First Time at the TECHSHOW

We’re here at the Hyatt Regency Chicago for the American Bar Association’s (ABA) 2019 TECHSHOW--and we mean it literally!

We’re posting for you as the TECHSHOW is happening, from booth # 904 (Er … mostly. We did some brainstorming beforehand!).

This is our first year as exhibitors at the ABA TECHSHOW, and we’re half-way through our second day at it. At this point, we’ve found our rhythm, mastered our pitches, and brought some magic to the experience (again, we mean it literally). So we thought we’d share the experience with you.

What is the ABA TECHSHOW?

It’s an annual exhibition of legal technology providers from all corners of the industry from throughout the United States, and it’s a major opportunity for law students, lawyers, and legal professionals to network with each other and with us, the legal tech providers, about how various forms of legal technology can automate, simplify, and expedite their legal work.

It’s hosted every year by the American Bar Association, which is a voluntary bar association that sets a lot of educational standards for law schools throughout the United States.

Why Are We Here?

Multiple reasons, and they come together in the end!

First, we’ve understood for a while now what the American Bar Association’s 2018 Techreport re-confirmed (because they said it last year and they’re saying it again): legal technology’s use for practice management by attorneys and legal professionals has “plateaued” in the last few years despite high customer satisfaction with legal technology.

Put differently, our industry’s growth has leveled off across law firm demographics; it’s smoothed out like a tabletop.

Now, this is neither good nor bad, technically. The legal industry is curious about technology, happy when they have it, but cautious about implementing it. So our marketplace is stable. But what business prides itself on being stable?

Second, per the recommendations of our users, we’re now fully integrated with Outlook and Gmail, and our users can seamlessly access LawPay, Quickbooks, and CalendarRules from our platform.

On top of that, we’ve made it possible for attorneys to opt-in to receive and respond to questions from clients via text messages. And our biggest enhancement is our Android app, which we launched at the start of February.

All of this brings us to why we’re here.

We want to put a human face on the technology we’re selling.

We wager that solo practitioners and small law firms hesitate to embrace legal technology because they haven’t been shown the humans that work within and between the platform that lets them streamline their work and better interact with their clients. Hence the plateau.

And when we’ve enhanced our platform as much as we have in recent months, we have to be here!

How’s It Going So Far?

It’s been magical!

We’re at a corner booth two lanes over from the escalator that leads down to the convention hall, so as people round our corner from either direction, our magician, Danny Orleans, is able to draw them in and introduce them to SimpleLaw!

Now that it’s the start of Thursday afternoon, we’ve found our routine. With conferences like these, it takes a bit of time to become comfortable reaching out to people--even if that’s why everyone’s there, to reach out to one another.

But our confidence is built up, our mint wrappers are piling up, and our leads keep going up, so we’re ready for the rest of TECHSHOW!