For the sixth year, InsideLegal partnered with ILTA to produce its annual ILTA Vendor Education/Media program at the Annual ILTA Conference.  This year's topics included:

• ILTA Vendor Business Meeting
• 2009 InsideLegal/ILTA Member Technology Purchasing Survey Overview
• Thought leader & industry expert panel discussions:
  • Utilizing Social Media to Maximize Your Company’s Message
  • Working with Legal Technology Media
  • Working with ILTA (outside of the Annual Conference)
  • Advice for Selling to Law Firms in the Down Economy

We'll be posting a recap of each of the sessions, with this first post covering the ILTA Business Meeting led by Peggy Wechsler and the InsideLegal/ILTA Member Technology Purchasing Survey presented by InsideLegal's Jobst Elster.

ILTA Vendor Business Meeting
The ILTA Business Meeting was led by Peggy Wechsler, ILTA's Program Director, who welcomed the vendor audience to ILTA 2009.  She again thanked the vendors for supporting ILTA and kicked off the meeting by introducing several key ILTA staff members that were in attendance:

• Ken Hansen (ILTA Vendor Coordinator)
• Anne Flippin (Managing Editor – ILTA's Peer to Peer Magazine & ILTA's whitepaper series)
• Maureen Babcock (ILTA Conference Co-Chair)
• Randi Mayes (Executive Director)

Peggy then discussed the main initiatives for the ILTA conference this year – going green and virtual outreach of the conference.  To continue in their mission to produce a "greener" conference, all program guide information was paperless this year and sent as e-files before conference.  Also, there was a section to recycle badges and conference bags at the end of the event.  ILTA also made the conference easier to access for those members not able to attend by offering ILTA TV by ii3, which had live broadcasts from the event.

Attendance was another hot topic with ILTA feeling the hit that has affected the attendance numbers of other industry events.  ILTA did offer a few programs to assist firms that were not otherwise able to send members due to budgetary constraints.  They offered one day passes and a registration for local firms that could attend during the day.  The total attendance on the firm/member side was
around 850 while vendor attendance totaled 1,400. 

InsideLegal/ILTA Member Technology Purchasing Survey
Next on the agenda was an overview of the 2009 InsideLegal/ILTA Member Technology Purchasing Survey presented by Jobst Elster of InsideLegal.  Jobst covered the main changes to the survey this year including:

• Expanded survey pool to include firms with 50-99 attorneys – sent to total of 730 firms, ranging from 50 – over 3,000 attorneys, yielding 115 responses (17% response rate)
• More detailed breakouts of technology purchases – past & future (i.e., included questions about purchases that were held over from last year, and in which cases vendor selections had already been made)
• Added questions about social media/cloud computing/SaaS
• Separate section on how firms are approaching IT spending/technology purchasing amidst the economic downturn as well as a closer look at firm-vendor relationship

You can view the complete survey at InsideLegal and download the audio file of the program below.

        Download MP3 of Survey Overview

Stay tuned for our next posts where we will cover the panel discussions from the ILTA Vendor Program.