I have recently returned from hashtag ILTACON 2024. This was my third ILTACON, second as an exhibiting vendor, and first as a active ILTA volunteer. All three of the personas that I inhibit within ILTA could use some internal unpacking and will probably inform quite a lot of my thinking in the next few weeks and months. But, short answer: it was great!
I do have some general notes for improvements at the end of this, because of course of I do.
In my first persona – Sarah Glassmeyer, Legal Tech Expert and Thought Leader (no, I know, it’s ridiculous) – I get asked a lot as I’m cruising around (by which I mean getting lost in the Gaylord) “Hey, Sarah, what are you seeing that’s cool?”
I mean, obviously, who better to be the arbiter of cool than a middle aged librarian from Indiana that’s carrying multiple Vera Bradley bags and wearing homemade friendship bracelets?
Usually when people ask me this I am in the middle of fixating on something dumb and say “Oh I just asked the TR people and they are in fact changing their color scheme to hunter orange and green. I guess they’re embracing the Minnesota Midwest Princess vibe.” And then people stare at me like they can’t believe I’m apparently someone people listen to.
Same, girl, same.
So this year I really endeavored to keep a better list of hot/fresh/interesting/exciting things I was seeing in the exhibit hall so I would be prepared. I know a lot of people don’t get to go to ILTA or didn’t have time to see the hall, so I thought I’d share here.
In no particular order, here is…
Top Five Cool Start Ups I Saw, One Honorable Mention, And Two Big Guy Highlights
In the interest of full disclosure and because I always try to be as ethical as possible, the founder of this company gave me a job once. But! He also laid me off when the company sunsetted. So. I think that makes us even.
ANYWAY.
I think this may have been my favorite new thing I saw at ILTA. Now, granted, I like to build things and be a bit of a control freak and not rely on out of the box tools. But I’m also incredibly lazy and I’m not going to learn too many more new hard skills. Or run a server? Honey, ain’t no one got time for that. Lega allows people to get their hands dirty with generative AI and LLMs without destroying their manicure, if that makes sense.
A quick but perhaps more precise way of describing this is that it provides the tools and materials that someone would need to create a generative AI “skill” or “app.” (We really need a standardized way of describing these gizmos across providers.) Examples: a LLM based tool designed to summarize depositions or a Generative AI tool that would create social media copy.” Users can design a use case, pick the model, compare the performance of models, see how the models comply with internal governance, and it all happens in a more secure environment than publicly available tools. If I were an educator and needed to pick one tool to use a basis for LMM projects, this would be at the top of my list.
Longtime readers know that I’m not so good at the grammar stuff. Or the punctuation stuff. Or spelling. Honestly, I can’t believe I’m a quasi-professional writer.
When I’m writing something that doesn’t need the special Sarah Glassmeyer je ne sais quoi, I use the Microsoft Word internal editor and it gets me right. But if I was writing something super-legalish, you bet your bippy I’d use WordRake. If you have some special sauce that you add to your writing, either hillbilly speak like me or techical terms of art for a legal practice, I did see that they have a feature that allows users to keep some of the interesting language choices they need to make.
But that’s not why it made my list. You know the uncanny valley vibe that Generative AI text gives off? Personally, I always think it reads like a 10th grade book report. Well, WordRake now has a clean up feature that will turn that robot speak into something that sounds more human. This makes WordRake a must if you are (or are supporting users that are) regularly relying on Generative AI to do first drafts of texts.
I tried to stop at as many booths as possible both to gather industry intel as well as for very specific day job reasons. I had viewed a demo of AdvoLogix when I was at Reynen and remember really liking it, both because I loved the lady doing the demo and I really liked the fact that it was built on Salesforce. (I also like word plug-ins. Fight me.) But walking up to the booth, I didn’t think I’d be totally nerding out and excited to the point I was probably scaring the rep a bit.
Friends, I ended up nerding out and being excited to the point I was probably scaring the rep a bit.
After the day job explanation, I asked if there was anything new or exciting in the world of legal matter management, and he said “well we have a new tool to help implement SALI tags” I was like “buddy, you have no idea how ripe of an audience you have right now to hear about this. TELL ME EVERYTHING.” One of the criticisms I’ve heard about implementing SALI from a law firm or legal ops perspective is that it’s A LOT. There’s a lot of tags. There’s a lot of stuff to be tagged. This…automates that and takes on some of the burden. If you would love to use SALI tags but the thought of going through your backlog makes you want to cry…check this out.
Oooh, LiquidText is delightfully geeky. To call it a PDF editor is not nearly enough. I think the way I think of it is “The Wario to JigSaw, StructureFlow, and other Diagramming tools’ Mario.” Which is not a dig at JigSaw or StructureFlow at all! At all! Those are both amazing tools in their own right. I guess I think of this analogy because LiquidText allows users to connect text and content across documents and create a similar internal structure/diagram of knowledge and information without the visual diagram. It’s kind of magical to see in action.
I know they have at least one academic partnership and I can see a lot of potential use there. (If I’m remembering correctly, the founding team came from another academic discipline and managing knowledge in academic materials is how they came up with the product idea. I MAY BE WRONG.) It also has many obvious litigation use cases as well as document heavy transaction work.
Basically if you or someone you know has the type of gig that requires piles of documents and you or they are using post-it tabs and making notes and trying to create indexes to help find connections between them all, try this out.
Kind of like with Lega, I think I didn’t fully get what LexPipe was doing when I first encountered it. I thought it was a YahooPipes (RIP) for legal that would be a no-code builder to help people connect APIs to internal and external data and build apps.
That’s not what LexPipe is. At all. But someone should build that.
So what does it do? LexPipe helps law firms price litigation. It takes data from public and private sources, looks at similar work internally and externally, and gives pricing teams the info they need to price matters, with a goal of potentially creating AFAs for litigation. I think it could also be used by those doing Litigation Funding.
This is one of those products where the tech and product seem solid, it’s just a matter of changing the culture to accept it. The AFA and billable hour fight has been going on for a while and I’m hoping having this tech available makes more people try AFAs.
Start Up Honorable Mention – Wemble
I only have Wemble as a honorable mention because I can’t confirm that I actually went to their booth and got a demo. I remember chatting with them in the hall socially and my dad and I ran into the founders one evening (and my dad gave them the “surprisingly strong Old Man Farmer Handshake” – sorry, guys), but I don’t think I actually got a product demo. But I’ve seen it before and really loved it and wanted to point people at it.
Wemble is a resource allocation platform, which means it’s a dashboard/content source about all of a firms’ attorneys, what they can do, and what they have done. It answers the question “Hey we need an attorney that can do [x]…who’s available?”
The thing I like about Wemble – and other resource allocation tools that do this – is that it allows attorneys to indicate if they have the bandwidth to take on more work, if they’d like a little breathing room, or if there are things that they’d like to learn. Wemble does this in a clean interface.
Associate training, lawyer well being, and creating and maintaining a diverse (for many metrics of diversity) legal profession are issues dear to my heart. Wemble, for being a “boring business application”, makes these goals a little easier to attain.
THE BIG GUYS
I’m more interested in giving a little shine to smaller companies that may not have gotten your attention, but I would be remiss if I didn’t note these two large legal tech tidbits in my “cool shit I saw at ILTA” round up.
I think rolling into my conversation with vLex, I was assuming that vLex was a legal research tool. Maybe with some drafting or docket stuff thrown in and all buttoned together with LLMs.
Nope! Not really! It’s a LLM/Gen AI workflow tool.
If you’re keeping track, yes, this is 4 out of 6 products thus far that I, Sarah Glassmeyer Legal Tech Expert and Bon Vivant, was completely making completely wrong assumptions about.
Now, you can use it for cool (for various definitions of the word cool) research tasks like creating 50 state surveys or jurisdictional comparisons, but it also allows users to do “enhanced by LLMs” regular legal work. It’s somewhat like Lega, but you have the access to the vLex content sources behind it.
To use an analogy, if Lega.AI is a tub of unsorted legos, vLex Vincent is a Lego kit with the instructions and Legos you need to build it (but you can still go off trail and build your own thing with the Legos in the kit or combine some of your own unsorted bin Legos as well.) If Legos were M&A work, for example.
Thomson Reuters Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel Claims Explorer
Boy that name was a mouthful. Holy cow. Anyway, blah blah blah exciting practice tool for barred attorneys.
I DON’T CARE ABOUT THAT. I mean I do, but that’s not why I’m including it.
Here’s the text from the Thomson Reuters website explaining it: “Use generative AI to help you find the strongest claims for your matter and avoid missing those that are relevant to your case. Simply enter the facts of your case and receive a list of claims to consider.”
Dude. My dudes. MY DUDES. I had read that before but it wasn’t until I saw a live demo that it fully clicked for me what I was looking at.
Do those of you in the A2J world remember about 10 years ago when checklists were the new hotness and used to help lay people figure out if they had a legal problem that could use some assistance? So, that, but slap a bird an LLM and Generative AI on it. And connect it to all the rich content sources that TR has to offer.
Now, no one is saying self represented litigants or other lay people should use this tool. It’s not designed for lay people and I’m sure it’s priced at a point that it’s as unattainable as a human lawyer.
What am I saying? I’m just saying that the technology is there or is close to there to create an incredibly powerful tool to advance access to justice. If we don’t figure out ways to make this safe for lay people to use and/or for use by A2J professionals since human legal professional help is inaccessible, then what are we really doing with our lives?
So that’s my initial ILTACON post. My brain is full and I have so much to reflect upon and think about. I hope some of that trickles out into more posts here. It definitely will but maybe not as direct as this one.
As with all conferences, by far the best part was all of the unstructured conversations occurring in the exhibit hall, at meals, or when randomly running into someone before a session starts. I was going to bully a certain someone into hosting some gatherings of legal tech people a la Paris Salons or, as my “note to self” says “We need a Legal Tech Bohemian Grove (without the naked dancing around the owl statute)(but don’t kink shame if that’s what someone is in to)”
Maybe another way of thinking that is “perhaps there could be an official unconference ahead of the real ILTACON to give people unstructured talk time in slightly structured way.” There’s a lot of people that I would love to see interact with the ILTACON crowd – librarians, legal tech academics, and A2J peeps – who are also not as financially able to attend the full conference. Maybe this could be a way to connect?
This guy also had fun.
He helped me build and tear down our booth. I told him the exhibit hall set up is very similar to watching the circus coming to town (an annual event that he and Mom always bounced us out of school for) and tear down will be better than dumpster diving the circus. All of which should tell you everything you need to know about both legal tech conferences as well as my childhood.
Until next time…I remain your faithful conference correspondent.
You catch any of those bovine-related hot-takes or no?
SALI seems like a good faith effort to boil the pan-juris ocean… LLM assisted auto-append might be the *only* viable path to adoption… still gonna take a hot minute… Sets the ol’ ‘Cui Bono’ sense a-tinglin’ in any event… Documentation game better be up to scratch if nothing else… A poorly structured consensus function alone would likely make for capture trivial for an incentivized BigLaw / Nation-state / LitFund outfit. I can see a Bentham or even an Elliott Capital weighing in if they felt it… conducive.