LawTech Futures 2014: The one with the http regret

…

Yesterday was LawTech Futures 2014 – The Future of Legal Technology (Europe’s largest legal technology event). The last two years I was invited to attend, went and wrote reviews: LawTech Futures 2012 Reviewed: The Search for the Holy Grail of Legal Technology Conferences has Begun! and LawTech Futures 2013 Reviewed: The one with the neocortex. This year I must have fallen off the invite list. So no review I am afraid but just a few comments generated via Twitter from this side of Hadrian’s Wall.

Legal Conferences (especially Futuristic / Technology ones) are usually well covered these days on Twitter. Indeed sometimes you can glean as much about the Conference from Twitter as actually being there e.g. LawTech Camp London 2012: In Tweets.

That was, unfortunately, not to be the case yesterday. There were quite a few tweets from vendors telling you to come to their stalls for free giveaways. Riverview Law, Jeremy Hopkin’s daughter and I have a particular penchant for flashing green bouncy balls (sorry… an in-joke from last year). But there were very few tweets about the actual content of the Conference. Indeed the official Conference Twitter account could only muster four and those were just about the venue filling up. I was left not knowing what the future of legal technology holds. It was the keynote by Sir Tim Berners Lee that got most tweet coverage. We found out in particular that:-

Going back 25 years, what would you change about the web? I would take out the // in http:// ~Sir Tim Berners-Lee #LTF2014 — Yasmin Andrews (@Yasmin_Legastat) March 25, 2014

But then that had already been predicted by Jon Busby on Twitter last week:-

@ChristianUncut i think i know the answer…he’s remove ‘//‘ 😉

— Jon Busby (@jonb1966) March 19, 2014

So Twitter at least told us what was going to happen at the Conference before it did. Maybe just as well I hadn’t made the trip to London this year to find that out. Although Jon Busby tells me that Sir Tim’s http regret was widely publicised elsewhere and he picked it up in Wired last month. Other startling insights on the world wide web included:-

More from @timberners_lee at #LTF2014 – the biggest thing he never saw coming with the Web was “kittens” as in Grumpy Cat etc

— Charles Christian (@ChristianUncut) March 25, 2014

Why so little LawTech Futures Conference Tweets this year? I tweeted with Jason Plant about that:-

Good day at #LTF2014 too short to catch up with everyone properly. — Jason Plant (@planty) March 25, 2014

@planty Not many tweets from it today if you discount the stall holders tweets. Less Twegals there this year? #LTF2014 — The Time Blawg (@TheTimeBlawg) March 25, 2014

@TheTimeBlawg it was busy, but tablets and phones seemed to be few and far between during sessions. — Jason Plant (@planty) March 25, 2014

@planty absence of tablets and phones odd at any legal tech conference these days. — The Time Blawg (@TheTimeBlawg) March 25, 2014

@TheTimeBlawg could also have been down to sessions being so packed you were concentrating on getting in and had no time to settle and tweet — Jason Plant (@planty) March 25, 2014

@planty was there perhaps less to tweet about? Sir Tim seemed to be the main topic of tweets – but not much there I could see for legal?

— The Time Blawg (@TheTimeBlawg) March 25, 2014

@TheTimeBlawg you could be right. There was less on the main stage this year and the lounge stage smaller bit busier

— Jason Plant (@planty) March 25, 2014

@planty … of course my absence this year would have reduced the tweet count dramatically 😉

— The Time Blawg (@TheTimeBlawg) March 25, 2014

So very little in the way of tablets, smart phones and tweets at a legal technology conference. I can only deduce that the audience was therefore dominated by Big Law (and if Eversheds attended they left their iPads at home). Big Law does, of course, need to attend these conferences because Big Law is so behind the Legal IT curve 😉

On the Legal IT curve debate see also:-

• Big Law Little Law (Guest Post by Mark Gould)
• Legal Technology is not all about tablets, cloud and getting there first (Guest Post by Rupert Collins-White)
• Legal IT and agility (referencing a blog post by Jeffrey Brandt)
• Big Law and the Dinosaurs (referencing a blog post by Nicole Black)

Photo Credit: Yasmin Andrews