Conferences / Symposia

For Legal Technology, Above the Law Needs An Entire Summit

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Above the Law is partnering with the Electronic Discovery Institute to host a Legal Technology Leadership Summit from September 6 to September 8, 2011. We’ll be bringing together lawyers and technology professionals and offering a special track dealing with digital forensics, managed by the American Society of Digital Forensics and eDiscovery. And since this is ATL, we’re rolling to the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Florida.

If your law firm or organization is interested in attending, we’d love to see you. Click here to sign up now.

Patrick Oot, General Counsel and Co-Founder of the Electronic Discovery Institute (“EDI”), described the summit as an opportunity “to provide a setting where thought leaders from large organizations and corporate legal departments can collaborate on the current state of the law pertaining to various uses of digital information.”

Speaking for Above the Law, David Lat noted that legal technology directly impacts the day-to-day life of many of Above the Law’s readers. The summit will bring together counsel from many major corporations and leaders in providing cost-effective technological solutions.

Clients expect their lawyers to be using technology to keep costs down, lawyers expect technology to be intuitive to a bunch of people with liberal arts degrees, and Above the Law expects that putting all these people together will be good for the whole industry. Tech gurus, thought leaders, clients, David Lat and Elie Mystal, and a Florida resort. What could possibly go wrong?

Click after the jump for the full press release from EDI…

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Small Firms, Big Lawyers: Twitter and Business Cards at the ABA TechShow

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Ed. note: This is the latest installment of Small Firms, Big Lawyers, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.

When 1,500 lawyers gathered at this week’s ABA TechShow in Chicago, an interesting thing happened:

The business card died.

When these lawyers weren’t listening to the dozens of cutting-edge seminars or browsing the exhibitors’ booths, they were making new friends and new professional connections. But instead of exchanging business cards, many of the attendees were trading Twitter handles — their online identities that begin with the @ symbol. (I’m @jayshep.) Massachusetts lawyer Gabriel Cheong (@gabrielcheong) told me that by the end of the conference, he had collected exactly zero business cards. (I immediately gave him one of mine. #irony) Instead of accumulating two-by-three-and-a-half-inch scraps of cardstock, he typed their Twitter names directly into his iPhone. (And I doubt anyone actually said, “Uh, I’m not on the Twitter.”) Molly McDonough (@Molly_McDonough), online editor at the ABA Journal, tweeted at the end of the conference: “For first time, I didn’t collect any biz cards at #abatechshow. Just made note of names and followed on Twitter.” Others retweeted (quoted) her tweet with approval.

So does this mean it’s time for small-firm lawyers to learn how to tweet?

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Fear and Loathing in LegalTech

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Daniel de Juan, a sales engineer from Mitratech, summed up perfectly what LegalTech was like for me this year: “Being at LegalTech is almost like being at a casino, in the sense that you lose all track of time.”

Two years ago, I found the conference to be pretty intimidating, and that was when the conference was much smaller due to the weak economy. Last year, LegalTech New York was much bigger, and I found it slightly overwhelming. This year, due to some bad planning on my part, I came home from LegalTech utterly exhausted.

It seems I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. After a quick search on the Internet, I have seen only a few things written up about the conference, so I’m guessing many people went through the same experience. (For example, I spoke with members of The Posse List on the first night, and they told me that they were gearing up to do 36 interviews during the two and a half day conference — so it must have been a whirlwind for them as well.)

That said, here are some musings from my adventure last week….

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The LegalTech Pregame Show

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Ed. note: Gabe Acevedo will be covering LegalTech for Above the Law this year. If you are interested in communicating with someone from ATL about LegalTech coverage, please contact Gabe at gabe@gabesguide.com. Thanks.

The pregame show for LegalTech New York 2011 has been in full swing the last few weeks. Vendors and their PR reps have been constantly reaching out via emails, text messages, phone calls, and smoke signals, to contact industry experts, “thought leaders,” law firm decision makers, members of the media, and, perhaps most importantly, knuckleheads like me. All are doing their best to generate “buzz” before they announce their new products, alliances, services — fill in the blank as you see fit — at the conference.

Then, at 9:00 AM on Monday, LegalTech New York will open with what I am certain will be a riveting keynote address from Gabriel Buigas, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Hewlett Packard, entitled Legal vs. IT: Turn the Battle into a Solution to Meet Compliance. At that point, everything will reach a crescendo.

Well, not exactly.

Don’t get me wrong; I am sure Gabriel Buigas will give an excellent speech. But the real action will begin at 10 AM, when the doors to the exhibit hall open. That is when all hell breaks loose, and hundreds of technology vendors will be eagerly waiting to share with you the great news about their respective companies.

With that as a backdrop, here is some of what I expect to see at this year’s LegalTech….

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The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 01.14.11
(And a note about ATL’s LegalTech coverage.)

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This week, The Rundown is going international. LegalTech is just around the corner, and there will be a solid contingent of lawyers from the United Kingdom in attendance.

Speaking of LegalTech, I’m going to be covering the conference for Above the Law. If you are interested in communicating with someone from ATL about LegalTech coverage, please contact me at gabe@abovethelaw.com. Thanks.

In this week’s Rundown, we will touch on the LegalTech conference. We’ll also link to a quick interview with the General Counsel of the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, who recently discussed the UK Bribery act and its connection to e-discovery.

Staying in foreign territory, why has there been a recent boom in cases requiring foreign languages? I also highlight two articles of interest on outsourcing…

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(And a note about ATL’s LegalTech coverage.)“

The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 12.09.10

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This week, when I wasn’t thinking about how to crack down on lunch thieves and trying to recoup the money I paid former Judge Porteous over the last few years (which put me in a bit of a financial bind, but I’ll be fine because I’m on the short list for a job at Skadden’s San Francisco office), I found time to piece together another Rundown of legal technology for the week.

In this edition, we go back to the future to discuss “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There is also a free download addressing European privacy and e-discovery, as well as other related content.

In addition, the most famous plaintiff in e-discovery will be speaking in Boston. And have you ever wondered what the legal industry will look like in ten years?

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The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 11.19.10

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This week — in between tweeting some really funny stuff (such as how I want to blow up airports — it was so funny!), buying up every last can of Four Loko that I could get my hands on, and forwarding Skadden employee evaluations to all of my friends — I spent the rest of the time tracking the news articles and blog posts I wanted to cover in The Rundown.

Among other things in this edition, a prominent e-discovery company offers its predictions for 2011, a big fish swallows a little fish, and we engage in more Touro talk (this time positive).

There is even a crossword puzzle — seriously, a crossword puzzle…

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The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 11.06.10

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What a wild week in Washington! In the aftermath of hundreds of thousands of people rallying for sanity, the Republicans trounced the Democrats in the House.

As for me, when I wasn’t cleaning the millions of dollars I had stuffed in my closet to hide from the IRS or arguing with my therapist about how versatile my JD degree is, I spent the rest of the time collecting information for this week’s Rundown. Among other things, this edition covers my discussion of the the book “6Ps of the Big3,” a major technology acquisition, a possible flaw in the workflow of the e-discovery process, musings of one of the world’s most widely traveled lawyers, and a new exam for certifying e-discovery qualifications…

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The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 10.22.10

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This week, when I wasn’t taking lessons in constitutional law from Christine O’Donnell, the greatest candidate for the United States Senate ever, or honing my brief drafting skills with the help of a Ph.D., I spent the time putting together this week’s legal technology Rundown.

In this edition, we see that a lot of lawyers will be working for or against BP for quite some time, and a former Senator explains why shipping American jobs overseas is a good thing. There is also some news on Qualcomm, a little cloud talk from north of the border, Rocket Matter is in “sync,” and much, much more…

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The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 10.15.10

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This week, in between eating as many burgers with extra onions as I could at Rogue States, and lobbying heavily for my law school to be more like Harvard and hide their GPAs (in my case, I was really hoping they could implement that retroactively), I managed to collect lots of good material for this week’s Rundown.

Among other things, the Rundown features a major merger, more on predictive coding, another Masters Conference write-up, several surveys, a cartoon caption contest, how technology is helping those in pro bono — and, oh, a bit of litigation that could last a long, long time….

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Highlights From the Masters Conference

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This week, while taking a break from my favorite pastime — hanging out with strippers and snorting coke with federal judges — I attended the Masters Conference in Washington, DC. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this conference, it has carved out a significant niche for itself in the e-discovery universe. The Masters Conference is a gathering of legal technology thought leaders from all over the world, who come together every year at this time to talk about all things e-discovery. The yearly meeting was the brainchild of entrepreneur extraordinaire Robert Childress, president of Wave Software.

After attending last year’s Masters Conference, I thought I knew what to expect again this year: a small meeting (certainly not on the level of a LegalTech or an ILTA Annual Meeting), with the usual suspects, and similar — if not the same — topics of discussion.

Well, what a difference a year makes! The Masters Conference may only be in its fifth year of existence, but it seems to have just had its coming-out party. I’ll give you my three takeaways, after the jump…

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The Rundown: This Week in Legal Technology – 10.01.10

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Welcome to the latest installment of The Rundown, a review of recent developments in the world of legal technology. Let’s plunge right in.

* Happy Birthday to Clio, a legal technology company that helps to streamline law offices. Clio is officially two years old, which is like twenty years in Biglaw.

* I pick up a lot of information about legal technology on Twitter. Two of the best people to follow in this subject area are Rob Robinson of Orange Legal Technologies and Eric Feistel of Integreon. These guys tweet out a plethora of information on a daily basis. It should be no surprise that in a past life they used to work together for another vendor.

* Another writer who has a firm grasp of e-discovery issues is Greg Buckles of ediscoveryjournal.com. This week he has an interesting post about vendor trends at LegalTech, which — hard to believe — is right around the corner.

More links, after the jump.

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