ILTACON (International Legal Technology Association Conference) is one of the leading events in the LegalTech calendar. And this year at Nashville, Tennessee, we saw its biggest edition yet, with over 5500 people in attendance.
ILTACON is for a market that has already arrived. Consider the fact that this year, it was in its Forty-sixth edition! While a large part of the world is still waking up to LegalTech, U.S. has a far more matured ecosystem and nuanced conversation around it.
That maturity is the thread that runs through everything. It shows up in what firms are willing to admit to one another in a public forum (everyone is learning together vibe), in how the money moves, and in how firms treat competitors’ experience as useful rather than threatening. Even the networking is refreshingly open, and people genuinely want to learn more about your work if you have something meaningful to contribute.
This was the second consecutive year where I was attending ILTACON and it is interesting to meet not only of the lawyers but also the L&D teams, systems designers, CIOs, vendors, and a whole category of professionals who did not exist in this industry a decade ago. That mix tells the story that LegalTech is no longer a small or speculative play.
The U.S. LegalTech market size is estimated at approximately $5.7 billion to $7.3 billion. And that shows up in the startup scene too, which I find structurally different from what I encounter elsewhere. These are not early-stage companies searching for a use case. Most of the startups that fill the vendor halls are million- or billion-dollar companies, that too with massive marketing budgets. Competition between them is intense, and the gap between the top two players (Harvey is valued at $15.5billion and Legora at $5.6billion) and everyone else is significant enough that smaller vendors need either a clear niche or creative ways to stand out. The acquisition activity already underway is the predictable consequence, and I expect more of it happening.
At ILTACON, we are looking at a room that has moved past the question of AI adoption and into the far harder questions of deployment, governance, and return. The veterans of this field have weathered many storms and have their playbooks honed to deal with newer tools and technologies. Even then, some would confess how AI is like no other technology before as it fundamentally changes the governance of the law firm itself.
There was a whole lot of learning and interesting ideas that emerged, but a few really stayed with me:
Most firms now work with one Legal AI tool or another. Question of whether to use them is no longer treated as a variance.
AI governance needs more attention, and firms realise that they need better measurement standards to analyse what is working. Debate on ROI of AI deployment is also accelerating, with no settled position yet.
Firms are buying far more tech than they are successfully deploying. While many firms have solved the procurement, the deployment and adoption are the gaps that need to be addressed. Even across the firms, their adoption varies greatly, with some teams genuinely embracing these tools, and there are also those that actively resist. Firms making real progress treat pushback from the staff members as a signal.
There is broad recognition that business case can only be built where the underlying proprietary data exists.
AI conversations are moving out of the tech team into the business, as treating AI as a technical topic excludes the people who most need to shape it.
Several firms also told me vendor dialogue has increased tenfold, which is a meaningful shift in where capability, and dependency, now sit.
Most users are hardly touching more than a fraction of the features of the LegalAI tools, making the role of L&D teams critical across the firms. Fact remains that results of the tech decisions are taking materially longer to arrive than most firms budget for.
In fact, the topic I was invited to speak on was on the growing role of learning and development within firms. Alongside Megan McMillin of Harvey and with facilitation support from Dulani Moore, I spoke on “Integrating GenAI into a Modern Legal Learning Framework”. The session brought two complementary perspectives: my research and advisory work on how legal education and institutions are adapting to GenAI, and Megan’s experience of what happens when these tools are deployed inside real firms, at scale and under real-world constraints.
At ILTACON, almost everyone I spoke to recognised access to justice as a gamechanger in this field. Yet it occupies very little of the agenda. Part of the explanation is that because attendance is expensive, the academic and policy voices are thinned out. Perhaps the justice gap may not close as a by-product of commercial success, however impressive that becomes.
A recurring theme and one that strongly echoed what I heard even at LegalTechTalk is that the real constraint is people, not technology. Considerable emotional support is now being extended to lawyers through the tech transition, and communication is moving from reactive to proactive to building trust and gathering feedback.
ILTACON stands out because it is not simply a showcase of technology, but a great learning environment. Unlike many events in this space, the entire conference is driven by volunteers, which is a remarkable achievement at this scale, and one that reflects the depth of engagement within the U.S. Legal Tech community.
I work across countries and the U.S. legal tech ecosystem is meaningfully further ahead than anywhere else I work. There is so much to learn, not just from the technology being built, but from the community being built around it.
Authored by Kanan Dhru
Affiliations: The Hague University of Applied Sciences; Lawtoons