This past summer, the International Legal Technology Association's (ILTA) annual conference ITLACON was overshadowed by the abrupt announcement that three long time members of the organization's executive team—Clay Gibney, Deb Himsel, and Peggy Wechsler—would be replaced in a reshuffling of the team and ITLA's board of directors.

The move was not without contention. In a letter on LinkedIn, ILTA founding member and nQueue president and CEO Rick Hellers wrote, “We have reached a tipping point with the sudden and unexpected firings,” reproaching ILTA for what he saw as an “overall trend towards commercialization,” and noting that in the past the conference was “about solving specific problems, and led by those who have done so.”

In late September, Hellers announced on LinkedIn the launch of a new organization named the Association of Legal technologists (ALT). Hellers recently told LTN that the organization “is about connecting people and problems. … It's about providing a forum and a setting so that people can come together get to know each other, and form lasting long-term relationships based upon mutual trust.”

Hellers explained idea for ALT was “a grassroots type of thing,” based on the feeling that ITLACON no longer met the needs of some participants. “There became a big sense that in talking to more and more people that the ability to network at ILTACON was lacking, mid-sized firms were feeling left out, and vendors were feeling nickeled and dimed and felt they did not have a seat at the table.”

But while Hellers noted that ALT was created to fill “a void in the conference and networking events,” he stressed that the organization does not see itself as a competitor to ILTA. “This isn't a political contest; we're not trying to draw members from ILTA or any other organization.”

Kelli Kohout, chief administrative officer at Davis Wright Tremaine, and a former ILTA board member who is now on the ALT executive team, added that she hopes ILTA and ALT can “complement one another.”

She noted that the focus of both organizations will be fundamentally different. “ILTA provides a great format for those that want to obviously go into a large vendor hall to see lots of vendors, to talk about products, to buy products” and have the chance to “attend hundreds of educational sessions.”

On the other hand, “What I see ALT becoming more like is a think tank—more focused on a specific problem that we identify [and] could be solved by bringing people with diverse backgrounds together,” Kohout added.

Jeffrey Brandt, CIO at Jackson Kelly PLLC, and an active ILTA member who served on the organization's board of directors, considers ALT to be “another alternative,” among many, offered in the legal industry.

Brandt, who joined ALT's nascent working group to help get the organization off the ground, added that ALT can be thought of as a competitor in the sense that “some people will only have limited budgets, and so they'll have to pick one thing or another, but that's not particularly new. But is it a direct competitor? I don't think so.”

Legaltech News reached out to ILTA for comment on the launch of ALT. At press time, however, the publication has not received a response.

ALT Conference

ALT will hold its first ever event from February 11 to 13, 2018 at the Camelback Inn Resort & Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona. The choice of location for the event was a nostalgic one—it was where VSLUG, the organization that would one day evolve into ILTA, held its first event several decades ago.

Hellers noted that members of ALT group will be meeting in Scottsdale in October 2017 to “finalize the agenda for the conference in February and begin sketching out future events in future venues” throughout the country.

The focus of such events, he added, will be to around problem solving specific legal tech challenges and “providing a forum and a setting so that people can come together get to know each other, and form lasting long term relationships based upon mutual trust.”

While Hellers expects “the typical folks in law firms, the CIOs, the directors of technology and the techies” to become part of ALT and participate at these events, he also is hoping to see “a large participation” of attorneys and corporate legal department professionals as well.

Brandt added the organization may attract a fair share of participants, given that “concept of returning to old school networking with a high tech twist has a lot of appeal.”

But not all ALT participants will be from the legal side. Hellers said that tech vendors will also be a part of the organization and have “will have an equal seat of the table. They will be part of these discussions, and they will be part of the networking.”

Vendors who join and participate in ALT events, however, will need to “abide by a code of conduct,” he added. “We will ask that the only thing being sold is a relationship, not a product. There will be opportunities for that if you build the relationship and you help solve problems that people are trying to solve.”