If I had to choose just one takeaway from ILTACON 2024, it wouldn’t be something I’ve learned about generative AI, but that at times of change, more than ever we gravitate to the humans around us.
Nashville was the biggest ILTACON yet, hosted in the Gaylord Opryland; a 3.3m square foot goliath of a hotel where everyone spent several days in varying degrees of lostness. This was my first time in Nashville, and possibly my favourite ever ILTA, with honest, behind the scenes conversations helping to add context to the barrage of product announcements from vendors.
The conference kicked off with some line dancing from ILTA president Tony McKenna and CEO Joy Heath Rush, channelling some of that joyful Nashville spirit. A fast paced and very funny keynote from British celebrity mathematician Dr Hannah Fry took a look at the tendency of humans to blindly accept what machines tell us (citing many examples, including when Japanese tourists famously followed their car satnav into the sea) and encouraged the audience to always question and interrogate the data before them.
It was a very pertinent keynote, although for those of us who heard Dr Fry speak at ILTACON in London last year, we had heard much of the content before. To Dr Fry’s point about making sure we engage our brain, the issue, many people I spoke to at the conference agreed, is that we are all so busy that few have the headspace to think. It is a counterproductive situation, and perhaps we all need to get better at building in some time to reflect, absorb, and make sense of all of the new information we are being exposed to.
While product news came thick and fast, ILTACON 2024 was a year of more mature gen AI announcements: more tailored gen AI assistants, or assistants now out of beta. There are some really interesting AI use cases in the finance and billing space, where the technology can not only flag where a bill is wrong, but suggest how to fix it and create new narratives in order to comply with outside counsel guidelines. There are some very cool new integrations and advances in the DMS space that mean users can now use generative AI within their own document repository, with all of the opportunities and challenges that presents. I’ll be sharing insights from a few demos in the coming days.
Despite the increasing visibility of real world use cases, it is worth noting that many vendors were announcing products that have not been released to law firms that don’t have the budget.
It’s hard to convey how refreshing, albeit exhausting, ILTA was. Dr Fry talked about ways in which you can distinguish robots from humans using language. Apparently the word ‘poop’ is the easiest differentiator. It’s something that machines don’t and won’t do and is unlikely to feature highly on their radar. Taking that analogy further, they are unlikely to hug, shake hands, exchange war stories, drink coffee or beer and get excited about each other’s life events. That is what makes this community so humanly special and provides a necessary sanity check amid the gen AI noise.
I would sound a note of caution.
One recurring conversation was people telling me that in reality, very few firms have made an awful lot of progress in their gen AI roadmap. Many still don’t have a roadmap. There’s still a lot more talk than action. While this is true, some of the most interesting work I heard about during ILTACON can’t be published yet.
One of the things we humans do well for better and worse is gravitate towards people like us. It’s beholden on all of us to continuously step outside of our comfort zone, to challenge not only the data, but our own belief systems and to ensure that occasions like ILTA provide progressive knowledge exchanges, not an echo chamber. I can’t wait to see what we’re talking about next year.
caroline@legaltechnology.com