SOLID is a TED-STYLE Talk summit focused on innovation and the business of law. Did you ever listen to a great SOLID Talk or panel and wish you had time to engage and brainstorm in real time on how to apply those ideas to your business? 16+ speakers will give TED-STYLE talks around the intersection of innovation, advanced technology, and the business of law. They share what they are doing, how they are doing it, and the business impact it has.
Our talks are followed by facilitated table talks, sprint panels, and town hall discussions, whereby participants discuss what they know now that they did not know before the session started and how to apply these lessons to their own organizations. SOLID provides participants with maximum interaction with peers and colleagues in a round table, workshop environment to assess current challenges and design concrete solutions.
Welcoming Remarks – Zeynep Ersin
The Challenge:
The legal industry is experiencing a once-in-a-generation inflection — legal professionals are responding to it like employees when they need to respond like entrepreneurs.
The Reality:
Nick Robertson is the former COO at Relativity, where he architected and scaled operations and go-to-market from the first enterprise deal to $500M+ in revene. , He now invests in the next generation of legal tech through OnDean Forward, and teaches the principles of entrepreneurship at Northwestern University. His message for Chicago: there’s never been a better time for all of us to embrace the entrepreneur mindset.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
AI is an entrepreneurial opportunity the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The people who treat it that way will build the next decade.
The Challenge:
Everyone is chasing the “AI dividend,” but very few teams know how to capture it , or scale it. The gap isn’t the technology. It’s the operating model. Leaders are struggling to translate individual productivity wins into team-level outcomes and enterprise-level value that a CEO or CFO can feel.
The Reality:
AI produces value in three layers , individual, team, enterprise. Most organizations stall at the first. Dorothy has been building the next two: redesigning workflows, structuring human-plus-agent models, and reframing the value story so that a productivity gain becomes something measurable at scale. Her experience shows what it takes to operationalize the dividend, not just talk about it.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
The AI dividend isn’t a windfall , it’s a discipline. Leaders who connect agent-driven productivity to real business outcomes will define the next era of legal performance.
The Challenge:
Not every GC has a large team, a big budget, or the luxury of hiring into every gap. But the mandate keeps growing — board visibility, strategic influence, faster decisions, higher stakes. The question is how you lead a lean legal function without burning out, falling behind, or outsourcing everything.
The Reality:
The GCs finding the most creative solutions right now aren’t always the ones with the most resources. They’re the ones who’ve rethought how they work — using AI as a thinking partner, reclaiming hours that used to disappear into routine work, and finally getting to the important issues that were always on the list but never at the top.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
You don’t need a big team to lead a high-performing legal function. You need the right tools, the right instincts, and the discipline to use the time you get back on the work that actually matters.
The Challenge:
Legal leaders know AI is changing everything — but knowing it and doing it are two very different things. The gap between inspiration and action is where most departments are stuck right now, waiting for permission, waiting for certainty, waiting for someone to go first.
The Reality:
Some GCs aren’t waiting. They’ve already restructured how their teams work, rebuilt their relationships with the business, and turned legal into a genuine driver of profitability. The M&A team calls them first now. The CFO sees them as a partner. And it started not with a massive transformation initiative, but with a single step taken before anyone else thought it was necessary.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to take the step. The GCs who are already living in the future started exactly where you are.
The Challenge:
Legal leaders have more information, faster access, and more powerful tools than ever before — yet many still feel overwhelmed. The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence or experience. It’s knowing what to ask, how deep to go, and how to turn raw information into judgment, strategy, and action.
The Reality:
Through his work as a trial consultant, legal solutions leader, and law professor, Joe has seen a clear shift: the differentiator is no longer recall or horsepower alone — it’s curiosity. When access to information becomes instant, the advantage moves to those who know how to ask better questions, explore more deeply, and translate insight into persuasion. In practice, that shift changes who leads conversations, who shapes strategy, and who creates leverage in high-stakes legal work.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
In the age of AI, genius isn’t about knowing more. It’s about asking better questions — and knowing what to do with the answers.
The Challenge:
Most organizations don’t fully understand what a Legal Chief of Staff actually does — and most Legal Chiefs of Staff don’t realize how far the role can go.
The Reality:
Samantha Lofton is the Chief of Staff to the Chief Legal and Corporate Affairs Officer of Zimmer Biomet, a global medical device company. She came in with a degrees’ in Management and Decision Science and Information Systems, a career full of drop-in rescue operations as a Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Risk Officer and Head of Legal Project Management in Large Law Firms, Clinical Research operations experience and a simple operating philosophy: build the ecosystem, give it away, find the next problem. Four years in, she’s moving beyond just legal operations — and the story of how she got there is a roadmap for everyone in this room.
What You’ll Learn:
What “build it and give it away” actually looks like in practice — how to create systems that run without you so you can move to bigger problems
Why the Legal Chief of Staff role is dissolving the boundary between legal operations and business operations — and what that means for the careers of everyone in the room
The difference between building something technically correct and building something people actually adopt — and why that gap is where the real value lives
Key Takeaway:
The Legal Chief of Staff role isn’t a destination. It’s a launchpad. The ones who treat it that way will find themselves doing work that doesn’t even have a legal label on it — and that’s exactly where the future is.
The Challenge:
Two years into GenAI adoption, most firms have moved beyond pilots—but many still struggle to translate early momentum into consistent, firm-wide impact. Tools are in place, yet usage remains uneven and workflows fragmented.
The Reality:
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. By integrating with platforms like iManage and leveraging tools like Harvey’s Agent Builder, they are turning capabilities into cohesive, scalable solutions.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
GenAI delivers value when it’s embedded into how legal work actually gets done— integrated, and operationalized at scale.
The Challenge:
The GC role is changing faster than most legal leaders are prepared for — and the traditional skills that built great careers are no longer enough to hold the seat.
The Reality:
Regina Jones is the CLO of Archer Daniels Midland, a Fortune 35 company. She started in IT, worked the oil fields, served as Chief of Staff during the Enron collapse, and has spent 30 years building the kind of range that turns lawyers into business leaders. Her take on where the GC role is going — and what AI actually changes about it — is the clearest framework in the room.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
AI isn’t replacing legal leaders. It’s revealing which ones were always business leaders who happened to think legally — and accelerating the gap between them and everyone else.
The Challenge:
Legal departments are under pressure to show AI-driven cost savings — and most of them are looking in the wrong place
The Reality:
LaTonya Ellis, Associate General Counsel & VP will highlight how legal departments can achieve significant cost savings by addressing a crucial question that often goes unconsidered” What tasks are we outsourcing that can be managed in-house”?
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
You don’t need a new tool. You need a new question. Think free first — and then follow the money.
The Challenge:
The GC role has fundamentally changed — pulled upward into board-level strategy, global risk, and existential business decisions. That evolution has left a massive leadership gap inside the legal function that no traditional title or playbook has been written to fill.
The Reality:
The most forward-thinking legal departments aren’t run by risk managers anymore. They’re run by strategic operators who give the business options, not answers — and who build the infrastructure to make those options actionable. Legal ops isn’t a cost center. It’s the engine.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
Nobody has a playbook for the Legal CXO role — because it’s never existed before. The people who will define it are already in the room.
The Challenge:
Legal teams are drowning in AI tools, adoption mandates, and the pressure to do more with less — and the faster they chase adoption, the further behind they feel.
The Reality:
Joshua Duplantier has spent three years inside EY building AI solutions for legal teams — starting with EY’s own GCO as client zero. His conclusion: adoption is a destination that keeps moving. Adaptability is a design system that compounds. The legal teams getting called on by the rest of the business right now are the ones who figured that out first.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
Stop training your team for tools. Train them for change. The teams that do will be the ones the business calls — and legal stops being a cost center the moment that happens.
The Challenge:
Everyone is talking about using Gen AI in legal workflows. Fewer people are talking about the step that has to come first: knowing what problem you’re actually solving.
The Reality:
Colleen Gomos (Corporate Partner) and Kyle Hoover (Senior Manager, Innovation & Strategic Design) at Seyfarth built a cross-functional framework to close that gap. Using time and narrative data, now analyzable in minutes rather than weeks or months, they developed a structured, repeatable process for uncovering misalignment between where legal effort is going and where clients believe it should go. Rather than presenting a single client case study, they share an approach that works regardless of client, practice area, or workstream.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
Attendees will leave with a concrete starting point for having proactive, data-driven value conversations with their own clients, not someday, but now.
The Challenge:
Legal teams are under increasing pressure to adopt AI, while managing rising demand, limited headcount, and growing expectations from the business.
The Reality:
Most AI investments today focus on copilots, contract review, and drafting tools — helping lawyers move faster once work hits their desk. But this approach doesn’t address the real problem: too much work reaching legal in the first place.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
AI delivers the most impact in legal not by speeding up work, but by eliminating repetitive tasks and shifting legal’s time to higher-value work.
The Challenge:
Leaders are under pressure to project confidence and drive outcomes even when they don’t feel ready—while also creating an environment where others feel safe to speak up, ask for support, and lead.
The Reality:
In practice, many talented people hold back because they expect “no”, doubt themselves, or feel constrained by others’ assumptions—so ideas, requests (budget/resources), and leadership moments go unspoken unless someone actively draws them out.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
Act before you feel ready, and deliberately “lend confidence” to others by inviting their voice and backing their asks—because that’s how confidence gets built, individually and across the team.
The Challenge:
Much of the AI conversation in legal centers on efficiency: fewer hours, fewer lawyers, fewer steps. The narrative suggests contraction — that automation reduces demand and compresses the profession.
The Reality:
In practice, AI is doing something very different. By eliminating repetitive, execution-heavy steps — research cycles, meeting notes, manual triage, outline drafting — legal teams are gaining back capacity for higher-value thinking. That reclaimed space enables deeper strategy, faster iteration, and more complex work. In markets like patent litigation, this compression of effort is expanding opportunity, not shrinking it.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
AI doesn’t eliminate legal work. It removes friction — and friction removal expands markets.
The Challenge:
Conferences often overwhelm with insight — but leave leaders without clarity. After a full day of AI case studies, talent shifts, workflow redesign, and market change, the hardest question remains: what actually matters?
The Reality:
In this closing fireside conversation, a small group of senior leaders will reflect in real time on what stood out, what surprised them, what shifted their thinking, and what patterns emerged across the day. No slides. No rehearsed talking points. Just judgment, perspective, and synthesis from operators living these changes firsthand.
What You’ll Learn:
Key Takeaway:
Insight without synthesis is noise. Clarity is what you carry back to the office.
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Getting Legal to Love New Tech: Secrets to Successful Adoption
Anna Richards will share an updated “playbook” on successfully introducing new technology in the corporate legal world. In this session, Anna will guide attendees through the challenges and proven strategies for motivating technology adoption and fostering a culture of engagement.
Key Points Covered:
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The Evolution of "Legal Ops" and New Specialized Roles
AI doesn’t eliminate work—it changes it. Legal operations professionals, data analysts, and AI specialists are now critical to running a modern legal team .
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The Global Advantage: Thriving in Expanding Roles Through Prioritization and High-Impact Relationships
The Global Advantage: Thriving in Expanding Roles Through Prioritization and High-Impact Relationships. In today’s ever-evolving professional landscape, roles grow in scope, responsibilities multiply, and the need for collaboration across diverse environments intensifies. This session explores innovative strategies for managing an expanding role by "slicing the pizza" of priorities, focusing on what truly matters, and building high-impact relationships globally. Learn how to navigate regulatory, cultural, and technological complexities, deepen key partnerships, and find common ground across continents. Attendees will leave with actionable tools for prioritization, collaboration, and balance, empowering them to thrive in multi-layered, dynamic roles without losing focus—or sanity.
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From Tactical to Transformative: The Expanding Mission of Legal Ops
Legal operations is at a turning point, with a rapidly evolving role that demands that Legal Operations professionals also be a strategic business partner. In this session, Stacy Lettie explores what that really means and how legal ops can move beyond tactical support to bring meaningful, measurable value to their organizations - and most importantly how we define just what that value is. Attendees will learn about the expanding remit of legal ops, how technology is changing how we look at our roles and how we execute on our roles, and partnering with business leaders to shape the future of legal. This talk is for professionals ready to elevate their roles and become agents of change.
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Beyond Legal Advice: Building a Future-Ready Legal Department
In this session, Tim shares his vision for the future of in-house legal teams, inspired by his experience leading Toshiba’s legal transformation. With a focus on aligning operations, risk, and strategy to maximize value creation by and for the company, he’ll outline practical steps for moving beyond reactive legal services to becoming a proactive business partner. Tim’s leadership philosophy offers a blueprint for creating a legal function that drives business objectives while navigating the ever-accelerating pace of change. Discover how to future-proof your legal team and maximize its organizational impact.
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The AI Agent Takeover: How Lawyers Are About to Be Replaced—Without Losing Their Jobs
The legal industry is on the verge of a massive disruption, but the conversation has been missing a key insight. For years, AI in law has been pitched as a tool for automating routine tasks, but that narrative misses the real transformation: AI Agents. Drawing on lessons learned from working with dozens of Fortune 500 legal departments, this talk reveals how AI Agents are already reshaping legal workflows—by handling complex work that once required human lawyers. Contrary to the prevailing hype, these agents aren’t eliminating jobs; they’re transforming roles and workflows in ways that were once unthinkable. This is the true future of AI in law: replacing tasks, not jobs, and enabling legal teams to focus on higher-value, more strategic work. Prepare to rethink what it means to be a lawyer in the age of AI.
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How to upskill in the era of AI
In this session, we will explore how, in this new era, you can secure your future and how AI can help supercharge your Security, Legal, and Compliance teams. By now there’s no doubt that generative AI is here.
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Generative AI: A Personal Exploration from eDiscovery to Reimagined Opportunities in Law and Business
This talk explores the personal journey of discovering the transformative potential of Generative AI (GenAI) in law and business. Beginning with the foundational use of GenAI in eDiscovery for document review, analysis, and classification, the discussion expands to its applications in many other business areas. Emphasizing the critical skills and knowledge needed in selection and application of models, tools, and prompting techniques, this talk focuses on the critical skills for optimizing GenAI capabilities across applications. By weaving in real-world examples, this talk highlights the potential of GenAI application for data across legal and compliance areas, while also reflecting on the adaptability and curiosity that drive innovation and redefine career paths.
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The Evolution of Legal Ops: Driving Change with New Specialized Roles
The legal operations world is at a turning point. With 20 years of investments in people, process, and technology, corporate law departments have built a foundation that’s driving a new wave of transformation. Generative AI is not just changing how legal teams operate—it’s creating entirely new specialized roles to meet the demands of today’s business challenges. Drawing on parallels between the eDiscovery revolution and today’s generative AI-driven shift, this session explores how technology shapes roles, the skills leaders are hiring for, and the opportunities for professionals to stay ahead in this dynamic field.
Key topics include:
This isn’t just a session about what’s changing—it’s about what’s next and how to prepare for it.
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Big Fish, Small Pond to Small Fish, Big Ocean: From Legal Ops to Strategic Operations and Enablement
How starting my career at Uicorn Start Ups, prepared me for the jump from Legal Ops to Strategic Ops and Enablement. In this session, Angela Mendenhall will discuss her journey from small pond to big ocean, and how Zoom is challenging the Legal Ops status quo with a cross functional Strategic Ops and Enablement team. Angela will discuss how this models allows Legal Ops to get out of the weeds, distinguish themselves from other Legal admins, and have a voice, not just a seat at the executive table.
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How to Get the Most Out of SOLID
SOLID isn’t just another conference—it’s a fast-moving think tank designed for action. Whether you're a first-timer or a veteran, this session will give you the blueprint to maximize your time, make meaningful connections, and leave with real takeaways. Learn how to engage, contribute, and walk away smarter, more connected, and ready to turn insights into impact.
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Now to Next, Together: Defining, Creating, and Adding Value in the Legal Landscape"
The Power of Technology, Data, and Collaboration
This session serves as the cornerstone of the summit, offering a forward-thinking perspective on how legal teams can define, create, and add value in a rapidly evolving landscape. By embracing technology, data, and deeper collaboration, we can unlock efficiencies and drive meaningful results. This talk will challenge attendees to rethink traditional value frameworks and inspire a collaborative approach to align stakeholders’ goals, leveraging the theme, “Now to Next, Together.”
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Legal Data Intelligence in the Age of Generative AI
Consensus is building across legal departments that generative AI represents an inflection point in our industry, providing the ability to effectively manage laborious data tasks and quickly find relevant information that can be transformed into insights, intelligence, and advice. Legal Data Intelligence (LDI) practitioners are uniquely positioned to help legal teams adapt to these changing times with their deep experience in managing large data volumes, deploying AI in secure environments, building defensible workflows, and overcoming intractable data challenges across a wide array of use cases.
In this talk, LDI founding member Bobby Malhotra shares his views on the importance of applying a legal data intelligence framework to solve complex legal data challenges in the age of generative AI. He also highlights five important traits that set LDI practitioners apart, enabling them to more efficiently solve data challenges, break down silos, and deliver business value.
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Squad Goals: Crafting Teams for Success
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The Encryption Illusion—Why Our Data Isn’t Safe (And What to Do About It), Unleak the Leak
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