If there’s one overarching takeaway from ILTACON 2026, it’s that legal tech has hit the big time.
As Above the Law’s Stephen Embry noted, this year’s conference was CES-like, taking over the 700,000-square-foot Gaylord Opryland convention space in Nashville and drawing over 5,700 attendees.
Along with the sheer scale of ILTACON, the event also revealed the industry’s rapid pace of change — even just over the past few months.
Take a pair of panels featuring Steno, the legal tech company focused on court reporting and litigation support.
Back in March, Steno was featured in a panel at Legalweek, and one participant — a technology professional at a major law firm — was warning attendees of a big problem on the horizon.
The problem, he said, was training junior lawyers, and he was worried the industry could be like “a snake eating its own tail.”
That’s because of an apparent paradox: Today’s senior lawyers can vet AI outputs and apply advanced judgment to create final versions of their work product. But developing these skills requires doing the very work that is being outsourced to technology.
Panelists at the Legalweek event wondered how future senior lawyers were being developed — and about the best courses of action for law firms to consider to safeguard the future of the profession.
On Thursday at ILTACON, just five months later, a new Steno panel provided some detailed answers. The industry has had five months to address these types of concerns, and companies are now showing their work.
Titled “AI as a Teammate: Use Cases That Drive Talent Development,” the discussion focused on ways to utilize AI tools without stymying the development of junior lawyers.
For those who may be worried about the state of lawyer training, the panelists shared some reasons for optimism.
One panelist wondered, for example, whether the training value of traditional lawyer tasks may be overstated.
“It’s not that there’s no value in going through the paper boxes or the diligence room,” said Nick Hafen, the head of legal technology education at BYU Law School. “But once you know what a clause looks like, doing it again and again doesn’t add a lot of value to your training.”
“And I think AI can concentrate and enhance that training.”
Here, we share some key takeaways from Steno’s portion of the panel.
Introducing the ‘Doppelganger’
Since the launch of generative AI, applications that create first drafts of a lawyer’s work product have been most frequently compared to junior associates when describing their function within a firm.
But what if that idea were reframed? What if, instead of creating a generic “associate,” an AI tool focused on becoming a “doppelganger” of a specific lawyer you’d want to emulate?
Jeff Cox, an attorney who’s the director of brand at Steno, laid out the case in detail at the ILTACON panel on Thursday. He described an approach that wasn’t 100-feet wide and 1-foot deep, but instead was 1-foot wide and 100-feet deep.
“A generic AI writing system produces output calibrated against a broad model of what ‘legal writing’ looks like,” he said. “That can be useful, but it’s not what we’re talking about here.”
Instead, “a ‘doppelganger’ produces output calibrated against what a specific lawyer’s legal writing actually looks like.”
In other words, instead of trying to be all things to all people, an AI doppelganger is trained to mimic an elite lawyer — how they open an argument, how they deal with difficult facts, how they approach a concession so that it doesn’t look like a retreat.
“That logic is real. It is learnable,” Cox said. “It is even teachable.”
A Mentorship Boost
When it comes to training junior lawyers, the current mentorship model isn’t exactly perfect.
It requires the right matter, the right assignment, and the right bandwidth. Much of it boils down to a question of access, a commodity that isn’t evenly distributed in law firms, Cox noted.
What if, instead, the associate had a digital version of a senior partner to interact with? Cox laid out a rundown of the process:
• The associate produces an outline or summary of research and sends it to the partner’s digital doppelganger system
• The system applies feedback, based on its training on the partner’s work
• The associate studies the response, identifying where the associate’s own instincts diverged from the doppelganger’s
• The associate finalizes the marked-up draft and takes it to the partner
• The associate enters this conversation with a hypothesis of what the partner’s feedback will be
• When the partner and associate meet, the conversation is far more substantive than it would be without this process in advance
The effects of such a system could be profound, according to Cox.
The associate enters the conversation looking to confirm a theory, rather than just submitting the associate’s version of the work product and awaiting surprise feedback. The process encourages, democratizes, and accelerates the mentorship process.
“It compresses the feedback loop that mentorship at its best is always trying to create,” Cox said.
Additionally, the digital doppelganger is always available — and available to all of the lawyers at the firm, not just the associates who work with that partner.
“It becomes infrastructure,” Cox said, “available without competing for partner time and calendar time.”
Creating the Doppelganger
At many law firms, the traditional process of finalizing a legal document is rife with inefficiencies.
An associate’s draft gets redlined by a partner, often as a hard copy that’s marked up by hand. Several rounds of review or multiple reviewers can create competing drafts. Confusion, lengthy processes, and interpersonal frustrations ensue, before the final work product is ultimately sent out.
It’s a process that can seem comically archaic and inefficient. But it’s also the perfect training ground for a large language model.
A marked up draft reveals a lawyer’s core reasoning, which can be supplemented with analytical memos and other correspondence from that lawyer.
To create the doppelganger, Cox said, you can draw on a variety of materials to show how a lawyer moves a complex matter toward its conclusion.
“Why did this argument go first?” Cox said. “Why was this fact treated as background rather than foreground?”
“Writing out the reasoning behind instructional choices attached to the work that illustrate it is what transforms the voice replica into a genuine thinking partner.”
The Cutting Edge
Many like to joke that, when it comes to innovation, law firms are in a “race to be second.” No one wants to be an outlier in a famously risk-averse industry, but everyone does need to keep up.
For law firms, there’s game-changing potential for having the judgment of an excellent lawyer encoded as baseline infrastructure, Cox said. And the time to act is now.
“The lawyers and law firms who build this now will be practicing at a materially different level than those who wait,” Cox said. “I think the question is not whether to do it. The question is how much longer you can afford to wait.”
Interested in discussing your litigation support options with Jeff and his team? Feel free to schedule a Steno demo here.