Opening Remarks

From The LegalTech Fund’s front-row seat to the market’s deal flow, you’ll learn about the long-term patterns that define the future. We’ll decode these patterns to reveal the three forces driving change, the emerging “haves vs. have-nots” divide, and how you can build a winning culture of experimentation.

The Challenge:
General Counsels are being asked to do more than ever - drive strategy, manage risk, and deliver business value. But the traditional model of “legal advisor” no longer fits the demands of today’s business.

The Reality:
The modern GC is part lawyer, part strategist, part technologist. Success now means leading teams that think like business leaders first, lawyers second, and building the data and AI foundations to keep pace with change.

What You’ll Learn:
--- How GCs are moving from productivity gains to true business value creation
--- Why building data foundations is the prerequisite to leveraging AI
--- The new roles and skills shaping tomorrow’s legal departments
--- What top CLOs are actually looking for when hiring and growing their teams
Key Takeaway:
The GC role is no longer just about practicing law - it’s about building the business of law.

The Five Must-Have Competencies to Thrive in the Agentic AI Era

The Challenge:
AI is advancing at a pace that legal teams have never experienced before. Every few weeks, new capabilities shift how people, process, and technology fit together. Planning for the future is challenging when the ground is constantly moving.

The Reality:
Agentic AI systems, that not only assist but take action, are setting new expectations for how, and the pace at which, work gets done. Legal professionals who possess the competencies to fully leverage advanced AI are thriving in this new era of productivity.

What You’ll Learn:

--- What are the five must-have competencies for legal professionals, from AI literacy to data security, privacy and governance, strategic thinking and business model adaptation.
--- Why it’s critical to bring a change management mindset to all business of law initiatives.
--- Practical steps to prepare your team and organization for change.
Key Takeaway:
You can’t predict the org chart two years from now, but you can build the competencies now that will carry you through the change.

A Preview of the Digital Readiness Self-Assessment

The Challenge:
The marketplace is pushing us to adapt to an accelerating wave of technological innovation, including—but not limited to—AI. Doing so requires shifts in the ways we approach our careers.

The Reality:
The Cowen Group has identified four key skills that enhance your personal ability to harness innovation behind your organization’s key goals and strategies. All are trainable. Translation = with focused effort, you can get better.

What You’ll Learn:

--- This is a preview of a free 60-minute workshop available to all SOLID attendees in the weeks to come
--- The workshop will enable you to assess the current state of your four skills versus your future desired state
--- Once you plot your current versus future state, you can create your own developmental plan
Key Takeaway:
To get from Now to Next, you need a plan that will drive your growth. This is where you begin.

The Challenge:
Many high-performing lawyers feel unseen. They do excellent work, but visibility feels out of reach, and their voice doesn’t shape the bigger conversation.

The Reality:
Visibility is about showing up, sharing your perspective, and being intentional about how you learn, write, and engage with others.

What You’ll Learn:

--- How to develop a point of view that’s actually valuable — and where to start
--- Publish, speak, and network with thoughtfulness and intention
--- Why continuous learning (not shortcuts) fuels credibility and career momentum
--- How to translate curiosity and consistency into opportunity, and impact
Key Takeaway:
Thought leadership isn’t about being the loudest in the room. It’s about doing the work, learning deeply, sharing bravely, and connecting authentically

The Challenge:
Most law firms treat innovation as an experiment on the side. The result? Small productivity gains, but little impact on clients, talent, or the bottom line.

The Reality:
Seyfarth made R&D a core function, building Seyfarth Labs that transform experiments into scalable solutions. From automating separation agreements to creating client-ready platforms, their model has become both a talent magnet and a business driver.

What You’ll Learn:

--- How an internal lab delivers measurable client impact
--- Why executive sponsorship matters more than tech itself
--- Real client stories where tech-enabled solutions drove retention, revenue, and satisfaction
Key Takeaway:
Innovation isn’t a side project- it’s an engine. With the right structure, leadership, and investment, R&D can transform a law firm’s value to clients and its ability to win the war for talent.

The Challenge:
Legal departments everywhere are under pressure to “do something with AI.” But most discover the hard truth: without fixing their data, the AI vision never leaves the whiteboard.

The Reality:
AI doesn’t fail because of algorithms—it fails because of unstructured, siloed, and poorly governed data. LightningIQ has seen this firsthand, from global banks drowning in decades of documents to enterprises struggling to even find the right data to train on. The lesson is clear: no AI strategy survives contact with messy data.

What You’ll Learn:

--- How leading organizations are tackling unstructured data at scale
--- Why governance and “data in place” are prerequisites for AI success
--- The AI Readiness Checklist: a simple, actionable framework you can use immediately
--- Case study insights: how one enterprise moved from data chaos to AI-ready in 90 days
Key Takeaway:
Before you chase AI pilots, fix your foundation. The organizations that get their data house in order now will be the ones who actually deliver on the promise of AI tomorrow.

The Challenge:
Deepfakes are no longer futuristic threats; they’re here, already undermining reputations, influencing negotiations, and calling evidence into question. For legal professionals, the stakes are enormous: trust in clients, cases, and even the justice system itself is on the line.

The Reality:
AI-generated deception is advancing quickly, and the legal, technical, and ethical risks are mounting. But with the right tools and expertise, legal teams can expose synthetic media, safeguard evidence, and protect the integrity of their work.

What You’ll Learn:

--- How deepfakes are already impacting clients and cases today
--- The key legal and ethical risks every professional needs to understand
--- Practical steps for detecting and countering AI-generated deception
--- How digital forensics can restore clarity and truth in a world of synthetic media
Key Takeaway:
Deepfakes aren’t just a tech problem; they’re a legal problem. Digital forensics offers a clear, practical roadmap to defend against AI-driven deception and protect the credibility of the justice system.

The Challenge:
Legal teams are chasing efficiency with productivity tools and automation, but staying in traditional silos doesn’t rewrite P&Ls—or careers. Too many teams are mistaking incremental improvements for real transformation.

The Reality:
The real shift is bigger: legal is being woven into enterprise architecture, AI strategy, and cross-business workflows. Roles are being redefined, org charts are breaking, and the future belongs to those who can connect legal, data, and design into enterprise value.

What You’ll Learn:

--- Why “productivity” is only the warm-up, not the destination
--- How new AI- and data-driven roles are breaking traditional silos
--- The skills and mindset needed to lead transformation (without being a coder)
--- Why the next generation of leaders will be those willing to invent roles before they exist
Key Takeaway:
This isn’t about doing the work better—it’s about rethinking the work, the roles, and the way legal leads. Productivity is the starting line. Transformation is the real race.

The Challenge:
Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures demand speed and precision, but traditional due diligence often misses the messy middle: unstructured data, ownership disputes, privacy concerns, and legal hold chaos. Those blind spots put value and timelines at risk.

The Reality:
Josh Kreamer, a founding member of Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) and team lead for the LDI Architect group focusing on corporate use cases, has seen firsthand how a data-driven approach transforms high-stakes transactions. By surfacing risks early and bringing clarity to complex data issues, LDI helps legal teams shift from reactive firefighting to proactive control, protecting value and keeping deals on track.

What You’ll Learn:

--- Why unstructured data is the Achilles’ heel of traditional due diligence
--- How LDI equips legal teams to navigate privacy, ownership, and regulatory complexity
--- How a proactive data strategy turns risk into advantage in high-stakes deals
Key Takeaway:
In high-stakes transactions, speed is nothing without control. LDI gives legal teams the tools to see around corners, safeguard value, and lead the deal with confidence.

The Challenge:
Legal teams are under pressure to move faster, do more, and enable the business, but there’s no magic tool, consultant, or shortcut that builds operational excellence overnight.
The Reality: It takes ground-up work: examining processes, fixing inefficiencies, retraining mindsets, and doing it before you can scale AI, data intelligence, or predictive risk modeling.

What You’ll Learn:

--- How to find inefficiencies—and save full-time headcount—without cutting staff
--- Why legal ops transformation starts with process, not technology
--- How a 20% time investment changed the trajectory of Jeremiah’s legal team
--- Replacing the “fail” fast mindset with “try and win”
Key Takeaway:
If you want to future-proof your legal department for the AI era, you have to build your foundation first. This session shows you exactly how to start.

The Challenge:
AI is transforming legal work faster than most leaders can grasp. What feels like a brilliant lightbulb moment for us can land as a blaring siren for others; creating fear, paralysis and resistance. Legal professionals, trained to value precedent and policy, now face a pace of change that feels more like a remix than a rulebook.

The Reality:
Disruption doesn’t pause for reflection. Standing still is no longer an option. The same adaptive skills that keep a dancefloor alive – reading the room, shifting the tempo and keeping the rhythm – are the ones that leaders need to guide their teams and clients through existential uncertainty.

What You’ll Learn:

--- Ways to encourage “the lightbulb moment”
--- Practical strategies for aligning divergent reactions – from panic to possibility
--- A simple adaptive framework for leading through disruption
--- Why rhythm and harmony matter more than rigid plans in this moment of rapid change.
Key Takeaway:
Disruption is noisy, but adaptive strategy helps leaders find a rhythm and create harmony to keep people moving forward.

The Challenge:
For years, legal teams have wrestled with overwhelming volumes of data. Continuous Active Learning (CAL) helped tame the chaos, driven by human feedback and measurable, defensible predictions. But the profession is now at another inflection point with the emergence of agentic AI built on LLMs.

The Reality:
Generative AI has already expanded what’s possible, moving beyond search into reasoning, summarization, and classification. The next leap – Agentic AI – will push even further. Instead of static models, we’ll see agents acting as collaborators: exploring evidence, testing hypotheses, and connecting facts at scale.

What You’ll Learn:

--- How AI in legal tech has evolved from CAL to generative to agentic systems
--- Why responsibility, transparency, and defensibility remain non-negotiable
--- What agentic AI can actually do in practice: from uncovering hidden patterns to delivering strategic insights
--- How legal experts must guide and shape this next era of AI adoption
Key Takeaway:
The future of legal data intelligence isn’t about managing documents; it’s about empowering lawyers with AI collaborators that surface insights, accelerate decisions, and reshape the role of legal teams in the business.

The Challenge:
Legal teams are under pressure to innovate, but the hardest part is moving from ideas to action. Big visions often stall because they feel too risky, too expensive, or too complex.

The Reality:
Sometimes, the most transformative shifts come from a single bold move — a fresh process, a new use of AI, a team restructure, or a small change that sparks outsized impact. These real-world experiments, tested by peers, can become the playbook for others.

What You’ll Learn:

--- The one bold move each leader made and what pushed them to try it
--- How they approached execution and what the outcome looked like
--- Practical lessons to adapt and apply inside your own organization
Key Takeaway:
Innovation doesn’t have to mean overhauling everything at once. It can start with one bold step. This fireside chat gives you a front-row seat to ideas you can borrow, adapt, and put into practice the very next day.