It overstates it more than a little to call this news. There are rumours of news but, as I write this on Monday, the vendor stands are still being put up and, if there are announcements being made, I am missing them [correction: FTI Technology has just launched Ringtail QuickCull Appliance for In-House E-Discovery sometime between my starting this article and reaching the end. More when I have seen it]. Mind you, you could miss the announcement of a war here.

The setting for this hotel is a whole new development beside the Potomac. The Capitol is visible in the distance from the upper floors of the hotel. Google Earth shows this place as a development site, with the foundations of the Gaylord National Resort the only visible evidence of what now appears. It is as if someone listed all the components of a riverside resort area – hotels, restaurants, apartment blocks, shops and hotels – and plonked them down in neat rectangles in the hope of creating an instant community.

Perhaps it is too early or, more probably, the one component which was not catered for in the regularity of the plan was the regularity of the economic cycle – the late 1950s by the look of some of it apart from the marina and the conference hotel. Many of the shops have yet to open and I suspect that the only furnished apartment in some of the blocks is the model – the show flat we would call it. The only real sign that someone still has money is that the marina houses some fine boats. If this conference was not here, I suspect the place would be dead.

Peggy Wechsler runs this show with a rod of iron and a heart of gold. There are about 800 delegates here and the total headcount including vendors is about 1400. Peggy appears to know every one of them. ILTA may appear like a large family party, but it is a big business run by a dedicated team with military precision, with Peggy seemingly able both to plan and control the whole thing and keep up correspondence with us all.

At first sight, the scale of ILTA appears to belie one’s understanding of the effect of recession. Things cannot be that bad, one might say, if 1400 people from the industry can spend a week in a glass palace beside the Potomac. That is to miss a number of points. Not the least of those is that e-discovery remains a multi-billion dollar industry and that, whilst the hoped-for deluge of post-Lehman litigation may not yet have appeared, there is still non-optional litigation, to say nothing of increased activity by regulators, particularly financial regulators. There is talk of data being preserved and parked against the possibility of future use, defensive or offensive. There have, of course been victims, both companies gone down and individuals who have lost their jobs. It may be true, as someone was saying at lunch today, that many providers of software and services are running at a loss and dependent on external funding. It is certainly true that costs are being cut.

The changing scene, however, demands changing technology and changing attitudes, and ILTA remains both a showcase for the technology and place for vendors, lawyers, clients and consultants to exchange and advance ideas. These people compete – and how – but they face a shared problem. As to the grandness of the venue, where else do you put 1400 people where you can deliver sessions, display exhibits, provide accommodation and food, have places for formal and informal discussions and lay on entertainment at the end of the day?

There was a reception last night on the terrace overlooking the Potomac, the first opportunity to see who is here and to catch up with them. I spoke to a dozen or twenty people – people I am in touch with throughout the year, people I see only at conferences, and one or two who flagged me down because they recognised me from the photograph on my blog. These are perhaps the most gratifying meetings of all because they imply an unseen audience and because they put flesh on the bare numbers which the web stats give me.

The party broke up whilst I was deep in conversation with one of the latter and I failed to spot where everyone had moved on to. Peggy appeared from nowhere, like a genie from a lamp, and directed me to the Piano Bar down the street. I arrived in time to see a group dancing vigourously and noisily on top of two grand pianos, and decided it was just as well that no one had yet moved into the apartments across the street. I am getting a bit old for this sort of thing – old enough, indeed to remember the lyrics to Fred Wedlock’s 1981 song The Oldest Swinger in Town

When your barber takes a little less time each week,
The kids don’t understand a word you speak;
When you walk into a disco and they offer you a seat,
You’re the oldest swinger in town.

You prefer a pint of mild to Bacardi and Coke.
The songs are too loud and there’s too much smoke.
You’d like another dance but you’re scared you’ll have a stroke.
You’re the oldest swinger in town.

Even the words have aged – “swinger” has acquired connotations rather different from those intended at the time, and the only thing you don’t find in these places is smoke.

Mine was not the only British grey hair on the premises. The chap I was standing next to in the gloom turned out to be Charles Christian, editor of Legal Technology Insider and now of its counterpart American Legal Technology Insider who, like me, reports on the world’s legal technology from the sticks, in his case rural Norfolk. Also there was Chris Bull, Chief Operating Officer of legal outsourcer Integreon who, like Charles, I only ever see in America.

The point of this ramble through the ages is that, whilst years may be no great asset in a noisy bar full of young people, it helps bring perspective at bad times in the economic cycle. I remember a lecture from an estate agent in the last recession (probably actually the one before that) at which the speaker talked up the benefits of having some grey hair around, not just for the plummet down into recession but for the long haul out of it. I suspect we mocked him somewhat. There is talk, in the UK at least, of having reached the bottom. Perhaps – one of the things we learn is to disbelieve anything emanating from government, this government anyway. Nevertheless, recessions do have bottoms, and history suggests that we emerge stronger from them than we went in.

In terms of this industry, and painful though it seems now, the pressure on costs is likely to have beneficial results in the mid-term. Recession is the forcing ground for new technology, of which FTI Technology’s announcement of today is the latest example. It is the catalyst also for a reappraisal by lawyers and their clients as to how best to get the work done. Its distribution will be different as the economy recovers, with the lawyers no longer acting as exclusive gatekeepers and no longer able (with a few exceptions) to say that their offices are the natural home for the guts of e-discovery. The work is not going to disappear, however, far from it, and is not lost to the vendor community if a proportion of it is taken in-house by the clients, who will need software and services themselves.

This is not some La-La Land of chin-up optimism, nor would I waste my breath seeking to revive a corpse. There is little consolation for those companies who have gone, for the people who worked for them and those who invested in them. You won’t find many short-term optimists here on the banks of the Potomac but I think that most of us reckon to be back here this time next year – well, not here exactly, but in the Gaylord Palace of Varieties chosen for next year’s ILTA. Apparently it makes the others look positively conventional.

There has been some alarmist comment about the very large birds which soar above this venue. There are nerves enough here without the feeling that vultures are waiting patiently above. Intrepid investigative journalist Charles Christian has identified them – Bald Eagles, apparently which are being encouraged to re-colonise the area. So an augury of revival and of better things to come then, not a symbol of pending doom.

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