ILTACON 2024: bigger - and better - than ever!

 

 

This years ILTACON: bigger - and better - than ever.

Bigger; how?

ILTACON is big. And this year's edition in Nashville was no exception. Indeed, ILTACON 2024 had more visitors, more speakers, and more software vendors on the show floor than other years.

So what are we talking about in terms of numbers?

A total of 4184 visitors travelled to Nashville, Tennessee, across 32 nationalities, 1882 of whom attended the full week.

So what do those visitors do during those 4.5 days? The congress starts on Sunday evening with a festive opening. Networking opportunity 1 of a total of 431 moments to come together. Networking is stimulated by interactive badges, with which you can 'link' with other visitors and from which you can hang ribbons about the capacity in which you are attending ILTACON (first timer, speaker, C-Suite (CIO, CTO, etc.), Vendor, etc.).

 

Learning sessions are scheduled all day on Monday. That day is entirely focused on knowledge sharing and networking. In fact, the Exhibit hallwith al vendors is not accessable until the opening party on Monday evening, when it is immersed in this year's theme for the whole evening hours (this year's theme was Tennessee - these reporters creatively turned that into Thelma and Louise, and we were recognised as such too).

The Exhibit hall is huge, with 211 participating parties so you do need several visits to speak to all the suppliers you have on your wish list. Anyway, ILTACON is a continuous puzzle throughout the week where you have to choose between networking or knowledge sessions or getting information on the show floor. Because the coffee breaks and lunches took place in the exhibition hall this year, interaction with suppliers was facilitated to the maximum. A real improvement over last year. Now you 'only' had to decide which of the parallel planned knowledge sessions/company updates/etc. you wanted to visit ?

To illustrate: there were 396 sessions to choose from (divided among 336 different speakers, including one Dutchy).

Fortunately, there were two of us and we set up a schedule each night with who was going to attend which session, to make the most of the week.

 

 

 

The sessions we attended were:

• Monday keynote by Hannah Fry
• AI Decision-Making: Identifying use cases before selecting a solution
• Copilot - what have we learned in the first year
• Create a Chatbot-Driven Knowledgebase in SharePoint Online in One Hour
• Best Practices for working with large language models
• Can AI Chatbots Make Knowledge Truly Accessible?
• A Pratical Toolkit for the Successful "Accidental" Change Manager
• Cutting-Edge Collaboration: When Generative AI Meets DMS
• Transforming legal operations with effective change management workshop: a holistic approach to support, Technology and law firm profitability
• Several Start up pitches in the Exhibit hall   
• M365 Teams and your DMS. A clash or a symphony?
• Wednesday Keynote: change your filters
• ILTA's Technology Survey: unveiling trends shaping the future workplace
• Company update Microsoft
• Battle of AI Perspectives

 

There were also dozens more sessions on - obviously - the impact of AI on practice, Compliance, and Knowledge Management. It was noticeable that the latter is again a hot topic, especially along the axis of unlocking relevant content via AI. The structural application of change management took centre stage several times, as well as investing in training and proper guidance.

For CTOs, there were also several technical sessions and you could learn all about security. All sessions were fortunately labelled/tagged in the event app so you could easily choose what suited you.

Better than ever?

The sessions that stood out for us were:

Copilot - what have we learned in the first year

Two offices talked about their reasons for testing Copilot (it's in all Office tools!) and their experiences in using Copilot over the past year. This is the only session we experienced where people had to stand all around in the room. So the interest from practitioners in this is evident.

Some 'take aways' from this session:

• Get your security settings right beforehand
• Start with your staff departments and then rebuild those use cases for legal practice
• Learn to iterate and also teach your testers what Copilot cannot do (i.e. 'give me all emails from last week regarding xyz' but not 'give me all emails from last hour regarding xyz').
• Note the differences between the options within the Office apps on the web or the desktop versions (the latter are more limited) 
• Subscribe to Microsoft's blog where all Copilot updates incl. explanations appear monthly 
• Create a Teams channel for all testers to collect good (and bad) prompts in, to learn from (and use Notebook for capturing very long prompts)

 

 

M365 Teams and your DMS. A clash or a symphony?

A conversation between two firms (iManage user and NetDocuments user) one of which had already fully integrated MS Teams into its work processes and the other was considering it.

Take aways from this session:

• Don't start it until you have your Governance well thought out and set up (including archiving);
• Don't use Teams alongside your DMS (as a 'convenience copy'), but make sure it integrates with your DMS to avoid getting different versions of documents in different places.
  In that respect, it was a shame that it did not include a third firm using a DMS built on Sharepoint, for comparison with those other two big DMSs in the session.
• The firm currently considering implementation honestly admitted to having underestimated the importance of Teams (so you have been warned ;-)).

Can AI Chatbots Make Knowledge Truly Accessible?

When the audience was asked who had a chatbot operational in their firm, hardly a hand appeared in the air. It is also often unclear what is meant by a chatbot.

You can use a chatbot to gather knowledge faster (reduce time to knowledge) or to facilitate 'just-in-time knowledge'.
The panellists shared their experiences of using a chatbot.

Take aways from this session:

• A chatbot is not a virtual assistant - managing expectations - but it can answer many questions, distinguish between
  • What is always the right answer
  • For a given time, what is the correct answer
  • What is the right answer for the right people
• Decide how you are going to measure the value of your chatbot; to do this, you also need to know who your target audience is, what the purpose of the chatbot is, what information can be used and whether you can pull data from multiple systems (thus saving time for the user who would otherwise have to search in multiple places)
• Devote sufficient attention to adoption; decide how to approach it

 

 

 

The Transforming legal operations with effective change management workshop emphasised not communicating via e-mail and choosing other ways to get a message across. The Power of Lunch was put forward as a much better alternative. Combine the useful with the pleasant. Invite your target group to a good lunch and tell your story with impact.

 

A practical toolkit for the successful accidental change manager

This was truly a very practical session with plenty of tools for anyone who gets the task of managing change on the side. Something you just do alongside your daily work. Successful of course, let that expectation be clear. However, this session made it very clear that change management is a field of expertise in itself. But one that - fortunately if you ask us - is now receiving much more attention in the legal profession.

In a nutshell and with a commitment to share the super well-thought-out templates, visitors were taken into the world of Prosci.

Take aways from this session:

• Benchmark measurements before you start the change process; what do you want to achieve and what do you monitor for that?
• You need 18% of your target audience to change their behaviour; that's where the tipping point is
• Different groups can be categorised and each needs to be approached differently; there is no 'one size fits all' - map your groups and the 'change mindset' well
• Research shows you have to deliver a message 7 times before it finally sticks

 

ILTA's Technology Survey: unveiling trends shaping the future workplace

The results of the survey released annually are also shared. Key conclusions from the report:

• GenAI was - not very surprisingly - the main theme;
• Cloud adoption is slow in the really big offices, because of many legacy tools.
• Microsoft's importance - partly due to O365, Teams and CoPilot - is increasing (many Microsoft first - strategies);
• Products from the mainstream market enter the legal market. Think Salesforce and Oracle.

 

Battle of AI perspectives

This year's focal point was the session that stemmed directly from two keynotes at Lexpo 2024: Nikki Shaver and Pim Betist shared their visions on AI (is it really going to happen that fast, or do we still have time to wait and see what happens around us and prepare our organisation for it), but this time with a panel discussion afterwards.

This was by far the most lively session in terms of audience interaction. Of the 1.5 hours, Pim and Nikki were jointly speaking for about 45 minutes, with the rest of the time an animated discussion between audience and speakers led by ILTACON coryfee Joy Heath. Kudos to her for bringing together these two excellent speakers who managed to keep this session at that 'lousy timeslot' yet so lively and thus ILTACON 2024 ended so inspiringly!

Some last words

We often get the question: should we, as a Dutch firm, be part of this?
Off course you don't have to. But apart from the very good knowledge sessions, ILTACON is also a very good opportunity to see what's happening in the world. And although there are certainly many vendors in the Exhibit hall that are mainly focusing on the US market for the time being, there were also at least 20 or so vendors that we know also have a foothold in the Netherlands / Europe.

We will devote a separate article to this, but the whole makes ILTACON really worth a visit.

Finally, a fun factoid: this year, three colours of t-shirt: green, blue and pink. Three guesses which one 'ran out' first ;-)