ILTACON 2025, A Pirate’s Summary – August 2025

Paul Longhurst
Aug 18
4 min read

Piracy was a fact of life for early settlers of Chesapeake Bay, with none of these more infamous and terrifying than Edward Teach known as Blackbeard because of his lustrous, coal-black facial hair adorned with bright ribbons and burning tapers. ILTA embraced this theme for its ILTACON 2025 conference in Maryland earlier this month, opening proceedings with a ship on stage and piratical but jolly volunteers prancing around the Gaylord Convention Centre helping the 4,500 attendees find their way around.

As a first time ILTACON delegate, albeit a veteran of many such legal tech conferences across a 37 year career in the sector, I was struck by the scale of this event and the number of sessions to choose from with as many as seven or eight running at the same time. Rather than focusing on one topic, I tried to sample different areas to get a sense of what our colleagues in the USA are grappling with. The reality is much of the same that we in the UK are, albeit with a different focus here and a nuance there.

The good ship ILTACON was launched by an impressive Ryan Campbell whose keynote encouraged us to find joy in a busy and increasingly challenging world, his joy being exemplified by Flo which is Ryan’s pink Cadillac! From here, the sessions were legal sector focused with many incorporating AI, sometimes to the detriment of the topic. One such session looked at financial system innovations although all of these seemed to be predicated on the use of AI. Whilst AI is clearly making its way into such tools, there is also a good deal of non-AI functionality that provides real benefits for users and, as consultants, our job at 3Kites is to understand requirements before finding the best solution regardless of whether it is AI-enabled or not.

In a similar vein, a session aimed at new system adoption covered some interesting ground regarding the ability of lawyers to engage with change, this being a theme that was repeated elsewhere and often to good effect. However, the change here was again predicated on AI and this is simply not the case for all change projects – it would be helpful for AI themes to be dialled down so that they take their place alongside other technologies rather than being seen as an overriding objective.

However, the impact AI is having was well represented by a discussion which pointed out that whilst LLMs (Large Language Models) are not search engines, they can provide insights using the results of searches which have gathered relevant information from a large content store (eg, your DMS or Document Management System). A significant point here was for documents (previously considered sources of unstructured content) to be viewed as data due to the advances in entity extraction and meaning abstraction that AI has introduced.

Sessions covering law firm futures also focused on the impact of AI. It is clearly a game changer and at 3Kites we see the potential benefits and banana skins most clearly in the Knowledge Management (KM) arena, building on the LLM point above. It is already providing data enhanced judgement (including BD anticipating market trends) and seeing firms move into predictive guidance (compliance as a ‘fire prevention’ approach). Aside from KM, AI is also leading to the creation of multi-disciplinary teams (eg where Business Services are as valued as the lawyers), productisation (“AI is the lighter fluid driving change”) and a shift from services to seasoned advice (more pragmatism, reduced complexity… empathy!).

Returning to the theme of change management, although without reference to any specific technologies, was a session which carries my only name check here. Dr. Larry Richards gave some superb insights into the psyche of a lawyer, ably assisted by Julia Montgomery. Some interesting points that I noted here were the 183% increase in the rate of change (including AI) at law firms over the last four years, alongside change-inhibiting stats for lawyers compared with others in society, eg:

Scepticism in lawyers was measured at 90% compared with a 40% average in others
Autonomy is 89% in lawyers versus 50% in others
Resilience where 90% of lawyers were thin-skinned, actively listening for criticism

We are dealing with individuals who may know their field very well and like to work alone but for whom any kind of failure (eg to adopt a new system) can be a real struggle… easier to ignore things and hope they go away! The speakers provided helpful advice for those managing change including consultants like me:

Lawyers respond to competition – work with a pilot group and publicise its successes
Scarcity via, say, limiting numbers for a meeting/event can improve lawyer engagement
Helping lawyers can build reciprocity whereby they offer to help your project

I also attended sessions on file sharing (keep it simple – a limited number of options will help build ‘muscle memory’) and SaaS security (detection is key when prevention fails). The latter is of particular interest as we at 3Kites see firms handing responsibility for IT security to third parties (including product vendors) without asking enough questions in an area that could adversely affect the business if access to key systems and/or data access is lost.

Lastly, I turn to the suppliers without whose sponsorship these conferences would simply not happen. So many of the (smaller, especially) stands in the ‘vendor village’ flagged up their AI credentials, often to the detriment of the underlying service which was less easy to discern. However, there is much buried treasure waiting to be found alongside those titans of the sector which continue to drive many of our law firms. Whilst the start-ups can represent a commercial risk, they can also point the way forward – I saw a great looking due diligence tool which provides real progress by hooking into AI-powered tech… yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate’s life for me!

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