Click to view InsideLegal's LegalTech NY Photos

All the talk about the pending ‘storm-zilla’ heading for New York on Wednesday had a definite impact on day 3 exhibit hall foot traffic but on the upside, eased the typical long breakfast lines at the Hilton Marketplace restaurant. Despite the lower attendance numbers, the overall vendor consensus was positive, both from a booth traffic and lead quality standpoint.

Our day kicked-off by meeting with Brett Burney of Burney Consultants and a long time legal technology influencer. While Brett spends most of his time consulting with corporations on eDiscovery and litigation preparedness strategies, he is always acutely aware of general legal technology trends and developments. At breakfast, he mentioned his current crusade of promoting mac-based/compatible technologies for lawyers including involvement in last year’s MiloFest, an annual conference for ‘Mac-lovin lawyers’. The conversation turned to tech tools for small firms and how the popular web-based practice management systems are not comprehensively closing the loop on helping them manage their practice. Specifically, RealPractice’s Brad Cooper talked about offering services and technology to help lawyers generate more leads, convert those leads by using Smartphone technologies to push follow-up reminders, and lastly, manage those leads via an integrated practice management platform. New products unveiled at LegalTech like My RealPractice are designed to address both small firms’ marketing and new business needs as well as the integration with a matter/case management platform. As Cooper mentioned, who cares about having a full-featured matter management system if you have no new client and matters to manage. 

As it turns out, Wednesday turned into ‘ILTA day’ as we took plenty of time to meet with the fabulous ILTA crew including Peggy Wechsler, TJ Johnson, and Deb Himsel. The ladies previewed some exciting staff changes (check back @InsideLegal in a few days for more details) and talked about plans for another INSIGHT UK event taking place April 5th in London. It was also good to hear that planning for ILTA’s annual conference in Nashville is on track and the Gaylord Opryland Resort is freshly renovated and back up and running since last year’s horrible flooding.

Next, we spent the final show hours roaming the exhibit hall looking for interesting vendor news or aiming to get product updates from companies we saw last year. Here are some of day 3 vendor news highlights:

YouSendIt: The Web-based digital file delivery service that allows users to securely transfer electronic files that are too large or too sensitive to e-mail has officially added the legal vertical to one of its target markets. According to Andy Chafee, Director, Worldwide Legal Markets, YouSendIt has been in legal since November and looking to expand its legal presence by offering secure file transfers on a firm-wide basis versus the current one-off, individual lawyer accounts that are rampant within many firms. Beyond YouSendIt strict security protocols, special features that are bound to attract more legal users include an Outlook plug-in as well as admin functionality that lets users schedule or time out downloads based on bandwidth, etc. 

Vu Telepresence: We first talked with these guys at LegalTech West Coast last year and over the last 6 months they have made more inroads into legal, especially by touting Vu’s accessibility and affordability when it comes to video conferencing. Vu’s regional director told us that legal has responded well to their message of using Vu to make depositions easier as well as enabling web conferencing via a PC/laptop connection. This seems like it would go over really well considering all you need to videoconference with Vu is a PC equipped with a web cam.

SAP: Last LegalTech, SAP’s Susie Krupa told us about the Waldorf, Germany-based software giant’s plan to pursue the top 20-50 global law firms with integrated HR, financial management, business intelligence and resource planning solutions. This year, Susie highlighted SAP’s LegalTech session on 'Why ERP Now for Law Firms?' co-presented by Baker& McKenzie’s Martin Telfer, Global Director, GTS (Baker & McKenzie is currently deploying SAP’s ERP solution having already gone live on HR mini-master, a part of SAP's Human Capital Management solution, and planning to go-live on Financials later this year). She also told us about SAP’s recent Business Transformation Study featuring Howrey LLP and their associated ROI calculations. 

CT Tymetrix: We stopped by CT Tymetrix, a legal management solution for corporate legal and insurance providers. The company’s big buzz for New York was the unveiling of RateDriver, a mobile application that estimates the average rate of any lawyer in the U.S. Based on the 2010 Real Rate Report, a statistical analysis of $4.1 billion in legal invoices, the mobile app is the first data driven model that identifies and quantifies the real drivers of U.S. lawyer rates.

Lastly, our painstaking quest for a simple explanation of ‘What the hell do I need to know when it comes to eDiscovery?’ was finally answered with a handy dandy eDiscovery for Dummies pamphlet compliments of RenewData (request a copy). Now if only the eDiscovery community could band together to provide an easy to understand guide of who provides what when it comes to EDD solutions (vs. the 'we do stuff to the left of EDRM and we are recognized by Socha-Gelbman and can do it all for you' claims). 

Our LegalTech NY parting shots include a ‘big’ thanks to LegalTech for not selling out the Bridges Bar for overpriced sponsorships and making it available for general meeting space which has always been a premium at this show. Also, we thought the biggest promo buzz was RealPractice’s offer to provide free professional social media headshots to all conference attendees – they had well over 100 lawyers, vendors, media and consultants take advantage. All in all, it was great to see everyone and catch up. Until January 30, 2012…