Our report from ILTA 2010

27 August 2010 — The Posse List team was in Las Vegas this week at the annual International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference, led by our Chief Technology Officer Scott Madsen.   It is a four and a half day event with a packed agenda and we find it to be the best event of the year (and each year seems to have a tsunami of legal technology events) because its educational content (the educational content is entirely peer-developed) crosses 50+ areas of the law and technology through 160 educational sessions.  As attendees will attest it has become  THE place to further your professional development,  and make valuable connections.   To get an idea of content here is this year’s agenda (click here).

Plus the exhibit hall featuring over 150 key vendors to the legal market.  There was a slew of vendor announcements at ILTA this year and our colleagues at InsideLegal put together a list with links which you can access by clicking here. 

Note:  we interviewed the folks from InsideLegal and we’ll have that interview next month, but just a few notes.   InsideLegal  is an online legal community and insider’s guide to doing business in legal technology, and a
information resource for anything related to legal technology research, surveys, law firm innovators, vendor executives, industry statistics, etc.   They have been producing ILTA’s vendor education program (click here) since 2004 and have worked closely with industry media on assembling panel discussions and educational programs for vendors.  They produced the program again this year and are presenting the findings of the 2010 ILTA Member Technology Purchasing Survey (click here) which highlights what ILTA law firm members are spending on technology an what applications and services they are implementing and planning to buy.  

The ILTA 2010 theme was “Strategic Unity”,  a concept that resonates the need for law firms and law departments to unite their technology with the practice of law. These disciplines must come together as never before in order to survive and thrive in the future. Conference sessions were developed around this concept,  offering attendees ideas and options in creating unification strategies in their own organizations.

But there seemed to be two other major talking points on the floor of the conference: (a) the consolidation taking place in the e-discovery market: Altegrity acquiring Kroll; Autonomy acquiring CA’s Information Governance division, AccessData acquiring Summation, etc. and (2) the integrated approach to e-discovery so many vendors are striving to accomplish.

And as always at these conferences there is too much to do, too many people to see.   We interviewed a great number of vendors and speakers at the conference and those in-depth interviews (text and audio) will post  after Labor Day when we continue our e-discovery “thought leaders” series (click here).   But just a few highlights:

*  Autonomy, ever onward and upward, unveiled its new end-to-end, meaning-based Risk Management platform for law firms using IDOL (one of its products) to deliver multiple risk management modules from a single intelligent platform.  It combines Autonomy Client Intake, Conflicts Manager, Legal Hold, Records Manager and Supervisor with IDOL and as a result automatically understands the inter-relationships within data, and monitors and apply policies against all communications channels.  As a result, law firms can transform legacy and manual risk management processes and reduce the cost of owning and maintaining multiple point solutions.  Combined, the modules manage compliance with regulations and ethical rules as well as meeting client requirements for data security, and responding to requests from regulators and courts.  Autonomy says this is the first platform that automates the time-consuming risk management process.   We’ll have more next month with an in-depth interview with Deborah Baron, VP Legal and Compliance for Autonomy.

*  CaseCentral introduced its “Review Service Providers Certified Partner Program” (RSP).  The program was developed in response to the growing demand from lawyers, legal experts and service providers for more efficient solutions to expedite the document review process. The RSP program provides the training and tools needed to offer clients a one-stop shop for initial document review using the RSP’s review services bundled with CaseCentral’s on-demand single matter and multi-matter, multi-party eDiscovery review software. Certified partners can now offer all-inclusive reviewing services based on a pricing model — per hour, per document or per gigabyte.   We’ll have an in-depth interview next month with several folks at  CaseCentral.  

*  eTERA Consulting  is a company that keeps making a larger and larger presence in the data management field.  It was recently named to the Inc. 500 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.  It is a leader in “early information assessment” (EIA) and the company will be making a full presentation on EIA at the Chief Litigation Officer Summit on September 12-14 2010 in Las Vegas.    They did a nice job at this conference via a presentation on the highly-charged topic of electronic discovery economics.  Dan Junk (newly arrived at eTERA and formally a managing attorney at Simpson Thacher and Bartlett where he was responsible for coordinating all national defense counsel in tobacco litigation throughout the U.S.) kept to the ILTA theme of “strategic unity”, the integration of technology with the practice of law.  It is a company where the pieces just seem to be falling into place.  Next month we’ll have an interview with Scott Holec, eTERA’s President.

*  We had a chance to hook up with “social media guru” Rob Robinson who is back at Orange Legal Technologies.  Orange LT just continues to experience phenomenal growth with another bang up quarter.  The company thinks this accelerating growth is a direct indicator of increasing client desire for complete, integrated, and Software-as-a-Service delivered electronic discovery services, something we have commented on numerous times this past year.  Orange LT has “OneO® Discovery Platform” which has the ability to deliver online analytics (early case assessment), processing, and review from the security of a hosted centralized repository.  Posse List members will remember Orange LT supported the joint defense counsel in one of the largest cases ever filed by the S.E.C. — United States v. Robert Allen Stanford, et al.  And through Rob’s expertise they still have the best slideshare presentations any vendor has produced such as Rob’s “meet and confer” presentation (click here).

*  And speaking of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service vis-a-vis e-discovery … there were 8 presentations.  We will provide all of that material next month when The Electronic Discovery Reading Room launches our new web site on the cloud and e-discovery, sponsored by Autonomy, CaseCentral and Microsoft. 

*  Recommind knocked the socks off the conference when they announced huge growth with its Axcelerate On-Demand solution, with revenue during the past year increasing 961 percent and new cases jumping by 425 percent.  They are the leader in predictive information management and we believe they are the e-discovery industry’s only on-demand solution with predictive coding  and  predictive  analytics  technology.  Next month we will have a follow-up to our earler interview with Craig Carpenter (click here)  and discuss their advances in Europe where they have become a major player.

Other coverage of ILTA

There was some excellent coverage of ILTA this year by our colleagues.  The conference wrapped up at 12 noon today (Las Vegas time) so we suspect there will be more wrap-ups, commentary over the weekend.  Here are some links to some of that coverage.  We’ll add to this list over the weekend best we can:

*  InsideLegal coverage can be found by clicking here.

* Christy Burke of Legal IT News has a series of posts audio posts from the conference which you can access by clicking here, clicking here and clicking here.

* Barry Murphy’s eDiscovery Journal  has some excellent coverage and you can access it by clicking here.

*  Bowtie Law’s ReCap of ILTA 2010  which is here.