I am not a morning person. At home I enjoy my bed. The hotel bed made me considerably more of a morning person as I gave up on productive sleep by 5:45 a.m. and was out exploring the Windy City by 6:15. I had breakfast at a spot on Michigan Avenue called Yolk. I will save any reviews for another day, but suffice it to say that I may go back again tomorrow.
The conference kicked off with an introduction from Paul Unger and soon we were off for our first courses of the day. There are seven different tracks to choose from in a mix and match fashion.
I spent some time in Solo/Small Firm courses hearing about technology options for the little guy and Social Networking/Marketing courses which included information on making use of all of those juicy tidbits the opposing party (and unfortunately our own clients) broadcast on Facebook and Twitter.
After lunch Professor Larry Lessig delivered a fast-pace, entertaining and thought-provoking keynote entitled “Code is Law” where he discussed the impact of the digital age upon the law and our need to adapt the laws of old to fit into our digital society. The address deserves more than I am able to review in this space at this time so I will have to leave it for another post. Do a Twitter search for #ABATECHSHOW to see the stream of comments about the speech and all the other goings-on here. To view the keynote yourself, here is a nearly 50 minute video of the talk along with the slides.
Breaks are scheduled throughout the day to enable the attendees to go through the Expo and meet with vendors. As you would expect, Westlaw and LexisNexis have huge booths but there are a lot of new players in legal tech that are showing off their products. A few I have noticed include Rocket Matter for cloud-based practice management and TrialPad for slick trial presentations with the iPad.
Tonight there are several Taste of ABA TECHSHOW dinners. I’m not much of an extrovert, so I am looking forward to spending some time with some of the attendees in a conversation-conducive environment. Earlier I met Jeff Richardson of iPhone J.D. fame and have seen some other people that I respect in the legal tech blogging world that I hope to meet in the coming days.
The highlight of my day has been seeing Hot Mama and Things 1, 2, & 3 on Skype. The girls probably enjoyed seeing themselves on the camera back home as much as they enjoyed seeing me but I am really glad that this technology exists. I appreciate the hard time Hot Mama is going through in my absence. I just hope when I return she doesn’t decide to run off for a few days and stick me with three whiny kids all by myself.
