“Shoptalk is the event I’ve talked about many times and the one I spoke about when we first started,” says Bradley Collins, founder of LegalTechTalk, which has been acquired by events company Hyve Group. Shoptalk – a series of events for retailers – is just one of the events owned by Hyve, which is known for its heavy focus on large, loud events with orchestrated networking.
“The main reason [for going with Hyve] is that we admire the events they have built and scaled,” Collins says. It is also because Hyve runs an event called POSSIBLE in Miami – the destination for LegalTechTalk’s USA conference in December next year.
Collins has built LegalTechTalk up to an impressive scale in just three years and was always adamant that he was looking outside of the legal sector for inspiration. So what’s so special about the Hyve events?
“They believe in the festival format,” says Collins. “The production, the stages, the parties, we’ve modelled LegalTechTalk very much on them.”
Interestingly, he also talks about orchestrated meetings. “They orchestrate one-to-one meetings at scale,” Collins says. “In Miami there were hundreds of meetings on the beach. They match the right buyers with the right sellers at a ridiculous scale, and they have the right infrastructure for that. Shoptalk orchestrated 50,000 meetings across three to four days, helping to find the pain point of retailers and really understanding that and matchmaking.”
This will be music to vendors’ ears, no pun intended. While LegalTechTalk has been a barrel of fun for many, there hasn’t been much emphasis on helping people to do business, which after all, is why they are there.
It will be interesting to see how the market responds to the acquisition – LegalTechTalk re-signed half of its conference clients last month on the spot and they are spending double. Hyve is private equity backed and whether prospective customers care about that or not remains to be seen. They can, on the plus side, provide massive scale (Hyve was acquired by Hellman & Friedman for $1.8bn in June). The standard PE risk factors to look at include cost cutting, although Hyve is going from one PE owner to another.
Collins and team will be around for at least three years and he has no doubt of the conference trajectory, including in the US. “This will be bigger than ILTA,” he says, adding “But we’re just growing the pie. We don’t have that competitive tension and want everyone to succeed.”
