LegalTechTalk hit London like a juggernaut last week, bringing together circa 5,500 in many cases international professionals to the Intercontinental Hotel at the 02, transforming it into a legal tech festival that has dominated social media feeds ever since.
Coffee stations, a nail bar, massages, juice bar, live music, beer and cocktail bars (and don’t forget mocktail bar), surround and permeate the exhibitor booths, which themselves increasingly offer beverages or food to entice conversation and fun. We once called it the Met Gala of legaltech conferences, but perhaps a better analogy would now be Glastonbury. Legora built their own pub.
Exhibitors still talk privately about who the audience of this conference is and whether it’s really their target market, but there is absolutely no doubt that LTT has brought people and fun in droves. It would be good to see some analysis of who attended, once the LTT team has had a well-earned rest. Vendors pay a fortune to appear at the conference and smart marketing teams will ensure that ROI considerations outweighs FOMO. With it expanding to the USA next year, customers will want to see that there is a focus on substance and not just size.
While attendees still sometimes struggle to concentrate on sessions amidst the buzz, the stages and content were good this year, not least (of course) on the Garden Stage, hosted by Legal IT Insider.
Here are few takeaways from those sessions, which provided plenty of food for thought.
The challenge is not (just) whether AI works
The legal industry’s biggest challenge is no longer whether AI works. It’s whether people, organisations and institutions can adapt quickly enough to use it well.
Across discussions ranging from access to justice to law firm innovation, data governance, leadership and pricing models, speakers repeatedly arrived at the same conclusion: technology is rarely the limiting factor. Human behaviour is.
Curiosity versus anxiety
One of the most memorable observations came from Stradley Ronon’s director of knowledge and innovation, Sarah Hirebet, and COO Marissa Park during a session on human-centred leadership.
“Curiosity is the antidote to anxiety,” they said. That simple phrase arguably captured the challenge facing legal organisations today. Many firms continue to approach AI adoption as a technology project. The most successful examples discussed at LegalTechTalk focused on culture, education and engagement.
Stradley Ronon’s approach has been not to overwhelm lawyers with technology. Instead, they start by asking a basic question: what frustrates you? What do you wish was easier? Let’s solve that.
This echoes a lesson many legal technology leaders have learned over decades: people rarely resist change because they dislike innovation. They resist because they don’t understand how it helps them.
The pilot problem
This was echoed during the panel Legal IT Insider hosted on how to build pilots that create lasting change. Speakers discussed how to avoid the phenomenon of “innovation theatre” – pilot projects that generate excitement but never become embedded into daily practice.
The reasons for failure include unclear ownership, weak governance, insufficient leadership involvement and a failure to connect innovation projects to firm-wide priorities.
One particularly interesting observation was that some firms now effectively budget for pilot failure. At Iberian giant Cuatrecasas, POCs have a budget that can be lost. Rather than treating unsuccessful projects as failures, they are increasingly viewed as a normal part of experimentation.
The access-to-justice paradox
One thought-provoking discussion came during an access-to-justice session hosted by Dana Denis Smith, founder of Obelisk Support.
The panel highlighted a paradox facing the legal sector. AI is simultaneously improving access to legal information while creating new risks.
Research discussed during the session showed large numbers of consumers already using non-legal tools such as ChatGPT to understand legal disputes, particularly around landlord and tenant issues. Speakers also warned that courts are increasingly dealing with AI-generated submissions containing inaccuracies or hallucinated authorities.
Law firms can build governance frameworks, training programmes and quality controls around AI use. Individual consumers cannot. The challenge therefore becomes societal rather than technological. How do we improve access to justice without flooding legal systems with unreliable information?
Several speakers argued that inclusion efforts often disappear when economic pressure increases. Yet they also made a compelling commercial case for maintaining them.
The most striking observation was that sponsorship matters as much as opportunity.
Removing barriers is important, but visibility, advocacy and active sponsorship are what ultimately determine who progresses.
The governance gap
The governance discussion surfaced repeatedly throughout the day.
During a WPP session on agentic AI, data governance and business integrity, a critical question emerged: what happens when systems begin acting with increasing autonomy?
Legal departments are finding themselves at the centre of that debate.
Historically, lawyers reviewed decisions after they were made. Increasingly, they are being asked to help design the governance structures that shape how AI systems operate in the first place.
The challenge is particularly acute because regulation remains fragmented and fast-moving.
As one panel noted, many organisations are operating in an environment where rules are still emerging. That creates both risk and opportunity. Businesses have a chance to influence standards, but only if legal teams can explain governance requirements in commercial language rather than regulatory language.
Beyond the billable hour debate
Another interesting theme was that AI may not entirely kill the billable hour, but it is accelerating experimentation around value-based pricing.
Several speakers suggested clients are not necessarily demanding the end of all hourly billing. What they increasingly demand is transparency.
The conversation is very much revolving around understanding what clients perceive as valuable, and how to calculate what to charge for that.
One speaker described a decision to provide certain AI-generated outputs at no charge, simply creating an export. The firm’s pricing instead focuses on interpretation, curation and expertise.
The next phase of legal AI
If there was just one takeaway from the Garden Stage, it is that legal technology is entering a more mature phase, as we have echoed in other columns.
The industry’s attention is shifting away from questions of capability towards questions of implementation. How do we properly govern AI? How do we measure success? How do we scale pilots? How do we train people? And how do we maintain trust?
The legal sector spent much of the last three years asking what AI can do. The question now, is whether they are culturally and structurally ready for what comes next.
