Technology

ILTACON Reminds Us That We Can't Have Nice Things

Legal technology shows are back. Or back-ish anyway.

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At 7:30 this morning, a lone man walked the hallway connecting the Mandalay Bay resort and casino in Las Vegas. He drank directly from a bottle of Jameson’s he’d clearly been carrying for longer than the last few minutes. I’m not saying he was here for the annual ILTACON show… but I’m certainly not going to count it out. Too bad I couldn’t get close enough to ask him his thoughts on machine learning.

But it’s safe to say this conference has run into some speed bumps over the last few weeks that might drive an attendee to drink.

Massive last-second cancellations abound. The folks from iManage pulled out. Then Litera. Other vendors that I scheduled to meet with have now told me they’ve abandoned their plans too. Statistically, the delta variant may not be a tremendous risk to the vaccinated… but a lot of people aren’t trusting the crowd that tends to fill the casino floors in Vegas. You know, the sort of people drinking Jameson’s at 7:30 a.m. And those with young kids who can’t get vaccinated tell me they just couldn’t risk the off chance of bringing it home.

It certainly didn’t have to be this way.

When ILTACON announced a “hybrid” show this year, opening up to physical attendees while still allowing folks to watch sessions remotely, I made a plea on the Legaltech Week Journalists’ Roundtable for people to make the effort to attend in person. Booking the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for a tech conference is a serious undertaking and one that can turn calamitous if people don’t show up. After a year fully remote, the legal tech world had a moral duty to come out and support ILTA. Where would this space be if our big shows go under? Besides, vaccinations were rolling out at a rapid pace at that point… it was unthinkable that COVID would still be happening by late August.

So much for that!

Then, of course, came the other unpleasantness. After many of us publicly tried to rally people to the show, ILTA decided not to invite the legal press. Well, technically, we received “virtual passes” to allow us to watch sessions from our homes, a distinction without much difference. Still, I stayed positive. “This is just because occupancy restrictions haven’t opened up yet… we’ll get invited soon,” I kept telling my colleagues. A few days later — mid-podcast — it came out that ILTA had invited some journalists while shunning others. Fast forward a few months and most journalists ILTA felt the need to invite over the rest of the corps are not coming to Vegas, and I’m the one actually here.

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The whole affair betrayed such a profound misunderstanding of what the tech press even does at shows like these. We don’t really care about the CLE sessions running throughout the day — though some can be interesting — we come to these shows to sit down with vendors to hear what they’ve got cooking. The best stories coming out of this show over the years are about the mood of the industry — the synthesized understanding of 50 meetings over a week with people who spend their whole year building their personal slice of the legal tech pie. That’s not something you get from watching a keynote in your living room.

A boggling self-inflicted wound for the show, but looking out over thousands of masked tourists stumbling through a casino several months after vaccines became freely available, self-inflicted wounds seems to be sort of a theme here in Vegas.

It would be a lot easier to walk the exhibit hall right now, but instead I’m lining up meetings in my hotel room. Vendors have been incredibly gracious to agree to leave the floor and schedule times to talk with me. It’s an inconvenience for them, but maybe the lesson of the last year — and the lesson of those ubiquitous masks on the casino floor — is that we need to keep putting up with a little inconvenience to keep this whole shambles of a world turning.

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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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