I was recently on vacation with a friend, and we were discussing our upcoming schedules when she asked me a seemingly simple question: Why are there so many conferences in legal tech? 

I paused for a second before rattling off a string of unrelated rationales that ultimately did nothing to adequately answer the question, judging by her reaction. They made sense to me, but still didn’t fully paint the picture. I kept thinking about the question afterward. 

Since then, I’ve gotten back into conference mode following the welcome respite from non-stop events that comes for most of us in the November through January period. And now, after having attended two legal tech events in the past week, I’m remembering why legal tech loves conferences so much (or why I do, at least). 

Legal tech gatherings are a chance to fully immerse yourself in the aspects — or even hyperfixations — of your work that you love and to do so with others of like mind. I’ve been in several industries in my few decades as a professional adult, and none have had anywhere near the sense of community that legal tech, or at least different segments of the industry, tends to have. People are actually friends, and friends who are also knee-deep in the same complexities and niches of the legal tech bubble. 

Or, as my friend and colleague Sarah Glassmeyer, Director of Data Curation here at LTH, put it – legal tech conferences support the joy of nerding out. 

Case in point: the energy at last week’s New York Legal Tech Meetup, organized by Lega’s Christian Lang and hosted at the offices of Fried Frank, was akin to that of a reunion. In addition to engaging product demos, attendees were excited to reconnect with industry colleagues and friends they hadn’t seen in a while – in many cases since ILTACON in August 2024 (of course, another conference being cited as a reference for the passage of time). The joy of being able to nerd out with fellow legal techies again was palpable in the room. 

A similar sense of excitement surrounded the first-ever Women + AI Summit held at Vanderbilt Law School over the weekend. While not technically a legal tech conference, the gathering of women in AI was a powerhouse event of women doing cutting-edge work in the AI space, in both legal and other fields. Several attendees commented on how nice it was to be in a safe, welcoming environment where they could share ideas and stories without judgment – again, the joy of nerding out with like-minded women and making new friends, all without many of the distractions encountered on a daily basis. The day wasn’t even over before people (myself included) were ready to sign up for the next one. 

For sure, conferences can be exhausting, especially for introverts. The end of conference season in the fall can feel like a welcome relief, a chance to start trying to work down the months-long sleep deficit. But when it starts up again the next year and the excitement begins to build, the draw of nerding out can be hard to resist. 

For those ready to re-scratch that itch, conference season is pretty squarely upon us once again, with Legalweek next month, followed by ABA TECHSHOW a week after. And speaking of ABA TECHSHOW, your last chance to vote for the finalists who will present in this year’s Startup Alley pitch competition is this Friday. 

If you’re ready to get a head start on strategizing your conference attendance schedule now, I suggest consulting LTH’s Events Calendar. 

Next stop for me is the UF Law E-Discovery Conference next week, where I’ll be doing a lightning talk on why you should be preserving your GenAI prompts. If you’ll be there, drop me a line! 

What I’m Watching: 

To the cloud!: After decades of offering eDiscovery software, Relativity is officially accelerating its full transition to the cloud with an announcement about future hosting requirements. As of January 1, 2028, all new Relativity matters must be hosted in the RelativityOne cloud platform, though matters created in Relativity Server prior to that date will continue to be supported through their completion.  

Portfolio addition: LexFusion, a provider of go-to-market services connecting legal tech vendors and buyers, has added corporate governance platform Fides to its portfolio of member companies. The partnership aims to facilitate the adoption of Fides’ technology by in-house legal and governance teams looking to enhance operational efficiency and compliance readiness. 

More money for legal tech: Legal AI platform Paxton announced it raised $22 million in a Series A round, led by Unusual Ventures, with participation by Kyber Knight, 25Madison, and Wisconsin Valley Ventures, bringing its total funding to date to $28 million. Paxton intends to use the funds to expand its technology, grow its team, and support its goal of automating labor-intensive tasks. 

Free, clean legal training data: In a true move toward open-source AI, 273 Ventures has made the training data – all legally obtained and free from copyright infringement – for its KL3M models free on Hugging Face. The company is also continually adding other data and even some trained base models to the site as well. 

New fund formation tool: The burgeoning fund formation tech space has a new entrant following the launch of SmartEsq, Inc., co-founded by former Paul Hastings fund formation partner Esther Chiang and computer scientist Kristen Gandhi. SmartEsq is a comprehensive legal workflow platform that aims to eliminate inefficiencies in the labor-intensive aspects of private fund formation. 

AI patents on the rise: According to Anaqua’s annual Analysis of USPTO Patenting Statistics report for 2024, last year saw a 5.7% increase over 2023 in patents granted. Not surprisingly, AI was the second-most-patented area of technology, following only semiconductors. 

There’s a new agent in town: OpenAI announced the launch of deep research, an agent that performs work independently for users via ChatGPT prompts. Powered by a version of OpenAI’s upcoming o3 model, deep research uses reasoning to complete multistep research tasks by synthesizing large amounts of online information. 

Editor’s Note: This is the latest installment of my weekly Tuesday column on recent developments in legal tech and AI that have caught my attention. You can find the previous column here. If you have news or stories that you’d like to see featured in a future column, please contact me at press@legaltechnologyhub.com. If you’d like to get this column and other industry analysis in your inbox every week, sign up for a free LTH Insights Newsletter here.