We’re back, baby!
(At live events, that is.)
My wife and I drove down to Clio’s conference last week. As social feeds filled up with positive Covid test pics and blog posts lambasting the Rainforest-Cafe-as-hotel-venue that is the Gaylord Opryland, I got a bit contemplative about legal events.
Here’s what I decided:
We need a legaltech event to talk about building SaaS/service/media companies—scaling, acquisition, product-market fit, models, etc., and
We need hyper-local innovative events for lawyers. Maybe Lawyer Forward should resurface as a TEDx-style repeatable model.
The second proposal is harder so let’s table that for now, but the first one isn’t obvious, either.
Does legaltech need its own event?
In this issue of Selling to Lawyers, I want to question whether legaltech needs an event, what a successful event might look like, and (if we agree it’s needed) lay out a rough plan for hosting such a thing next year (!!!).
Your job is to tell me why I’m crazy so I don’t take on another thing.
So here we go…
Why Legal-Specific?
When I shared this idea in a Twitter thread, a couple of friends asked why legal would need its own event.
It’s a question worth asking.
The whole premise of Selling to Lawyers is that law is not that different, but it might be different enough to justify special consideration. How about in this case?
First, let’s assume legal is not different enough to justify its own event for tech founders; how else would those founders learn about running a tech company? As my buddy Dan Lear pointed out, they’d have many options.
Dan’s right—there are so many tech events.
A Google search for “best events for new tech founders” yielded more than a billion results. Although I’d urge founders to learn wherever they can, we can excuse them if they feel overwhelmed by all these options.
As with most niche contexts, many founders in legal came from legal. They saw problems in their work and followed the “scratch your own itch” method of development. Now we’re asking them to find events in outside spaces, adapt the messages to a highly-regulated industry, and define go-to-market strategies with non-professional buyers who also happen to be lawyers. That seems like a heavy (meaning, unlikely) lift.
Instead, what if we assume this context is special enough to justify its own event? I’m not sure that’s even a very hot take.
MedTech has its own events; EdTech has several; and so does FinTech…
Each context has unique rules, major players, collaboration opportunities, and systemic forces working against progress. Although some lessons about human behavior and complex systems are universal, I take context-specific events as a sign of maturity.
I don’t know. I say we get together to discuss our weirdness, bring smart people in from outside spaces to diversify our heuristics, and connect with like-minded souls. We can question whether it was worth it later.
What Would Make For a Good LegalTech Event?
All that said, there’s no reason to do this if we can’t deliver value to people with known problems. We have enough vanity in legal circles, so let’s do something important.
After coming home from Clio, Nicole and I walked to our new 8 foot long whiteboard (yay!) in our home office and sketched out what would make for a quality event. Some of our thoughts came from our experience hosting the Lawyer Forward event for five years, some of them from other events we’ve loved/hated, and some are just practical.
Here’s what we came up with:
This should be for builders rather than lawyers. We don’t want any pressure on legaltech founders to sell while they’re at the event. They’re around to participate and learn, not scan badges for email addresses and conference swag.
We’d want a “how to” vibe, balanced with inspiring “why” sessions. We did this at Lawyer Forward with a combination of TED-style talks that quickly break assumptions and small workshops that start conversations.
The group would have to be limited to 150. We could fit more in a big room but too many people makes the workshops impossible. In our experience, workshops are where people actually meet and talk, particularly introverts or other people who tend to hide or feel hidden. We should optimize for that.
I’m going back to Austin. I miss the food. And you know you want to go to Austin.
We’ve historically done 2 days of content spread over three days. So day 1 is a half-day starting in the afternoon, then day 3 ends early. That’s mindful of people’s travel and the fact that only weirdos want conference things to start before 10 am. Weirdos.
Some gatherings should be all together but we also need to make space for small groups hanging out in Austin. We usually did a day 1 dinner together then let small groups form after early togetherness.
There’s also a question of substance. I don’t want to get so broad that it won’t help anyone, or so niched that it won’t apply to anyone.
Specifically I want to make sure we have content for bootstrapping founders. Bootstrappers can build on community in a way that’s well-adapted to legal. We don’t talk enough about that approach.
Events probably already exist to help legal founders play the VC game. We won’t ignore that strategy, but we’d want to give options, especially in the current fundraising environment, and especially when we know women and minority founders aren’t getting a fair share of funding. It’s worth focusing on bootstrapped legaltech companies.
But I see this serving different types of founders who want to explore successful models. I think it’s time we mature the conversation a bit.
A (Not So) Modest Proposal
So what if we did this? What if we targeted an event in Austin in fall 2023?
To make this event happen, we can’t underfund it. Events are notoriously hard to cashflow and I think we’ll need a budget of some $150k. That totally arbitrary number could be allocated as $50k to the experience, $50k to speakers (I’m a big believer in paying speakers something), and $50k to operations. That’s a humble budget, honestly.
Let’s assume attendee tickets should cover ¾ of the cost, so that’d mean $750 a ticket. Can we deliver an educational experience worth a $750 ticket plus travel expenses? Can we focus on the learning while still providing the kind of fun that makes connections? And how do we make it worthwhile to vendors without surrendering the substance to sales pitches? This takes real thinking.
I believe we can do this.
It’d be for builders who use innovative technologies and methods to serve law’s purposes: to preserve a definition of humanity we care about. And we’d have our eyes keenly focused on building change that’s sustainable. That means economic viability, so we can’t just drop a bunch of “shoulds” and hope good will makes change happen.
We’re not out for awards shows or checking an “I’m so innovative” box. This wouldn’t be an anti-event, it would be something we believe should exist in a healthy legal ecosystem.
These are my initial whiteboard thoughts. What do you say?