ILTA CEO Joy Heath Rush.

The “interim” is no more. Earlier this week, Joy Heath Rush was officially named as Chief Executive Officer of The International Legal Technology Association after taking over the position in October 2018.

Rush is a former ILTA board president and succeeds Dan Liutikas, whose departure from the organization was announced last August. Prior to her new gig, Rush spent five years as the VP of Client Development at the legal software company Litera Microsystems.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Legaltech News: You came onboard as interim CEO during a bumpy time for ILTA. What was your first priority when you stepped into that role last October?

Joy Heath Rush: It was absolutely to listen. That was absolutely my priority because there were a lot of people who had things they wanted to talk about and whether it was the board of directors or maybe other volunteers… And that first three months I spent an average of four hours a day just in conversation and of course with my staff, trying to hear what people's concerns were… And then I wanted to look pretty hard at service delivery and make sure that people were getting the basic services that they were paying for with their membership and sponsorship dollars, such as getting the magazine and having access to programming…

How about now, having sat through all of those meeting and spent time listening has there been anything that's kind of risen to the pile n terms of things you need to focus on moving forward?

 Some of those are very internal and operational, things like making sure that every person who reaches out to us by phone or email gets a response with one business day… But some of the other ones we have, one of them I call “Putting the International Back into ILTA.” We have a very committed, passionate group of volunteers outside of North America. We haven't always done as much as we could to make their lives easier. Just things as simple as offering webinars at a time that's convenient for them, not at 6 p.m. on a Friday. And in fact to that end, just yesterday we on-boarded our first staff person outside of North America, so we now have somebody in the U.K.

You're the first ILTA CEO from the legal technology industry. How crucial do you think that is and what kind of a difference do you think that makes?

Having subject matter expertise I think actually is very helpful because for one thing when people come to you with ideas — you know, we have more ideas than we have hours in the day so at some point you have to determine which are the best ideas and how you should take your scarce resources and apply them.

I also think it's just such a close-knit community… In the scheme of things legal is a pretty small community. I mean if you take the 100 largest law firms in the world and combine them, they probably aren't as big as General Motors, you know?… Just having a background in the community also creates some credibility that helps you get things done.

Has it helped you with building relationships with legal tech vendors?

I've been able to see the organization from a lot of different roles and having very recently I've been on the legal tech side, I understand all of the things that a business partner can bring to the table and I think that when I talk to our business partners, again it's a credibility issue… I can look them in the eye— physically, literally, virtually— and say I have been where you are.

So how do you take ILTA forward? 

A: I think that I can't stop listening. That's not a 3-4 month deal… I think we also have to build sufficient agility,into our programming particularly, that we can attack emerging trends and hot issues as they occur.

Say there were to be some significant security breach that were impactful to our community… We have to have to have the right infrastructure in place and the right network, people to reach out and say “hey, we really care about this can we put some put some programming together about it in a day or in a week?