Robert Ambrogi Blog
Last September, when the company 8am — having successfully pulled off a major rebrand just three weeks earlier — then went on to pull off its first-ever customer conference in Austin, I wrote a review giving it high praise.
Although that inaugural event was modest in size, it was big in energy, as well as highly polished and professional, with the feel of a conference on the cusp of something greater.
Now we get to see whether that momentum carries into year two.
Today, 8am is releasing the details of Kaleidoscope 2026, its second annual customer conference, which will take place Sept. 22-24 at the Encore at Wynn Las Vegas.
LawSites has the exclusive on the details, including one the company had not yet revealed even on its own conference site: The keynote speaker will be Jesse Cole, the founder of the Savannah Bananas and creator of Banana Ball. The yellow-tuxedoed showman is famous for turning a struggling minor league baseball franchise into a viral global phenomenon by putting fan experience above all else.
This year’s conference will span three days and feature more than 25 breakout sessions organized into three tracks, with attendees able to earn 15 or more hours of CLE credit.
8am is the umbrella brand of an array of products that include the payments platform LawPay, the practice management platform MyCase, the personal injury platform CasePeer, and the immigration platform Docketwise.
In an interview yesterday, Nate Skinner, 8am’s chief marketing and sales officer, told me that the conference’s core purpose remains the same as it was in its debut year.
“One of our first-principle philosophies around our customer conference that we started last year was we want to create an opportunity to have our customers connect with one another,” Skinner said. “For us, it’s not about the size as much as it’s about the opportunity to create a deeper relationship with our customers, and for them to create those connections with each other.”
That said, the company is planning to grow the conference’s size. Last year’s inaugural conference drew roughly 300 attendees — a number Skinner said “overachieved” on the company’s objective — and this year the company is aiming higher, hoping to draw customers, partners and prospective customers alike.
Why Vegas?
Regular readers will recall that I ended my review of last year’s conference with a lament: The second Kaleidoscope would be in Las Vegas, a city I am not crazy about as a conference location. So I asked Skinner, Why the move from Austin, the company’s hometown?
It was a matter of both geography and math, he said. With a customer base spread across North America, any host city forces most attendees to travel. But Las Vegas has the advantage of being easy and affordable to reach from almost anywhere in the country.
Beyond that, he pointed to the concentration of legal professionals already in that vicinity — some 14,000 attorneys licensed in Nevada, including roughly 2,900 solos, plus the dense legal population of Southern California, a four-hour straight shot across Interstate 15.
The company also wanted to go somewhere different. “When we looked at all the places we could possibly go, and then you look at what everyone else is doing, [we said] let’s not do what everybody else is doing, let’s do something that’s uniquely us,” Skinner said. “There’s not a lot of legal tech conferences in Las Vegas.
“If we knock it out of the park and everybody loves it, we’ll go back,” he said. “If we don’t, and people wish they’d gone somewhere else or we did something different, we’ll adjust.”
(Those hoping for a repeat of last year’s free Tecovas cowboy boots should temper expectations. Skinner said the company leaned into the Austin theme because it was the company’s backyard. This year, there will be “some fun things” with a Las Vegas theme, but less of it. When I suggested yellow tuxedos for all attendees in honor of the keynoter, he demurred.)
Peer-Led Programming
As for the programming, Skinner said the clearest lesson from year one was that attendees most valued hearing from their peers — not from 8am executives.
“They definitely don’t want to hear from me,” he said. “They want to hear from each other.”
To that end, this year’s speaker lineup leans heavily on practicing lawyers, several of them from the more headline-grabbing corners of the profession:
- Todd Spodek, the New York criminal defense attorney who represented Anna Delvey, the Russian-German con artist who posed as a wealthy heiress to defraud wealthy New Yorkers. Spodek will explore the ethical landmines attorneys face when a case goes viral.
- Emily Lekahal, assistant general counsel for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, will sit down for a fireside chat on the legal strategy behind professional sports.
- Charles Lee Mudd Jr., principal attorney at Mudd Law, will take attendees inside the surprisingly real world of space law — orbital disputes, asteroid mining, and who owns the moon.
The broader session list spans three tracks — Practice and Profession, Tech and Innovation, and Business of Law — covering everything from estate planning for the great wealth transfer, to immigration law’s unsettled landscape, to burnout, referral strategies and billing.
AI is well represented but, as was the case last year, does not dominate. Sessions include a grounded attorney’s guide to AI, a debate over AI-generated evidence in the courtroom, and a hands-on workshop connecting 8am’s MyCase to Anthropic’s Claude to surface unbilled time and collection gaps.
Skinner told me that the company thinks of a great customer conference as having three main ingredients: “A destination people don’t hate to go to, programming that is useful and meaningful, and then the third is something that draws your attention” — which is where Cole and his Savannah Bananas story come in.
The parallel between Cole’s obsession with the fan experience and how law firms should think about the client experience, Skinner suggested, is hard to miss.
A Steadier Year — Mostly
Last year, 8am put on its first-ever conference just weeks after completing a top-to-bottom rebrand. This year, the run-up to the conference has featured its own major change, a new CEO, with Jeff Hughes, a member of 8am’s board since 2024, succeeding Dru Armstrong.
I asked Skinner whether the company simply thrives on chaos.
“We do not thrive on chaos,” he said with a laugh. “We wouldn’t choose to do that again if we had the choice.” As for the new CEO: “Jeff is here and he’s great, and he’s super excited to meet our customers and get to know everybody and join us in Las Vegas.”
In a press release announcing the conference, Hughes said the event comes at a time when the industry is at an inflection point.
“Legal professionals are reimagining what a modern practice looks like, using AI and connected technology to work smarter and create better client experiences,” he said. “Kaleidoscope brings together the ideas, technology, and community to enable each of them to meet this pivotal moment with confidence.”
For his part, Skinner sees in-person events as an antidote to the relentless hype cycle around legal AI. “It’s very frothy out there,” he told me. “Half of this stuff is kind of overblown clickbait.” What customers want, he said, is for someone to tell them what is real and what is not — and they are more inclined to believe it face to face.
The Details
Kaleidoscope 2026 runs Sept. 22-24 at the Encore at Wynn Las Vegas, opening with a reception at the Encore Beach Club and closing with a party at the Intrigue nightclub.
The all-access pass is $995, but until July 31, registrants can take $400 off using the promo code FLIP at checkout. The company has also secured a room block at the Encore and Wynn at $289 per night. Registration and details are on the conference website.
Last year, Kaleidoscope’s debut proved that 8am could put on a polished, professional event whose vibe belied its modest size. If year two builds on that — yellow tuxedo or not — this conference may well cement its place on the annual legal tech calendar.
[Disclosure: I have a son who is employed at 8am — and who will be speaking there!]