Last Thursday saw the completion of another International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference (don’t call it a tradeshow, the ILTA folks don’t appreciate that :)).  As always, ILTA brought together a seasoned, educated crowd to delve into substantive issues in the comfort of shorts and flip flops.

In a slight departure from the myriad “ILTA Wrapup” blog posts and stories that inevitably follow the event, breathlessly recapping each and every vendor’s announcement about a revolutionary new feature or product, we thought it would be of more value to focus on the trends we saw at the event – several of which were obvious to most, but the first of which may not have been.  Here is our list of the 5 most interesting trends from the event:

• Trend #1: Absolutely Nothing.  OK, the trend isn’t exactly nothing, but rather the fact that no major announcements were made before or at ILTA.  No one acquired anyone else, no one announced a major OEM deal, and no one major announced they were entering the legal IT (meaning eDiscovery) space.  This is a good thing, as it points to continued maturity of the legal IT market – especially eDiscovery, which seems to have slowed down to merely a breakneck speed.  This should allow customers to begin separating substance from marketing hype…which is a very good thing indeed.

• Trend #2: Making Informed Decisions Earlier.  While we primarily saw this trend in eDiscovery – where even pizza-box eDiscovery vendors seem to finally be paying lip service to the fact that customers may actually want to know what their ESI is trying to tell them before it has been identified, preserved, collected, processed, and loaded into the pizza box so it can be culled and (finally, after several weeks) examined.  Clients like to know what they’re getting into before signing up for a big per-GB charge, so the more vendors figure this out the better.  With most of the bargaining power on the side of enterprise customers rapidly becoming educated about the need for a strategic approach to ESI, this was bound to happen.

• Trend #3: Let the Race to “End-to-End” Begin!  As countless observers have noted, it has become vogue to claim to offer an “end-to-end” solution as enterprises are increasingly seeing eDiscovery as a strategic issue that must be dealt with at the infrastructure layer – as opposed to a collection of disparate steps to be addressed by point solutions.  As a result, they are seeking out vendors and products which are 1) integrated across the EDRM lifecycle, and 2) able to accomplish as much of said process with as few disparate steps as possible.  For those very few who already have end-to-end coverage (let alone a fully integrated solution) the confusion resulting from marketing pitches outpacing product capabilities may not be entirely welcome, but for customers this development makes a lot of sense.

• Trend #4: Predictive Coding Hits Critical Mass.  ILTA 2010 was the first time when more than just early adopters expressed knowledge of and interest in Predictive Coding as the future of document review – even risk-averse, staid law firms wanted to know much more as they clearly did not want to continue losing business to their better-armed peers.  And perhaps even more interesting was the fact that more than competitive pressure was driving this newfound interest: large corporate clients were (and are) leading the way to the Predictive Coding future.  Keep an eye on this trend, as it will continue picking up steam into 2011 and beyond.

• Trend #5: Information Management is Vogue Again.  OK, so information management never went out of style…but many information management-related budgets certainly disappeared for a while, especially in the first half of 2009.  At ILTA 2010, however, they seemed to resurface with a vengeance – which is a very good thing indeed.  Even more promising, however, was the importance placed on getting a handle on email for knowledge management and records management purposes.  While the debate rages about how this can and should be done, the debate itself will be both healthy and productive.

ILTA is always an enjoyable event as it brings together a high level audience of people focused on improving their knowledge and their entity’s capabilities.  It is also a useful harbinger of where the industry is headed.  The above five trends will be interesting to watch as we close out 2010 and head into 2011 and LegalTech in February.