ILTACON 2026 is on! The conference has already started with the Opening Reception last night, so here are Monday happenings at ILTACON 2026!

As I discussed here and here, the International Legal Technology Association’s (ILTA) annual conference ILTACON 2026 is being conducted this week at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, TN. The conference has already started with the Opening Reception last night and today is the first day of sessions!

Each day at ILTACON 2026, eDiscovery Today will highlight notable sessions for the day – in most cases, those sessions will relate to eDiscovery, Information Governance, cybersecurity, data privacy, or artificial intelligence (as well as a few other happenings during the week).

Also, several eDiscovery Today partners are exhibiting at ILTACON this week. Here they are with their booth numbers: Epiq-430, Everlaw-331, KLDiscovery-213, Relativity-210, and Syllo-747. Please check them out!

Here are Monday happenings at ILTACON 2026!

9:00 AM – 10:30 AM CDT:

ILTACON Opening Session with Keynote Jim Abbott (Delta Ballroom A)

How do we learn to be grateful for the circumstances we are born into? From Michigan to Yankee Stadium, Jim Abbott’s story draws upon an extraordinary and improbable life spent facing down adversity on and off the baseball diamond. Being born without a right hand, Jim learned at an early age the importance of creativity, accountability and trust. Each of these principles would play a profound role as he made his way from learning to throw and catch a baseball with the same hand to ultimately throwing a triumphant no-hitter in Yankee Stadium. His talk explores that unique journey and the impact it would have not only on children and families around the country, but also on how we all can come to celebrate the challenges that make us who we are.

Speaker: Jim Abbott. 

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CDT:

eDiscovery Roundtable: The Destruction and Spoliation Edition (Tennessee AB)

As we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, we examine how both significant disasters and everyday data failures affect the work of e-discovery and legal data professionals as they preserve data for litigation and other legal proceedings. From truly tragic events, such as September 11 and catastrophic hurricanes, to almost comical tales of modern data lost, we’ll examine questions such as: 

How much data do your organization and your clients really need to preserve?

When does data destruction become spoliation?

What are some of the best practices for data preservation?

What special considerations are there for preservation of mobile data and social media?

What role does AI play in data preservation?

We’ll have our traditional review of relevant case law along with our panel of technologists and lawyers analyzing these issues and more. As always, the Roundtable is your opportunity to join the discussion and, for 2026, share your thoughts on historical events and modern data challenges.

Speakers: Scott Milner, Partner, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, L.L.P.; David Horrigan, Discovery Counsel and Legal Education Director, Relativity ODA LLC; Deeanna Fleener, Senior Manager, Practice Support, K&L Gates; Marcin Krieger, Associate, Reed Smith LLP; Julie Lewis, President & CEO, Digital Mountain, Inc.; Alex Sappington, Co-CEO, Page Vault, Inc.

Caution to Confidence Prompting Techniques Promoting AI Adoption (Volunteer North)

This session is not about basic prompting—it’s about helping legal professionals build confidence by safely “failing fast” while designing AI workflows attorneys can trust. Legal teams often create prompts that look fine in isolation but break down when applied across different matters, users, or edge cases—the unusual, messy, or high‑complexity scenarios where AI is most likely to fail. To handle this real‑world variability, effective AI adoption requires structured experimentation, governed iteration, and psychological safety. 

Participants will learn advanced prompting techniques such as task decomposition—breaking complex legal tasks into smaller, AI‑ready steps—along with multi‑step prompting, chaining, and agent‑style workflows. These strategies enable rapid testing and refinement without compromising quality, ethics, or professional judgment. 

We’ll also address the human side of adoption: how to give feedback, evaluate AI‑generated work, and move past the fear of “getting it wrong.” Attendees will leave with practical patterns for building AI workflows that improve through iteration—transforming experimentation from a liability into a strength. 

Key Takeaways 

• Learn how to “fail fast” safely so you can build confidence and improve your prompting skills without risk. 
• Use task decomposition to break complex legal tasks into clear, AI‑ready steps that produce more reliable results. 
• Apply simple advanced prompting patterns (multi‑step prompting, chaining, early agent workflows) to improve consistency. 
• Evaluate prompts using repeatable criteria for accuracy, completeness, and usability 

Speakers: Ken Lam, AI Transformation Project Engineer, Thomson Reuters; Sierra Gaines, Lawyer, Miller Thomson LLP; Ian Lopez, Manager Business Intelligence, Ballard Spahr LLP; Michael Ott, Partner, Ice Miller LLP.

Whose Legal AI Workflow Is It Anyway? An improv-style CLE workshop. (Delta B)

As legal organizations and corporate law departments move beyond standalone AI tools, the next frontier is agentic workflows—AI systems that reason across multiple steps, call tools, retrieve and analyze documents, and collaborate with humans to complete complex legal tasks. But knowing how to design these workflows remains a challenge for many firms.

This interactive, improv-style session invites the audience to help design legal AI workflows in real time.

Attendees will call out real legal use cases—from contract review and regulatory monitoring to litigation prep and client alerts—and the speakers will work through them live, demonstrating how to transform an idea into a practical, agentic AI workflow using the tools firms already have, such as Harvey, Legora, Leya, and low-code workflow platforms.

Rather than presenting pre-built examples, the session will walk through the full design process with audience participation:

1. Use Case Selection (Audience Driven)

Audience members propose legal tasks they would like to automate or augment. The panel evaluates which ideas are suitable for agentic workflows and which should remain human-led.

2. Workflow Decomposition (Live Design)

The speakers break the selected use case into discrete steps—identifying where AI agents can retrieve documents, analyze information, summarize findings, and where lawyers must review or intervene.

3. Tool and Platform Mapping

The panel maps each step to realistic firm tools (Harvey, Legora, Leya, DMS, KM systems, and low-code workflow builders), showing how workflows can be built without custom coding.

4. Guardrails and Human-in-the-Loop Controls

The group designs approval points, validation steps, and escalation paths to manage risk and preserve attorney judgment.

5. Adoption and Value Discussion

The session concludes with discussion on how such workflows would be rolled out, measured, and refined in a real firm environment.

Through this live, audience-driven format, attendees will see how agentic workflows differ from simple prompt-based tools and gain a repeatable framework for designing their own AI workflows back at their firms.

Participants will leave with:

A practical design method for agentic legal workflows

A clearer understanding of which use cases work (and which don’t)

Confidence that workflows can be built with existing firm tools

A deeper appreciation for the role of lawyers in supervising AI

Speakers: Michael Ertel, Director of Practice Innovation, Crowell; Christian Lang, Head of Innovation, Barbri; Max Paterson, Adjunct Professor, Cornell University Law School.

2:30 PM – 3:30 PM CDT:

AI Is Already in Your Organization, Is Your Privacy Program Ready? (Davidson North)

A practical, step-by-step approach that helps organizations move from reactive, ad-hoc privacy compliance to a defensible program that can adapt as AI and regulations evolve. Learn how to build privacy maturity in phases, from data mapping and policies to systems that enforce them, while navigating the convergence of AI and privacy enforcement across US and EU jurisdictions.

This is not about theoretical compliance, it’s about translating policy into controls and evidence, and making measurable progress with limited time, budget, and internal patience.

Speakers: Michelle Merola, Partner, Hodgson Russ LLP; John LaBarre, Chief Legal Officer, Harvey; Andy Ward, Global Director Information Governance, eSentio Technologies.

Does AI Truly Break Down Knowledge and Content Barriers? (Delta B)

Legal organizations and corporate law departments often struggle with gatekeeping around content and knowledge. This session explores whether and to what extent AI can democratize access to information while maintaining security and compliance, and what other tools may be equally if not better suited to facilitate this access. Learn strategies for developing content workflows to ensure accessibility without sacrificing governance.

Key Takeaways:

Understand how to remove barriers to knowledge sharing.

Learn best practices for balancing accessibility and security.

Explore tools and techniques for firm-wide content management.

Speakers: April Brousseau, Director, Knowledge & Research Services, Harbor Global LLC; Emily Florio, Director of Knowledge Research and Resources, DLA Piper; Rebecca Holdredge, Knowledge Management & Innovation Director, Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.

Litigation Support Reimagined: Skills, Structure, and Expectations (Tennessee AB)

Litigation support is no longer a back-office function. Today’s teams are expected to shape data strategy, guide technology decisions, and influence case outcomes in a rapidly evolving legal tech landscape.

This session examines how litigation support teams are redefining their role, the skills and structures required to meet rising expectations, and how they can demonstrate value beyond traditional cost metrics. 

Attendees will leave with practical insights into building future-ready teams that operate as strategic partners.

Speakers: Shawn McClurg, Director of Practice Solutions, Miles & Stockbridge P.C.; Ashley Godevais, Vice President, Account Management, Page Vault, Inc.; Ann Halkett, Director, SOLVED eDiscovery Services, Alexander, Holburn, Beaudin + Lang LLP; Steven Heitz, Director of Litigation Technology, Troutman Pepper Locke LLP.

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM CDT:

From Intake to Destruction: Mapping the Modern Data Lifecycle (Davidson North)

Legal organizations and corporate law departments generate enormous volumes of data across the client and matter lifecycle, yet most still lack a unified, end to end understanding of how that data moves, who owns it, and how to govern it effectively. This session follows the modern “data journey” from new business intake through retention and disposition, highlighting opportunities for automation, compliance, metadata governance, security controls, and analytics at every stage.

The session also examines how repository strategies are evolving in 2026 as firms recognize that “approved” repositories are not always used repositories. Through real examples and comparative approaches, participants will explore when traditional DMS centric models work, when they don’t, and what modern, scalable alternatives enable lawyers to work naturally across Teams, fileshares, and other platforms while maintaining governance.

Attendees will leave with practical strategies to raise IG maturity and operationalize governance at scale without disrupting legal work.

Speakers: Ann Gorr, Legal Technology Consultant & Information Governance Strategist, Ann Gorr, LLC; Jordan Fox, IG Consultant, InOutsource; Andrew Corridore, Associate Director of Information Governance, Foley Hoag LLP.

Leading in Every Direction: Women Shaping Legal’s AI-Enabled Future (Magnolia Mezzanine 11/12)

How women lead up, across, and throughout their organizations, and how sponsorship, allyship, and influence turn expertise into impact.

Leadership in legal does not always come with a title, a large team, or formal decision-making authority. Women in eDiscovery and legal technology are frequently called upon to influence senior leaders, guide teams through change, collaborate across functions, manage client expectations, and introduce new approaches, often all at once.

As artificial intelligence reshapes legal work, these leadership capabilities are becoming even more important. In this candid, practical, and interactive conversation, three women leaders will share how they lead up, lead across, and lead within their teams; build credibility around emerging technology; advocate for responsible innovation; and navigate the unwritten dynamics that can affect women’s advancement. The panel will also examine the distinct roles of mentors, allies, advocates, and sponsors, and how women can cultivate those relationships while opening doors for others.

Through a realistic AI leadership scenario and brief audience exercises, attendees will practice framing an executive recommendation, influencing without formal authority, and identifying one concrete sponsorship or allyship action. Attendees will leave with practical language, strategies, and actions they can use to strengthen their influence and lead change from wherever they sit.

Speakers: Beth Finkle, Executive Director, Women in eDiscovery; Emily Bartkowicz, Litigation Support Manager, Akerman LLP; Maribel Rivera, ACEDS – VP, Strategy and Client Engagement, Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS), a BARBRI Company; Nicole Rapp, eDiscovery AI; Freya Zhou, Fileread AI.

New Rules, New Risks: Discovery Obligations in the AI-assisted Workplace (Tennessee AB)

As organizations adopt more AI-driven tools inside their everyday workflows, a new category of discoverable information is emerging that most teams are not prepared for. Internal chatbots, drafting assistants, automated decision tools, and enterprise LLM deployments are all generating content that can fall within discovery and the question is no longer if it will show up in matters, but when. This session takes a practical look at what this means for eDiscovery teams in 2026. We will talk about where AI-generated data actually lives, which pieces are potentially discoverable (prompts, traces, outputs, version history, logs, vector databases, etc.), and how these systems create new risks around accuracy, transparency, and documentation. We will also discuss what counsel needs to know when advising clients who rely on AI tools day-to-day.

Attendees will leave with a grounded understanding of the emerging obligations, the questions they need to raise early in a matter, and the steps they can take now to avoid being blindsided later.

Speakers: Eric Robinson, Vice President, Global Advisory Services & Strategic Solutions, KLDiscovery; Meredith Perlman, Senior Counsel, Hilgers PLLC; Jigna Dalal, Litigation Support and eDiscovery Director, Beveridge & Diamond, P.C.; Chuck Kellner, Strategic Discovery Advisor, Everlaw.

Here’s a link to the detailed agenda for the week.

In addition to those Monday happenings at ILTACON 2026, there is also the Exhibit Hall Opening Reception in Ryman A, from 7pm to 9pm. Always a terrific networking event!

So, what do you think? Are you checking out the Monday happenings at ILTACON 2026? If you’re here in person, look me up!  And 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.