The nascent Association of Legal Technologists (ALT) wants to upend the way legal technology conferences are done. Announced in September 2017 following the contentious reorganization of the International Legal Technology Association's (ILTA) executive team, ALT styles itself as more of a think tank and networking space than a traditional legal technology association.

And with ALT's announcement of its first conference, named “ctrl-ALT-del, Networking Rebooted” in Scottsdale, Arizona, from February 11-13, 2018, how the organization intends to stand out is coming into focus: an overarching theme of “legal design thinking.”

Kelli Kohout, chief administrative officer at Davis Wright Tremaine, explained that legal design thinking is the brainchild of Margaret Hagan, director of the Legal Design Lab and a lecturer at Stanford Institute of Design, who will be the conference's keynote speaker.

“Margaret Hagan's work for the last few years really has been teaching students who are coming out of law schools and others who attend her design school how to address legal problems and come up with a creative solution,” Kohout explained.

Such thinking looks at how to solve a legal problem, from access to justice to profitably managing cases on a fixed fee basis, by designing new processes or legal technology platforms. The goal is to be easy for legal end users—whether they be lawyers or support staff—to implement, use and manage.

Kohout, who is a part of her firm's innovation initiative to develop legal solutions, said that such legal design skills are necessary in the current legal market because attorneys are “all being asked to think differently in order for our firms to remain relevant.”

For Judi Flournoy, chief information officer at Kelley Drye, such thinking does not solely focus on how to create new processes or platforms, but also on understanding legal's current workflows and operational needs. She explained that legal design thinking requires one to “understand how people do their work and why people do the work the way they do, by talking to them, by observing them, by asking them questions, by engaging them directly.”

The emphasis on engagement, however, expands just beyond legal design thinking. The ALT conference, after all, aims to be a hands-on experience for many of its attendees.

“What the attendees at ALT can expect is a really focused, interactive experience,” Flournoy said. “If they are coming just to listen, this might not be the conference for them. We will break out from the beginning of the keynote, and we will be teaching some of the processes that Margaret teaches at the design school.”

Kohout added that in addition to “brainstorming sessions and prototyping” potential technology platforms, attendees will be working user experience concepts by creating stakeholder maps and journey maps as well.

After the keynote, the conference will be split into two tracks. While the first, “The Changing Legal Landscape,” will have sessions examining how the legal industry is changing and why legal design thinking is needed, the second track, “DevOps” will “be focused more toward a technical audience” with hands-on workshops, Flournoy said.

She explained that DevOps is a continuation of legal design thinking, and it will look at using a certain methodology to design and implement “repeatable processes with minimal disruption that can be easily understood and reused over and over again, regardless of whether it's a Windows 10 deployment or another system.”

Rick Hellers, nQueue president and CEO and one of the founding members of ALT, noted that the organization expects the conference to be attended by managerial and technology-focused professionals in the legal world, including CFOs, CIOs, IT directors and directors of technology. Hellers added that attorneys from law firms will also attend, and he is optimistic that others from the corporate world will join the crowd as well.

In addition to professionals from law firms and potentially legal departments, the conference will also seek to include a number of legal technology providers. Hellers, who calls these companies “strategic partners,” noted that they will be there to participate in the workshops and sessions alongside other attendees.

“For us, it's not about, 'Let's get as many strategic partners as we can because they'll pay a lot of money and buy a booth,'” he said. “Our strategic partners are not there to sell. They are there to develop relationships; they are there to add to the conversation.”