ILTACON 2026 closed this week at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville. Candle spent the week in the Startup Hub, the exhibit-hall neighborhood ILTA sets aside for early legal tech companies. If you were walking the floor looking for what is actually new, that is where you ended up.
What the Startup Hub is, and why it is a bargain
A standard 10x10 on the ILTACON show floor usually comes bundled with a partnership that costs more than most early companies should spend. The Hub is the exception. Selected startups pay $3,500 and still get real booth space: a furnished 10x10 with a branded backdrop, carpet, a table and chairs, power, a monitor, and two full-access conference badges.
That space is at least five times more expensive anywhere else in the hall. You are also standing in front of the people who buy legal technology for firms, with a listing in the conference app and extra networking that is hard to buy a la carte. ILTA vets the list, so the Hub stays small on purpose.
We used that booth all week. So did the companies below. I am listing them alphabetically, then Candle last.
Counsel Stack
Counsel Stack is building the accuracy layer legal AI has been missing: citation verification against primary authority. Their citator API checks whether a cite is real, used correctly, and still good law. They posted the top aggregate score on the independent Vals Legal AI Report, a 200-question U.S. legal research benchmark run with consortium firms.
Hallucinated cases and bad pincites are not a theoretical risk anymore. If you are going to let a model near a brief, you want something like this sitting between the draft and the filing.
Practi
Practi is subscription billing built for law firms. Attorneys create a plan, share a page at practi.ai/your-firm, and collect a monthly fee through Stripe. Firms keep the revenue. Setup is meant to take minutes, not a billing-system project.
The billable hour punishes firms for getting faster. Practi is a bet that as AI compresses legal work, the practices that win will sell access, not hours.
Reducto
Reducto turns messy legal documents into structured data. Parse, extract, split, classify, and pull redlines from contracts that ordinary OCR still mangles. Legal AI teams at companies like Harvey already use it as the document layer underneath their products.
If your model cannot read the agreement, nothing downstream matters. Reducto is that first mile: citations, clauses, tables, and exhibits in a form software can actually use.
Seedless
Seedless generates synthetic legal data so firms and vendors can test AI without touching client files. Emails, contracts, transcripts, and other business records, built around a coherent fact pattern, with answer keys. No seed set of real customer data.
Every serious legal AI buyer asks for a proof of concept. Almost none of them can hand over the data to run one. Seedless is how those evaluations actually happen.
Candle
And then us. Candle is the AI email assistant for law firms. We sit inside Gmail and Outlook, connect to the system of record the firm already runs, and turn legal email into finished work: triage, matter context, drafts, and time capture. Nothing is sent or filed until someone at the firm approves it.
The Hub was a good reminder of why that still matters. The floor is full of tools that help with research, documents, billing, and data. Email is still where the work starts, and it is still where firms lose the day.
If you stopped by our booth, thank you. If you did not, you can see Candle at trycandle.ai.