SOLID Atlanta

Outside Money, Inside Pressure: What the New Legal Funding Wave Means for Your Budget

Outside capital is pouring into AI-native firms built to undercut traditional players on speed and price, while established firms strain their own economics to keep up on AI investment. Both trends are about to hit your panel relationships and your invoices. This session breaks down what that funding shift actually changes for how you select, price, and hold outside counsel accountable.

Inside the AI-Enabled Legal Department

Legal departments have quietly run on AI-native principles for years: fixed budgets, playbooks, automation, outcomes over hours. Now that AI copilots and agents are reshaping the work itself, the question changes: if you were building your department from scratch today, what would it look like? GCs, legal ops, and innovation leaders share what stays in-house, what moves out, and what they now expect from outside counsel and vendors.

The Future of Legal Is Built on Data

Don't send in the crew before you order the lumber. No AI investment, in-house or outsourced, delivers on its promise without the data underneath it. This session makes the case for data as the real foundation of legal transformation, and what separates departments getting real value from AI from those quietly accumulating expensive tools that never deliver.

From Insight to Operating Capacity: When Expertise Starts Doing the Work

Legal departments have spent decades trying to make what their best people know findable. The next step is making it operational: purpose-built AI agents that carry that judgment into contracts, research, and matter work, tested against expert review and improved over time. This session examines what it takes to turn expertise into something a system can act on, and what that demands of the team that owns it.

When Your Lawyers Start Building Their Own AI Tools

Some lawyers are quietly building their own tools with AI, no IT, no legal ops, no sign-off. This session looks at what they are actually building, what it reveals about gaps in your department's own tooling, and how legal ops and innovation leaders can capture the value without killing the initiative: governing the risk, scaling one person's fix into a department-wide solution, and shifting from gatekeeper to enabler.

Who Owns the System? Deciding Where AI Ownership Sits Inside Your Department

Structuring what your department knows and building the systems that act on it used to be two separate jobs, usually somebody else's. Generative AI is collapsing that line, letting your own subject-matter experts operationalize their judgment directly. This session tackles a question every legal department is now facing: does that system belong to legal ops, IT, a new hybrid role, or nobody yet?

Building the Next Generation of Institutional Memory with AI Personas

For decades, legal departments have wrestled with the same problem: how do you make what your most experienced lawyer knows available to everyone else, without that person being in the room? A new approach uses AI personas, built from real work product and structured interviews, to let a team engage directly with a colleague's judgment, expertise, and communication style, long after that person has moved on or moved up.

Building the Modern Legal Department: New Expectations of Outside Counsel

Legal departments are rapidly building their own capability in AI, knowledge, data, and technology, and it is changing what they expect from the firms they hire. This panel brings together in-house leaders to talk about how they are deploying AI internally, and how that shift is changing the way they evaluate outside counsel: on AI fluency, technology-enabled efficiency, business understanding, and genuine future-readiness. An unfiltered look at how sophisticated legal departments are rewriting the rules for who earns a seat at the table.

Different Bets, Different Blueprints: Building Institutional Intelligence for the AI Era

Turning what an organization knows into something people and systems can trust and reuse has become a strategic priority. There is no shared playbook. This panel brings together legal departments building that capability now, comparing what triggered the investment, what they built first, what they deferred, and what those choices reveal about where your own department should start.

AI Fatigue, But the Bill Is Due: What AI Value Creation Actually Looks Like

Everyone is tired of talking about AI, and the invoices keep coming anyway. Where are AI investments actually paying off, and where are departments quietly stuck with expensive shelfware? This session opens with quick case studies of real outcomes, then turns into a working discussion on how GCs can test vendor claims, demand proof, and stop paying for AI that never shows up in the numbers.

Aligning on AI: Rethinking the Client-Counsel Relationship

In-house use of generative AI has more than doubled in the past year, while outside counsel are still built for a labor-based delivery model. Clients are no longer just asking whether their firms use AI, they want to know exactly how it improves quality, speed, and cost. This session looks at where that gap is showing up in the relationship today, and what coordinated AI use between in-house and outside counsel could actually look like.

Will AI Adapt to Lawyers, or Will Lawyers Finally Have to Adapt to AI?

For years, legal technology has tried to fit around how lawyers already work. AI complicates that in both directions. It can pull meaning out of unstructured information well enough that lawyers may not need to change how they document their work to benefit. But some things cannot be reconstructed after the fact: why a decision was final, what judgment produced it, or whether it should be reused. If your department wants real institutional intelligence rather than better search, the question becomes whether the adaptation is AI's job or yours.

Transforming the People You Already Have Into the Team Your Department Will Need

The unicorn hire, someone with legal judgment, business acumen, data literacy, and AI fluency all at once, may not actually exist. This session looks at how legal departments are instead finding that potential inside their own teams, legal ops, contracts, paralegals, and generalists, and developing them into future-ready roles. It gets into how leaders spot who can make the leap, and the real friction that shows up when some people evolve and others do not.

The Simulation Effect: Building Legal Talent Before the Stakes Are Real

A closing look at how simulation is changing the way legal talent gets trained, in law schools, in-house programs, and beyond. What it means to prepare the next generation of legal professionals for a job that already looks nothing like the one their predecessors learned.