SOLID Atlanta

Lee Minkoff — "The Capital Scoreboard: What Capital Actually Rewards"

Managing Director, Renovus Capital Partners

Legal leaders talk about AI in terms of hours saved and matters closed. The people writing the checks are counting something else entirely: growth, the quality of that growth, and margins.

Capital providers repeat certain terms until a room can't forget them: growth, EBITDA, multiple. These words, rarely mentioned in law firms in the past, are now commonplace, speaking to the massive opportunity that the combination of capital and AI can bring to the global legal marketplace.

• The three numbers capital actually tracks, and why hours saved isn't one of them
• Just how much bigger and faster the market for legal AI actually is than it looks from inside a law department
• Why this is a growth story, not a headcount story, and what that means for you personally

You can't save your way to growth. The firms, and the people, who figure that out first are the ones capital is already backing.

Dorothy Cullen — "The AI Growth Portfolio: What Happens When You Reinvest the Dividend"

Legal Technology and Operations Leadership, NetApp

The AI Dividend answered what AI gives back. It never answered what you're supposed to do with it once you have it.

Dorothy Cullen's "AI Dividend" became one of this community's most quoted ideas. Two and a half months into a new role with no engineering team, no skilled resources, and a constantly shifting tool landscape, she has an answer taking shape, and it isn't the one people expect.

• What actually happens to an AI dividend once you stop asking where it went and start reinvesting it
• How a mid-sized legal team moves from experimentation to growing value in a DIY model
• A practical build, buy, or borrow framework for teams with no internal engineering support

The dividend was never the destination. How and where you invest it is the growth factor.

Gil Wolchock — "The Buyer's Scoreboard"

Vice President of Outside Sales, Steno

Every CFO is asking every legal leader to do more, faster, for less. For decades, that math simply didn't work.

Times have changed. Across the industry, corporate legal teams have started writing AI savings targets directly into their budgets, real numbers, owned by real leaders, checked against real invoice data by the AI itself. On the other side of the table, law firms are placing very different bets on what happens next, bets already deciding who wins the work and who quietly loses it.

• What it actually looks like to put your own name on an AI savings number and be held accountable
• The four prizes every corporate legal team is chasing with AI, and why all four shrink demand for headcount and outside counsel at once
• What separates the law firms already losing business from the ones winning more of it

The question isn't whether AI changes legal — it's whether you'll be found holding the last billable hour, or building what comes after it.

Evan Wong — "Stop the Work Before It Reaches a Lawyer"

Co-Founder & CEO, Checkbox

Legal teams keep buying tools that make lawyers faster at the work already on their desk. Almost none of them are asking why so much of that work reached a lawyer in the first place.

This talk is built around a hospital triage model, sorting and routing legal requests before they ever hit an attorney's inbox. The insight driving it: making legal easier to access doesn't shrink the department's workload, it grows it.

• Why making legal easier to access doesn't shrink the department's workload — it grows it
• The real difference between tools that make a lawyer faster and tools that make the whole system faster
• What one company discovered when they set out to automate three workflows and ended up automating eleven

The tools that win aren't the ones that make lawyers busier or lazier. They're the ones that quietly redraw what "legal operations" even means.

Kyle Brown — "No Human Bottleneck: Building a Legal Department That Runs Without You"

General Counsel, BeatStars

When every other team at your company is adopting AI, legal either keeps pace or becomes the blocker. Most legal departments are still deciding which.

BeatStars ran on outside law firms from 2008 until its first in-house hire. Then a publishing business with 20,000+ members arrived, and the question became unavoidable: would legal keep pace with every team already using AI, or become the department everyone waits on?

• How two lawyers, a contractor, and eight interns now run roughly 80% of their work through AI
• Why the job shifted from drafting agreements to building skills and playbooks others can use
• Why a process captured in a workflow means no human bottleneck

Legal stops being the blocker when your judgment lives in the system, not in your head.

Ashley Miller — "AI Fatigue: Now What?"

VP, North America, Litera

Legal teams have spent the last two years buying AI tools. Many underestimated the challenges with adoption, and few understood whether the tool they bought fit the workflow they bought it for.

The AI buying spree has turned into a new set of problems: legal teams sitting on point tools that aren't getting adopted, don't talk to each other, and in some cases were chosen more for name recognition than fit. This fireside conversation with David makes the case for a much more specific set of questions, almost nobody is asking them before they sign.

• The real difference between probabilistic and deterministic AI, and why it matters more for some legal workflows than others
• Why platform and integration, not any single tool, is what actually drives adoption and measurable ROI
• What to ask before your next AI purchase, instead of after

Buying the right AI tool isn't about a flashy demo. It's about whether it was built for the workflow you're asking it to do, and ensuring your team is successfully set up to gain value.

Pascal Partouche — "Ideas Are Cheap. Capacity Isn't."

Vice President, AI Transformation Lead, Deutsche Bank

AI turned a trickle of ideas into a flood of working prototypes. But testing, securing, governing, and supporting them still takes the same scarce people it always did.

The bottleneck has moved from creating to choosing. Every idea that gets built competes for expert time, leadership attention, and budget — and an idea that works in a demo can still fail the moment someone asks who owns it.

• Why more AI prototypes can mean less capacity, not more
• The two questions that decide which ideas earn your team's time
• Why a change only sticks when someone redesigns the jobs it touches

The scarce resource isn't ideas anymore. It's organizational capacity — and leadership is deciding where to spend it.

Stacy Lettie — "The Best Friend You Never Thought You Needed"

VP of Legal Innovation and Transformation, Johnson & Johnson

Legal departments are under more pressure than ever to cut outside counsel costs, and most are doing it the blunt way — treating decades-long firm relationships like transactional vendor negotiations.

Some of the most forward-leaning in-house teams are already tracking AI utilization in outside counsel billing through dedicated activity codes, ahead of where most of the market is. This talk is about what happens when you approach that conversation as a partner rather than an enforcer.

• How the most forward-leaning legal departments are already tracking AI utilization in outside counsel billing
• Why positioning yourself as the "best friend," not the enforcer, earns genuine buy-in from firms
• The line between what to stop paying for and what's worth a premium

The firms that win the next decade of client relationships won't be the cheapest. They'll be the ones held to real partnership.

Anna Richards — "The Intelligence Hiding in Your Invoices"

Chief Community Officer, Brightflag

Legal leaders are expected to justify outside counsel decisions with the same rigor applied elsewhere in the business. Most firm selection still relies on familiarity, not insight drawn from actual performance data.

Departments are sitting on years of rich performance data hidden in invoices. Without consistent structuring, that data can't be trusted, compared, or scaled across decisions — and most teams don't yet know what they're sitting on.

• What has been hiding in plain sight in your invoice data
• Why structured data, not generative AI, is the real breakthrough
• How to apply data-driven rigor beyond large RFPs

AI doesn't make outside counsel strategy smarter — structured data does. AI is simply the lever that unlocks it.

Marc Jenkins — "What Happens When a Lawyer Spends Nine Years Around Engineers"

Director of Legal Operations and Innovation, Constellation

Most lawyers looked at AI and saw a tool to speed up drafting. The ones who'd spent years working alongside engineers saw something else first.

Nine years working in-house next to engineers produces a specific kind of instinct: how to write law precisely enough that a system can execute it without a lawyer in the room. That instinct became the foundation of how Marc Jenkins approaches legal ops — and it reprices what a unit of legal work is actually worth.

• Why lawyers who've worked closely with engineers saw something different in AI than everyone else did from day one
• What it actually looks like when senior legal judgment gets written precisely enough for a system to execute
• The real economics of legal ops once the unit of legal work gets repriced in both time and money

AI isn't a tool for lawyers who think like engineers. It's a junior colleague that reads specs — and that changes what legal operations can actually be.

Laura Dieudonne — "Build Your Own Path"

Legal Operations and Administration Director, Delta Air Lines

Legal ops has a ceiling. Most leaders in the field hit it without seeing it coming, and some never leave.

Legal Operations and Administration Director at Delta Air Lines, Laura Dieudonne is building an operations career — and legal is where she's deploying it right now. This talk names the ceiling, describes what's on the other side of it, and lays out the moves that turn a legal ops role into an enterprise-wide trajectory.

• Why legal ops hits a ceiling, and what the view looks like from the other side of it
• What it means to lead with operations first and legal second
• The career moves and language that turn legal ops leadership into an enterprise-wide trajectory

Legal ops is not a career. It's a rotation. The leaders who treat it that way will go anywhere they want.

Speaker TBD

Talk title and description forthcoming