Is LegalTech A Good Investment?
by Aaref Hilaly on February 8th, 2008
Two days, 4 customers, 7 journalists, 4 bloggers, 3 analysts, 5 partners, 3 breakfasts, no lunches, 4 dinners, 2 parties, many drinks, countless hallway conversations…and 2 aching feet. That’s what LegalTech 08, held in New York earlier this week, was like for me (1). If traffic at our booth is any guide, then attendance was up significantly from last year. Despite having 3 demo stations, we frequently had people lining up to see the product. And the wait time for an elevator must have broken the 10 minute mark!
Fun as it was, LegalTech is anything but inexpensive. Even a medium-sized booth in an undesirable location costs over $11,000. Add to that the cost of travel, booth rental, and accommodation in one the world’s most expensive cities, and you can easily end up spending three times that amount. Hence the obvious question: is it worth it?
The answer largely depends on what you expect from the show. If lead generation is your exclusive focus, then most tradeshows are a poor investment. No matter how many contacts you zap with the scanner, the cost per lead is probably far higher than other methods of demand creation.
To my mind, the true value of an event like LegalTech is that it gathers everyone together, tears them away from their laptops (if not their Blackberries), and puts them in a frame of mind to think about new things. By simply putting yourself in the flow of ideas, you can identify new trends, explore new partnerships, learn what the competition is saying about you, and generally gather information that will help you make better decisions.
What price can you put on that?
(1) I’m sorry to say that the one item conspicuously missing from my LegalTech list is the conference sessions themselves, only because there was not time. I was particularly sorry to miss the keynotes given by our customers, Pallab Chakraborty from Cisco and Jay Brutz from GE, two of the most insightful opinions you can hear about e-discovery in the enterprise.
