Technology

Legal Tech Disruption And Stagnancy At Legalweek 2019

So much has changed in the legal tech space, and yet so much has stayed the same at legal tech conferences.

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Another Legalweek has come and gone. It was a whirlwind of meetings and conversations about the future of legal tech, and before I knew it, it was over and I was back on a plane and headed home.

What struck me about this year’s show was how much has changed, and yet how much has stayed the same. Technology has bulldozed through the legal industry, just as it has in other industries and our culture in general, and left a trail of wreckage behind it.

For example, over the past few years, traditional legal publishing has been impacted tremendously, and many of the traditional publishing companies, both newspaper and treatise-focused, are struggling to find a foothold in the new world order. Some have declared bankruptcy, others have restructured, and still others have significantly reduced spending and and overhead by closing offices and cutting their budgets.

Bar associations are likewise struggling to stay afloat and few have found a way to provide value in what is now primarily a digital world. Membership is down at national and local levels and bar executives are testing out many different tactics to increase membership and interest, but are having a hard time finding success.

Similarly, mainstay legal conferences, like Legalweek, are also facing challenges. In recent years, attendee numbers for many conferences have declined, as have the number of sponsors and vendors. Lawyers now have more cost effective ways to obtain information and CLE credits online and many are taking advantage of those opportunities and choosing not to attend conferences. This, in turn, causes companies to question the value of exhibiting at the conferences, since doing so tends to be a costly endeavor.

But even as technology has undeniably restructured and torn apart the industries that support the legal profession, many members of the profession have chosen to remain blissfully unaware of its impact on their practices. That’s why, by all accounts and despite the urgings of legal tech futurists, some aspects of legal tech adoption have occurred at a slower pace than anticipated. At the same time, legal tech companies are sprouting up left and right, at rates never before seen, ever intent on meeting the perceived needs of a profession that is ambivalent, at best, to some of their offerings.

And then, in the midst of all this tumultuous change — and  collective stubborn resistance to the same — came Legalweek 2019. Despite the hustle and bustle of the show, the dark cloud of change was ominously evident. It was hard to gauge attendee numbers, but the Expo Hall seemed smaller than it had in previous years, with some mainstay exhibitors appearing off the beaten path in much smaller booths than in years past.

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That being said, you couldn’t walk two feet without tripping over an eDiscovery vendor, and it’s safe to say that tech adoption in that space is thriving. And if talking about legal tech with people who have a passion for it is your thing, then Legalweek is the place to do it. It’s definitely one of my favorite things to do, and as in prior years, I was lucky enough to meet up with lots interesting people and had many engaging discussions about the future of legal practice and how technology will impact the legal industry.

First I met with Josh Becker, Head of Legal Analytics and Chairman at Lex Machina. I learned that since its acquisition by LexisNexis, Lex Machina has not rested on its laurels and continues to add new practice areas to its litigation analytics platform. We spent a lot of time talking about the importance of the quality of data provided by Lex Machina, since that impacted the quality of the analytics derived from the data. Or, as Josh repeatedly opined, “it’s better to have no analytics than bad analytics.”

I also spoke with Jeff Pfiefer, VP of Product Management at LexisNexis. He provided an overview of the progress being made following the recent acquisitions Lex Machina, Ravel Law, and Intelligize and shared his vision for the continuing development of those artificial intelligence tools. As always, I was impressed with the direction LexisNexis is taking these products, the way that they’re approaching the incorporation of these platforms into their own, and the speed at which they’re moving, especially given LexisNexis’s size.

Next I spoke with Mike Jones, Chief Sales Officer of ThoughtRiver, a company that provides AI-powered contract review that allows lawyers to pre-screen and triage the due diligence and risk analysis review process. He shared that one of the more interesting sessions he’d attended at the conference involved a discussion of “the current and future value around assigning a contract risk score for contracts and what you could do with that data and how it could drive your decision making.” You can watch the full interview here.

My next meeting was with Erin Hichman, Senior Analyst at ALM Media. We spent a lot of time talking about one of the trending topics at Legalweek this year: companies insourcing and building out their own legal teams rather than using outside counsel. According to Erin, “the legal service provider landscape is really going to change. We see the Big Four moving in, ASPs are making a lot of moves, and lots of tech investment. The landscape is going to change drastically in the next few years.” You can watch the full interview here.

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I also caught up with Allen Alishahi and Chao Cheng-Shorland from ShelterZoom, a multi-party real estate blockchain platform that streamlines real estate rental and purchasing processes. Chao explained that although ShelterZoom began as a real estate platform, they are now expanding its application and envision it as “an industry-agnostic legal contract platform…which turns the…contracting concept into completely digital, and it’s secure and audit-able, and also transparent on Blockchain.” You can watch the full interview here.

Next I sat down with Jim Brock, founder of Trustbot.io, a tool that streamlines and automates a company’s NDA contractual process. He explained that Trustbot.io is designed to bring “the contract process into workflows like Slack, Microsoft Office, and Teams not just to get the contract done, but to predict when it needs to be done.” You can watch the full interview here.

And last, but not least, I talked to Mike Sanders, Senior Solutions Expert, and Marriott Murdock, Regional Director, and learned about the latest news from NetDocuments. We talked about the insourcing trend a bit and Mike offered up an example of a law firm that developed a software tool to solve an internal problem, which NetDocuments later acquired: “A law firm who happens to be a NetDocuments customer that does deal closings and creates deal binders, and it was taking them a lot of money and a lot of time. They digitized the entire process and integrated that into the NetDocuments platform.” You can watch the full interview here.

And that’s it folks. It’s a wrap! Legalweek 2019 has come and gone, but the good news is that there are many more legal tech conferences ahead of us in 2019. And if you missed Legalweek this year, never fear —there’s always next year! Hope to see you there!

Niki BlackNicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase, web-based law practice management software. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter @nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.

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