Technology and training are the future for law offices, judging by the presentations and exhibits at a recent legal technology conference.
When the 2014 conference for the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) kicked off at Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, TN on August 17, Executive Director Randi Mayes felt like she was at a family reunion. “And,” she says, “our family gets larger each year.”
She’s not kidding. Four thousand badges were distributed at this year’s conference, with 1,600 going to ILTA members and the remaining badges to consultants, exhibitors, members of the media, and presenters.
ILTA’s family is a diverse one, too. Fifteen countries outside of the United States were represented, as were a variety of executive positions in law firms. There were chief executive officers, directors of various departments, IT leaders, and hundreds of other attendees with litigation or financial roles.
“Technology is not just for nerds anymore,” says ILTA 2014 presenter, Michelle Spencer, Senior Trainer with Bracewell & Giuliani, who attended her seventh conference in eight years. “Technology now touches every aspect of a law firm—marketing, finance, and records management.”
The diversity was evident on the exhibit floor, too (and not just in the vendors’ enthusiastic embrace of the Comic-Con theme). While Mayes wasn’t surprised by the large presence of security vendors, “Security is a subject that’s on everyone’s mind,” she says.
Spencer was surprised by the overwhelming number of new training products being launched. “Training still competes with the billable hour,” she notes, “but now that clients might audit you for your technology skills, things have changed.”
Related reading: How to do staff training that really works
Don’t be scared
The theme of this year’s conference was “Imagine” and with today’s technology, it seems almost anything is imaginable. That in itself can be a little overwhelming, even depressing at times, with all the warnings and stories about cyberthreats against data and businesses. However, keynote speaker Peter Diamandis, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Singularity University (an institution for the study of exponentially growing technologies) and author of Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, shifted the thinking. Instead of focusing on the risks and dangers, Diamandis built his message around the opportunities that come with technology, both for the economy and for society as a whole. “It was uplifting,” says Mayes. “It was a wonderful message to start and frame the week. If I had to sum up his presentation in a word, it would be ‘opportunity.'”
The future is fun
Once the attendees were all inspired, they set off to find opportunities from more than 200 educational sessions on everything from managing research tools to navigating the cloud. One session was such a hit that it commanded an encore presentation. In “What’s That? New and Cool Technologies,” attendees were introduced to a smorgasbord of new gadgets, such as wearable technologies and digital currencies, while the witty and opinionated panel members discussed the implications of these new products on the future of law firms.
Related reading: How to survive the coming competition
But don’t get left behind
How technology could help firms grow was naturally a running theme at the conference. “With everything being flat these days,” says Spencer, “firms are looking for efficient and practical uses of technology.” But according to Andrew M. Perlman, Professor of Law at Suffolk University and Director of the Institute on Law Practice Technology and Innovation, firms should be concerned about more than just professional survival; they need to be aware of how changes in technology relate to their ethical obligations as well.
Perlman was the chief reporter for the American Bar Association (ABA) commission that amended a comment to Model Rule 1.1, which concerns a lawyer’s duty of competence. In addition to stating that lawyers need to keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, the new comment language emphasizes that lawyers should also be current with the “benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.”
In his session, “What the ABA Rule Changes and Outside Counsel Audits Mean for Attorney Training,” Perlman led a discussion on the possible implications of this comment. According to Perlman, there are a number of competencies that lawyers need today that they did not need 20 years ago, such as:
- Cybersecurity, including the importance of using encryption and strong passwords;
- eDiscovery, as its use grows in litigation throughout the United States;
- New ways of conducting investigations, including ethical limitations;
- Using the Internet and social media for marketing purposes, and the ethical considerations associated with this usage;
- New Law, such as document automation and expert systems; and
- Effective and efficient use of established legal technologies, such as word processing and spreadsheets.
Related reading: 2 quick tips from a cybersecurity expert
Regarding the last item, Perlman believes that it’s important for lawyers to assess whether they are using these tools efficiently and not billing clients unnecessarily for work that could be done in a fraction of the time. (Perlman’s Institute is partnered with Casey Flaherty in the development of a legal technology audit that Casey pioneered as a corporate counsel at Kia Motors.)
Which brings us back to training
As Spencer noted earlier, it can be difficult to convince lawyers to trade some of their valuable billable hours for training. But with all of the changes in technology, in client expectations, and in ABA competency expectations, training is no longer a luxury; it’s mandatory. Which leads to the next challenge: as difficult as it is to get lawyers to the training sessions, it can be just as tricky to train them.
Spencer was a panel member at the “Millennial, Schmillennial: Bridging the Generation Gap in Awesome Training for Lawyers” session. On the panel with her were two attorneys—one a millennial and one a baby boomer—discussing the effects of the millennial generation on attorney training. They dove into the generation traits in the workplace, as well as a study on the personality traits of lawyers, and discussed how these have changed and how these changes affect training attorneys specifically.
Didn’t make it?
As a senior trainer for a large law firm, Spencer is always looking to the future and was gathering information from the conference in preparation for a meeting in which her team will be reviewing their firm’s training program from top to bottom. “We’ve wanted to do this for a while,” she says, “but we’ve always been busy handling other department needs. This year we’re moving the training program forward.” Spencer shared the tips she picked up at the conference with her co-workers and other trainers in the legal community via Twitter, which we’ve compiled and summarized here.
If you’d like more than quick tips, you can download the session handouts from the conference website (conference.iltanet.org/MainMenu/Downloads). The presenters’ files are linked to audio recordings and a handful of sessions will also have video recordings.
There’s always next year
Next year’s conference, which will take place August 30 to September 3, 2015 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada, is already in the planning stage. “The conference co-chairs have already started the process,” says Mayes. “We’re taking all the feedback from a variety of sources and putting our focus to that. We’ll continue to look at the changing roles in the legal industry around technologies and see how we can help firms prepare for the future.”