Tales from LegalTech: Day Two

You can’t make this stuff up!  We arrived at LegalTech 2009 yesterday ready for a full day of sessions on using Web 2.0 tools in a legal practice only to discover that WiFi was not available in the Web 2.0 conference room.  The irony of that situation did not escape participants, and the live bloggers were vocal on the subject.  Thankfully, the irony did not escape the conference organizers and Judy Kelly of Incisive Media quickly got WiFi access for the live bloggers in the room.  Unfortunately, the first session was already well underway by the time the WiFi was finally made available.  As a result, that first session was not fully reported on Twitter. Thankfully, the other two sessions were and you’ll be able to see the stream of Tweets by searching Twitter using the hashtag #LTNY.

The organizers of LegalTech did go out of their way to invite bloggers to “Live Blog” the sessions.  In fact, they treated us to breakfast on Tuesday morning and gave us an opportunity to introduce ourselves and our blogs.  Very nice.  It will be interesting to see what gets written in the daily blogs and once folks return to their own lives and have had chance to think further about what they saw and heard.

For me, the big surprise was Twitter.  I had gone to LegalTech fully expecting to write 3-4 paragraph blog posts at each session.  Instead, I discovered the power of tweeting the conference.  There was an immediacy and energy about Live Microblogging that was irresistible and effective.  We were getting the information out as quickly as we could cram it into 140 character packages.  And, we were getting responses back from other bloggers in the room, as well as tweeple around the world.  In fact, tweeple outside the conference tweeted their questions to us and we put them to the panelists.  Suddenly the sessions were relevant to far more than the hardy few who braved the bad weather in NYC to attend.

Over the next few days, I will do some blogging on the sessions I attended.  Above all, Lee Bryant and I will be posting notes and slides from our session yesterday (which, unfortunately, was the one for which we did not have full WiFi access).  Until then, do take a look at the Twitter stream.  It gave a remarkably accurate snapshot of the flow of conversation and key quotes from the sessions.  For my money, Live Microblogging via Twitter was definitely the way to go.

[Photo Credit:  kopp0041, Creative Commons license]