SOLID Atlanta
A full-day, TED-style summit on legal innovation and the business of law, with facilitated table talks and a room built for people who don’t just attend, they participate.
Thursday, November 5, 2026
Hosted by
Lee Minkoff: "The Capital Scoreboard: Where the Money Is Going"
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: growth and margin.
Words like EBITDA and multiples were rarely heard in law firms, and now billions of dollars of capital are applying them to the legal market. Somewhere on your outside counsel panel, a firm is already being rebuilt around that money, and you may not know which one.
- The numbers capital actually tracks, and why hours saved isn't one of them
- How big and how fast the market for capital-backed legal services is moving
- What it means for law firms, law departments, and your own career
You can't save your way to growth. Growth investment is required and firms will either need to embrace private capital or risk falling behind.
Kevin Young: "Once Upon a Lunch"
Partner, Seyfarth Shaw LLP
Clients keep telling their law firms they want a deeper partnership, not a sharper discount. Yet the work that could build it is often turned down because it does not fit how the firm is built.
Kevin Young left a lunch with an in-house lawyer holding a compliance problem her client could not afford to solve the usual way. Months later, the question was whether a law firm could say yes.
- How one lunch became a flat-fee, AI-backed offering for a national franchise brand
- What it takes beyond the technology: a labs team, project management and a client willing to invest
- Why saying yes to work you used to refuse builds both revenue and capability
The next great client relationship may start with a lunch and a problem the usual way cannot solve. Say yes, invest, and build the team that can do it again.
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 due to growth, legal either keeps pace or becomes the blocker. Most legal departments are still deciding which.
BeatStars has grown into a global music platform that has paid over $400 million to creators worldwide, with 1.5 million tracks downloaded monthly from a marketplace of more than 11 million beats and nearly 100 Billboard hits. As the business scaled and teams increasingly adopted AI, the question became unavoidable: would legal evolve alongside the business, 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.
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, and people still ask where it went and what happened to it. Two and a half months into a new role with no engineering team, no skilled resources, and a constantly changing tool landscape where AI support begins and ends with a login, 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 takes the reins in a DIY model, from experimentation to growing value
- A practical build, buy, or borrow framework for legal teams with no internal engineering support
- Why productivity is only the first step, and what capability and growth actually look like once you get there
The dividend was never the destination. How and where you invest it is the growth factor.
Gil Wolchock: "Not the Smartest Person in the Room: Leading with AI Anyway"
Vice President of Outside Sales, Steno
Many seasoned leaders feel they need AI figured out before they touch it, and that pressure keeps them on the sidelines. Meanwhile their teams and clients are watching what they do, not what they know.
Gil Wolchock is not an engineer, and when he first used AI on a real assignment, the stakes felt personal. One weekend and one question from his CEO changed how he thinks about leading with it.
- How a non-technical leader gets started with AI on one real assignment
- How curiosity, adaptability, resourcefulness and grit show up along the way
- What changes when you share your own AI use openly with your team
You don't have to be the smartest person in the room to lead with AI. It starts with grit, and curiosity takes it from there.
Ines Gonzalez: "I Am the Human in Control: How One Dashboard Earned a Seat at the Table"
Head of Legal Operations, LinkedIn
Every legal ops leader has a pile of usage data sitting somewhere, and almost none of them know what it's actually worth.
When her GC asked one simple question, what are we actually measuring, she didn't have a clean answer, so she built one herself, alone, with a tool she'd never used for this before. What happened next changed how her own leadership sees her.
- What it looks like to turn thousands of rows of unused usage data into a real dollar-value story
- Why "human in control" is a sharper standard than "human in the loop", and what changes when you adopt it
- How one dashboard built with no engineering background earned individual recognition and a seat at the table
You don't earn a seat at the table by working harder. You earn it by finding the value nobody else bothered to measure.
Julia Montgomery and Gergely Hajdu-Nemeth: "GenAI at Scale, Lessons Two Years In"
Julia Montgomery, King & Spalding | Gergely Hajdu-Nemeth, Harvey
A conversation. This session explores what it takes to move from experimentation to real operational impact with GenAI in legal practice, with candid lessons learned from deploying AI across core legal workflows.
Two years into GenAI adoption, most firms have moved beyond pilots, but many still struggle to translate early momentum into consistent, firm-wide impact.
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.
- 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
GenAI delivers value when it's embedded into how legal work actually gets done, integrated, and operationalized at scale.
EJ Bastien: "No Engineering Background. He Built the Agent System Anyway."
General Manager, Discovery Programs, Microsoft
Everyone is chasing AI maturity in legal. The most mature move right now might be refusing to stop being a beginner.
There is a standing rule in this talk: the moment you feel like you've figured out AI, 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.
- 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
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.
Evan Wong: "Stop the Work Before It Reaches a Lawyer"
Co-Founder and CEO, Checkbox
Legal AI's first wave made lawyers faster at the work on their desk. The next wave asks why that work reached their desk at all, and AI-powered intake, the legal front door, is where that shift is happening.
But a front door only changes where requests come in, and what stops the work before it reaches a lawyer is triage. In an emergency room, triage works because the hospital sets the protocols and every patient has a chart, and legal should work the same way.
- Why the next wave of legal AI starts before work reaches a lawyer
- What separates a front door from real triage
- Why legal, not its tools, should set the rules when AI handles legal work
- How to see, and show, where legal's work is going
A front door gets requests in. Legal's own rules and records are what stop the work before it reaches a lawyer.
Alison Grounds: "Beyond the Billable Hour: Pricing for Results"
Managing Partner, Troutman eMerge
Firms and clients now have access to the same AI tools, yet the billable hour still sets the price. It rewards time spent, not the innovation and accuracy both sides actually want.
Alison Grounds is asking how a firm and its clients could build a pricing model together that rewards both the investment and the output, not the hours. In a world where everyone has the same tools, the open question is how to recognize those who truly differentiate themselves.
- Why the billable hour is still here, and what a better model could reward
- How to look at what a firm invests alongside what AI delivers
- How firms and clients can recognize accuracy and innovation when everyone has the same tools
When everyone has the same tools, the difference is judgment, accuracy, and innovation. A better pricing model rewards that, and firms and clients can build it together.
Anna Richards: "Architecting for AI: The Practical Blueprint for the Modern Legal Tech Stack"
Chief Community Officer, Brightflag
Most legal departments don't need another session on where AI is heading. They need to know what to build underneath it, because tools might demo well but they underdeliver on a foundation that was never designed for AI.
Anna Richards will break down the five archetypes of legal technology and the key components that make up a system of record, and share how you can spot the layer that's capping what your AI can do. What that layer turns out to be, and what it costs the teams that miss it, is rarely what they expect.
- How to use the five archetypes of legal technology to navigate the crowded legal tech space
- A ‘north star’ architecture for the AI-native corporate legal department technology stack
- How to spot the layer that's capping your AI today and what to do about it
AI is only as good as the architecture that supports it. Make sure you know what you're building on top of before you buy the next tool.
Marc Jenkins: "Build It Together"
Director of Legal Operations and Innovation, Constellation
Most in-house teams still hand a problem to outside counsel and wait for an answer and a bill. The ones getting ahead are asking a different question: what can we build together?
Marc Jenkins asked his law firms one simple question: do you have AI capabilities? One raised its hand, and the regulatory lawyers testing the result are about to find out what it is really worth.
- How an in-house team and its outside counsel start building together
- What the expected savings look like, in hours and in dollars
- Why outside counsel wins too, and why the relationship gets better
The best AI projects begin with a conversation, not a purchase. When inside and outside counsel build together, both sides win.
Pascal Partouche: "Ideas Are Cheap. Capacity Isn't."
AI Strategy & Transformation Lead | eDiscovery & Archiving Technology, 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, and hiring ten more is no longer an answer leaders can justify.
The bottleneck has moved from creating to choosing, and every idea that gets built competes for expert time, leadership attention and budget. 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.
Joanne McMahon: "The Forward-Deployed Lawyer"
Manager, Legal Product Consulting, Litera
Fireside chat with David Cowen (20 minutes)
The right tech for the right work now changes every 30 to 60 days, and no legal team can keep up with all of it. The better question may not be which tool to buy, but who can help you choose.
Joanne McMahon spent more than 18 years in-house at GE, where no tool existed for her problem and no headcount was coming to build one. Today she leads a team of practicing lawyers in a role most people cannot yet define.
- What a forward-deployed engineer is, and why legal teams are starting to need one
- How to decide what to offload to AI and what stays with your judgment
- How a lawyer with no engineering background becomes the person who solves the problem
You don't have to keep up with every tool. You have to know what to offload, and who to ask.
Stacy Lettie: "The Job That Never Existed"
VP of Legal Innovation and Transformation, Johnson & Johnson
New roles like Vice President of Legal Innovation and Transformation are appearing faster than anyone can define them, and there is no job description to copy. The people stepping into them are expected to deliver results while still working out what success means.
Stacy Lettie stepped into a role that had never existed at Johnson & Johnson, with tools and projects already underway and the goals still to be defined. She is building people, process and technology at the same time, with no road map to follow.
- What a Vice President of Legal Innovation and Transformation actually does, and how success is defined
- How people, process and technology work together when the role is brand new
- How a career path becomes a job that never existed, and how you can follow it
Nobody has done this job before, and everyone did the best they could with what they knew. The way forward is to keep moving and keep learning what you did not know you did not know.
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Venue
800 Spring St NW, Atlanta
800 Spring St NW Atlanta, GA 30308
Located in Midtown Atlanta, easily reached from Hartsfield-Jackson via MARTA and close to the city's main hotel corridor.