SOLID Atlanta

Talk 1 — Judgment Is the Product

The Challenge

Every firm will soon have access to remarkably similar AI. When the tools are the same, clients are left with a harder question than they have ever had to ask before: why this firm, why this lawyer, why you?

The Reality

This talk tests that question from the inside. It starts from a real moment: looking at an AI-generated answer and recognizing that its narrowly legal analysis failed to account for the nuanced business context, practical alternatives, and human judgment the situation actually required. That gap — between what the AI produced and what the situation needed — is the competitive advantage no firm can commoditize.

What You'll Learn

• What it actually looks like to trust your own judgment over an AI's confidence
• Why "everyone will have the same tools" changes the competitive question from capability to trust
• What it looks like when a firm invests as seriously in judgment and resilience as it does in technology

Key Takeaway

The firms that stand out won't be the ones with the best AI. They'll be the ones whose people still know when to say: "That may be the answer it gave me, but it isn't the answer this situation requires."

Talk 2 — The Capital Scoreboard: What Capital Actually Rewards

The Challenge

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

The Reality

Capital has a phrase it repeats until a room can't forget it: revenue, margin, EBITDA. This talk makes the case for just how much bigger — and how much faster — the market for legal AI actually is than anyone sitting in the room today realizes. The numbers aren't academic. They're already deciding who gets the next mandate.

What You'll Learn

• 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

Key Takeaway

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.

Talk 3 — The Coffee Paradox: Why AI Won't Shrink Legal, It'll Expand It

The Challenge

Every legal leader assumes AI means less work, fewer hours, a smaller market. A 160-year-old economic principle says the opposite is what actually happens.

The Reality

The argument uses something everyone in the room already understands without a law degree: coffee. What happened to coffee consumption when it got cheaper and easier to make well is exactly what the data predicts for legal. Jevons Paradox — a 160-year-old economic principle — says efficiency doesn't shrink demand. It reveals how much was suppressed.

What You'll Learn

• What Jevons Paradox actually is, explained through a market everyone already understands
• Why cheaper, faster legal work has historically grown demand rather than shrinking it
• What this means for how you plan headcount, budget, and growth over the next five years

Key Takeaway

Efficiency doesn't shrink markets. It reveals how much demand was there all along.

Talk 4 — The Buyer's Scoreboard

The Challenge

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

The Reality

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 You'll Learn

• 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

Key Takeaway

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.

Talk 5 — If It's Not on the Sheet, It Doesn't Exist: What It Actually Means to Have an AI Strategy

The Challenge

Every legal leader says AI is their strategy for the next three years. Almost none of them can show you what that actually means — task by task, dollar by dollar.

The Reality

What changed everything was a sales rep's side project: a spreadsheet mapping every SDR task into four categories — what stays human, what speeds up, what runs automatically, and what disappears entirely. That model became a department standard. Then a mandate. This talk follows what happened when a legal ops leader took that same framework and applied it to every task their team owned.

What You'll Learn

• The four-category framework — Preserve, Augment, Automate, Eliminate — that turns a vague AI ambition into a task-by-task plan
• How to answer the question every CFO is about to ask: what headcount do you need, with AI and without it
• Why "what's your AI strategy" has a real answer

Key Takeaway

An AI strategy isn't a slide. It's a spreadsheet with every task in your department on it, a category next to each one, and a number at the bottom a CFO can actually plan around.

Talk 6 — Stop the Work Before It Reaches a Lawyer

The Challenge

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.

The Reality

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. What's happening inside real legal departments as a result is not what anyone expected.

What You'll Learn

• 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

Key Takeaway

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.

Talk 7 — Clean Data Before Agents

The Challenge

Most legal ops leaders are hired to fix something. A different kind of hire is starting to walk through the door: one given permission to find what's possible, not told what to repair.

The Reality

This talk begins with an unusual kind of hire: not someone brought in to fix a broken system, but someone given permission to find what's possible inside a healthy one. Reporting directly to the Office of the President at a major financial institution, this leader left one of the most sophisticated legal departments in the world because what was being built was worth building from scratch — and that required someone who could see it first.

What You'll Learn

• The difference between being hired to solve a problem and being hired to seize an opportunity
• What "speed to outcome" looks like when you strip away organizational drag
• Why the infrastructure most legal teams haven't built yet is the foundation everything else depends on

Key Takeaway

Fearless is possible. The organizations that figure that out first will look at corporate law departments the way we look at early internet companies.

Talk 8 — AI Fatigue: Now What?

The Challenge

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 Reality

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.

What You'll Learn

• 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

Key Takeaway

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.

Talk 9 — No Engineering Background. He Built the Agent System Anyway.

The Challenge

Everyone is chasing AI maturity in legal. The most mature move right now might be refusing to stop being a beginner.

The Reality

There is a standing rule for AI maturity in this talk: the moment you feel like you've figured it out, you're already behind. What follows is an end-to-end agentic litigation intake system — built without engineering support — that now processes every incoming lawsuit the same day it arrives. The question this talk keeps returning to is not whether non-technical leaders can build agentic systems. It's what stops them from trying.

What You'll Learn

• What end-to-end agentic litigation intake actually looks like
• Why the fastest movers aren't the most technical — they're the most disciplined about staying curious
• What "defensively on the bleeding edge" looks like as a daily practice

Key Takeaway

The ceiling you think is above you isn't there anymore. The question is whether you have the discipline to keep going after you find that out.

Talk 10 — Radical Alignment: How Legal Earns a Central Role in the Business

The Challenge

86% of General Counsel believe legal is a significant contributor to business success. Only 17% of C-suite executives agree, and 42% say legal contributes little or nothing at all.

The Reality

Four years of testing a different theory produced a very specific answer. Legal doesn't close this gap by explaining its value better. It closes it by creating so much enterprise value that the old perception becomes impossible to sustain. Two-thirds of the way through that transformation, something changed — in cost structure, outside counsel spend, and how the business itself talks about Legal — when one question became the only one that mattered.

What You'll Learn

• Why closing the perception gap between Legal and the C-suite has almost nothing to do with communicating better
• The single question that redirected 100% of one legal team's resources toward the work that actually moves the business
• What actually changed — in cost structure, outside counsel spend, and the business's own perception — once that question became the only one that mattered

Key Takeaway

Quality, quantity, and speed were never the real measure of legal's value. The real measure is enterprise value the business can see, feel, and measure — and that's what finally earns legal a seat at the center of the company.

Talk 11 — Managing Regulatory Change

The Challenge

It's hard to be compliant if you don't know what you have to comply with.

The Reality

Regulatory change stopped being a Wall Street problem. Tech, healthcare, and consumer platforms now sit under AI, privacy, and safety mandates — and states, EU members, and international bodies are writing conflicting rules, stepping in where the federal government may not. This talk maps the landscape and builds the three-part framework that makes compliance defensible.

What You'll Learn

• The history of the regulatory change management industry
• The three things every defensible program should have — a register, a documented process, and an operating model — and why missing any one of them creates compliance exposure
• When to use out-of-the-box AI, a dedicated solution, or a consulting firm

Key Takeaway

It is hard to prove you are compliant if you cannot say what you have to comply with.

Talk 12 — The Best Friend You Never Thought You Needed

The Challenge

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.

The Reality

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, and why firms that get treated as the former deliver results the latter never will.

What You'll Learn

• 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

Key Takeaway

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

Talk 13 — Kill the Redline: What Happens When Legal Gets as Focused as a Heart Surgeon

The Challenge

Commercial contract negotiations have run on the same redline cycle for decades — drafts marked up back and forth, read mostly by lawyers, while the business people who actually own the deal wait on the sidelines.

The Reality

What one team built eliminates the traditional redline cycle almost entirely — scoring every draft against pre-agreed business principles instead of playbooks and markups. What that unlocks for attorneys who used to run that cycle by hand is the real story. Not less work. Different work. And a different kind of focus that changes what legal advice actually looks like.

What You'll Learn

• How principles-based contracting replaces the traditional redline cycle, and why it hands control of the negotiation back to the business
• What happens to a legal team's time once real-time AI analysis replaces static playbook markups
• Why the most valuable version of a legal advisor might be the one thinking about only one problem, all day, every day

Key Takeaway

The future of legal isn't more coverage spread thinner. It's total focus — the way you'd want your heart surgeon focused only on your heart.

Talk 14 — What Happens After the Prompt?

The Challenge

AI is changing professional work faster than many of the systems around it can adapt. And some of the most interesting questions are only beginning to emerge.

The Reality

This session is interactive. The room gets a scenario, new information unfolds in real time, and attendees make a live call. The situation is familiar. The AI-era twist is not. What happens when the decision lands may be the most useful thing that happens all day — because it is a question worth taking back to your organization and asking again.

What You'll Experience

• A live, audience-driven decision
• A familiar workplace situation with an AI-era twist
• A question worth taking back to your organization

Key Takeaway

Come prepared to choose. And to choose again.

Talk 15 — Should the Seat Be a Person?

The Challenge

For decades, the advice was simple: surround yourself with people smarter than you. AI just added a question nobody's fully answered yet.

The Reality

Forty-five days into the CEO role, a company is being rebuilt around a single principle from a book read three times. The principle starts with the oldest hiring advice in business — surround yourself with people smarter than you — and asks the follow-up question nobody has fully answered yet: what happens to that advice when AI can be in the room too?

What You'll Learn

• The follow-up question to the oldest hiring advice in business, now that AI can be in the room too
• What it looks like to automate your own administrative function completely
• How one leader is rebuilding a team around a single interview question

Key Takeaway

The smartest thing in the room used to always be a person. That assumption just expired.

Talk 16 — What Happens When a Lawyer Spends Nine Years Around Engineers

The Challenge

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.

The Reality

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 a solo practice with no staff. The economics behind it reprice what a unit of legal work is actually worth — in both time and money.

What You'll Learn

• 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 running a lean practice once the unit of legal work gets repriced in both time and money

Key Takeaway

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

Talk 17 — Build Your Own Path

The Challenge

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

The Reality

VP of Legal Operations at a major global company and a graduate of an elite COO leadership program, this leader is building an operations career — and legal is where they are deploying it right now. This talk names the ceiling, describes what is on the other side of it, and lays out the moves that turn a legal ops role into an enterprise-wide trajectory.

What You'll Learn

• 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

Key Takeaway

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