Technology

alt.legal: A Conference About Innovation Should Be A More Innovative Conference

If they want to bring back perennial LegalTech attendees, how about they challenge the norm and innovate the format?

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“Kind of vendor-heavy, and less people this year, isn’t it? What panel are you going to?” said everyone at Legalweek, the entire time.

Legalweek 2018 is over, and it’s always a fun time. A little less fun for me this year as I’ve been really under the weather, to the collective chagrin of every plane I board. But it’s still fun to interact, to wheel and deal, to see thought leaders coming together and having important, interesting conversations.

In talking to attendees, exhibitors, journalists, panelists, one theme has started to crescendo over recent years: nothing is really new. AI for legal research, smart contracts in the blockchain, proportional eDiscovery… we’ve been hearing about this for ages now. It’s great to see new product announcements, because it indicates that someone is doing something about it and we can go from theoretical to reality.

And I recognize that there’s new people who have never been to a single LegalTech (now known as Legalweek) or ILTA or ABA TechShow, and for them, every panel is insightful, every interaction is saturated with expertise. But for many perennial attendees, LegalTech is a time to catch up with old friends and to have a packed slate of face-to-face meetings. And by my measure, most of those attendees are beginning to drop off, choosing instead to rent a corporate suite down the street and capture the primary ROI — the convergence of stakeholders — without heavily engaging in the conference itself.

Doesn’t it feel like we can do more? We are gathering thought leaders from the bar and bench, brilliant inventors from the leading technology and services providers, savvy and experienced C-level information and innovation executives. The amount of talent and brainpower is staggering. Do we need more slides, more rigid and fabricated panel discussions, more booths in the exhibit hall to demo what is already available on YouTube or a company’s website?

Here are some suggestions for a more innovative legal tech conference.

  1. More non-lawyers. Ansel Halliburton tweeted it best. Lawyers shouldn’t be explaining the technology without technologists present.
  2. Disrupt the panel discussion. Panels have started to lack creativity, diversity, and engagement. Many panels failed to leave much time for Q&A with the audience, and while the voices are mostly qualified leaders, there is much to be desired in terms of organic discussion and wider communication channels. One suggestion: banish moderators. Introduce four smart people, set up a general topic for discussion, then walk off stage. Another suggestion in place of long monologues presenting overly saturated slides of content: PechaKucha, a creative presentation style requiring 20 slides progressing at 20 seconds each slide, for a total presentation time of six minutes and forty seconds. I’ve used this in the workplace and while it’s a lot of effort, it frequently makes for more succinct and memorable narratives. Having done something a certain way for a long time is a terrible reason to continue doing it, even if it’s much easier.
  3. Unconferences. There are some other legal tech conferences that aim for this, and I applaud their efforts. The idea of an “unconference” is to get away from conventional conference structures in general. Sometimes that means agenda-less sessions, or breakout sessions that don’t have firm start and end times, where people can drop in and leave anytime. Sometimes, even the topics are crowdsourced themselves. Jeena Cho previously made a good argument for why unconferences make sense for lawyers.
  4. Solving actual problems. An insightful approach has been described here. A call for the practice to change, a call for legal education to change, a call for attorney training to change… they only go so far. What about taking all the brainpower in a room and attacking a specific problem (sufficiently made anonymous to protect privilege, as necessary)? It does not need to be a full-blown hackathon, but I think there’s a lot to be learned by accomplishing an actual outcome at a conference.

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I don’t mean to pick on LegalTech specifically, as many of the big conferences are guilty of being staid and hackneyed. If you read anything positive on the trending #LTNY or #Legalweek hashtags, only a handful of them are substantive, and most of those are a vigorous agreement and amplification of confirmation bias — loud singing to a choir.

Most of the positive comments are gratitude for providing a connection point, where the best and brightest in the industry converge in a bounded time and space. That has its own virtue, to be sure. To be fair, I heard only fractions of keynotes and sessions this year, because most of my LegalTech schedule is now spent leveraging the connection point aspect of LegalTech: meetings, meetings, meetings.

So it may be for a different group or venue to challenge the conference framework with something more innovative, but conferences like Legalweek are still well-attended. If they want to bring back perennial LegalTech attendees, how about they challenge the norm and innovate the format?

Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)

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