Legalweek 2027 Agenda

As AI becomes table stakes, the real differentiator is the power user who changes how legal work actually gets done. This session digs into research on the “frozen middle” versus true power users, highlighting the extra hours, impact, and innovation they unlock. Attendees will discuss how to spot and empower these people, normalize experimentation, and scale their agents and workflows across teams—moving beyond pilots to real, practice-changing adoption.

The traditional law firm business model is facing mounting pressure as client expectations evolve, AI reshapes how legal work gets done, alternative providers gain ground, and new ownership and investment structures challenge established practices. What does this mean for the future of law firms, their clients, and the companies that serve them? This forward-looking discussion explores the changing economics of legal services, shifting competitive dynamics, evolving talent and staffing models, and the growing demand for greater efficiency, transparency, and measurable value. Panelists will examine which longstanding assumptions about the business of law are becoming unsustainable, where new opportunities are emerging, and what firms must do now to remain competitive in a rapidly changing market.

AI governance isn’t a policy document—it’s a cross-functional team sport. This session explores which roles must be at the table and how security, compliance, data privacy, information governance, procurement, innovation, and training work together to operationalize governance in practice. Speakers will share how they roll out guardrails at scale, manage agents and shadow AI, and respond to growing client demands for controls, transparency, and risk mitigation, giving attendees a clear picture of the governance coalition they need to build.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how legal services are delivered, how legal organizations operate, and what clients expect from their advisors. For legal leaders, the challenge extends beyond understanding the capabilities and limitations of this transformative technology to managing its implementation responsibly and effectively, ensuring it creates meaningful advantages for their organizations. This forward-looking conversation brings together leaders from business, technology, the legal profession, and academia to explore what it takes to lead through AI-driven change, navigate the challenges of implementation, and ensure that transformation delivers lasting value for organizations, the profession, and the people and communities it serves.

Discovery is expensive, inefficient, and strategically contentious—but those same pressures can create leverage for parties on every side of a matter. Plaintiff, defense, and corporate legal perspectives come together for a candid debate about where discovery costs can realistically be reduced, which practices create unnecessary burden, and where efficiency runs headfirst into litigation strategy. Can better technology, earlier cooperation, and smarter workflows reduce costs without compromising a party's position?

As the skills required to succeed in the legal profession evolve, are law firms looking for talent in the right places? Traditional recruiting models that prioritize law school rankings, academic credentials, and familiar hiring pipelines may be overlooking candidates with the capabilities firms need most. This session examines how firms can rethink what makes a successful lawyer, identify emerging competencies in technology, AI, business acumen, adaptability, and client service, and expand recruiting efforts beyond elite law schools. Panelists will explore skills-based hiring, building stronger relationships with a broader range of law schools, recognizing transferable experience, and using AI-driven recruiting tools without reinforcing existing biases. Attendees will gain practical strategies for building a more diverse, competitive, and future-ready legal workforce.

Many organizations still lack a formal eDiscovery function—until a major matter forces the issue. This session will explore how to justify investment, select and configure tools to handle both relevance and classification filtering, and navigate organizational politics by aligning closely with cybersecurity and IT. Attendees will leave with practical guidance on structuring a right‑sized discovery model, avoiding costly last‑minute vendor spend, and designing a program that can withstand strict data‑classification and security constraints.

This session will focus on how legal, IT, security, records management, and business teams determine what must be preserved, what should be retained, and what can be defensibly deleted? We'll examine the challenges of managing retention obligations across legal holds, collaboration platforms, employee communications, legacy systems, and AI-generated content. Panelists will explore how organizations are reconciling competing legal, regulatory, operational, and business requirements; establishing defensible retention schedules; addressing conflicting preservation obligations; and managing data that has outlived its original purpose. Attendees will gain practical insights into identifying high-value information, documenting retention and deletion decisions, assigning accountability, and implementing policies that reduce risk without sacrificing access to critical business knowledge.
 

Technology is evolving faster than the laws designed to govern it. As businesses rapidly adopt new tools, platforms, and data-driven practices, regulators and litigants are applying longstanding statutes to conduct their drafters could not have anticipated. This panel will explore how that shift is changing the legal and enforcement landscape across areas such as data collection and use, digital platforms, automation, and artificial intelligence. Panelists will discuss how companies can anticipate emerging interpretations, manage regulatory and litigation risk, and pursue innovation while building sound compliance and governance practices.

Billions are flowing into AI infrastructure, platforms, legal technology companies, and law firm implementations—but the economic model remains unsettled. As vendors move from seat-based subscriptions toward usage-, token-, and outcome-based pricing, legal organizations must determine not only what AI costs, but who ultimately absorbs those costs and captures the resulting value.

This market-level discussion will examine what consultants, investors, vendors, law firms, and corporate legal departments are seeing across AI implementations. Panelists will explore emerging financing and deal structures, changing pricing models, the growing cost of compute, and whether legal organizations are effectively being asked to buy back their own knowledge after it has been packaged into AI-enabled products.

Behind every high-performing law firm is a technology infrastructure that either enables growth or creates costly obstacles. From practice management and document management systems to cloud infrastructure, integrations, cybersecurity, and AI readiness, the decisions firms make about their core technology have lasting implications for profitability, productivity, and client service. This session examines how law firm leaders can evaluate their technology foundations, identify gaps and redundancies, balance modernization with business continuity, and make smarter investments that support the firm's long-term strategy.

In an era of sprawling data ecosystems and complex vendor webs, legal and compliance teams can no longer treat risk as a point-in-time checkbox. This session will unpack the concept of distributed digital risk—how obligations are inherited across third parties, healthcare and other highly regulated environments, and constantly reshaped by changing operations and laws. Drawing on real-world breach scenarios and emerging tooling that maps data repositories to legal obligations, we’ll explore practical ways to continuously assess your exposure “at a glance” without expanding your threat surface. Attendees will leave with a foundational framework for building programs that prove preparation when regulators, insurers, and courts inevitably ask, “What did you do to get ready?"

As law firms and corporate legal departments consider deploying AI agents to perform work traditionally handled by people, how do the economics actually compare? Beyond salaries and software subscriptions, the true cost of each model includes implementation, training, supervision, maintenance, infrastructure, and the quality of the work produced. This session examines the total cost of ownership of agentic AI versus human teams, exploring where automation delivers measurable savings, where hidden expenses erode anticipated returns, and how organizations can evaluate productivity, scalability, and risk. Attendees will gain a practical framework for determining when to invest in AI agents, when to expand headcount, and when a hybrid approach delivers the greatest value.

AI systems can move quickly—but so can bad information. Outdated content, duplicate documents, weak permissions, and cross-client contamination can undermine both the quality and defensibility of AI-generated work. This session examines how knowledge teams can identify where those risks enter the system, correct them before they spread, and strengthen the controls, metadata, and governance practices needed to support more reliable and defensible AI use.

Before legal teams automate a workflow with an AI agent, they need to understand what the work actually requires. This session explores how to break a process into tasks, decisions, dependencies, data inputs, and risk points before deciding what an agent should—and should not—do. Learn how to identify where human judgment must remain in the loop, design clear escalation and handoff points, and avoid automating a broken or poorly understood process.

For nearly a decade, AI proponents have promised catch-all solutions to ease administrative burdens and free up valuable time for strategic legal thinking. However, these promises often overlook the critical human component: the administrative, secretarial, and legal operations teams driving and managing this technology behind the screen.

This session focuses on how the deployment of AI directly impacts the daily roles, cognitive loads, and training needs of your legal support infrastructure. Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) and law firm partners will learn how to transition their support teams from manual "doers" to strategic "editors" and risk gatekeepers. Discover how to build modern up-skilling frameworks that move beyond static software tutorials, implement structural guardrails against data leaks and hallucinations, and redefine the career trajectories of administrative professionals into AI-driven workflow architects who scale your practice.

Everyone says AI transformation is a technology challenge—until they run into the GC, the CFO, and the partner who quietly hates everything. This panel pulls back the curtain on what we call “corporate therapy”: the real work of uncovering fear, power dynamics, and politics that make or break AI initiatives. Attendees will learn how to spot the human fault lines in their organizations, reframe AI so people feel super-suited instead of replaced, and build decision frameworks that balance risk, reward, and organizational sanity.

Discovery is no longer just about identifying responsive documents. AI-powered analysis is creating opportunities to uncover relationships, reconstruct timelines, identify critical witnesses, test legal theories, and develop litigation strategy while review is still underway. This session explores how legal teams are moving beyond traditional document review to extract actionable intelligence from large volumes of evidence—and how earlier insights can influence investigations, depositions, settlement decisions, and trial preparation.

Generative AI has fueled predictions that legal work will get dramatically faster, billing rates will drop, and clients will demand AI discounts. The evidence — and the existing billing ethics framework — suggest otherwise. Lawyers who use AI well aren't becoming faster so much as more thorough, precise, and attuned to client context, which supports higher rates, not lower ones. This mirrors the earlier shift from metered Westlaw/LexisNexis charges to flat subscriptions: AI costs are becoming overhead, with e-discovery-style pass-through rules applying only in narrow cases (extraordinary single-matter use, client-directed tools).

The deeper opportunity isn't efficiency, it's value. AI lets lawyers understand clients' businesses more deeply and act as genuine partners rather than hourly vendors. Clients who get that level of service don't nitpick invoices. Rather than a cash grab (which ethics rules prohibit anyway), this is a moment to invest in stronger client relationships. Discussion topics include: 

• Looking to prior technology shifts such as online legal research, we should treat most AI subscriptions as overhead according to ABA Formal Opinion 93-379
• AI likely raises the value and quality of legal services provided, it will probably raise hourly rates, which was anticipated in ABA Formal Opinion 512 and is reinforced by Rule 1.5(a)'s reasonableness standard, which recognizes value delivered, outcomes achieved, and skill applied 
• The real payoff to AI use is deeper client relationships, not efficiency: AI enables lawyers to act as strategic partners rather than hourly vendors, and clients receiving that level of insight are less likely to scrutinize invoices

Legal teams are constantly responding to new risks, regulatory demands, technology changes, and business pressures—but governance cannot be built entirely in reaction mode. This session explores how legal and operational leaders can balance immediate demands with more proactive governance, including where to standardize, what to monitor, when to escalate, and how to build frameworks that can adapt before the next issue becomes a fire drill.

A client needs to know whether the firm has handled a niche legal issue before, and the partner wants an answer immediately. The information exists somewhere across thousands of matters, documents, and individual attorney experiences—but finding it quickly and reliably is the challenge. This session explores how law firms are transforming fragmented institutional information into searchable, reusable intelligence that surfaces prior work, attorney expertise, litigation strategies, and matter outcomes. Panelists will examine how improved data organization, AI-powered search, and access controls can help firms overcome disconnected repositories, protect confidential information, preserve institutional expertise, and deliver accurate answers without duplicating research or compromising professional judgment.

As clients globalize and AI companies push the boundaries of talent mobility, traditional partner-centric models are straining. This panel brings together a client-facing non-lawyer leader (David), a law firm partner, and a corporate legal/ops leader to examine how next-generation client teams are built and led. The discussion will cover:

• How non-lawyer, globally focused roles triage matters, coordinate multi-country mandates, and manage relationships.
• Collaboration models across law firms, accountants, HR, and other providers—especially as PE-backed, multi-vertical competitors emerge.
• Practical tactics for reading client sentiment, rescuing strained relationships, and capturing a greater share of global work.
• What AI and talent wars are doing to non-competes and mobility in tech/AI companies—and how that shapes client expectations of their outside counsel.
• Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for evolving team structures, roles, and behaviors to compete in an AI-enabled, globally integrated market.

Moving from governance policies to operational reality requires a clear implementation strategy. How do you determine which policies to roll out first, establish accountability across departments, and ensure compliance without creating unnecessary bureaucracy? This session provides a practical roadmap for implementing governance programs across law firms and corporate legal departments, from conducting an initial assessment and identifying gaps to establishing phased implementation schedules, assigning responsibilities, and integrating controls into existing workflows. Panelists will explore how to develop training and communication plans, manage exceptions, establish monitoring and reporting mechanisms, and measure whether governance policies are being followed. Attendees will leave with actionable steps for building a governance rollout plan that is scalable, enforceable, and adaptable as organizational needs and technologies evolve.

The first phase of generative AI asked lawyers to become better prompters. The next phase is about systems that can retain instructions, understand specialized workflows and repeatedly perform defined legal tasks. Using concrete law firm examples, explore how reusable AI skills, workflows and agents are being designed for activities such as litigation, research, drafting and matter preparation—and what separates a useful reusable capability from another interesting AI experiment.

As AI takes on more of the work traditionally used to train junior lawyers, law firm leaders must rethink how judgment, experience, and professional instincts are developed. This session explores how firms can use AI without weakening the apprenticeship model—examining new approaches to mentorship, supervision, skills development, and creating the next generation of trusted legal advisors.

Moving AI-assisted review from experimentation into active litigation requires more than demonstrating that the technology works. Through practical examples, this session examines how legal teams select appropriate matters, establish review protocols, validate results, document decisions, and maintain meaningful human oversight. Panelists will explore how to measure efficiency and accuracy, manage exceptions, and explain AI-assisted methodologies when clients, opposing counsel, or courts begin asking questions.

A strong vendor partnership starts long before implementation—and continues well after launch. This session explores the key decisions that shape successful relationships, from setting expectations and negotiating the right contract terms to managing implementation, measuring performance, and maintaining accountability over time. Attendees will learn where partnerships most often break down and how to build the structure, communication, and follow-through needed for lasting value.

In a market awash in AI hype, mid-market and small firms can’t afford to guess their way forward. Drawing on real-world consulting experience and the upcoming book Leveraging Disruption, this session unpacks what’s actually happening with AI implementations in law firms—what’s working, what’s stalled, and why. We’ll focus on leadership and change management, not just tools, addressing pricing, compensation, talent, and client expectations in an AI-augmented practice. Attendees will leave with a practical playbook to adopt AI at a sustainable pace that strengthens, rather than destabilizes, their firm.

Making the economics work requires more than buying technology and hoping for productivity gains. In three focused presentations, legal industry leaders share practical strategies for managing AI investments, controlling costs, and demonstrating measurable value. From selecting use cases that deliver meaningful returns to managing implementation expenses and rethinking how legal work is priced and resourced, this session examines the financial decisions organizations must make before today's AI experiments become tomorrow's expensive commitments.

As AI, cloud platforms, connected data, and third-party tools become embedded in legal work, security and privacy decisions can no longer sit solely with IT or InfoSec. This session examines the questions legal leaders need to own—from data access and privilege to vendor risk, cross-border data use, incident response, and AI governance—and how to work effectively with security teams without outsourcing legal accountability.

This session explores how neurolinguistic programming (NLP), neuroscience, and psychology can give lawyers an edge in high-stakes interactions. In this interactive session, speakers will demonstrate practical tools to quickly “read the room,” build rapport, and uncover what’s driving clients, jurors, witnesses, and counterparts. Participants will also learn techniques to manage their own triggers and shift their mental and emotional state in real time, so they can respond flexibly instead of reactively. Attendees will leave with a concrete, research-backed toolkit they can apply immediately in corporate practice, litigation, leadership, and everyday professional conversations.

Legal operations teams sit at the center of a department under increasing pressure to move faster, control costs, adopt new technology, and meet rising expectations from the business. Yet many teams are still working within processes designed for a very different legal department.

This session takes stock of where legal operations stands today: what is working, where teams remain stuck, and which operational problems are demanding the most attention. This session will examine how legal operations teams can transition from service provider to a more deliberate, scalable operating model.

Being “proactive” isn’t about predicting every new regulation; it’s about building systems that flex as fast as the business and the technology do. In this session, we’ll unpack how to design a compliance function that anticipates risk, embeds guardrails into day-to-day operations, and still responds decisively when the unexpected happens. Through examples from high-risk markets and cross-border data environments, you’ll learn how to balance proactive frameworks with smart reactivity, align with the business, and turn compliance into a strategic advantage.

Agentic systems can fail in ways traditional software does not—stalling mid-workflow, handing tasks off incorrectly, looping, calling the wrong tools, or producing inconsistent results across an interconnected stack. This session examines what legal teams should do when their AI agents stop behaving as expected: how to diagnose where a workflow is breaking, determine when human intervention is required, build escalation and fallback paths, and design monitoring that catches problems before they affect clients or business operations. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for keeping agent-driven workflows resilient, recoverable, and under control.

Agentic AI changes the governance question from “Was the output accurate?” to “What was the system allowed to do?” This session examines how legal teams can govern autonomous AI systems that plan, make decisions, call APIs, and execute workflows on the organization’s behalf. Explore the controls needed to define delegated authority, monitor live actions, establish human intervention points, maintain auditability, and prevent small permissions from becoming outsized operational risk.

This session explores how firms can navigate leadership and relationship transitions without jeopardizing their most valuable asset: client trust. This session will examine practical approaches to identifying future relationship owners, engaging clients early and meaningfully in transition plans, and aligning business development, talent management, and client service around continuity. Drawing on real-world experience building a firmwide succession program, the speaker will share concrete frameworks for mapping key relationships, mitigating risk when senior partners retire or shift roles, and communicating transitions in ways that reassure institutional and individual clients alike. Attendees will leave with actionable steps to move succession from an abstract risk to an operational priority that protects revenue, deepens loyalty, and strengthens the firm’s long-term viability.

When sensitive information moves between law firms, clients, and third-party providers, who controls what happens to it next? From matter files and work product to proprietary business information and institutional knowledge, data transfers raise complex questions about ownership, access, retention, reuse, and deletion. This session explores how firms and corporate legal departments can establish clear protocols for transferring, classifying, and managing information throughout its lifecycle. Panelists will examine how to protect privilege and confidentiality, prevent unauthorized reuse or cross-client exposure, manage downstream vendor access, and preserve valuable institutional knowledge while honoring contractual and regulatory obligations. Attendees will gain practical insights into building defensible data-sharing practices that balance security, compliance, and long-term business value.

The AI pilot delivered promising results, the business case was compelling, and everyone was on board. Then reality set in. Requirements shifted, adoption stalled, integration challenges mounted, costs escalated, or the technology evolved faster than the implementation itself. What happens when a promising AI initiative starts going off the rails? Through a candid examination of real-world implementation challenges, law firm leaders and technology partners will explore how to recognize early warning signs, identify the root causes of failure, and work together to get a troubled project back on track. From renegotiating expectations and redefining success metrics to addressing vendor accountability and rebuilding user confidence, this session offers practical strategies for deciding when to course-correct, rethink the approach, or pull the plug altogether.

The modern case file extends far beyond email and traditional documents. Some of the most consequential evidence now lives in the sources organizations find hardest to preserve, collect, and review. This session examines the challenges posed by Teams, Slack, mobile devices, ephemeral messaging, cloud applications, and AI-generated content. Panelists will explore how legal teams identify relevant sources, navigate technical and privacy limitations, establish defensible collection practices, and address the growing complexity of evidence that does not fit traditional discovery workflows.

This session is designed to give GCs and legal ops a practical, risk-aware understanding of how modern legal AI actually works. The session explains how platforms route different tasks across multiple large language models, why that matters for accuracy and governance, and where failure modes like hallucinations and context rot appear in real legal work. Using concrete in-house scenarios—such as contracting, policy drafting, and outside counsel management—it shows how teams can safely use AI to take matters 60–75% of the way before engaging firms, without compromising privilege or data security. Attendees leave with clear language and questions they can use to evaluate vendors and confidently explain AI’s “under the hood” workings to CISOs, CIOs, and boards.

As law firms continue integrate AI into legal work, corporate clients are raising new questions about transparency, accountability, and the value of services delivered. What should firms disclose about their use of AI, and how can legal departments establish expectations around billing, staffing, data security, and the supervision of AI-generated work? This session explores the evolving relationship between clients and outside counsel, examining how AI is reshaping outside counsel guidelines, creating new compliance challenges, and changing expectations for documentation and reporting. Attendees will gain practical insights into establishing clear standards, managing exceptions, resolving disputes, and building accountability without undermining the efficiency and innovation AI promises.

As clients tighten expectations around how outside counsel use AI, firms are facing a new layer of operational, ethical, and contractual requirements. This session examines how AI provisions are showing up in outside counsel guidelines, what clients are demanding around disclosure, data use, security, supervision, and approval, and how firms can build governance processes that satisfy clients without slowing innovation or creating unmanageable compliance burdens.

What does a defensible discovery workflow actually look like when deadlines are tight, budgets are constrained, and evidence is increasingly complex? Working through a realistic litigation scenario, participants will examine critical decisions across preservation, collection, processing, review, validation, and production. The session will focus on where documentation, quality control, human judgment, and escalation points belong—and how to build processes that withstand scrutiny without creating unnecessary expense or operational burden.

Legal ops teams are often asked to evaluate—or implement—technology before anyone has clearly defined the problem it is supposed to solve. This session explores how to move vendor selection upstream: define the operational need, establish what success should look like, and determine which capabilities actually matter before choosing a platform. Attendees will examine how to align tools with workflows, avoid buying technology in search of a use case, and create success measures that make it easier to know when a solution is delivering value—and when it is not.

Contract analytics, CLM reporting, obligation management, and AI-assisted review are only as reliable as the data behind them. Inconsistent metadata, missing terms, duplicate records, and poorly structured agreements can undermine search accuracy, distort reporting, and create compliance and operational risks. This workshop explores how legal teams can assess contract data quality, identify and prioritize remediation efforts, and establish standards for capturing, classifying, and maintaining contract information. Participants will learn practical approaches to assigning data ownership, validating AI-extracted information, correcting legacy data, and building quality controls that make contract intelligence more accurate, accessible, and actionable.
 

AI adoption is more than a technology challenge—it's a human one. As legal organizations introduce AI into everyday workflows, employees are confronting questions about job security, professional identity, trust, and the changing value of their expertise. Fear of displacement, resistance to change, anxiety about new expectations, and uncertainty about evolving roles can undermine even the most carefully planned implementations. This session explores the psychological and organizational factors influencing AI adoption, examining how legal leaders can recognize and address resistance, build trust and psychological safety, and help employees adapt to new ways of working. Panelists will discuss practical strategies for managing the human side of transformation, supporting professional development, and creating a culture in which people feel empowered rather than threatened by AI.

AI can sound completely confident while being completely wrong. For legal teams, the challenge is not just spotting hallucinations—it is building verification into the workflow without erasing the efficiency gains AI was supposed to create. This session explores practical approaches to validating AI-generated legal work, including source checking, multi-model review, human escalation points, confidence thresholds, and supervision protocols designed to catch errors before they become client, court, or business problems.

Regulatory changes are multiplying, but not every development presents the same level of risk to every organization. In this practical session, we will walk through how regulatory information can be structured and mapped to different organizational profiles—considering factors such as industry, geography, and company size—to help teams identify what may matter most. Using sample organizations, the discussion will illustrate how teams can move from broad monitoring to more focused prioritization, and how those insights can support coordination between in-house legal teams and outside counsel.

MSOs are challenging long-held assumptions about how law firms are financed, managed and grown. By separating the practice of law from the business infrastructure around it, these structures can open the door to outside capital, centralized operations, professional management and aggressive growth strategies. This session examines what MSOs could mean for law firm economics, partner control, consolidation, competition and the increasingly blurred line between a law firm and a legal services business.

As the skills required to succeed in the legal profession evolve, are law firms looking for talent in the right places? Traditional recruiting models that prioritize law school rankings, academic credentials, and familiar hiring pipelines may be overlooking candidates with the capabilities firms need most. This session examines how firms can rethink what makes a successful lawyer, identify emerging competencies in technology, AI, business acumen, adaptability, and client service, and expand recruiting efforts beyond elite law schools. Panelists will explore skills-based hiring, building stronger relationships with a broader range of law schools, recognizing transferable experience, and using AI-driven recruiting tools without reinforcing existing biases. Attendees will gain practical strategies for building a more diverse, competitive, and future-ready legal workforce.

Legal teams are using AI to assess litigation risk, evaluate potential outcomes, and make critical decisions earlier in the dispute resolution process. Learn how corporate legal departments and outside counsel are leveraging AI-powered analysis to evaluate exposure, develop case strategies, and determine when to settle, negotiate, or proceed to trial. This session explores how organizations are moving litigation analysis upstream, reducing reliance on lengthy review processes, and making faster, more informed decisions. Panelists will share practical approaches to controlling litigation costs, strengthening collaboration between in-house and outside counsel, and resolving disputes more efficiently—often before they reach the courtroom.

As AI governance programs mature, organizations are moving beyond internal policies toward formal validation, certification, and measurable assurance. This panel explores what it takes to demonstrate that an AI governance program is not only well designed, but operationally effective—from controls, documentation, and accountability structures to audits, standards, and third-party certification. Panelists will discuss what certification can prove, where it can fall short, and how legal teams can prepare for increasing scrutiny from clients, regulators, and business leaders.

This session will examine the latest professional responsibility obligations shaping how lawyers use technology, including competence, confidentiality, supervision, verification of AI-generated work, candor to the court, and responsibility for the tools used by employees and outside providers. Through recent disciplinary actions, court rulings, and practical scenarios, attendees will learn where lawyers are getting into trouble and what safeguards firms and legal departments should put in place before a technology mistake becomes an ethics violation—or a bench slap.

The CLM implementation that looked promising two years ago is now behind schedule, over budget, or failing to deliver the expected results. Meanwhile, business needs have evolved, stakeholder expectations have shifted, and new technologies have emerged that may offer capabilities and solutions that weren't available when the original contract was signed. How do you determine whether to repair the existing implementation, rethink your approach, or walk away altogether?

This session explores how legal operations teams can diagnose what's gone wrong, reassess their technology investments against today's options, and develop a realistic recovery strategy.

Panelists will discuss how to address flawed workflows, integration challenges, poor adoption, and changing requirements while navigating vendor relationships, contractual commitments, and the difficult decision of whether to fix, modernize, or replace an implementation that isn't delivering value.

This session explores how legal teams are experimenting with multi-model review, adversarial prompting, red-team analysis, quality-control agents, and confidence scoring to improve the reliability of AI-assisted legal work. Panelists will discuss what these workflows can catch, what they still miss, and how to document the process in a way that supports supervision, accountability, and client trust. The session will also examine how to design “AI quality control” without creating a black box of models checking models with no clear human owner.

As firms connect generative AI to internal knowledge, retrieval is only half the problem. The harder question is determining which source should win when precedents, research, matter documents, client guidance, and lawyer commentary conflict. This session explores how knowledge teams can establish authority signals, provenance, freshness, permissions, and validation rules so AI systems surface the right knowledge—not simply the most similar document.

As AI compresses the work behind legal expertise, firms face a question: what happens to profitability when your most efficient work becomes your least billable? This session moves past the adoption debate to the one that matters for firm leaders: how value is created, measured, and captured in an AI-enabled market. We'll examine what AI means for pricing, value-creation, and the delivery model, and how firms can turn AI efficiency into a growth engine. 

In this highly interactive workshop, participants will engage in facilitated table discussions with peers to explore how AI is reshaping client expectations, pricing models, legal service delivery, and competitive differentiation. Following each discussion segment, tables will share their perspectives, experiences, and recommendations with the broader audience, creating a collaborative exchange of ideas and practical insights. 

Through peer-to-peer discussion and audience-wide sharing, participants will leave with a deeper understanding of emerging economic models in legal services and actionable insights for navigating the opportunities and challenges of an AI-powered future. Discussion topics include: 

• Client pricing is evolving - firms must rethink traditional billing models and explore value-based pricing approaches that better align fees with outcomes, efficiency, and client expectations
• AI is reshaping client expectations. Clients increasingly expect faster delivery, greater transparency, improved outcomes, and clearer demonstrations of value as AI becomes embedded in legal services
• Value is defined by the client. Successfully leveraging AI is not just about efficiency gains. It is about delivering measurable business impact, enhanced decision-making, and a better client experience
• Lawyer differentiation is being redefined. As AI automates portions of legal work, firms will increasingly compete on judgment, strategic counsel, domain expertise, client relationships, and the ability to effectively integrate AI into service delivery

Generative AI is making fabricated and manipulated audio, video, images, and documents easier to create—and increasingly difficult to distinguish from authentic evidence. Featuring perspectives from the judiciary, this session examines how legal teams should approach preservation, authentication, forensic analysis, expert testimony, and evidentiary challenges involving synthetic or manipulated content. What happens when a party challenges the authenticity of critical evidence, and how should courts and litigants prepare for a world in which seeing is no longer believing?

Pro bono work remains a critical part of the legal profession’s commitment to access to justice, but the way that work is delivered is changing. New technologies, alternative service models, expanded partnerships, and increasing demand are creating opportunities to reach more people—while also raising questions around supervision, confidentiality, conflicts, competency, and professional responsibility. This session will explore how law firms and legal departments can expand the impact of their pro bono programs while building the right safeguards around the work, the people performing it, and the clients they serve.

This workshop-style session will show corporate legal and privacy teams how to extend their existing CCPA/GDPR-style privacy programs to cover AI in a practical, operational way. Drawing on real-world experience building privacy and AI systems for companies ranging from Fortune 500s to small IP shops, Thomas will walk through mapping AI compliance onto familiar structures like data maps, consent models, and least-privilege access, then layering in AI use policies, training, and controls to reduce shadow AI. Attendees will be guided to think through and sketch a reusable framework for their own organizations—classifying data risk tiers, deciding what can be shared with which tools, and anchoring all of it in a stronger compliance culture—so they leave with a concrete structure they can immediately start implementing rather than just another high-level AI overview.

Small and mid-size law firms are expected to deliver sophisticated client service, manage complex litigation, and keep pace with rapid technology change—often with lean teams and limited resources. This practical forum explores how to build a reliable technology foundation, use e-discovery and litigation workflows to compete effectively, and connect firm technology to client intake and service. Through practitioner insights and interactive discussion, attendees will leave with practical ideas for prioritizing investments, explaining costs to clients, and making technology work harder for their firm.

This case-study session will feature two IP success stories: one from a law firm and one from an in-house IP team. Each speaker will share the challenge they faced, the approach they took, and the lessons or outcomes that made the effort successful. After the presentations, the speakers will join a moderated discussion with the audience about what others can learn from these experiences, how the approaches might apply in different settings, and what challenges remain for IP teams and their clients.

How do you know whether a legal ops investment is solving the right problem? In this practical workshop, we'll share how to align on goals before choosing tools, redesigning workflows, or launching initiatives. Drawing on real-world experience building and improving a legal function, we'll explore how to move beyond vendor buzz and “proving value” to first identify which value matters to the busines. 

Participants will learn frameworks to define a challenge, clarify the outcome they want, and identify the criteria that should shape an investment decision. The discussion will also cover evaluating trade-offs such as implementation effort, integrations, IT dependencies, team capacity, and whether a tool will improve an existing process or add unnecessary complexity.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for making more informed legal ops investment decisions—and for explaining those decisions to leadership.

This session will examine how technology is changing courtroom practice—and what those changes mean for judges, litigators, and the integrity of the record. The session will consider practical applications, including digital transcription and tools that support access to and management of the record, alongside questions of reliability, implementation, and appropriate use. A presentation followed by a moderated fireside chat will draw on real-world examples, including a court transcription pilot if available, to explore what is working, what challenges remain, and how trial teams can prepare for the evolving courtroom.

As corporate legal departments gain access to the same discovery technologies as their outside counsel, law firms must rethink how they price, staff, and differentiate their discovery practices. This session explores the economics of running a profitable discovery practice, including alternative fee arrangements, staffing models, technology investments, and the changing balance between work performed in-house and by outside counsel. Practice leaders will discuss how to protect margins, demonstrate value beyond technology access, and build client relationships that sustain long-term profitability.

The Case Law Forum returns to Legalweek with more sessions and more time for discussions. The rules of discovery are evolving as courts confront new questions involving artificial intelligence alongside enduring challenges in managing electronically stored information. In this forum we will explore recent rulings, share the practical considerations shaping their approach, and offer insights into what these developments may mean for litigants and counsel. The conversation will focus on emerging principles and practical takeaways, with panelists and specific topics to be confirmed.

Plaintiff firms are navigating changing case-acquisition economics, evolving client expectations, and rapid advances in AI and legal technology. This forum will bring together perspectives from across the plaintiff bar to explore how firms are adapting—from marketing and intake to technology investment and operational growth—and what it takes to compete and scale in a changing legal landscape.

The ever popular GC Workshop is back for 2027 in an all new format. Our GC as an Enterprise Leader Intensive is built for leaders ready to move beyond managing Legal and take a more active role in shaping the business.

The General Counsel’s role continues to extend far beyond leading the legal function. Today’s GC is an enterprise executive— shaping strategy, advising the C-suite and board, guiding the business through risk and disruption, making high-stakes resource decisions, and determining how people, technology, outside counsel and data come together to support the company’s priorities. This year's program is designed around that expanded mandate. 

Through TED-style talks, executive case studies, rapid-fire insights, and peer discussion; GCs and senior legal leaders will tackle the strategic choices that define modern legal leadership: where Legal should focus its time and resources, how AI and technology change the department’s operating model, how to make better decisions with imperfect information, and how to lead a legal function that can keep pace with the enterprise.

The popular Legalweek AI Workshop is back with a new name, an all-new format, more speakers, and a dynamic mix of session formats designed to deliver fresh perspectives, candid discussions, and opportunities for audience engagement.This year’s program brings together leading voices from law firms, technology companies, and the broader AI ecosystem to explore what’s next for legal AI, the changing economics of AI investment, and the strategic decisions shaping how firms build, buy, and deploy AI capabilities. From emerging breakthroughs in agentic AI to new ways of measuring value beyond efficiency gains, attendees will gain insights into the opportunities, challenges, and competitive pressures redefining legal work. 

Patent portfolios are valuable strategic assets, but monitoring them for potential infringement and competitor activity can be difficult to do consistently at scale. This session will explore how in-house IP teams can use real-time monitoring and market intelligence to spot emerging risks, assess where competitors may be encroaching, and turn signals into actionable decisions. Through practical examples and discussion, speakers will share approaches to integrating monitoring into portfolio strategy, prioritizing findings, and making better-informed decisions about where to focus legal and business resources.

As court reporting faces workforce shortages and new technologies reshape how the record is captured and used, litigators must understand both the reliability of the official record and the opportunities to turn it into useful trial intelligence. Through case studies, speakers will examine how reporting methods and tools—including AI and ASR—affect record integrity, access to transcripts, and the ability to analyze proceedings efficiently. The discussion would also look at whether technology is helping court reporting adapt or creating new challenges for attracting and retaining professionals.

Small and mid-size law firms are expected to deliver sophisticated client service, manage complex litigation, and keep pace with rapid technology change—often with lean teams and limited resources. This practical forum explores how to build a reliable technology foundation, use e-discovery and litigation workflows to compete effectively, and connect firm technology to client intake and service. Through practitioner insights and interactive discussion, attendees will leave with practical ideas for prioritizing investments, explaining costs to clients, and making technology work harder for their firm.

Discovery practice leaders face growing pressure to adopt AI, automate workflows, reduce costs, and deliver results faster—all while maintaining defensibility, quality, and professional oversight. How do leaders encourage innovation without introducing unacceptable risk or undermining established practices? This session examines how to evaluate emerging tools, establish accountability for technology-enabled work, manage resistance within teams, and determine when innovation creates measurable value versus unnecessary complexity. Panelists will explore the leadership decisions required to modernize discovery practices without sacrificing control.

Even the most carefully planned legal technology implementations can go sideways. Changing business requirements, unexpected integration challenges, shifting stakeholder priorities, and rapidly evolving technology can leave customers and vendors working from a plan that no longer makes sense. In this interactive workshop, participants will work through real-world implementation scenarios to diagnose what went wrong, identify competing priorities, and develop a strategy for getting a troubled project back on course. Participants will leave with a practical framework for making course corrections, rebuilding stakeholder trust, and establishing a realistic path to delivering value.

How can a law firm help its litigation teams use generative AI effectively while managing risk? Drawing on practical, anonymized examples involving privilege review, document review, and case analysis, this session will explore how AI can be applied in litigation workflows.

Presenters will discuss approaches to AI adoption, including training and certification, cross-functional review and approval, and guidance on using enterprise tools responsibly. In a conversational, workshop-style format, they’ll share ideas other organizations can adapt to support responsible AI use, identify useful applications, and make litigation work more efficient.

Small and mid-size law firms are expected to deliver sophisticated client service, manage complex litigation, and keep pace with rapid technology change—often with lean teams and limited resources. This practical forum explores how to build a reliable technology foundation, use e-discovery and litigation workflows to compete effectively, and connect firm technology to client intake and service. Through practitioner insights and interactive discussion, attendees will leave with practical ideas for prioritizing investments, explaining costs to clients, and making technology work harder for their firm.

Private equity investment, acquisitions, and market consolidation are reshaping the eDiscovery ecosystem, creating new opportunities and challenges for law firms and their clients. What happens when fewer providers control more of the technologies and services that discovery practices depend on? This candid discussion examines the implications of consolidation for pricing, innovation, service quality, vendor independence, and long-term technology strategy. Discovery practice leaders will explore how to preserve negotiating leverage, manage vendor concentration risk, and make platform and partnership decisions that protect both their practices and their clients.

Technology is changing how trial teams prepare for jury selection—from organizing publicly available information to identifying themes and developing more focused questions. This session will examine how technology can support voir dire while keeping attorney judgment at the center. Through practical examples, speakers will consider the opportunities and limits of these tools, including accuracy, privacy, bias, and ethical use, and discuss how litigators can use technology responsibly to make more informed jury-selection decisions.

Legal operations teams have more data at their fingertips than ever before, but collecting metrics is only valuable if those numbers drive better decisions. How do you determine which metrics matter, establish meaningful benchmarks, and translate performance data into improvements the business can see? This session explores how legal operations leaders are measuring success across legal spend, outside counsel performance, matter management, technology adoption, and team productivity. Panelists will share practical approaches to building useful dashboards, identifying trends that require action, and communicating results to general counsel and business leaders. Attendees will learn how to move beyond reporting activity to demonstrating measurable impact, justifying investments, and using data to continuously improve legal department performance.

As multimedia technologies and markets evolve, licensing is expanding into new and increasingly complex territory. This session will examine major multimedia licensing deals and the lessons they offer, including how organizations negotiate and manage licensing at scale in a fragmented marketplace. Speakers will explore the technical and legal questions shaping the field—from encoding and decoding technologies to ongoing debates around RAND licensing—and discuss what these developments mean for IP owners, implementers, and their counsel.