We’re now less than two weeks away from this year’s ILTACON, which starts Sunday, August 23rd! Here’s the ILTACON 2026 Word Cloud to give you a sense of the primary topics being discussed!

ILTACON 2026 will be conducted August 23 through 27 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, TN.

As I like to do for conferences like this, I took this year’s detailed agenda (linked here) and ran the session titles and descriptions through a word cloud generator. I then reviewed the first cut of it and removed some obvious words from the list: session, without, attendees, across, learning, learn, including and using. I probably could have removed some other obvious words as well (such as legal and technology) but didn’t want to go too far with it. The ILTACON 2026 Word Cloud shown above is the result I got.

Here are some notable terms that occur frequently:

• “AI” is (no surprise) the top occurring word at 203 times, which is 36 times more than last year’s 167 times and over three times as many as 2024! When you add another 13 times for “GenAI” and another single time for “artificial intelligence”, that’s 217 total times! That’s even more than 168 times for “legal” at a legal technology conference! AI rules!
• Taking out “session leaves “practical” as the next occurring word at 81 times. I thought about removing it from the list, but there are several meaningful uses of “practical” in session descriptions, so I kept it in.
• The next top occurring word was “data” at 78 times, which is a considerable drop from last year’s 100 times. That’s surprising.
• Those terms were followed by “support” (67 times), and “teams” (67 times), then “work” (66 times), then “firms” (63 times) and “tools” (62 times). The word “technology” only appears 57 times – another surprise.
• Even there are several sessions related to the topic, “eDiscovery” occurs 10 times, “discovery” occurs 13 times and “e-discovery” occurs once for a total of 24 times combined. That’s a slight rise from last year’s 21 times total.
• The word “security” occurs 30 times (14 less than last year’s total of 44 times), with “cybersecurity” occurring 5 times. That’s 24 times less than security-related terms last year.
• “litigation” occurs 10 times (compared with 13 last year), while we already noted “support” occurs 67 times (so most of the “support” occurrences are not “litigation support”, which occurs 6 times overall).
• “governance” occurs 51 times (compared with 25 last year and only 7 the year before!), but only two of those occur in “information governance”.
• “privacy” only occurs 8 times (which is still more than the 6 times it appeared last year).

A larger version of the ILTACON 2026 Word Cloud is available here.

Hopefully, the ILTACON 2026 Word Cloud gives you some sense of what’s being covered at this year’s ILTACON – way more sessions related to AI, also more sessions related to eDiscovery, comparable session counts for cybersecurity, litigation support, information governance, hardly any sessions on privacy.

I’ll be covering the conference as press again this year and I’m excited to be a panelist in the session Trust but Verify: Validating AI Workflows in eDiscovery on Tuesday, August 25th at 10:30am. I’ll be presenting along with Tiana Van Dyk, Managing Director, Canada at Epiq; Cristin Traylor, Senior Director, AI Transformation & Law Firm Strategy at Relativity and Umair Muhajir, Vice-President, AI & Review Services at DISCO! Join us to learn how legal organizations can transform their workflows by elevating data, information strategy, and human capability into strategic assets in a defensible, scalable, and repeatable manner!

I’ll highlight that session and a few other notable sessions in the coming days. Stay tuned!

So, what do you think? Are you planning to attend ILTACON 2026?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.