ILTA Takeaways for Law Firm CIOs and COOs!
(plus some cool tech we saw)
I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a few insights from #ILTACON that may be helpful to any professional service COO/CIO. While these insights are certainly not exhaustive (as the scope of the conference was rather wide), they represent a synthesis of common themes I came across.
* Technical Literacy *
Technical literacy is gaining importance and relevance as a complementary skill to legal reasoning in the legal profession; the office of the CIO can help drive technical literacy within their firm
Improving technical literacy within a firm is just as important as improving soft skills like sales, marketing, interpersonal, etc.
Technically literate firms operate more efficiently than those that struggle to implement or use new technology
The best technology disappears! When the office of the CIO automates workflows and enhances technical literacy, firm performance benefits
* Document Management *
Running a tight ship requires first and foremost a high-quality DMS and successful firm operation starts with DMS adoption and management
The biggest challenge to a seamless DMS experience is both change management (ensuring attorneys actually *use* the DMS system) and migration (getting all the documents ETL’d in)
Document management is as much a culture issue as technology issue, the technology solution should enable an organized culture and remove friction from an existing set of practices but it cannot create that culture from scratch
AI makes transitioning a lot more seamless here by enabling mass migrations of documents into a DMS with automated meta-tagging!
* AI Solutions *
Many vendors continue to overpromise on AI solutions and frontline salespeople fundamentally misunderstand the technical capabilities and limits of AI w/r/t hallucinations and reasoning
Language models are fundamentally stochastic which means they are a statistically guided token generation system and always will be
While “hallucination” remains poorly defined, we saw more than a few vendors promising reasoning capabilities that are simply at odds with the nature of how this technology is built and interacted with
The best AI solutions combine LLM calls with lexical rules engines and are both humbler and more narrowly scoped than “all-in-one” products
* Cool innovative tech we ran across *
WordRake for improving writing quality
Language Weaver for translating documents at scale
Draftable for redlining
Pre/Dicta for chatting with an AI judge
#lawfirmoperations #lawfirm #lawfirmcio #lawfirmcoo
