This week my colleagues and I attended the Netlaw British Legal Technology Forum (BLTF) in London for only the second time since we started working on solutions focused on the legal market. As has become my habit, here are my thoughts from my experience at what was a varied event.
The BLTF is held in a historic Victorian venue which creates a unique atmosphere with vendors, delegates and speakers all closely intermingled, made all the more convivial by the early servings of beer shortly after lunch. This year we had a booth in the main hall area which afforded us plenty of opportunity to meet with delegates and, perhaps most importantly, enabled us to showcase our new team member ZED. We weren't quite sure how he would be received, but I'm pleased to say that every copy of ZED found a new home with an excited delegate - watch out for ZED appearing in workspaces in a law firm near you!
The event was bookended by two exceptional speakers - Professor Richard Susskind and the world renowned Professor Brian Cox who presented on subjects as diverse as the six hypotheses for AI and humankind's moral obligation to the cosmos. Heady stuff indeed! As mind expanding as each subject was, both speakers tethered the subject matter back to the role of the legal industry in establishing the legal frameworks that will govern how humanity will govern, for example, the use of the limitless resources of the galaxy or the ethics of artificial intelligence's impact on evolution itself.
Back down to earth, it was great to spend more time with the British legal industry and to hear from practitioners and leaders alike about their governance and exploitation of unstructured data. Consistent with other regions and industries, all were seeking to understand how they might address their dark data, but many were driven from different perspectives. Most notably, this was the first event where we were engaged by members of Knowledge teams, from a Chief Knowledge Officer to professional support lawyers or paralegals. They are seeking ways to make better organized and classified matter available to their knowledge lawyers and also deal with ensuring knowledge capture as teams change and evolve.
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On that subject, I had a chance to try a different approach to introducing Zero Dark Data to this new audience. In an effort to bring some color I tried using a comic book theme in my TED Talk. My thinking was to illustrate the perspectives of the different characters involved in information governance (IG), from data vigilantes thro sidekicks to data heroes, proposing that law firms and their IG or knowledge teams should be aiming to be heroic in the field. You see, a law firm which acts as a data hero has a complete command of its data, especially that which it stores on behalf of clients, can be trusted by its clients, can leverage its data for new value and can also provide client advisory on how to become data heroes themselves. Oh, and they can comply with the GDPR and reduce their breach blast radius.
I had a blast at the BLTF this year. Plenty of interaction with quality people and plenty of inspiration from quality presenters. We had a few beers too."