Every year, kCura’s offices close between Christmas and New Year’s Day for a holiday break. And every year, we return from our week-long hiatus with one thing on our minds: Legaltech New York.
The conference is one of the biggest in the industry, and our team spends January getting ready to catch up with as many of our customers, partners, and industry friends as possible—from hosting hands-on labs in the Community Pavilion to treating attendees to a night (or two) on the town.
This year, Dean Gonsowski, our VP of business development, and David Horrigan, our legal content director, are attending LTNY as part of the kCura team for the very first time. We recently sat down with them to chat about their expectations for the conference, as well as what they each have planned for next week.
Jacque: What are you most looking forward to this year?
David: There are certain things I look for at every Legaltech: the amount of foot traffic, the composition of the audience, who has bigger booths, who has smaller booths, who’s moved off-site. All these things may seem unimportant, but they reflect on the health of the industry and where things are going.
Dean: I agree, and I think watching the movement of various players is particularly compelling. I’m interested in how recent mergers and acquisitions play out, and I look forward to seeing familiar faces in different roles and capacities.
I also think some e-discovery trends, such as the newly revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and information governance, will be big, but they have been on a slow burn over the last couple of years. Cybersecurity, on the other hand, is something that seemingly went from zero to 60 in the past year. Everyone knows about it, but lately it has begun to really impact the legal community—which is one of the big reasons we decided to run the “Cybersecurity Strategy Best Practices” panel that I’m moderating.
Who’s joining you in that discussion?
Dean: We have Judy Selby from Baker Hostetler, who is an expert in cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and the impact on corporations and in-house counsel. We also have Barclay Blair, the executive director at the Information Governance Initiative; there’s certainly a big connection among governance, cybersecurity, and e-discovery, and he’ll have a really useful perspective on how to think about cybersecurity within information governance. We also have John Loveland, the managing director at Consilio who focuses on building out IG solutions for companies.
David: That’s a great group. I’ve had my eye on this trend as well. Ed McAndrew from Ballard Spahr—who served previously for many years as the cyber crime coordinator for the Department of Justice in Delaware—and I have spoken on security and cyber issues many times, and he has a great perspective on how mobile and social media in particular affect what we’re doing as legal professionals. I’m interested to hear what he has to say about The Law of Mobile, Social, and Emerging Technologies. Monica Bay—the former longtime editor-in-chief of LTN and now fellow at Stanford CodeX—will join us for a discussion on that, too, as will Ari Kaplan of Ari Kaplan Advisors and Sean Doherty of 451 Research, who joined 451 this month after many years at LTN.
We’re definitely keeping you guys busy, but what are your plans in between your sessions?
Dean: I’m really looking forward to joining a session Consilio is hosting called “Intelligent Cloud: Ensuring Governance, Risk, Compliance & e-Discovery in Cloud-Based Applications.” I’ll get to join Mark Jenkins, the senior director at Skyhigh Networks, and lead solution architect Mike Silano from Box to talk about the nexus of cloud content in e-discovery. Getting data from places like Box and Dropbox has really started to change the nature of e-discovery.
David: Aside from catching up face-to-face with folks, I’m going to keep my ear to the ground and live tweet as many sessions as I can. I’m also looking forward to this being the first Legaltech in half a decade where I am
