SOLID New York

A full-day, TED-style summit on legal innovation and the business of law, with 16+ speakers, facilitated table talks, and a room built for people who don’t just attend, they participate.

Thursday, October 1, 2026

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Session I 9:20 AM CT

Table Introductions

Funders, Founders, and the Entrepreneur Mindset in the Room

The Challenge:

The legal industry is experiencing a once-in-a-generation inflection — legal professionals are responding to it like employees when they need to respond like entrepreneurs.

The Reality:

Nick Robertson is the former COO at Relativity, where he architected and scaled operations and go-to-market from the first enterprise deal to $500M+ in revene. , He now invests in the next generation of legal tech through OnDean Forward, and teaches the principles of entrepreneurship at Northwestern University. His message for Chicago: there’s never been a better time for all of us to embrace the entrepreneur mindset.

What You’ll Learn:

The one entrepreneurial instinct from the that applies directly to how you build and manage legal operations today
What the operator-investor lens reveals about which legal tech companies to trust — and what the best ones have in common
Four entrepreneurship principles from the Northwestern classroom translated directly into skills every legal professional needs right now

Key Takeaway:

AI is an entrepreneurial opportunity the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The people who treat it that way will build the next decade.

Unlocking the AI dividend: what is it, how do you measure it, and what do you do with it?

The Challenge:

Everyone is chasing the “AI dividend,” but very few teams know how to capture it , or scale it. The gap isn’t the technology. It’s the operating model. Leaders are struggling to translate individual productivity wins into team-level outcomes and enterprise-level value that a CEO or CFO can feel.

The Reality:

AI produces value in three layers , individual, team, enterprise. Most organizations stall at the first. Dorothy has been building the next two: redesigning workflows, structuring human-plus-agent models, and reframing the value story so that a productivity gain becomes something measurable at scale. Her experience shows what it takes to operationalize the dividend, not just talk about it.

What You’ll Learn:

How to design your “agent workforce” so value compounds
How How to measure productivity gains in a way that resonates with senior leadership
How to translate the AI dividend into enterprise-level wins

Key Takeaway:

The AI dividend isn’t a windfall , it’s a discipline. Leaders who connect agent-driven productivity to real business outcomes will define the next era of legal performance.

Rethinking Legal AI: Putting in Systems, Not Just Tools

The Challenge:

Legal teams are under increasing pressure to adopt AI, while managing rising demand, limited headcount, and growing expectations from the business.

The Reality:

Most AI investments today focus on copilots, contract review, and drafting tools — helping lawyers move faster once work hits their desk. But this approach doesn’t address the real problem: too much work reaching legal in the first place.

What You’ll Learn:

Why the biggest efficiency gains in legal come from reducing inbound work, not accelerating it
How leading teams are using AI to structure, triage, and automate requests before they reach a lawyer
What it takes to create true visibility into legal demand across the business
How an intake-first approach amplifies the value of your entire legal tech stack

Key Takeaway:

AI delivers the most impact in legal not by speeding up work, but by eliminating repetitive tasks and shifting legal’s time to higher-value work.

Imagine If: What Legal Looks Like When You're Already Living in the Future

The Challenge:

Legal leaders know AI is changing everything — but knowing it and doing it are two very different things. The gap between inspiration and action is where most departments are stuck right now, waiting for permission, waiting for certainty, waiting for someone to go first.

The Reality:

Some GCs aren’t waiting. They’ve already restructured how their teams work, rebuilt their relationships with the business, and turned legal into a genuine driver of profitability. The M&A team calls them first now. The CFO sees them as a partner. And it started not with a massive transformation initiative, but with a single step taken before anyone else thought it was necessary.

What You’ll Learn:

What it actually looks like when legal ops is running at full speed — the real metrics, the real relationships, the real career impact
Why the data foundation you build today is the AI capability you’ll have tomorrow — and why starting small still counts
How to reframe legal’s value from cost center to margin maker in the language your CEO and CFO already speak

Key Takeaway:

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to take the step. The GCs who are already living in the future started exactly where you are.

Table Talk Town HallTable Switch Morning Break

Session II 11:10 AM CT

Adoption or Adaptation? Why the Teams Winning at AI Stopped Chasing the Wrong Race

The Challenge: Legal teams are drowning in AI tools, adoption mandates, and the pressure to do more with less — and the faster they chase adoption, the further behind they feel. The Reality: Joshua Duplantier has spent three years inside EY building AI solutions for legal teams — starting with EY’s own GCO as client zero. His conclusion: adoption is a destination that keeps moving. Adaptability is a design system that compounds. The legal teams getting called on by the rest of the business right now are the ones who figured that out first. What You’ll Learn:

Why the traditional adoption methodology is the wrong frame for AI — and what replaces it
What “adaptability as a design system” actually looks like inside a working legal team, with real examples from EY and clients
How to measure whether it’s working — and what speed to insight tells you that adoption rates never will

Key Takeaway: Stop training your team for tools. Train them for change. The teams that do will be the ones the business calls — and legal stops being a cost center the moment that happens.

The Pentagon: What the Most Evolved Legal Chief of Staff Role Actually Looks Like

The Challenge:

Most organizations don’t fully understand what a Legal Chief of Staff actually does — and most Legal Chiefs of Staff don’t realize how far the role can go.

The Reality:

Samantha Lofton is the Chief of Staff to the Chief Legal and Corporate Affairs Officer of Zimmer Biomet, a global medical device company. She came in with a degrees’ in Management and Decision Science and Information Systems, a career full of drop-in rescue operations as a Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Risk Officer and Head of Legal Project Management in Large Law Firms, Clinical Research operations experience and a simple operating philosophy: build the ecosystem, give it away, find the next problem. Four years in, she’s moving beyond just legal operations — and the story of how she got there is a roadmap for everyone in this room.

What You’ll Learn:

What “build it and give it away” actually looks like in practice — how to create systems that run without you so you can move to bigger problems
Why the Legal Chief of Staff role is dissolving the boundary between legal operations and business operations — and what that means for the careers of everyone in the room
The difference between building something technically correct and building something people actually adopt — and why that gap is where the real value lives

Key Takeaway:

The Legal Chief of Staff role isn’t a destination. It’s a launchpad. The ones who treat it that way will find themselves doing work that doesn’t even have a legal label on it — and that’s exactly where the future is.

The Value Gap: A Repeatable, Data-Driven Approach to Aligning Legal Effort With What Clients Actually Value

The Challenge:

Two years into GenAI adoption, most firms have moved beyond pilots—but many still struggle to translate early momentum into consistent, firm-wide impact. Tools are in place, yet usage remains uneven and workflows fragmented.

The Reality:

Firms seeing real results have moved from experimentation to operationalization—embedding AI into core legal workflows and tailoring it to their unique knowledge, practices, and systems. By integrating with platforms like iManage and leveraging tools like Harvey’s Agent Builder, they are turning capabilities into cohesive, scalable solutions.

What You’ll Learn:

What separates experimentation from sustained, operational impact
How leading firms are customizing AI to reflect their knowledge and workflows
Where integrations and workflow design unlock the most value
Lessons learned from two years of real-world deployment—what worked and what didn’t

Key Takeaway:

GenAI delivers value when it’s embedded into how legal work actually gets done— integrated, and operationalized at scale.

Redefining Legal Leadership: The Beginning of the CLO the Future Needs

The Challenge:

The GC role is changing faster than most legal leaders are prepared for — and the traditional skills that built great careers are no longer enough to hold the seat.

The Reality:

Regina Jones is the CLO of Archer Daniels Midland, a Fortune 35 company. She started in IT, worked the oil fields, served as Chief of Staff during the Enron collapse, and has spent 30 years building the kind of range that turns lawyers into business leaders. Her take on where the GC role is going — and what AI actually changes about it — is the clearest framework in the room.

What You’ll Learn:

Why the convergence of CEO and CLO agendas is the most important structural shift in legal leadership right now — and what it demands of the people in this room
The difference between legal understanding and legal thinking — what AI can replicate and what it cannot, and why that distinction defines your value going forward
What “digital augmentation of talent” actually looks like in practice — how to identify the 80% AI can accelerate and show up smarter with the 20% that remains yours

Key Takeaway:

AI isn’t replacing legal leaders. It’s revealing which ones were always business leaders who happened to think legally — and accelerating the gap between them and everyone else.

Table Talk Town HallTable Switch Lunch

Think Free First: How One Legal Department Found Millions Without Buying Anything New

The Challenge:

Legal departments are under pressure to show AI-driven cost savings — and most of them are looking in the wrong place

The Reality:

LaTonya Ellis, Associate General Counsel & VP will highlight how legal departments can achieve significant cost savings by addressing a crucial question that often goes unconsidered” What tasks are we outsourcing that can be managed in-house”?

What You’ll Learn:

How a simple decision tree — think free first — transformed outside counsel spend across an entire enterprise legal department
Why the AI dividend most legal leaders are searching for is already sitting inside their existing tools and spend, waiting to be captured
What intentionality actually looks like in practice — and why it matters more right now than any technology you could buy

Key Takeaway:

You don’t need a new tool. You need a new question. Think free first — and then follow the money.

The Legal CXO: Filling the Gap the Modern GC Left Behind

The Challenge:

The GC role has fundamentally changed — pulled upward into board-level strategy, global risk, and existential business decisions. That evolution has left a massive leadership gap inside the legal function that no traditional title or playbook has been written to fill.

The Reality:

The most forward-thinking legal departments aren’t run by risk managers anymore. They’re run by strategic operators who give the business options, not answers — and who build the infrastructure to make those options actionable. Legal ops isn’t a cost center. It’s the engine.

What You’ll Learn:

Why the modern legal department’s job is to provide risk-weighted options, not yes or no decisions
How the GC’s expanding mandate has created an entirely new leadership role — and why it’s yours to define
What it actually looks like to step into a role no one has had before, with a new GC and a shifting mandate
How to talent spot, build upward, and position your team for a world that’s changing every 90 days

Key Takeaway:

Nobody has a playbook for the Legal CXO role — because it’s never existed before. The people who will define it are already in the room.

The Lean Legal Department: How One GC Is Doing More With a Lean Team and AI

The Challenge: Not every GC has a large team, a big budget, or the luxury of hiring into every gap. But the mandate keeps growing — board visibility, strategic influence, faster decisions, higher stakes. The question is how you lead a lean legal function without burning out, falling behind, or outsourcing everything. The Reality: The GCs finding the most creative solutions right now aren’t always the ones with the most resources. They’re the ones who’ve rethought how they work — using AI as a thinking partner, reclaiming hours that used to disappear into routine work, and finally getting to the important issues that were always on the list but never at the top. What You’ll Learn:

How a GC running a six-person team is absorbing expanded board responsibilities without adding headcount
Why AI is replacing the “rambling” phase of outside counsel relationships — and what that means for legal spend
What happens to the back-burner issues — the important but never urgent work — when legal teams finally have time to think

Key Takeaway: You don’t need a big team to lead a high-performing legal function. You need the right tools, the right instincts, and the discipline to use the time you get back on the work that actually matters.

What Happens After What Happens Next: Three Years of Harvey at Mayer Brown

The Challenge:

The Reality:

What You’ll Learn:

What separates experimentation from sustained, operational impact
How leading firms are customizing AI to reflect their knowledge and workflows
Where integrations and workflow design unlock the most value
Lessons learned from two years of real-world deployment—what worked and what didn’t

Key Takeaway:

GenAI delivers value when it’s embedded into how legal work actually gets done— integrated, and operationalized at scale.

What Is Genius in the Age of AI? How Curiosity Became the Ultimate Legal Advantage

The Challenge: Legal leaders have more information, faster access, and more powerful tools than ever before — yet many still feel overwhelmed. The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence or experience. It’s knowing what to ask, how deep to go, and how to turn raw information into judgment, strategy, and action. The Reality: Through his work as a trial consultant, legal solutions leader, and law professor, Joe has seen a clear shift: the differentiator is no longer recall or horsepower alone — it’s curiosity. When access to information becomes instant, the advantage moves to those who know how to ask better questions, explore more deeply, and translate insight into persuasion. In practice, that shift changes who leads conversations, who shapes strategy, and who creates leverage in high-stakes legal work. What You’ll Learn:

How elite lawyers are redefining “genius” now that recall and research are instant
Why curiosity — not intelligence or experience — is becoming the real advantage in high-stakes legal work
How AI changes who feels confident, prepared, and persuasive in the room

Key Takeaway: In the age of AI, genius isn’t about knowing more. It’s about asking better questions — and knowing what to do with the answers.

Table Talk

Town Hall

Table Switch

Afternoon Break

Confidence Isn't Given,It's Built

The Challenge:

Leaders are under pressure to project confidence and drive outcomes even when they don’t feel ready—while also creating an environment where others feel safe to speak up, ask for support, and lead.

The Reality:

In practice, many talented people hold back because they expect “no”, doubt themselves, or feel constrained by others’ assumptions—so ideas, requests (budget/resources), and leadership moments go unspoken unless someone actively draws them out.

What You’ll Learn:

Confidence is a skill built through action, not a trait you’re born with.
Taking responsibility in high-stakes moments accelerates growth and expands what you believe you can do.
Confidence spreads: borrowing belief from a supportive leader (and then paying it forward) helps others step up.
In the age of AI, human connection is the differentiator—relationships, encouragement, and real conversations unlock performance.

Key Takeaway:

Act before you feel ready, and deliberately “lend confidence” to others by inviting their voice and backing their asks—because that’s how confidence gets built, individually and across the team.

AI Is Not Shrinking Legal: It's Expanding It

The Challenge:

Much of the AI conversation in legal centers on efficiency: fewer hours, fewer lawyers, fewer steps. The narrative suggests contraction — that automation reduces demand and compresses the profession.

The Reality:

In practice, AI is doing something very different. By eliminating repetitive, execution-heavy steps — research cycles, meeting notes, manual triage, outline drafting — legal teams are gaining back capacity for higher-value thinking. That reclaimed space enables deeper strategy, faster iteration, and more complex work. In markets like patent litigation, this compression of effort is expanding opportunity, not shrinking it.

What You’ll Learn:

The specific steps legal teams no longer need to perform — and what replaces them
How AI increases capability and capacity inside lean teams
Why markets like IP and patent litigation are growing alongside AI, not despite it
How to structure workflows so humans stay in the loop while AI handles the friction

Key Takeaway:

AI doesn’t eliminate legal work. It removes friction — and friction removal expands markets.

Fireside Chat - From Signal to Strategy: What Should You Do Differently Tomorrow

The Challenge:

Conferences often overwhelm with insight — but leave leaders without clarity. After a full day of AI case studies, talent shifts, workflow redesign, and market change, the hardest question remains: what actually matters?

The Reality:

In this closing fireside conversation, a small group of senior leaders will reflect in real time on what stood out, what surprised them, what shifted their thinking, and what patterns emerged across the day. No slides. No rehearsed talking points. Just judgment, perspective, and synthesis from operators living these changes firsthand.

What You’ll Learn: