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This year, the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) hosted its annual ILTACON conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor Maryland from August 21st to August 25th. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this conference was ILTA’s first 100% in-person event since 2019. Needless to say, members of the legal sector, including TitanFile were looking forward to meeting again in person to network and learn from their peers.
With more than 1300 attendees in attendance, ILTACON 2022 was a huge success! Below, you’ll find some of our highlights from the conference.
This year, the ILTACON exhibit hall was filled with approximately 160 ILTA business partners, ranging from technology providers to financial service providers to consultants.
Our team held a booth in the exhibit hall throughout the entire event to share insights on how law firms can improve security and efficiency around file sharing. It was great to be able to reunite with our clients, bond with neighboring business partners, and connect with attendees.
We also spread the news on the recent introduction of customer-managed encryption keys to TitanFile, which enable TitanFile’s clients to create and manage their own encryption keys for files uploaded to the file-sharing platform.
On Wednesday, August 24th, TitanFile’s Director of Business Development, Victor Abou-Assaleh, participated in a roundtable discussion on “Supporting Users in a Hybrid Workspace” alongside:
Having serviced the legal market for more than 10 years, Victor shared his expertise on what he believes to be the most critical ways to support users in a hybrid workspace:
1) Attorneys and support staff need access to a self-serve toolkit
“One of the things I’ve learned over the last 10 years, specifically serving the legal market is that you have to focus on user experience, from a technology perspective. If we look at what Apple did in the consumer market, they’ve simplified everything. They have the cleanest user interface and there are fewer choices for the end user. Focusing on the user experience is a big component of driving user adoption in a hybrid workforce. You can train people on legacy tools or you can have much easier tools that are intuitive and self-serve.”
– Victor Abou-Assaleh, Director of Business Development at TitanFile
2) Security should be prioritized both in and outside of the office
“Today, your clients are imposing certain rules. The number of security audits that law firms are being required to complete from their clients increased significantly. And I think part of that’s because of the change in the hybrid workforce. I think when everybody’s in the office, there’s a sense of security because you’re behind a big firewall. In a hybrid workforce, some people are on a VPN, some people are not on a VPN. Some people have a proper office space at home, some people are sharing with roommates on kitchen tables with client data. There’s a lot more collaboration happening in the cloud. And it’s important to have some sort of governance, both on the technology side of things, but also on the process side of things to ensure that things don’t linger forever and that you limit your exposure.”
– Victor Abou-Assaleh, Director of Business Development at TitanFile
Ahead of the release of the 2022 ILTA Tech Survey, ILTA hosted a session revealing some important trends from the survey:
Some of the trends that were mentioned were:
The 2022 ILTA Tech Survey will be available through ILTA in mid to late September and will include data from over 460 firms representing 125,000 attorneys and approximately 250,000 total users.
Having attended virtual conferences for the past two and a half years, there’s nothing like experiencing an ILTACON in person.
During this event, we had the opportunity to sit in on several educational sessions and converse with hundreds of attendees. Here are our top 3 takeaways from ILTACON 2022:
1) Law firms are abandoning on-premise deployments and moving towards the cloud
Law firms can try to resist technological advancements in the cloud, but it’s inevitable that the future of law firms is in the cloud. Cloud technologies offer several benefits that allow for lower maintenance costs, more convenient access to data, and the adoption of tools and capabilities that would otherwise not be available with existing on-premise deployments.
In addition, with technologies like Customer-Managed Encryption Keys, storing data in the cloud can be just as secure as storing data on-premise.
“Cloud-adverse be damned,” – Todd Corham, Chief Information Officer at Saul Ewing LLP
2) Hybrid work models are here to stay
Many big enterprise law firms have permanently adopted a hybrid work model. This switch requires equipping attorneys and support staff with the hardware and technologies they need to work securely and efficiently from home. Some firms are budgeting for a “technology package” which includes a laptop, printer, VPN, and client collaboration software.
Law firms are also investing more into security training for staff that enables them to work more securely whether it be inside of the office or out.
3) End-users value efficiency just as much as security
In addition to clients demanding more efficient ways to collaborate with their law firms, we’ve learned that attorneys and support staff are also demanding access to toolkits that make their lives simpler. This is due to the frustration caused by not being able to perform simple tasks such as file sharing without support from their IT team.
Some attorneys and support staff have admitted to having complaints, but not openly complaining to their IT teams. For that reason, it’s important for IT teams to evaluate the user experience around the tools that are provided to users. After all, how secure are your tools if your users aren’t using them?