Greetings from the lobby of the New York Hilton, site of this year's LegalTech NY conference and trade show. I've been touring the show floor this afternoon, learning about the state of the art and best practices in all aspects of the technology supporting legal practice. The vast majority of the exhibiting companies are offering products and services relating to electronic discovery (or e-discovery), from computer forensics to predictive coding (a big buzzword this year) to document review and production to analytics.
There are, though, other industry categories that are well represented here, mainly relating to law practice management. Numerous vendors offer ways to put your practice online and loft it to the cloud, whether for software as a service (SaaS), backup, document sharing or all of the above. There are a fair number of back office management solutions as well: bookkeeping, billing, resource management and cost controls. Data security makes a good showing, whether from companies with tiger teams to seek out and identify firms' and companies' security holes, or hardware and software to close the holes before they are found; some do both. Finally, there are some translation service companies, mobile practice tools, and printing/document creation and management offerings.
From the number of people here, and the filled-to-bursting floor space, it appears that legal technology is a thriving area, and no wonder:electronic discovery is now a part of almost every litigation, firms and in-house departments alike are desperately seeking ways to reduce their costs and increase efficiency, and clients are demanding instant response and full access to case files. As a legal educator, I see some small challenges in this technological expansion (some of the most common entry-level lawyer jobs for our graduates could be made obsolete by technology and outsourced service providers), but much more opportunity for law school graduates to learn about, master and implement these solutions in their own practices and with colleagues.
There are a few other points that are clear after walking around LegalTech NY. First, based upon the "drop a card and win" prize assortment, iPad Minis are thought to be the hot item to pull in people's contact data. Second, based upon the food being given away, vendors are well aware that lawyers and IT professionals alike live on caffeine and sugar (coffee and chocolate abound). Finally, there seems to be no geographic center of legal tech companies; I've spoken with vendors from Utah, Kentucky, all over Canada and many other places.
For more about LegalTech NY, you can follow the #ltny hashtag. Meanwhile, I'm on my way back in. Wish me luck winning an iPad Mini! {Jonathan}
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