ILTA Impressions – A Call for Unity

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-08-24 15:01:04  Despite being a regular speaker on the eDiscovery conference circuit, this is my first time making the ILTA conference. The theme of the conference is Strategic Unity, expressed in social networking, new education initiatives and collaborative technologies. As a volunteer run organization, the tone at ILTA does not have the same frantic vendor driven character as Legal Tech has taken on. My panel session on ECA usage scenarios and perspectives seemed to go well, but that is always difficult to tell from the other side of the microphone. The top moments included Tom Morrisey’s “Voldemort, the software that cannot be named”, Chuck Kellner’s violation of the vendor profit oath and the agreement that there is no “ECA solution”, only features that support your ECA process. Imagine my surprise when Jim King dragged me over to the IPRO booth to proudly show me the Allegro banner proclaiming “Early Data Assessment”. Please forgive the iPhone picture quality…

Although ILTA strives to be more about sessions and networking, there is an exhibit hall and I always look for market trends and messages from the booths. I saw the re-emergence of the “eDiscovery Solution” message that dominated LTNY 2008. The product suites on the first go round did not live up to the ‘solution’ hype, but we have seen enough acquisitions and consolidations in the last year to lend more substance to provider suite offerings. Other common topics included predictability, cost savings and simplicity. Here are some of my favorite banner quotes:“Predictable Pricing”“All-in-One”“Cost me less and saved me money in weeks” “Practical and Actionable”“Out Predict, Out Perform”“Got Predictive Coding?”“Defensible, repeatable eDiscovery process”and my very favorite- “What happens in our Vault, stays in our Vault”I could not decide if the last was just a clever Vegas reference or it was a reference to an infinite retention product.