Law and Lawyers Inside

Getting Educated at LegalTech New York 2010

For the legal community, the New York LegalTech show and conference has long been one of the preeminent opportunities to catch a glimpse of the future of legal technology. Sometimes, LegalTech has been spectacularly wrong in its “group think” predictions–I clearly recall the year that the exhibit hall was dominated by Lotus Notes-based solutions, most of which had completely disappeared within a year of their triumphant release. Most of the time, however, the conference provides a surprisingly accurate snapshot of litigation support, electronic discovery, and even the health of the legal industry as a whole. For this alone–and LegalTech offers much more–the show is a must-attend event for hundreds, if not thousands of legal professionals.

NY LegalTech has been criticized for years, however, for the “conference” side of the event. Though it offers dozens of educational presentations, a good number of which are CLE certified, the conference seems to have more than its fair share of sessions that never move beyond the most elementary discussion of their subject matter or are led by faculty who appear to be chosen for reasons other than their subject matter mastery and presentation skills. These presentations seem all the more jarring because the majority of conference attendees already have sophisticated knowledge of many session topics, and they attend these programs to increase their existing knowledge, not to be tutored in basics they have known for years.

LegalTech 2010 continued to have its share of weak presentations, but I was pleased to see that a number of conference sponsors took the conference’s persistent criticism to heart. Perhaps in keeping with the “back to work” ethos that permeated the entire conference, I found many more sessions than in the past that focused on practical examination of specific problems, rather than entry-level explanations of general issues. Even sessions featuring judges tended to discuss specific issues and their potential resolution, rather than the theoretical discourse that’s so common when judges must balance their ability to shape legal analysis against their need to appear impartial.

For me, though the educational sessions always offer some new information, I continue to get a greater education by visiting the exhibit hall and spending time with the vendors there. In wandering the aisles this year, for example, I could see not only the hundreds of specific solutions on display, but also industry reactions to the flood of e-discovery-related legal opinions that were issued in 2009. And, while LegalTech encourages all manner of practice support vendors to attend the show, the vast number of e-discovery solutions on display–overpowering the diverse mix of other exhibitors–also said a great deal about the current focus of the legal and legal technology industries.

So what are some of the more interesting things I picked up at LegalTech this year? Here are a few that come to mind.

Clients are getting even more serious about taking direct charge of e-discovery projects to save costs and to reduce business disruption.

It was impossible to escape exhibitors who were offering enterprise-level data collection tools. Although representatives from each of these companies would still agree (if pressed) that using a competent third party professional or collection service remains the gold standard for neutral, unassailable data harvesting, the increasing frequency of pre-discovery meet and confer sessions to hammer out discovery protocols has made it possible for many litigants to negotiate less invasive and expensive data collection protocols. In addition, while litigants will always disagree to some extent about the appropriate procedures for discovery data collection, years of education within the legal community have somewhat reduced the knee-jerk skepticism with which self-collection is viewed

Dramatic growth in the number of enterprise data collection systems, with or without accompanying “early case assessment” analytical functionality, suggests that vendors are seeing corporate litigants invest ever more heavily in infrastructure that ostensibly reduces the costs of data collection and standardizes collection procedures across the organization’s entire litigation portfolio. Tools that automatically build audit information into each file acquisition add further reliability to ESI that has been collected by a self-collection tool, helping establish that these copies contain the full range of digital information that the originals possessed. I expect to see some of the less-well-funded or advertised tools wither away as the market matures, but I believe that we will continue to see continued growth in defensible self-collection solutions.