2026 Conference Agenda

How do you build an institution that can continuously adapt when the pace of technological change exceeds the pace of organizational change? A candid, moderated conversation among law firm chairs, CEOs, and managing partners about strategic leadership and institutional adaptability.

As AI, data, knowledge, pricing, innovation, and strategic delivery intertwine, structures become strained. Explore how Husch Blackwell created a Transformation Office uniting independent capabilities around a shared mandate for change, how it defined ownership across disciplines, and the lessons learned from building an integrated approach to innovation, intelligence, governance, and client value. Discover opportunities and tensions as functional boundaries disappear.

Our three finalists will present their cutting-edge projects and engage in an interactive Q&A session, providing valuable insights and learning opportunities for the audience. Cast your vote for the most innovative solution and join us at the conference cocktail party where the winner will be announced. Presented in random order.

Knowledge and innovation groups looking for “unicorn” team members who have the legal knowledge, business acumen, data literacy, and AI fluency are seeking people who may not actually exist. This session explores how firms are instead identifying untapped potential inside their KM, library, research, and intelligence teams, to develop professionals into future-ready roles amid constant change. It examines talent transformation in practice, how leaders identify who can make the leap, and the possible friction when some evolve while others continue in traditional roles.

Knowledge Management and legal engineering have long operated separately. KM structured legal knowledge; legal engineers built systems to execute it. Generative AI is collapsing that gap, enabling experts to operationalize knowledge directly and blurring traditional boundaries. This session explores how AI reshapes the relationship between legal knowledge, workflow design, and delivery, why structured knowledge is more strategically valuable, and how firms are rethinking who owns the systems that translate judgment into scalable execution.

Will AI adapt to lawyers—or will lawyers finally have to adapt to technology?

For decades, firms have tried to make technology accommodate how lawyers naturally work. AI complicates that ambition in both directions. Its ability to extract meaning from unstructured information suggests lawyers shouldn’t need to become data stewards or restructure their workflows to benefit. Yet some things cannot be inferred after the fact—why a document was final, what judgment produced it, or whether the work should be reused. If law firms want institutional intelligence rather than better search, the question becomes whether the burden of adaptation belongs to the technology or to the lawyers themselves.

Law firms have spent two years focused on AI adoption. Less attention has been paid to what constant technological change is demanding of the people expected to lead it. Emerging research suggests that cognitive overload often comes not from using AI, but from overseeing and evaluating its work — a burden increasingly falling on partners and senior lawyers. This session reframes adoption as a capacity challenge — exploring why resilience is becoming a business capability, how cognitive strain affects judgment and performance, and what KM and Innovation leaders can do to help lawyers sustain change without sacrificing the quality of their work.

Some lawyers are building their own software tools without IT, KM, or Innovation oversight. This session explores what they're actually making. We'll examine the gaps those tools reveal in firm innovation programs. We'll also look at how teams can capture value from unsanctioned work, govern risk without killing initiative, and scale one lawyer's fix into a practice-group solution. Finally, we'll cover the shift from primary builder to strategic enabler.

When Troutman Pepper and Locke Lord merged in January 2025, the firm chairman declared KM a priority, and 18 months of hard work followed: Appointing KM and AI Innovation Partners, launching enterprise-wide KM tools, building a partner champion network, designing a knowledge infrastructure, and implementing an AI strategy. This session is an inspiration for any firm building KM from scratch. Explore the challenges they faced, the decisions that worked, and lessons you can take from their experience.

For decades, Knowledge Management has tried to solve the same problem: how do you make what a firm's best lawyers know available to everyone else, without those lawyers having to be in the room? A research collaboration between Davis Wright Tremaine and Stanford liftlab is exploring a new answer: AI personas built from legal work product and structured interviews that allow attorneys to engage directly with a lawyer's judgment, expertise, and communication style.

Corporate legal departments are rapidly expanding their own capabilities in AI, Knowledge Management, data, and technology—changing not only how legal work gets done internally, but also what they expect from outside counsel. This panel brings together in-house leaders to explore how they are deploying AI, building institutional knowledge, and rethinking the operating model of the modern legal department. It will also examine how those shifts are reshaping the way sophisticated clients evaluate law firms: from KM capability and AI fluency to technology-enabled efficiency, business understanding, and genuine future-readiness. The result is an unfiltered client perspective on what law firms must now demonstrate to earn trust, deliver value, and remain indispensable partners.

Knowledge Management professionals have spent decades making expertise findable. Womble Bond Dickinson is making it executable. Its AI Labs function builds specialized agents across patent, bankruptcy, chemistry, and litigation support—not as one-off tools, but as reusable capabilities deployed across matters. This session examines how subject-matter judgment becomes something an agent can execute, then be tested against expert review, corrected, and improved over time. The deeper story is what this requires of Knowledge Management itself: building, governing, and continuously improving assets that no longer just inform the work, but participate in it.

Institutional intelligence—turning what a firm knows into something people and systems can find, trust, and reuse—has become a strategic priority. AI didn’t create this need, but deploying it exposed how much knowledge remains fragmented, tacit, or locked inside individual lawyers and disconnected systems. Every firm faces this pressure, but there is no shared playbook: each firm's path reflects its culture, leadership, legacy systems, existing capabilities, and the problem it chose to solve first. This panel brings together three firms building that capability now, comparing what triggered their investment; what they chose to build first, defer, or leave unresolved; and what those choices reveal about what Knowledge Management is being asked to become.