Just a week to connect, network and Learn!

We are a couple of weeks out from ILTACON 2026 in Nashville, and I am genuinely looking forward to it. Not for the slideware. For the conversations.

ILTACON is where the legal technology world gets honest. It is the one place each year where you can sit down with people who run real firms and ask the questions that matter: what is actually working, what was overhyped, and where the real bottlenecks still are. After a year in which legal AI moved from novelty to near-ubiquity, those conversations have never been more useful.

Because the ground really has shifted. A year or two ago, the debate was whether firms would adopt AI at all. That debate is over. The ABA’s 2024 survey found AI use among lawyers had jumped to around 30 percent, nearly tripling year over year (ABA Journal, 2025). The Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer survey found that most law firm attorneys are now using generative AI at least weekly (LawSites, 2024). The question is no longer “if.” It is “how well,” and that is a much more interesting question to discuss in person.

So this year, I am coming to ILTACON less to talk and more to compare notes. I want to hear what worked in your firm and what fell flat. I want to know where your AI program got stuck, because in my experience the sticking points are remarkably similar from firm to firm: cost that crept up unexpectedly, a security objection no one could resolve, a tool that nobody owned after launch, a governance gap that made leadership nervous. Naming those honestly is how the whole field gets better.

For our part, our team at V Group Inc will be at Booth #858, and we are deliberately bringing demonstrations rather than brochures. I have never found a glossy one-pager persuasive, and I doubt you have either. What we will have running is the real thing:

  • Secure local AI processing on actual hardware, so you can see what “the sensitive data never leaves your control” looks like in practice.
  • Contract review and redlining that gives lawyers a head start while keeping them in control.
  • Litigation summarization that turns a mountain of documents into a usable chronology.
  • And the multi-model approach underneath it all, the routing that keeps legal AI both private and affordable.

The reason I am drawn to the demo format is that legal AI has an honesty problem right now. There is a lot of confident marketing and a lot of vague claims, and our profession has already been burned by tools that promised more than they delivered. The antidote is to show the thing working, let people poke at it, and answer the hard questions in real time. That is what a booth should be for.

I also want to be clear about who I hope to meet. Not just the firms that are far along. If anything, I am most interested in talking with the people who feel behind, or who tried something last year that did not stick. There is no judgment in that. Most firms are somewhere in the messy middle, between experimentation and real integration, and that is exactly the stage where an honest conversation is worth the most. Whether you are taking your first careful step or restarting a program that stalled, I would like to hear where you are.

A small ask, because logistics matter. ILTACON gets busy, and the best conversations are the ones that do not get squeezed into a hallway. If you know you want to talk, drop a comment here or send me a note, and we will set aside proper time at the booth. I would rather have twenty real conversations than a hundred rushed hellos.

There is something energizing about a whole industry gathering in one place to be candid about a technology that is genuinely reshaping the work. The hype cycle gets exhausting from a distance. Up close, with people who are actually doing the work, it gets clarifying. That is why I keep coming back.

So if you are heading to Nashville, come find us at Booth #858. Tell me what you are seeing, what you are skeptical about, and what you wish someone would just demonstrate honestly. I will do my best to do exactly that.

See you in Nashville.

Sources

  • ABA 2024 Legal Technology Survey Report, via ABA Journal (AI adoption near 30 percent, up from 11 percent): abajournal.com
  • Wolters Kluwer 2024 Future Ready Lawyer Survey, via LawSites (most law firm attorneys use gen AI at least weekly): lawnext.com

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