Some industry leaders believe that the world’s most successful trade shows (having rebounded strongly post-pandemic) may continue (more or less) unchanged by either AI tech or the current wave of ‘festivalisation’. But that seems to be contradicted by the success of new-wave events which offer participants the opportunity to enjoy themselves as well as learning, meeting and doing business. In many ways, of course, the festival fun (which can certainly attract a new generation of executives) might almost be camouflage for a coolly analytical approach to curation, meetings management – and RoI.
Jonathan Weiner – co-founder of Money 20/20 (now owned by Informa) and Shoptalk (Hyve Group) and now founder of HLTH (Hyve) and HumanX – is ambassador for this new style of event, characterised by high-profile speakers, strong branding and creativity but also by the sheer scale of shows in, for example, Las Vegas and on both sides of the Atlantic. His events are focused on a high-priced meetings format that exploits the technology of a sector. The compelling events are an antidote to what he describes as “traditional, boring shows”.
Some of the new shows find buyers or investors (like the UK’s pe-owned Hyve Group) soon after launch but others are a bit more patient. In March this year, Emerald – the largest US trade show group – paid £20mn upfront (8x 2025 EBITDA) with additional contingent payments up to a maximum of £16mn, for the seven-year-old InsurTech Insights. The UK-based company – with shows in London, Hong Kong and New York – self-describes as “the world’s largest insurance technology community, offering unprecedented connection to the most comprehensive and global gatherings of tech entrepreneurs, investors, and insurance industry incumbents”.
Perhaps only industry insiders could see through the dry language to identify yet another new-wave event that is changing the landscape in a B2B vertical.
Two former InsurTech employees were especially thrilled by the deal.
They are Bradley Collins and Mikkel Jensen (with backgrounds in sales and marketing) who had worked together at InsurTech Insights for several years before taking their tips and tricks to start their own event. Collins says: “We built InsurTech from the ground up. Mikkel was there from Day 1 and I joined towards the end of Year 1. They are now the biggest insurance events in Europe and Asia, and the second biggest show in America. We learned a tremendous amount there. It’s a very entrepreneurial and hard working place, but they/we also made some mistakes along the way, which we learned from and can avoid.”
The two friends were drinking beer on a New York rooftop after completing the US InsurTech event in 2022 when they decided to start their own version of InsurTech in some other industry vertical. Collins said to Mikkel: “Hey, we’ve done this in three continents now. We’ve got a blueprint. It works. We can surely do this anywhere. There must be an industry that’s slower than insurance to innovate. The common thread is transformation.”
Collins says the only sector they could indentify that was slower than insurance in being transformed by tech was the legal industry: “If you look at every other industry sector. In Fintech, you have Monzo and Revolut competing with the big banks. In retail, Amazon changed the whole business model and the business model of insurance has changed. Every industry has had this seismic shift. But the legal industry is still all about documents, paper and filing cabinets. It’s gone into computers now, which was a massive change. But it’s not really changed much when you think about what’s happened in other industries: Airbnb versus hotels, Uber versus taxis. Almost every industry has had these disruptors. It’s completely changed the game. If you look at investment trends, for the last 20 years, fintech has boomed. There’s now over 1,000 unicorns. In insurance, there’s now nearly 300 unicorns. When we looked at legal, there were only two unicorns, but investments had grown by 100% between 2017 and 2020. There’s been over a billion invested into legal tech startups this year, which is crazy. And there wasn’t a big event in legal compared with the other sectors.”
He adds: “There’s not the equivalent of Cannes Lions, or a Money 2020, or ShopTalk, at least not in Europe; there wasn’t one. And we thought we could create that, and the time is now. So we knew it was the right market to go into. Then ChatGPT happened and AI became big. And now you don’t need paralegals anymore really because AI can do a lot of that work. The industry is starting to go through this huge change and we are positioning ourselves in the centre of that. We aim to be the biggest catalyst for innovation in the space. That’s what we’re doing. That’s our mission.”
That was the start of LegalTechTalk, admitted by the founders to be an odd name “because it’s so much more than tech”. In the future, it might become LegalTalk but the confusing brand did not get in the way of the 2024 launch event in London which they describe as “a happening”, a festival with high-quality food and drinks, boat parties, music, dancers, entertainment and fun. “There are a lot of events in legal but this is already the event”.
Collins says: “Since the very beginning, we have had a five-year plan. Festivalization was one of the keywords we put out there. We invest a lot into the production of the event for our people who are not only going to post it on LinkedIn but to show their friends on Instagram. It blurs the line between business and pleasure. Our event is something that you want to go to, not just because you have to, but because you actually want to be there and have a good time.”
The startup was funded by £100k from friends and family which covered the venue deposit; all other expenses were met by advance payments from sponsorship and visitor tickets. The first event took place in June 2024. The £1mn revenue, a mere £100k development loss and 2,500 visitors (55% UK) achieved by a team of just six (including the founders), tells the story of a project that quickly found its market.
This year’s LegalTechTalk takes place on 26-27 June at the InterContinental Hotel, near London’s Thames-side O2 venue. They have 300+ speakers and are expecting 4,000 attendees and more than 14,000 meetings. They have 40 media partners from around the world who are bringing delegations from countries including the US, India, Singapore and Brazil. Side events, parties and meetings are being held across five days including the weekend. They are determined to captivate their visitors and participants and make it the complete location which means persuading people to stay with the event rather than exploring the distractions of the UK capital.
Collins and Jensen are sometimes careful to manage expectations. But it seems likely that the projected £2.7mn revenue (15% from visitors) will this month generate more than 500k of EBITDA – with a team of 10 people:
| SnapShot LegalTechTalk | |||
| £mn | 2026* | 2025* | 2024 |
| Revenue | 5.0+ | 2.7 | 1.0 |
| Sponsors etc | 85% | 85% | 84% |
| Visitors | 15% | 15% | 16% |
| EBITDA | 2.3mn | 0.5 | (100k) |
| Margin | 45% | 20% | — |
| Visitors | 5,500+ | 4,000+ | 2,500 |
| People | 13 | 10 | 6 |
Clearly, the 2025 result will be the real proof of the potential of LegalTechTalk but Collins and Mikkel are a team in a hurry. This newest of event startups has a seasoned B2B chair, Simon Middelboe, and has already retained the services of a strategy consultant (Plural) and M&A specialist (Fusion). It’s no accident that this month’s attendance will be swollen by would-be backers prepared to invest in the company’s growth plan which, Collins says, might include “geo-cloning opportunities. I think there are a lot of corporate events that are not quite as fun and exciting as this one. So maybe other regions could be quite interesting for us as well.”
But a more immediate key to the future may be the company’s digital output of webinars, emails and research reports. It publishes news stories five times daily, so the website has a lot of insights and a fast-growing regular audience, not least for the recording of every single funding round in the legal sector. It claims to be the world’s no.1 legal page on LinkedIn.
The high frequency coverage (including a fair amount of original content), round-tables (in person and virtually) and the growing newsletter signups would represent a very competent B2B media business on its own. But, for Collins and Mikkel, it’s just part of the event relationships and promotion. You might bet that any new investor will be wanting to monetise the content and add a subscription revenue stream to the business. But, then, with some 15% of visitors paying £1-2k for admission, there may be no shortage of profit-generating initiatives once the company has all the skills and people it needs to exploit them.
Collins and Mikkel (together, 95% shareholders) expect £500k of EBITDA this month. That, the 2026 projection (£2.3mn EBITDA) and prospective new revenue streams might just prompt a £40-45mn enterprise valuation from their first external investors. But the rapid ascent of LegalTechTalk also speaks volumes about the exhuberant ‘multi-channel’ future of, perhaps, a growing number of B2B verticals. Who’s next?
