Quick summary: ILTACON 2026 drew a record 5,700 attendees, and law firms made one thing clear: meeting room booking friction is still the top pain point. AI is welcome, but only when it is task-specific and easy to trust. And a well-run meeting room, space booking, and digital signage is quietly becoming part of the client experience.
I just got back from ILTACON 2026 in Nashville, and by every measure, it was the biggest ILTACON yet. According to ABA Journal legal tech columnist Nicole Black, this year’s conference drew 5,700 attendees, 1,100 more than last year. Our team had more than 150 conversations. And it was incredible to meet with over 40 customers across four days at our booth.
Three things came up again and again in our new conversations with firms. Meeting room booking is still harder than it should be. Firms want AI they can trust, not AI they have to babysit. And the meeting room itself, from booking to the screen on the wall, is doing more to shape the client experience than most firms give it credit for. Here is what stood out to our team on the show floor.
What We Showed at Booth 665
We showcased three additions perfect for legal teams:
- A booking add-in for Microsoft 365, so legal teams can book rooms and desks without leaving Outlook
- An updated booking calendar for reception and conference services teams, with one-click presets and color-coded meeting types
- ConciergeAI, a natural-language booking agent built into Outlook and Microsoft Teams
Meeting Room Booking Is Still a Friction Point
Booking a room should be the easy part of a law firm’s day. It rarely is. Between hallway conversations and formal meetings at our booth, we heard the same story from firm after firm: difficulty booking services, more complex meetings, no-shows that quietly eat up expensive real estate, and administrative teams reworking reservations and manually updating siloed systems and service teams. of the ongoing changes.Two things came up more than anything else. Firms already on Korbyt Booking, now more than 30 percent of the Am Law 100, told us how much they appreciate a true Microsoft 365 add-in, rather than a COM add-in or a browser tab they have to keep open. And almost everyone who saw our interactive floorplans stopped to look twice, especially when a room card showed more than one photo. In a profession where the room itself is part of the pitch, seeing what a space actually looks like before you book it is more than a nice-to-have.
Legal Teams Are Wary of AI Slop, Not AI Itself
If there was a mood at ILTACON this year, it was skepticism dressed up as curiosity. More than one attendee used the phrase “AI fatigue,” and a few were blunter: they are tired of AI features bolted on for a keynote slide rather than built to solve a real workflow problem. Legal teams also carry a higher bar than most industries, since client confidentiality and matter accuracy are not optional.
That skepticism showed up in the broader coverage of the show, too. In an Above the Law preview of the conference, one Thomson Reuters product leader put it simply: lawyers have shifted from asking whether AI can do something to asking whether they can trust it. That is exactly why we built ConciergeAI as a single-purpose booking agent instead of a general chatbot.
See ConciergeAI in action: Meet ConciergeAI, AI Room and Desk Booking in One Workflow
See ConciergeAI in action: Meet ConciergeAI, AI Room and Desk Booking in One Workflow
Ease of Use Beats Feature Lists, But IT Still Needs a Champion
Nearly every conversation about adoption came back to the same idea: the easier a tool is to use, the faster people actually use it. Attorneys will not read a manual to book a desk, and administrative staff will not learn a new interface mid-trial season.
But ease of use for end users does not remove the work on the IT and operations side. Several attendees told us their biggest obstacle was not the technology itself, but getting executive buy-in and change management support to roll it out firmwide. A few firms mentioned that HR was still managing seating charts in static PDFs, updated by hand whenever someone moved desks. More than one IT leader admitted they had just finished implementing another major system and were not eager to start a new rollout so soon. That fatigue is real, and it is a fair reason to pilot a change with one floor or one practice group before asking IT to roll it out firmwide all at once.
Fragmentation showed up everywhere, too. Multiple firms told us they run room booking, visitor management, and services as three separate tools that barely talk to each other. Nobody in those conversations wanted another standalone tool. They wanted whatever they added next to sit alongside the systems they already run. They wanted a comprehensive solution, one that could handle multiple workflows and integrations.
The Meeting Room Is a Brand Moment and a Billing Event
For a law firm, the meeting room is not just a scheduling problem, it is where a client forms an impression. Firms that stopped by our booth understood immediately how Korbyt Booking and Korbyt’s meeting room signage work together: sync a room’s calendar, then let the screen outside that room greet the client by name, show the firm’s branding, or point them to the right floor. All while in-room signage displays the firm’s brand, live news, or industry trends.
Signage was only half of that conversation, though. The other half, and the part that made it specifically a legal one, was billing: client-matter integration with financial systems like 3E, Aderant, and Chrome River, and more, is not an afterthought. It is built into how bookings and service requests already get billed back to the right matter. Add AV and catering coordination on top of that, as in how Kennedys uses Korbyt Booking and Visitor Management, and the meeting room stops being a logistics headache and starts being part of the client experience your firm controls.
Where This Leaves Legal Teams
ILTACON 2026 confirmed something we already believed: booking process is still broken at too many firms, AI only earns trust when it is scoped and reliable, and the meeting room is one of the most visible touchpoints a firm has with its clients. The single request we heard most often after that was for smarter, more customizable reporting. If your firm is still managing rooms, desks, and seating charts across three disconnected tools, let’s talk.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to common questions about ILTACON and law firm workplace technology.
ILTACON is the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), a global community of more than 25,000 legal technology professionals. ILTACON 2026 was held August 23 to 27 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, Tennessee, and drew a record 5,700 attendees.
Most firms run booking, Exchange, video conferencing (MS Teams, Zoom, WebEx) and client-matter in separate systems that do not talk to each other well. That gap creates double bookings, wasted real estate, and hours of manual rework for administrative teams, especially when client visits get added on short notice.
Purpose-built booking agents let employees reserve a room or desk in one natural-language message from Outlook or Teams, using the firm’s existing booking rules. That is different from a general AI chatbot, since the agent is scoped to one task and one set of firm data.
Three themes dominated the conversations at our booth: meeting room booking friction, including double bookings and no-shows that waste expensive real estate; skepticism about AI features that are not scoped to a specific workflow; and a growing recognition that the meeting room itself shapes the client’s impression of the firm.
