By the Draftwise team.
Wednesday moved at a calmer pace and was also more reflective. Winston Weinberg, CEO of Harvey, summed it up: ‘This is the year of transformation, and it’s about what will change in the industry. It’s less about the product roadmap and more about what it will do to the profession.’
Enough time has passed since generative AI arrived in legal that firms now have a track record to point to. The conversation is moving toward what those results mean for the profession and where things go from here.
Igor Labutov, Chief AI Officer for Legal Solutions at Epiq, talked about the importance of measuring impact against what firms are already doing: ‘In order for us to objectively measure the impact of these tools, on your data and against an outcome, it has to be done objectively against what’s being achieved right now, against the output that humans have.’
James Ding, CEO of Draftwise, put it more simply: ‘The point is not data science. The point is better decision-making.’
Alexis Mitchell, AI Senior Consultant at Syllo, shared a practical tip for getting there: ‘You have to make a plan for what to evaluate. Evaluating on a live matter will give you information on usability or your workflow, but it isn’t a good way to measure accuracy.’
Get that plan right, and the proof isn’t hard to find.
Measurement was only part of the conversation. There was also plenty of discussion about how firms connect information that currently sits across separate systems and teams.
Igor pointed to procurement data, contract data, and disputes as examples: ‘Prior to now, it was really hard to bring those together… that unlocks a whole new set of value propositions.’
That builds nicely on the taxonomy discussions from earlier this week: first getting clear on how information is defined and organized, then looking at how it all relates.
Zooming out, this ILTACON has felt like a pretty good snapshot of where the industry stands. Part of that comes down to the people in the room. There’s real energy in seeing so many smart, thoughtful people across the industry work through hard problems together.
‘The defining question coming out of ILTACON is no longer whether AI can produce the work. It can. The question is whether legal organizations can turn that output into trusted progress,’ said Mat Rotenberg, Director of Workflow Solutions at Bloomberg Law.
And it’s not just the big, well-funded names generating that energy. For all the attention on a handful of fast-growing companies, some of the newest startups on the floor were bringing genuinely creative ideas to the table.
Maybe the clearest sign of where things stand is how often conversations came back to what AI could change about the business of running a law firm, not just which features shipped this quarter.
That feels like an important shift. Firms are talking less about what a tool does and more about what it lets them do differently.
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Many thanks once again to Draftwise for the great reportage of ILTACon! And if you’re now thinking about the next major conference to attend, then….
See you at Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18 – join us at the intersection of legal AI and the business of law in New York for the most important legal innovation event of the year! Day One: law firms, Day Two: inhouse. Top speakers from across the legal AI world, leading law firms, and major companies. All for one purpose: to describe and explore the frontier of legal technology. See you there!
UK and New York event links are here:
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