Who's it for? (ABA TechShow 2019)

At 7 PM the night before TechShow began, I decided to make the drive to Chicago to attend the giant conference. My friends Jess Birken and Megan Zavieh had encouraged me to get my butt there and I finally relented the day before a long drive. It took some serious caffeine to get there.

And, to be honest, it took some serious caffeine to get through the event. My first trip to TechShow was simultaneously energizing and draining, social and isolating, educational and uninformative. As much as it filled me up, I found it ultimately taxing. I even decided at the end of the event that it's time to quit caffeine and find better ways of getting through. I might have the same prescription for the organizers of TechShow.

I've written elsewhere about the trouble with legal conferences, so I'll focus this article by asking two of Seth Godin's favorite questions: Who's it for and what's the change you want to see?

The Who

Every live event has two groups who pay the bills: the attendees and the sponsors. Generally the sponsors get a lot of focus because they pay the big chunks, while attendees are the product sold to the sponsors. I've never felt that so keenly as at TechShow.

Several conference sessions were explicitly paid for, the content designed by sponsors to sell the sponsor's wares. The pay-to-play environment was transparent. Attendees seemed mostly okay with this arrangement, especially if they were given a boxed lunch to enjoy while they listened to pitches.

So, is the conference for the sponsors? And if that's the case, do the sponsors get what they want out of it?

I spoke with several sponsors about their experience with TechShow. The general sense I got was that they don't expect to get actual clients out of the event. One told me that his company's purpose in attending is to scope out the competition and make some strategic partnerships. No judgment there. If that's what TechShow is selling, that's a good worth having.

Or maybe the conference is for the attendees? If so, what kind of attendees are the organizers trying to attract and serve?

I'm told that TechShow is targeted more to the solo/small market than other events like ILTA or CLOC. Since these are my "peeps," I feel qualified to judge whether the event hits this mark. In short, it does as well as any other legal event I've gone to, which probably isn't much of a compliment.

Nearly every practicing attorney I spoke to said their purpose in attending is not the instruction, but the interaction. The event is kind of a stake in the ground that attracts small practitioner friends and several of us in the LawTwitter bubble find ways to sneak away from the show and hang out. If TechShow is for attendees, it seems more designed to chase the attendees away to Chicago's many fine restaurants.

So the event may be for sponsors and it may be for attendees. I really couldn't tell because neither seemed to experience a designed change, which is the second of Godin's questions.

The Change

What's the change the organizers want to see? This question is fundamental to designing any kind of product, and it's especially important when you have multiple interest groups. What is it that TechShow aims to accomplish for its "who"?

I decided to check the website. "ABA TECHSHOW is where lawyers, legal professionals, and technology all come together," the site's front page declares. "For three days, attendees learn about the most useful and practical technologies available. Our variety of CLE programming offers a great deal of education in just a short amount of time."

This seems to suggest that the attendees are the "who" and that tech training and quick CLE are the "what." Does the event deliver that change? Probably not.

The learning sessions aren't really designed for learning. That's typical of these live legal events, but TechShow takes credit-as-pedagogy to another level. In fact, I found out that several of the speakers submitted proposals for subjects totally different than the ones the TechShow organizers gave them. One small firm speaker, for example, had proposed several ideas related to running a small firm but was handed a session on a subject she'd never before researched or experienced. She felt like the organizers just wanted to check the box that covered a given subject and included some gender diversity. The actual learning wasn't the priority.

At the Lawyer Forward conference, we organized training material into 18-minute TED-style talks and interactive small group workshops. Those aren't the only ways to do it, and several smart lawyers are finding ways to design more human-centered training. I don't know how an event as large as TechShow can design for more intimacy and interactivity, but it's needed. A room full of lawyers barely listening to a subject the speaker doesn't really know will get you the quick CLE credit, but it doesn't do much for actual learning.

So I'm still not really sure what change the organizers are after. If it's passing familiarity with a bunch of tech products who've paid for exposure, maybe the event is fine. I might target the materials more toward handling these technologies – an option better for both attendees and sponsors – but that might be wishing for too much. This is just one of so many legal conferences that do what's needed to get CLE credits and sponsor dollars. We're mostly content to play along.

The Path Forward

Having attended LegalTech only once, I hesitate to offer broad prescriptions. Instead, let me suggest a broad principle: segmentation.

I noticed that the best-attended sessions were on the academic track. Those who attended the academic sessions seemed engaged, excited, and all on the same page. I think that's a result of the focus on audience.

Law schools are all in similar spots in the LegalTech landscape. Obviously there are differences. The top ten schools teach technology as a research discipline while many small schools do it as a backdoor path to relevance. Still, the schools all seem to be asking similar questions. That makes designing the experience much easier.

The TechShow organizers could accomplish similar results with the solos and smalls it targets. One thing I've learned in my years of training solos and smalls is that we're all over the map. Some are very tech-savvy, some don't know where the power button is; some want just enough tech to get back to the library, some would rather play with an iPad than practice; some want to build audience as a soloprenuer, some want to run an expertise-focused business. Designing a session for that kind of diversity seems impossible.

So stop. Don't have sessions that satisfy all of those people. Do a better job of segmenting the audience and of designing paths for them. Encourage attendees to follow the path you design, but give them flexibility to choose sessions outside their path if they want.

Think of it like the "Start Here" page of a website. If the site is designed for the user, it'll say things like "If you're X type of person, then here's the path for you..." Do a similar thing for conference attendees. And segment as much as you can. Design one unique path for "newer lawyer with an interest in transactional law who loves social media" and a different path for "experienced attorney who just started a practice and is transitioning from Word Perfect to Google Apps." With the kind of scale this event has, you could probably create 100 custom paths and not go too far. Use questionnaires to assign attendees to the right path and then hand them a map through it.

Adaptive operations are the future of all businesses. Rather than ask users to adjust to your thrown together CLE, create experiences that adapt to them. This principle is why your Amazon.com looks different than my Amazon.com. The experience is adaptive. Try to create that for the conference attendees.

In Sum

TechShow was fine. I got to hang out with people I really like and can name a couple of technologies that were new to me. If that's what the TechShow people want and attendees and sponsors are still willing to pay for it, whatever. Keep doing it.

But we can do better by asking who the event is for and designing the change we want to see in them. By segmenting better and adapting the experience to each user, events like TechShow can use their exposure to create real change.