I’m blogging from the ILTA SharePoint event at the Hilton while the LegalTech event continues upstairs.  Attendance was outstanding, I estimate 120-140 in the room.  Bob Daniels, Norm Thomas and Adam Juechter from Microsoft kicked off the event and gave a general overview of SharePoint 2010, with extra focus on the new document management capabilities in 2010 and the potential for it being “the version” that changes DM for legal.  While they covered the key points well and were honest about what SharePoint 2010 can and can’t do for legal DM, the audience seemed to react with some skepticism.  That said, I’ve had several discussions with firms over the past few days who are interested in exploring SharePoint 2010 DM.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the upcoming months.

My presentation was next, and I talked about how SharePoint has evolved in legal over the past several years leading up to the soon-to-be-released 2010 version.  I talked about best practice usage of SharePoint 2007 today, about new and interesting features and capabilities coming in 2010 for law firms, and closed with a look ahead up some trends we’re seeing around SharePoint and information management in general.  I mentioned “master data management” and the future of information integration and access, which stirred a lot of interest from the audience.  I had a couple of great discussions with firms following the presentation about where we might be headed in this area. 

John Belegrade and Doug Horton from Handshake Software presented about “matter centricity” in SharePoint 2010, and how new features such as Business Connectivity Services and Master Metadata Services fill some gaps in the 2007 version. Again, discussed the document management capabilities of SharePoint 2010.  Beginning to see a pattern here?

The final session of the day included presentations from Tom Baldwin of Reed Smith, Guy Wiggins from Kelley Drye and Beau Merserau from Fish and Richardson.  Tom started off, and as always did an outstanding job walking through their “ouRSpace” portal and discussing his project.  Guy spoke about Kelley Drye’s SharePoint extranet and workflow projects, and they’ve done some very impressive work building a new business intake workflow using K2 and SharePoint.  Beau wrapped up with a discussion about Fish’s plans around SharePoint 2010 and – one more time – their plans to explore using SharePoint 2010 as a document management systems.  I really enjoyed Tom’s presentations, especially his comment regarding expertise systems that “you never want a lawyer to enter anything themselves – it will either be outdated or overstated”.  Classic.

I believe that ILTA will be posting my presentation along with the other speakers’ presentations on the ILTA web site shortly.  I’ll update this post when available.

Tuesday was full of media meetings, and discussions with other vendors, clients and partners.  All in all, LegalTech was a great show with a lot of activity and continued buzz around XMLAW.  The SharePoint event also went well, thanks to Kara Portwood and our friends at ILTA.  Both events exceeded my expectations.