ABA TECHSHOW Post-Mortem: Not Your Granddaddy's Legal Tech Conference
TECHSHOW is more than 30 years old, but the atmosphere felt as fresh and energetic as at any contemporary conference.
Jack Newton, CEO of Clio, introduces keynote panelists Mark Britton of Avvo, Charley Moore of Rocket Lawyer, and John Suh of LegalZoom. Not visible behind Newton are moderators Judy Perry Martinez and Paula Frederick.
When you’re the granddaddy of legal technology conferences, your biggest challenge is remaining relevant to new generations of legal professionals. This year, ABA TECHSHOW, which wrapped up Saturday in Chicago, proved that not only is it still relevant, but that it can even push the envelope of what a legal tech conference can and should be.
That is no small feat at a time when a number of newcomers have emerged on the legal tech conference circuit. I’ve unabashedly gushed about the Clio Cloud Conference, which has continued to grow in popularity since it debuted in 2013. Coming up in April is the fifth annual CodeX FutureLaw Conference from the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, a conference known for bringing together an array of cutting-edge legal technologists and entrepreneurs. I could go on, or I could simply refer you to Dan Lear’s post wrapping up the best legal conferences of 2016.
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Amid these upstarts, TECHSHOW just marked its 31st year. The first was in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president, the New England Patriots were in the Super Bowl for the first time, and Microsoft was first listed on the New York Stock Exchange. A conference that old risks getting stuck in its ways and failing not only to address the interests of contemporary legal professionals, but also to spark them.
This year at TECHSHOW, sparks were a flyin’ everywhere, it seemed. New programming, new speakers and new features fueled a high level of energy. Yes, this was the venerable TECHSHOW, where you can still find exhibitors who’ve been there every year since 1986, but the atmosphere felt as fresh and energetic as at any contemporary conference.
Credit for this goes to the planning board and its chair this year, Adriana Linares. Not without opposition, Linares pushed through several initiatives that were calculated to shake things up a bit, and they largely succeeded.
Her most controversial move was a radical refresh of the speaker roster. There has long been a perception that the TECHSHOW faculty favors the usual suspects year after year. (In fact, this has not been true, as I demonstrated through a survey of past years’ rosters, finding a good rate of turnover.)
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Linares decided this year to exclude anyone who’d spoken for the five preceding years. (She explains her decision in this Law Technology Now podcast.) That decision shut out many of those usual suspects and raised concerns among some of TECHSHOW’s old guard about the quality of this year’s programming.
I will confess that a schedule heavy with meetings and briefings left me little opportunity to attend educational sessions. But based on those I did attend and on word of mouth from the many others I spoke to, the programming this year uniformly met or exceeded the standards one would expect at TECHSHOW.
No doubt, debate will continue over whether some speakers from the past should have been excluded, but no one can debate the quality of this year’s roster or that it brought many new faces who equally deserved their places on the rostrum.
An innovation this year in which I was personally involved was the Startup Alley and its companion opening-night pitch competition. The Alley was an opportunity for 12 startups to display their wares in a special startups section of the exhibit hall, and the competition put them head-to-head in an audience-judged contest to select the most innovative of the lot. While the competition suffered some logistical woes around sound projection and space limitations, TECHSHOW deserves credit for highlighting emerging technologies.
The winners, by the way, were first-place finisher Ping, a passive-timekeeping application, followed by Doxly, a platform that promises to streamline the M&A deal process, and UniCourt, a platform that unifies data from state and federal courts for search and analytics.
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Yet another innovation this year was TECHSHOW’s inaugural academic track, spearheaded by Michael Robak, associate director of the law library and director of information technology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. This two-day workshop brought together law school faculty, students, legal technologists and others to consider how law schools can better provide students with the technology and practical skills they need to succeed after graduation.
Running throughout the conference was a hackathon sponsored by Thomson Reuters and Tech For Justice that focused on developing tools to improve access to justice for veterans and those who aim to support them. The winner was Carry On, an app that connects veterans who have endured military sexual trauma with other survivors and with appropriate services.
Even this year’s keynote pushed the envelope, inviting into the lions’ den of an ABA event the CEOs of three companies who are redefining the delivery of legal services: Mark Britton of Avvo, Charley Moore of Rocket Lawyer and John Suh of LegalZoom. In a revealing and surprisingly uncontentious on-stage conversation, they were interviewed by Judy Perry Martinez, who chaired the ABA’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services, and Paula Frederick, general counsel for the State Bar of Georgia.
On my way home yesterday, as I was thinking about how to sum up the past four days, a tweet by Tim Baran of Good2bSocial jumped out at me. Tim nailed it, calling TECHSHOW “the awesomest relationship conference,” hashtag #likesummercamp. For all its innovations this year, what makes TECHSHOW so venerable year after year and what’s made it so successful for more than three decades are the relationships it fosters, both new and old.
Leaving TECHSHOW, what was top of my mind was not the programming or the special events or the exhibitors, as interesting as they all were. It was the people – the old friends I revisited and the new friends I made – and who I look forward to seeing again at next year’s TECHSHOW.
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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at [email protected], and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
