Technology

Dispatches From The Liminal Zone Of The Legal Profession Under COVID

ILTA>ON highlights the hazy border the market finds itself in.

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I think it’s fair to say that in both form and substance this year’s ILTA>ON conference embraces its position in the liminality of the legal industry. The schedule itself is unbounded as global participation joins at all hours. Presentations and panels teeter between analyzing long-term glacial trends and conjecture about the staying power of the knee-jerk COVID-19 accommodations of the last few month. All the talking points along the pathway to the future have scattered and the throughline of the conference seems to be making sense of it all — like adults frantically sorting through a LEGO catastrophe before company arrives in 30 minutes.

For a show dedicated to the future of the industry, this year’s installment feels to have jumped the guiderails more than ever before. Which, of course, is the fun of it. Futurism isn’t really exciting until you find yourself unmoored to conventional wisdom.

The morning keynote set this tone with Richard Punt, Managing Director, Legal Strategy & Market Development of Thomson Reuters, offering thoughts on where the industry would go once the COVID quake settled ranging from the more predictable conclusions based on the last decade, such as increased client focus on business outcomes rather than the nature of legal inputs, to more unforeseen developments tied to the pandemic, like an increased online shift of justice. It may be hard to believe that justice is moving online with all the pushback to the mere suggestion of moving trials online, but Punt doesn’t necessarily see trials moving online as much as an increased acceptance that many other stages of litigation can. That’s certainly not too hard to believe.

Where does the legal industry generally and legal technology specifically go from this juncture? Litera CEO Avaneesh Marwaha sees this as a wakeup call to industry strategizing, “What COVID did to this industry is: if you want to build a 5-7 year strategy, that plan better allow for flexibility.”

We’ve had a decade of relatively predictable progress — AI hype cycle notwithstanding. But now there’s a shared recognition that things aren’t guaranteed to go to plan. For Litera, Marwaha finds that embracing flexibility pays off with customers. “We have to be nimble in our planning to allow for shifting priorities — the big shift is that clients want to partner with providers that are nimble as well.”

Litera has its share of big news to share this show as well, unveiling Litera Litigate offering coverage of drafting, case management, and binders for litigators, and Litera Transact combining Doxly and Workshare Transact, while announcing that its Litera Desktop feature has seen 50 percent year over year growth. Now all of these solutions are available through the Litera Work ecosystem.

Tech providers have touted agility before, but there’s just more weight to those words now. Tomas Suros, Global Product Marketing Director-Legal at AbacusNext told me that their latest ILTA announcements were in the works before the pandemic, but that the virus still had an impact on the release. “We’re an agile development house, so we shifted some priorities and features included in the release… we have a long list of features planned and we accelerated some features based on this, all stuff that was either requested by clients or just made sense.”

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Specifically, AbacusNext offers a new cleaner and customizable user interface, new apps including an accounting and an hours comparison app, and API provisioning. And that’s apparently not the end of updates coming out in 2020 from them.

The capper after another day roaming the threshold outpost of ILTA>ON is a round of Family Feud sponsored by iManage. It’s an ominous entry for attendees grappling with the weighty existential questions of the law’s winding technological path. Two teams — but really all of us — locked beneath the spotlight attempting to guess what a nebulous, unseen audience really desires. It doesn’t matter if it’s the most effective application of machine learning advancements to the timely provision of legal services or five things a man might buy for an anniversary gift. In either event we’re embarking upon this journey without a clear guide.

Survey says. Survey says indeed.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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