The 4Cs of ILTACON 2025

It was my first time at ILTACON, and while I’ve been to my fair share of legal tech conferences, ILTACON stands apart in terms of its sheer size (4,500 attendees) and scale (some days there were 10 sessions running in parallel). 

The ILTACON theme for 2025 was “pirates” but to me it felt more like a “big fat Greek” family reunion, except we were armed with lanyards and overpriced coffee. The conversations were lively and just like any good family gathering, most people had an opinion on everything! 

With my particular focus on the intersection of knowledge management, AI, and innovation, the sessions I selected and the discussions I engaged in, were shaped by this perspective.

Ultimately, my key insights from ILTACON can be distilled into the 4Cs: Connections, Conversations, Context, and Curiosity. 

1. Connections

For law firms, it’s a chance to bring remote colleagues together. For vendors like us, it’s an opportunity to meet customers, prospects, and even partners or other vendors face-to-face. 

ILTACON brings together professionals from different departments, countries, and backgrounds exchange ideas with openness, humility, and generosity. The willingness to share made every connection meaningful. 

2. Conversations

One of ILTACON’s hidden gems is how openly people share their challenges and compare notes. Leaders come to find out what their peers are doing as well as share their collective joys and pains.

During both our co-hosted roundtable and cocktail hour with BA Insights here's a few themes that stood out:

• KM is back in focus. Firms are increasing headcount and investment to meet AI-driven demand. Firms are also increasingly focused on operationalizing knowledge management, moving beyond high-level strategy to everyday practice. This means embedding knowledge capture and sharing into the flow of work rather than treating it as an afterthought. 

To succeed, firms must: 

• Establish regular rituals for capturing, classifying, and sharing knowledge. 

• Implement governance frameworks to ensure content remains high-quality, relevant, and trustworthy. 

• Design robust information architecture so that knowledge is not only stored, but also findable, usable, and AI-ready. 

By combining strategic vision with operational discipline, firms can close the gap between knowledge management theory and real-world impact. 

• KM roles are becoming more client-facing. Knowledge management leaders are increasingly client-facing, using their deep AI literacy not just internally, but to advise clients on strategy and/or adoption. 

• The pivot problem. With constant change in AI and technology, leaders face uncertainty.  One of the stats presented is a 183% increase in the rate of change (including AI) at law firms over the last four years. 

Leaders are therefore asking themselves, have we picked the right horse?  

• Resource-hungry AI pilots have slowed or stalled planned projects that were already planned before AI arrived. There’s a strong appetite to move from pilots to concrete, sustainable plans. 
  

3. Context is the next big thing

Several sessions mentioned context and context engineering. 

Ilona Logvinova's opening remark on the panel discussion at Search the Age of AI was spot on: "Search used to mean finding a needle in a haystack. Now, with AI, it can feel like you’ve been handed a haystack full of needles." 

In legal, finding the right document is essential. If the foundation of your analysis, opinion, brief, or memo is wrong, everything that follows will be too.  With increasing automation and commoditization of agents, context-specific tools that supply relevant information to models will become the main differentiator. 

Context is of course music to my ears. We’ve spent years making sure that our product Atlas helps law firms automatically capture, structure, enrich and surface knowledge at scale and in context. 

Lawyers or business service team members should not have to learn “prompt engineering” just to get a useful answer. 

The trend is clear: lawyers want to ask a legal question and get an authoritative, contextual response, without wading through irrelevant noise.  

The takeaway? Quality content with context + human in the loop is still the winning formula. 

4. Curiosity

Finally, I was struck by the sheer curiosity and how many of the attendees took time out of their busy schedules to to visit booths and ask lots of questions.

This matters in an era of rapid change. Curiosity is what keeps the legal community learning and evolving. 

However, you could say this initial curiosity (especially from lawyers) may lead to skepticism according to Dr. Larry Richards gave insights into the psyche of a lawyer.   

• Skepticism in lawyers was measured at 90% compared with a 40% average in others 
• Autonomy is 89% in lawyers versus 50% in others 

The legal sector is at an inflection point. Client expectations are rising, AI is moving from novelty to necessity, and firms are looking for ways to scale innovation without losing control.

You could say that the 4Cs I saw at ILTA – Connections, Conversations, Context, and Curiosity are the cornerstones for how we can navigate what comes next.