Attendees talk new tools, old concerns at this year's Techshow
Ron Kneiser, an estate planning attorney in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, has never used artificial intelligence. But he claimed a table at the front of the conference room, grabbed his phone to take notes, and settled into the ABA Techshow 2025 on Thursday morning. He was ready to finally learn.
“The time is right to do it,” Kneiser says. “I’m trying to figure out who has really figured that out there who will make it simple for me.”
At the 40th annual ABA Techshow taking place this year at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, he had plenty of opportunities to learn. Over the four-day event, there were more than 80 scheduled speakers, dozens of sessions and a gigantic space filled to the brim with incredibly eager vendors (with a lot of swag, to boot).
Techshow planners were expecting record attendance—possibly over 2,000 attendees, but that was before inclement weather in Chicago on Wednesday.
So far, Kneiser had scouted the vendors and was trying to find one that would fulfill all his estate planning law firm needs.
“Maybe Clio?” he says. “I’m trying to figure it out.”
He was among a few hundred other participants who went from session to session, coffee in hand, armed with questions for the people who created the technology that they were attempting to understand.
Matt Dejewski, an in-house attorney in Itasca, Illinois, equates the emergence of legal tech with gold mining (those who profit are the suppliers, rather than the miners). He hadn’t attended Techshow previously, but he says he owed it to himself to try. His company doesn’t currently allow him to use AI, but he says the company would consider using tools that have the robust features for him to excel.
“I’m trying to find the needle in the haystack,” he says.
Follow along with the ABA Journal’s coverage of the ABA Techshow 2025 here.
Also in attendance was Shelley Kester, an attorney and president of Wilson Kester, a family law practice based in Traverse City, Michigan. She says she dabbles in AI, but she had been meaning to come to Techshow to see what else was available. She was specifically shopping for a new case management system and a contract lifecycle management tool after growing the firm from four to 23.
“I was interested in hearing a lot of the AI presentations because it’s everywhere, but it’s going so fast,” she says. “How could anyone keep up?”
Kester has given a lot of thought to tech and to the worry that it could potentially take her job—or at least undervalue the role of lawyers. But, she says, she truly thinks that that the law is all about relationships and solving problems together.
“People want to know that they’re not just becoming a statistic or a bot,” she says.
She should know. Kester still remembers when the internet was founded and when voicemail replaced answering machines. Both were supposed to make lives easier, but she’s not so sure that they saved her any time at all.
This time, she hopes that AI tech will be a total game-changer. But it’s still early. She could always return to Techshow next year.
“What you get excited about today could be very different in three months,” Kester says. “You need to stay current and be responsible about tech.”
