to build a deposition binder or a deputy GC that there’s something out there providing instant contract visibility.
Which brings us to the real call to action guiding our tech coverage here: Don’t wait until the next procurement interval or, worse, tech crisis to find out what’s going on — meet with your people now. Thousands of IT professionals just returned home brimming with knowledge and stacks of business cards from innovative vendors. They know what they can implement, they need to know what they should implement by getting some enthusiasm from users. If you have any influence within your organization this is the time to hear about it.
Besides, the firm paid to send these folks, so may as well find out what happened.
Earlier: This Is Why You Absolutely Have To Get On Your Firm’s Tech Committee
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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