The curtain has come down on ILTACON 2026, where more than 5,700 legal technology professionals gathered August 23-27 at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland for the Coachella of legal tech conferences. Team Steno is still buzzing about the week’s two biggest takeaways: community matters, and customer service differentiates.

The week opened with ILTACON Rock, and ILTA CEO Joy Heath Rush telling a packed room that this year's theme was resilience, and that ILTACON is "a version of ‘choose your own adventure.’" Then ILTA Board President Jason Dirkx delivered the line that framed the entire event: "What makes ILTA ILTA is the community."

Community Matters

Community was the throughline of the week, and it showed up early. On Tuesday morning, Steno co-sponsored the SOLID Breakfast alongside Litera, Newcode.ai, and NetDocuments, where David Cowen delivered his 21st annual State of the Industry. The biggest lessons came through the stories of success shared around the room. Behind every successful transformation were people who challenged, supported, guided, and opened doors for one another. Cowen distilled the core point into one key line: "The greatest accelerator of AI transformation isn't technology. It's people."

The ILTA community literally builds the conference itself. The content is peer-powered, with volunteers choosing the sessions and colleagues leading them. "KM Roundtable 2.0: KM + AI - From Inspiration to Implementation" showed why that model works: 100+ ILTAns, guided by leaders including Sara Miro (Sullivan & Cromwell), Vishal Agnihotri (Alston & Bird), Oz Benamram (Pillsbury Winthrop), and Kevin Bosshardt (Saul Ewing), sharing their challenges and working through the industry's most pressing issues together. The best problem solving happens when people can put their problems in front of peers, ask questions openly and honestly, and collect new perspectives that only come when vendors, law firms, and corporate legal teams are in the same room.

Community is also central to how Steno grows. The week before ILTACON, we appointed Jon Hefler as our VP of Growth. Jon is a twenty-year builder of court reporting and litigation support businesses, from co-founding TSG Reporting to serving most recently as Chief Strategy Officer at Lexitas. At Steno, he will design and lead new growth programs as we deepen our footprint across the AmLaw 200, Fortune 500 companies, and national insurance carriers, all with a mandate centered on the community we serve.

Customer Service Differentiates

If community is what fills the room, customer service is what separates the companies in it. Above the Law caught me on the conference floor early in the week for a takeaway, and it doubles as the Steno operating thesis: "The biggest differentiator is not the tech or AI, it's the customer service—the white glove experience clients receive and the hospitality mindset that companies operate with that separates the vendors in the room from the partners."

It helps to remember what everyone in that room is up against. By Legaltech Hub's count, shared during "Managing AI Tool Overload" with Johnny Wong (Littler Mendelson), Tim Fox (Ogletree Deakins), and Christina Natale (HIKE2), there are nearly 1,200 generative AI solutions on the legal market, with platform competition running hot and product updates landing weekly. It’s still early innings and everyone is overwhelmed and still learning. While no one can control the market's pace, firms and their partners can control how they take care of people while everything changes: the service and the user experience, the same two things that carry change management and adoption.

That hospitality mindset ran through the week's best adoption advice, because inside a firm, the innovation team has clients too. Laura Chance, Manager of Knowledge Solutions at Stradley Ronon, is a self-identified "information therapist," and her house rule for approaching lawyers' workflows reads like guest etiquette: "No one wants you to come into their house and say your dishes are dirty." From her perspective, meeting difficult change management challenges with empathy will help you with adoption more than anything else. She offered a pro tip in the same spirit: "When you start technology adoption, talk to your secretaries."

Her fellow panelist Michelle Zaman of Morrison & Foerster made the service case in the language of trust. "Just because something is mandated, doesn't mean it is trusted," she pointed out. 

A lawyer can log in every day and still not receive value. Her three steps for any adoption program double as a customer service playbook: 

1. Understand how people work.

2. Identify the pain points in their workflows.  

3. Bridge that gap with real solutions. 

After that, it’s time to  give people an opportunity to experiment and support channels with trainers and with peers, so they can learn from each other.

The training conversation reached the same place. In "Human-Centered AI Adoption," Sarah Hirebet (Stradley Ronon), Johnathan Nixon (Crowell), Ian Nelson (Hotshot), and Rebekah Everest (Kelley Drye & Warren) shared their adoption playbook, while Everest named what a white glove rollout is made of. "It's not tech training.” she explained, “It's change management, it's culture." 

Nixon added a standard any service team would recognize. "If you're not prepared to do it right, be prepared to do it again," he said. And in the conference's final panel, Melanie Prevost (Vinson & Elkins) and Toby Franklin (Paul, Weiss) extended the theme to communication itself. The channel is part of the message, they explained, so meet people in the channels they use.

Steno Takes the Stage

How will we train the next generation of lawyers when AI is doing the grunt work, the non-billable, "character-building" labor that used to be the training ground for new associates? 

That question has been bubbling up all year, and at ILTACON it got its own session: "AI as a Teammate: Use Cases That Drive Talent Development," moderated by Kathryn Rattigan (Robinson+Cole) and coordinated by TaShika Lewis (Cooley LLP). Representing Steno, I joined the panel that also included Damien Riehl (Clio), Daniel Himmel (Legora), and Nick Hafen (BYU Law School).

The use case I shared was the attorney digital twin, or more accurately, the doppelgänger, an idea I wrote about for the Daily Business Review in July and put a finer point on in Nashville. A generic AI assistant produces output calibrated against a broad model of what legal writing looks like. A doppelgänger is calibrated against what one lawyer's writing looks like: how they open an argument, how they handle an adverse fact, how they structure a concession so it reads as confidence rather than retreat. It is not trained on the internet. It is trained on your work.

This is where the training question gets answered. A junior lawyer runs a draft through the doppelgänger, studies where their instincts diverge from the model's choices, and arrives at the partner markup with a hypothesis rather than a blank page. Doing so compresses the feedback loop mentorship has always tried to create, and it turns the judgment of a firm's best lawyers into institutional infrastructure, available at 11 PM. when the partner is unreachable. And every firm already owns the raw material.

It's also worth addressing the most pointed question that came from the audience during our Q&A: will legal assistants and paralegals lose their jobs? It depends on leadership mindset. A firm can cut costs to preserve an old billing structure and stay profitable on a shrinking footprint. That is scarcity. Or it can aim for abundance, expand productivity and capture more work with the team, now supercharged, that already knows how the firm operates.

Every answer we gave rested on the same foundation, and TaShika named it in her recap of the session. "There may eventually be AI doppelgängers for research, drafting, and knowledge retrieval,” she said. “There is no doppelgänger for human judgment." The judgment stays human. That is why successful AI adoption is ultimately a talent development strategy, not just a technology strategy. Above the Law covered the panel in depth.

Quick Hits: 6 More Memorable Sessions

There were more sessions worth writing about than one post can hold. A few that stayed with us:

• Whose Legal AI Workflow Is It Anyway? This improv-style CLE workshop tackled matching the AI to the task, and Michael Ertel of Crowell & Moring supplied a metaphor that cut deep: "Sometimes you need a chef's knife and sometimes you need a sashimi knife."

• The Legal Org Universe: The Future Opportunities of Chief AI Officers, Legal Engineers, Heads of Innovation, and Legal Operations. Mapping the leadership roles reshaping legal organizations. Oyango Snell, President & CEO of CLOC, opened by asking Carl Morrison what “legal operations” is and why it matters, and Morrison drew a clean boundary: "Legal engineers are there to build. Legal operations are there to move."

• Platform Wars: Which AI Tools Do Lawyers Really Want? Champion-building turned out to be the sleeper theme here. Mark Babcock of Barnes & Thornburg told the room where champions come from: "If a tool enables a rainmaker partner to make more money, they will be your biggest champion."

• Change Management for Legal Technology Transformation. Rachel Shields Williams of Bass, Berry & Sims delivered the thesis every innovation team should adopt: "Fall in love with solving the problem, not the technology."

• G100/G200 Closing Keynote. Karen Campbell, CIO of Foley Hoag, shared lessons from her conversations with fellow CIOs: AI measurement has to be tied to the firm's business goals, and the hidden costs of transformation, from change management to adoption to workflow disruption, get lost in the shuffle when firms focus on subscriptions, licenses, and token costs. The structural costs are real, even though they're not on the invoice.

• Who Gets Paid When the Work Gets Cheap. For the macro view, Ed Walters, VP of Legal Innovation & Strategy at Clio, delivered a master class on law firm economics,  tracing how AI is compressing the associate hours that anchor firm profitability and why the winners will hunt new markets instead of cutting costs. He reminded the room what happened when Blockbuster passed on buying Netflix, then closed with the week's sharpest warning: "The riskiest thing law firms can do is nothing."

The Pinkest Booth at ILTACON

Meanwhile at Booth 225, Steno leaned into the conference's official musicals theme with a Legally Blonde tribute built around one line: "What, like it's hard?"

Laura Bell Bundy, who originated the role of Elle Woods on Broadway, joined us Tuesday to greet attendees and take part in an in-booth conversation with David Cowen about what it takes to make brutally hard things look effortless.

The booth also doubled as a studio. Our podcast Between the Briefs just celebrated two years and 70+ hot takes thanks to hosts Joe Stephens and Adrian Cea. To honor the occasion, we recorded a special live episode with our limited-edition Hot Takes hot sauce on the table. 

Throughout the week, David Cowen joined us in the booth to host live episodes of Careers and the Business of Law, featuring conversations with the people shaping legal tech. The full guest lineup:

• Cindy Bare, Chief Data and Innovation Officer, FBT Gibbons
• Christopher Emerson, Chief Legal Operations and Innovation Officer, Quarles
• Jeffrey Roach, Managing Director, Harbor
• Sarah Hirebet, Director of Knowledge & Innovation, Stradley Ronon
• Rachel Shields Williams, Director of AI and Knowledge Management, Bass, Berry & Sims
• Priti Saraswat, Director of Knowledge & Innovation, Levenfeld Pearlstein, LLC
• Megan McMillin, Legal Innovation Partner, Harvey
• Damien Riehl, Solutions Champion, Clio
• Leigh A. Zeiser, Director of AI & Automation, Troutman Pepper Locke LLP
• Kathryn Rattigan, Partner, Robinson+Cole

See You Next Year

Next August, the expo floor undoubtedly will be full of tools none of us have even heard of yet. But what compounds from year to year isn’t just the technology on display. It’s the peer-powered sessions, the hallway generosity, the service standards that separate partners from vendors, and the community that makes ILTA ILTA.

Thank you to Team Steno for making the week happen, to the ILTA organizers, and to everyone who stopped by Booth 225 to talk shop. See you next year!

What, like litigation support is hard?