Technology

Fear, Loathing, And iPad Raffles In Manhattan: Legalweek20

The venerable NYC legal tech show still seems to be shrinking.

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Every frosty early February, legal technology vendors, visionaries, and even villains have huddled in the bowels of the Midtown Hilton to show their wares and evangelize about the future of the legal profession. Hotel space in New York is relatively cheap during this window between New Year’s and anything approaching a pleasant climate — it’s a logical time to book up a giant hotel and schedule some meetings with high-profile clients.

As usual, Legalweek offered three days of non-stop information. Unlike the algorithms that vaguely drive every product on the floor, it was more than I could process in such a tight window. Thankfully the show provides easy enough access to whiskey to smooth the sharp edges of collecting all this data.

Over the past several years, the show’s exhibit hall has shrunk like the polar ice caps. The crowded burrows of ostentatious booths are both more sparse and subdued these days. Vendors still flock to Midtown in February, but within the Hilton and its neighboring hotels, many eschew the exhibit hall and set up in suites holding pre-arranged meetings even though the idea of disappearing into a nondescript suite in a strange hotel doesn’t feel like the best business strategy in the #MeToo era.

Consolidation is also certainly a factor — one of the biggest, showiest booths of a Legalweek a few years ago is completely gone, sucked up into another giant entity. For a show once jokingly called “eDiscovery Week,” that side of the tech aisle has shaken down to a few hearty competitors opening up space on the floor like when a massive tree falls in the forest. Will saplings grow to take its place before the neighboring venture-capital-funded trees crowd out the sunlight?

With the eDiscovery market in a maturing space, the transactional sector has jumped into the breach. It’s not like transactional side solutions haven’t been around for a while — Kira Systems was the very first tech vendor I met with as an Above the Law editor — but this year I kept finding myself talking about deals. SimplyAgree assumes clients who don’t want something to pretend to be all things to all people. Are you trying to close a deal? Then SimplyAgree provides a straightforward closing tool. BlackBoiler offers AI-assisted contract review that learns from past deals and company standards, but the focus in my conversation with them was on the ability to prove the value of the system to clients (or your partners) in real-time. Where eDiscovery analytics went a couple years back, transactional work is heading now. Evisort all offered different angles on making and managing deals. I watched Evisort’s system take a random contract — unstructured data — and yank the key terms out of it in seconds. Knowable is all about, well, knowing things. Specifically knowing if your contract has produced unclaimed proceeds by missing triggering events. Deal tech was all over the place.

Not that eDiscovery doesn’t still hold a commanding presence at the show. Like DISCO’s legendary entryway ads — this year they brought some fun “Singlets” — which suffer only from not being the funniest legal tech ad series ever. Casepoint continues to grow, armed with its SEC deal. CloudNine, Consilio, Relativity, even companies at other stages of the process like data-gathering firms X1 which rapidly grabs stuff from your company computers and Cellebrite, grabbing digital data and more importantly training custodians to authenticate the process in court.

Despite remaining an informative and entertaining show, the pall over the proceedings remains the decline in booths. For conference organizers, booking those pricey booths keeps the show going. There was no outward betrayal of concern, but one has to wonder if the conference has to make a radical change to keep its prime spot on the legal technology calendar.

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Everyone is going to come to New York — but are they going to stop by the Hilton on the way?

HeadshotJoe 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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