ILTACON 2026: Highlights From The Event
It was a little over a week ago that I was at the Gaylord watching 5,700 people try to find their way through that hotel again. It never gets easier no matter how many years you’ve been going. It set the record as the biggest ILTACON yet, selling out every room. Some booths were so big they had their own zip codes.
Now that I am back at my desk and have had time to reflect, here’s what I actually took away from it.
Context is the new pitch
The word of the week was context. NetDocuments has Legal Context Graph. iManage rebuilt its whole platform around Context Fabric. Harvey has stopped talking about prompts and started talking about matters, memory, and preferences. The pitch has changed. The conversation isn’t “here’s a smarter model” anymore, it’s “here’s a model that actually knows your firm.”
This message resonates. It’s also one most mid-market firms aren’t in a position to accept yet, because it assumes your data is clean and structured enough to feed it.
I heard more than one CIO say the technology part is easy! Getting the data right is the hard part. I’ve been saying some version of that for quite some time now. It’s nice to hear it from those down in the trenches day after day.
Governance and the verification tax
Governance had a different tone this year, too. Intapp’s product team said that governance gets harder, not easier, as agents start doing real work instead of just answering questions. That tracks, because the more autonomy you hand a tool, the more you need to know what it’s doing on your behalf. The most interesting insights all week came from attendees. Firms aren’t seeing the efficiency gains they expected from AI, because someone still has to check the work. Triona Buckley, our Chief Product Officer, calls it the verification tax. It’s real, and it’s wrecking the ROI case a lot of firms used to get budget approved for this tech in the first place. You can’t fix governance by buying a better tool. You fix it by knowing what the agent touched, who reviewed it, and whether it correctly actioned on ten tasks, or just moved the work around for someone to clean up later
Agents are only as good as what’s underneath them
Agentic AI was everywhere, too. All of it sounds great in a demo.
MCP came up in many vendor conversation I had, usually described as the thing that finally lets these tools talk to each other instead of living in their own silos. iManage is using it to surface content inside Thomson Reuters CoCounsel. NetDocuments is staying tool-agnostic on purpose so firms aren’t locked into one AI vendor’s roadmap.
My thoughts? The agent layer is only as good as what’s underneath it. An agent that can act on your behalf is a bigger deal than a chatbot that answers questions, and it needs the bigger foundation under it to be trustworthy.
Buying the tool isn’t the transformation
The reality is a firm can purchase every tool on the exhibit floor and still not change how it does the work. What I kept hearing, in sessions and in hallway conversations, was firms deploying AI the way they’d deploy a new practice management or billing system, without asking what problem it’s trying to solve or who’s supposed to change their process because of it. Buying the tool isn’t the transformation, it’s all the work that comes before and after.
Once again there were discussions about moving off the billable hour. You can’t have a serious value-pricing conversation if you don’t have the operational visibility to know what work costs. Change management remains the hard part and a big part of the transformation story. Here’s the active version:
Firms are purchasing AI tools faster than they’re redesigning workflows or deciding where humans need to stay in the loop, which is where they’re losing a lot of the promised value. While we were developing Actionstep Intelligence we were very deliberate to bring AI to our customers within a platform they already know, use and trust. This helps to reduce friction around change since the users don’t have to change the way the work or learn a new tool.
Is bigger better?
The parties were bigger and the booths looked like small buildings. There was a lot of money spent on being seen this year. I hope there is budget left to make technology that delivers results! I guess we’ll find out next year. See you back in Nashville next Summer.
Beth Thompson is VP of Market Strategy & Legal Evangelism at Actionstep, a business management platform built for mid-market law firms. She writes and speaks on operational maturity, infrastructure strategy, and the business of running a modern legal practice.
