The 2024 ABA Techshow held at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago kicked off with its annual Start-Up Pitch Competition on Valentine’s Day. Representatives from fifteen legal tech companies gave their pitches, all hoping for the audience’s vote to win the competition. It was apparent from the pitches that generative AI (GAI) was once again going to be the featured topic of the Techshow, only this year the focus was on how to integrate it into legal tech and the practice of law.
Interestingly, the start-up that won this year’s competition was AltFee, which is not using GAI but is responding to the workflow changes and efficiencies law firms will see when using GAI. AltFee helps law firms scope out work and provide value-based fee structures that are alternatives to the billable hour.
The Techshow opening session looked to the future of law by touching on how technology has affected legal practice in the past. The event that became ABA Techshow started in 1985 and automation was the theme. Email, case management software, and voice recognition were topics of conversation then. Though that was almost 40 years ago, only about half of all lawyers use case management software today. While GAI has been the darling of the conference these past couple of years, AI was part of Techshow as early as 2005.
Though lawyers have traditionally been slow to adopt tech, the pandemic and GAI have been transformative to the legal profession in terms of an increased use of tech. The session presenters urged attendees to use this inflection point to address the significant access to justice gap. Lawyers represent approximately 15% of legal issues, leaving 85% of people who need legal help to look elsewhere. Lawyers could use legal tech and GAI to serve those seeking legal assistance, looking at that 85% as an opportunity to expand their businesses.
From this opening, the conference sessions I attended almost all spoke of GAI in some way, going much deeper into how it works and the ethical implications. Pablo Arredondo of Casetext provided one of the clearest explanations of the large language models (LLMs) behind GAI that I have ever heard, plus indicated that hallucinations are more likely to occur when LLMs don’t have enough training data about specific cases.
Stuart Teicher, the “CLE Performer,” provided a rousing and funny keynote on the use of technology and ethics. While I can’t reproduce his humor here, I can say that he advises lawyers to look at ethics opinions related to the cloud in the past decade as a guideline for how they might apply to GAI. He also said to be transparent about your use of GAI, ask if your clients and vendors are using it, and to watch what your chatbots say so they provide ethical information that does not slip into the unauthorized practice of law. He also had quite a lot to say about the privacy of client data. With any cloud-based service, it is best to assume you have NO reasonable expectation of privacy. Big tech companies can’t be trusted with private data because they can change terms of service anytime and have suffered data breaches. One statement he made sums up how he feels about lawyers, tech, and ethics: Lawyers are not allowed to avoid tech just because it seems inconvenient to learn.
Presenters on GAI at other sessions represented a Who’s Who of legal tech experts, including Tom Martin of LawDroid, Nicole Black of MyCase, Jack Newton, Nefra MacDonald, and Joshua Lenon of Clio, and Gyi Tsakalakis of AttorneySync. All, as usual, had important insights to share on GAI and legal tech.
There were three sessions I attended that were a bit off the normal GAI path. One was on podcasting for lawyers, with Patrick Wright interviewing podcaster Mathew Kerbis, who hosts the Law Subscribed podcast. (https://www.lawsubscribed.com/) Mathew provided all sorts of technical advice on starting a law-related podcast. Along with discussing equipment and apps, he also mentioned ways in which GAI can assist with podcast production by generating episode titles, topic ideas, interview questions, and show transcripts.
Another session, presented by law librarians Rebecca Rich and Jenny Wondracek, discussed the use of GAI as a second brain, using it to enhance executive brain function for those with neurodivergence (ADD, ADHD, autism, etc.) or for those who’ve suffered brain injuries. Various GAI tools, like goblin.tools (https://goblin.tools/), Tiimo (https://www.tiimoapp.com/), Notion (https://www.notion.so/), Pi (https://pi.ai/talk), and even ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, can help people to organize tasks in manageable steps, assist with time blindness, help regulate emotions, find lost words, overcome the blank page problem, and help take notes and put them into an organized system. The presenters shared that 17-18% of law school students have accommodations for disabilities, but no one needs an official diagnosis to use these GAI tools for help with these tasks.
Rounding out all the sessions on GAI, I attended one on something completely different: Cutting Edge Electronic Evidence: Explore Emojiland. As our keynote speaker Stuart Teicher mentioned, emojis are the new hieroglyphics, and attorney Patrick Wright explained how to interpret them as evidence in this session. In order to decipher the meaning of emojis, lawyers need to look at their context within the scope of the case, along with other evidence. Emojis can get complicated, particularly if several are strung together. Asking what the sender meant by emojis and how the recipient interpreted them are also key to deciphering their meaning. In the course of his presentation, Wright mentioned numerous cases where the interpretation of emojis played a role.
In addition to conference sessions, I also made many circuits of the Expo Hall, where all the vendors were stationed. I like to check in with our Advantage Partners, and most of them were in attendance.
The 2024 ABA Techshow had the highest attendance ever, both in terms of conference goers and vendors. Next year, the conference will be held at a bigger venue, Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago. It will be held at a later date, April 2-5, 2025. For more information and to register, visit https://web.cvent.com/event/f508d27a-e528-4edd-bd7b-894b1665207c/summary.
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