Conferences / Symposia, Technology

As ILTACON Convenes In Sunny Las Vegas, A Cloud Hangs Overhead

What prompted ILTA’s last-minute reshuffling of several key management positions?

By  
on

By the time you read this, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association will be well underway in sunny Las Vegas, where thousands of lawyers, law firm IT professionals, and others with an interest in legal technology will be attending four days of programs and wandering an exhibition hall packed with several hundred vendors.

But this year, there is a cloud over ILTACON, brought on by ILTA’s last-minute reshuffling of several key management positions, including the ouster of long-time executive Peggy Wechsler. As director of programs and strategic relationships, Wechsler was the primary organizer of the annual conference and other ILTA events since 1998 and one of ILTA management’s most-recognizable faces.

Two other executives have also left: Clay Gibney, former IT director, who had been with ILTA since 2008, and Deb Himsel, former director of learning, who had been with ILTA since 2009.

I reached out for comment on the changes to Daniel Liutikas, who took over in March as ILTA’s chief executive officer, and to ILTA’s press contact, but received no response. Two other publications, Legal IT Insider and Legaltech News, similarly reported receiving no response to their requests for comment.

But others are expressing concern about the changes, most prominently Rick Hellers, a founding member of ILTA and the president and CEO of nQueue. In an open letter he published on LinkedIn on August 10, he expressed concern “that ILTA has lost its way.”

All of this comes after the departure in February 2017 of Randi Mayes, ILTA’s executive director for 20 years. Mayes shook up last year’s ILTA conference when she announced her retirement just a month before.

She was replaced by Liutikas, who was formerly the chief legal officer and corporate secretary of CompTIA, a trade association for the information technology industry.

Sponsored

As part of last week’s management reshuffling, ILTA announced four executive appointments:

  • TJ Johnson, ILTA’s program director for conferences since 2003, was promoted to vice president of events and conferences.
  • Susan McClellan, ILTA’s program coordinator since 2015, was promoted to director of membership.
  • Corey Simpson was hired as chief technology officer. Previously, he was a senior consultant at Systems Evolution Inc. Earlier in his career, he worked at Liutikas’s former employer, CompTIA, as director of member communities.
  • Jason Stookey has been named vice president of partner development. He was formerly vice president, sales, at the National Association of Broadcasters.

While these changes were announced last week, it appears that they were made starting in May. Simpson’s LinkedIn profile, for example, says that he started in May. Others’ LinkedIn profiles show their positions changing in June or July.

Although ILTA’s top management appears not to be responding to media inquiries, the announcement  it put out of the management changes included this statement from ILTA president Meredith L. Williams:

With the appointment of our new CEO earlier in the year and the addition and promotion of strong, experienced senior staff, I am very excited that ILTA is prepared to continue to grow and evolve with our industry.

Sponsored

It also included a statement from Robert Dubois, past president and current member of ILTA’s board of directors:

While it is never easy to say farewell to familiar faces, we will continue to celebrate and honor all of the contributions that our departing staff have made and build upon that work for the future.

Hellers, in his open letter, recalled that ILTA started 35 years ago as a support group for users of specific legal software that ran on the Wang VS, with members sometimes helping each other with technical support and “sometimes just providing an ear to listen or a shoulder to cry on.” That “peer to peer” philosophy became the organization’s hallmark, Hellers noted, but he questioned whether it still prevails.

Events over the past few months and years has many of us wondering if the organization is still living up to its stated purpose, regardless of what the home page says or what the magazine is named. Simply put, we are concerned that ILTA has lost its way.

The cause of ILTA’s losing its way, Hellers suggested, is its trend toward commercialism. Whereas educational sessions at ILTACON used to be about solving specific problems, they are now led by big names from big firms “who simply pontificate.” Whereas vendors used to be treated as peers, they “are now ghettoized and treated as cash cows.” Rather than encourage partnership, education and support, ILTA now focuses more “on pushing attendance at ILTACON and bringing in sponsorship dollars.”

The terminations of Wechsler, Himsel and Gibney were a tipping point, Hellers wrote:

Deb and Clay each served ILTA diligently for almost a decade, and Peggy has been the face of ILTA for 20 years. She was often the facilitator of peer connections, the driver of educational initiatives and the fount of collective intelligence. She was a walking, talking Statement of Purpose. The timing, abruptness and lack of communication surrounding these dismissals are, in a word, disrespectful. Which is in direct violation of ILTA’s very first core value: “Respect our colleagues.”

All of this leaves a lot of questions about ILTA’s future, Hellers said, most significantly that of whether ILTA will return its focus to its statement of purpose and core values. If not, then members deserve to know on what ILTA will focus, If, then they deserve to know the plan. “Because if the recent changes are somehow in service of the organization’s stated purpose and values, your stakeholders deserve to be told how.”

As I write this, I am en route to ILTACON. I will be curious to see how much the cloud of these developments overshadows the next few days.

Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

CRM Banner

Topics

, , , , , , , , , , ,