I've spent the past 48 hours with my head in the clouds—not because of post-election overload, but rather because I've been at the NetDocuments ndElevate conference in Park City, Utah. I participated on a legal technology media panel Wednesday with consultant Brett Burney and ReplyAll Corp. co-founder and Bloomberg Above the Law writer Zach Abramowitz (I dubbed myself Zach #2), but the rest of the time I spent listening, learning and observing.

And there was certainly a lot to learn beyond the simple fact that I wasn't ready for weather under 20 degrees quite yet. Here's what has stood out to me over the past couple days:

1. Platformization

It's a common Silicon Valley saying these days that everyone wants to be the “Uber of X.” But what I'm seeing more and more in legal is that companies want to be more the “Salesforce of X,” primarily when it comes to their platform network. I noticed it when I spoke with Relativity's Jordan Domash about Relativity Trace, which signals the company's intention to build an expansive ecosystem of partners in compliance similar to what it already has in e-discovery.

NetDocuments is looking to do the same for document management—to be the base cloud platform that a number of partners can build upon. NetDocuments CTO Alvin Tedjamulia told me that he sees an opportunity for legal technology companies that want to migrate from an on-premises solution to the cloud. Rather than build out entirely new cloud capabilities themselves, Tedjamulia sees a future where NetDocuments is the cloud background that can help companies migrate to a new era.

It's a risky play—it necessitates that NetDocuments remains best of breed with its cloud platform so that it's something companies actually want to build on top of—but it's also one that has already seen success elsewhere in the legal technology industry. Abramowitz pointed to it during our media panel as something he's certainly watching, and although I hadn't given it too much deep thought previously, it's something I'm going to keep my eye on as well.

2. Smarter New Tech Implementation

The main Wednesday keynote was a talk by Chicago-Kent College of Law professor and well-known legal technology expert Daniel Katz. His talk spanned a wide variety of topics, from legal tech investments (LegalZoom's $2 billion is potentially too small a valuation, he says) to a new paradigm of legal monetization (pedigree typically beats performance in legal “because we don't measure stuff”).

But what struck me the most in his talk was how the economics of applying new technologies like artificial intelligence are changing. With the rise of machine learning as a service added to more technology providers offering open source technology on an enterprise level, the costs for implementing these “next-generation” technologies are coming down rapidly. It also helps, he said, that IBM Watson is no longer the only game in town, with Amazon, Google and Microsoft building out their own offerings. All it takes, he said, is a lot of data: “The way we got a driverless car is watching people drive. Watching lots and lots and lots of people drive … You get the rules from watching people's behavior. It's a lot more effective way.”

This easier implementation strategy is something I saw reflected in NetDocuments' own offerings. While there was one session that focused on the company's blockchain and AI partners like Diligen, for the most part, AI and blockchain was viewed as a product feature, not the main selling point. Instead, the focus was on practical applications: Among the 30 goals Tedjamulia said NetDocuments achieved in the past 18 months were security certifications, cloud-to-cloud transfer connections, and similar practical implementations. These technologies aren't going away anytime soon; they'll simply be in service of a larger goal.

3. Scaling Up

NetDocuments reconfigured its ndElevate conference this year in a different way, with partners attending the first half of the week, customers in the second half of the week, and a mix of both on Wednesday. All told, the company says there are about 300 people present at the conference's peak, and it expects more next year as it expands primarily to the mid-size law firm market. The majority of the show focused on the direction of the NetDocuments platform moving forward, but notably, there were some panels with a wider focus on legal technology at large (including my own media panel).

NetDocuments is following a path that a growing number of other legal technology conferences have already tread: growing beyond just a user conference. It's long been a trend in e-discovery. Relativity Fest, Exterro's inFusion conference and Zapproved's PREX, among others, focus as much on e-discovery law discussions as they do on e-discovery products themselves. Wolters Kluwer's ELM conference, happening concurrently with ndElevate, features an agenda with numerous sessions about technology trends, the value of alternative fee arrangements, and more. And while iManage's ConnectLive remains similar to competitor NetDocuments in that it largely focused on the company's direction, the 2018 conference did include some panels on user adoption strategies and a legal department panel.

So the question then becomes: What is the conference's core value proposition? General education is entertaining and can provide flavor to a user conference, but that's also something that can be had at Legalweek, ILTACON, ABA Techshow and more. Especially as ndElevate continues to expand, I'll be interested to see how the agenda changes in kind.