After three years of online meetings, ELTA could finally have a normal on-site conference and all the ELTA members could meet in person again. On November 29 the ELTAcon 2022 was arranged in Tel Aviv, Israel with the focus on how to get practical. The conference started with an ambassador meeting the day before and ended November 30 with the “start-up nation tour” so we had a great three-day experience. The conclusion from these three days is that the ELTA conference has turned out to become a great networking event combined with inspiring content. If you want to catch up with people in the legal tech world outside UK and the US, this is the event to go to.
Itzik Amiel professionally guided us through the whole conference and shared some great insights, which helped keep the energy level high amongst the audience.
Since it is time to now move on from big strategies and ideas, we need to focus on how we get all this tech to work in practice to support our business. Hopefully the development towards the “Industry Cloud”, presented by Sebastian Hartman, can support this development. The result ought to be less focus on tech itself and more on the business development using tech.
Interestingly, we had Pedro Tavares, Secretary of State for Justice of Portugal presenting an offensive approach to digitizing the legal sector. I just hope this can inspire other countries to further proceed with their digitalization.
Now also AI seems to become less mysterious and more of a tool in the toolbox to support our work. Therefore, it was great to see the presentation by Dr Eyal Shnarch from IBM. Naturally it was fascinating how they have been developing the Project Debater, but of more practical interest was the free, open-source, no-code system “Label Sleuth” which was the result of the needs from their own legal department. According to 
Shnarch, the legal department started analysing their own agreements by creating their own AI model using “Label Sleuth” for only 6 hours. Even if more time is needed, the development seems to be heading in the right direction.
It is also valuable to learn from people who are successful and share some of their lessons learned. Aidas Kavalis, co-founder of Amberlo, stressed the importance of setting the right price. Initially Ambero made the mistake of setting the price too low and thinking the solution would sell itself (which is a situation many startups get trapped in). If they would have continued in that direction, they would probably have ended up in the “startup graveyard”. Instead, he stressed the importance of selling value to your client and experiment with different pricing models. You won’t figure it out right away but once you think you have a workable strategy, enter a new part of the market and try it out!