Been There, Done That, Got the T-Shirt

Hello, friends in the computer. It’s been awhile, I know. It’s been a crazy few days weeks months years.

A quick update on me: I still live in Northern Indiana in the middle of nowhere, my dad moved in with me in March of 2020 for six weeks until the Covid stuff blew over and…he’s sitting next to me on my deck as I write this, and I work at Reynen Court as their “Legal Tech Curator”. Aside from the global rise of fascism and imminent environmental collapse, things are going about as good for me as they ever have. I’m honestly so happy and intellectually satisfied that my Hungarian side is absolutely like “shut up or you’re going to jinx it.”

AND I JUST GOT BACK FROM MY FIRST ILTA AND I’M PUMPED.

Before I get into that, two things…

So, in the course of this post and other communications, I will talk about my employer and my job. I really like both and believe very strongly in what we’re trying to achieve. But I assure you no one has twisted my arm to get me to do marketing for it - any positive things I say are genuine. But also if I say something you don’t like, it shouldn’t be imputed to them.

I am honestly so over people contacting my employers and trying to get me fired. Honestly, stop it or at least have the stones to cc me on the email.

Second thing, through this post I will use pictures of merch I made on Zazzle. I may or may not eventually sell for real and these are probably not final designs. They’re ideas I’ve had kicking around and thought would be fun frame to talk about my recent conference experience so I whipped up some mock ups late last night so that’s what that’s about. If you see someone steal them, join me in wishing they step on legos when they least expect it for the rest of their lives.

OKAY LETS GET INTO IT

I went to ILTACON for the first time last week. It was my first in person conference since Covid, and I think the first non-ABA in person meeting/conference I had been to since Clio Cloud 2018?

Oh wow, I really am in my Mariah Carey Butterfly era.

On top over everything, I also was meeting my coworkers in person for the first time. Spoiler alert: they’re lovely and fun and we (or at least I) had a great time hanging out.

(I would just like to note for the record that this was the last night in the exhibit hall and we had a bunch of drink tokens left so we cashed them in before bartenders went home and that for the majority of the conference, our booth did not look like a frat house.)

POINT ONE: I’m rooting for everyone

I wear many hats when I’m attending a legal tech conference. I work with our strategy and vendor relations team to find interesting legal tech solutions that we may want to commercially engage with. I also need to keep abreast of what’s being offered because our law firm and legal department customers count on us to be up to date and informative about the expanding ecosystem. Plus I’m an <cough> award winning thought leader </cough> and I guess I should talk about something other than my dad or sister’s dogs occasionally.

There are companies and individuals out there doing the same thing I personally do or roughly the same as my company does. I don’t see them as competition, which is hard to say without it being interpreted in a snotty way, but I absolutely don’t mean it like that. I see us all working towards similar goals. There are options for us to collaborate and go faster and farther together.

(Data standards and standardized tech deployments: get into it)

But even in instances where we are in direct competition and you win? Still great. Any time an innovative tool or process is adopted it makes it easier for the next person to try something. And if it fails? Still okay because hopefully we’ve learned to do it better next time.

I’m sure he won’t mind me badly paraphrasing him, but I was talking to Ed Walters about this and he said something like “there are many problems that are too insurmountable for each of us to solve, but they can be easy tackled by all of us working on them together.”

So this brings me to my first silly merch idea. I have long been a fan of Sen. John "Bluto" Blutarsky’s “COLLEGE” sweatshirt.

I’ve been wanting to make one that just says “LEGAL TECH” for a while now. For one, I didn’t always have company merch to rep at conferences. Two, at the risk of being ~~controversial~~ I am pro technology use by lawyers. I think it is generally a good thing when implemented well. And finally, much like the young lads of Delta Tau Chi, I feel like I have been on double secret probation for A LOT of my career. So I did:

POINT TWO: Community Based Solutions Ain’t All Hippie Shit but Let’s Not Get Too Corporate Either

One of my joys of ILTA was seeing people that I have known FOR YEARS and that have been plugging away at the issues facing law for literal decades. Maybe it’s because I hold onto grudges more than Nixon, but do you remember how we used to get the absolute tar kicked out of us in blogs, social media, and conferences for saying controversial statements like “maybe you shouldn’t waste time and money when there’s a pretty basic tech solution that many other industries have adopted to great success.”? Because I do.

I mean, maybe they still do it, but I’ve learned to not waste time on professional contrarians and probably blocked them…

The community was small and it was free and weird. (Shout out to O.G. legal tech Twitter weirdo Nicole Bradick for giving me this point idea.) I think there’s a bit of a war buddy camaraderie amongst those that have seen the idea of, say, cloud based legal tech solutions1 go from fringe idea to BILLION DOLLAR BIZNASS.

ANYWAY, I’ve been thinking of this quote that appeared in an Apple commercial but may have another original source.

It’s great that <pushes up hipster glasses> legal tech is going mainstream. But let’s not lose the weirdness that made us ready to take on 100 year old legacy processes and try to make the legal world a better (for many definitions of the word better) place.

That is probably my one surprise/critique about ILTA - the educational sessions were pretty staid, or at least not how I would have done it, but also maybe I am an asshole with poorly controlled brain chemistry that feels the need to make everything into a show. The one exception was the NLP explainer session and it took all I had to not yell “TALK YO SHIT” as way of agreeing with Pablo Arredondo and Damien Riehl.

(I’m so sorry, I haven’t left Indiana in 2.5 years…)

POINT THREE: Elvis Was Right - Less Conversation and More Action

I am now at the point of trying to get people to adopt innovative tools and processes for going on 15 years. (No, I know, it’s shocking that someone as young looking and beautiful as I am is that old but it’s true, it’s true…) Despite what people may have thought back then (see: Sarah’s Grudge List), I have never been a “use tech for tech’s sake” type of person. (That’s those blockchain assholes. Heh.) But now I am definitely at the point of…

It doesn’t matter if it’s tech I’m building and giving away for free or stuff that someone is spending a lot of money on, I have time and again had projects fail because the user group either wasn’t prepared before launch or supported afterwards. (I really need to do the “innovation is just like farming” talk or post sometimes.) I absolutely take ownership on my failures in these situations but I have to say I’ve also experienced people absolutely saying and maybe even thinking they wanted The Sarah Glassmeyer Librarian Rockstar Experience2 and then be like “oh we thought we could be cool without actually having to change anything…”

One of the things I love most about what I get to do with my job does is that I ask vendors to explain what they do post-purchase to support customers and effect change management. (Then I include in my write ups). Unsupported tech wastes the customers’ time, it wastes the vendors’ time (especially if they spent months getting the deal done and then churn after a year because no one used the solution) and it makes the next attempt at implementing tech harder for everyone.

So it’s great to see the exhibit hall options and otherwise be excited about new tool choices, but dang y’all…it’s just the first step.

IN SUMMARY…

I don’t actually have a final point other than to say “thanks for reading”, I’m doing great, I had a lot of fun rejoining the IRL professional world again, and I hope to see you soon.

Seriously it was so much fun seeing people again. Also, I am now apparently a hugger. But I’m squeezably soft so if you’re into that sort of thing, go for it.