SOLID New York

Lorie Almon — “Judgment Is the Product”

Chair & Managing Partner, Seyfarth Shaw

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've ever had to ask before: why this firm, why this lawyer, why you?

Lorie Almon has the answer, and she's tested it herself, including the day she looked at an AI-generated answer and realized that its narrowly legal analysis failed to account for the nuanced business context, practical alternatives, and human judgment the situation required.

• 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

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.”

David Perla — “The Capital Scoreboard: What Capital Actually Rewards”

Vice Chair, Burford Capital

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

David Perla has one phrase capital cares about, repeated until a room can't forget it: revenue, margin, EBITDA. He's about to make the case for just how much bigger, and how much faster, that market actually is than anyone sitting in the room today realizes.

• 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.

Jeff Cox — “The Coffee Paradox: Why AI Won't Shrink Legal, It'll Expand It”

Director of Brand, Steno

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.

Jeff Cox is making the case using 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 about to happen to legal.

• 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

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

Mike Haven — “The Buyer's Scoreboard”

Global Head of Legal Operations, Meta

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. Mike Haven sits on one side of that table, and he has the receipts.

• 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.

Myah Bowermaster — “If It's Not on the Sheet, It Doesn't Exist: What It Actually Means to Have an AI Strategy”

Head of Legal Operations, Cvent

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.

At Cvent, a sales rep's side project mapping every SDR task into what stays human, what speeds up, what runs automatically, and what disappears became the standard model. Myah Bowermaster took that mandate for her own department.

• 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

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.

Evan Wong — “Stop the Work Before It Reaches a Lawyer”

Co-founder & CEO, Checkbox.ai

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.

Evan Wong built Checkbox around a hospital triage model, sorting and routing legal requests before they ever hit an attorney's inbox. What he's watching happen next, inside real legal departments, is not what anyone expects.

• 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.

Jamal Brown — “Clean Data Before Agents”

Office of the President | Head of Legal Operations, Guggenheim Investments

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.

Jamal Brown left one of the most sophisticated legal departments in the world to join Guggenheim Investments, reporting directly to the Office of the President, because they saw something worth building and needed someone who could see it too.

• 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

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

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.

Ashley Miller has watched the AI buying spree turn into new challenges: legal teams sitting on point tools that aren't getting adopted, don't talk to each other, and some that were chosen more for name recognition than fit. In this fireside conversation with David, she makes the case for a much more specific set of questions almost nobody is asking 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.

E.J. 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.

E.J. Bastien has a rule at Microsoft Legal: the moment you feel like you've figured out AI, you're already behind. He built a multi-agent litigation system himself 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.

Tim Fraser — “Radical Alignment: How Legal Earns a Central Role in the Business”

Chief Legal Officer, Toshiba America

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.

Tim Fraser has spent four years testing a different theory at Toshiba America: that legal doesn't close this gap by explaining its value better, but by creating so much enterprise value that the old perception becomes impossible to sustain. Two-thirds of the way through that transformation, he has a very specific answer for what actually happened when Legal stopped defending itself and started asking a single question.

• 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

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.

Jordan Domash — “Managing Regulatory Change”

Founder & CEO, Responsiv

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

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.

• 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 makes it difficult to keep you compliant
• When you should use out-of-the-box AI like ChatGPT, a dedicated solution, or a consulting firm

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

Andrea Webster — “The Best Friend You Never Thought You Needed”

Associate Director, Legal Innovations & Operations, Novartis

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.

Andrea Webster owns the Global Outside Counsel Program at Novartis. Panel firms already report quarterly on their AI utilization through dedicated billing activity codes, ahead of where most of the market is.

• How Novartis is already tracking AI utilization in outside counsel billing through activity codes
• Why positioning yourself as the “best friend,” not the enforcer, earns genuine buy-in
• 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.

Steve Drake — “Kill the Redline: What Happens When Legal Gets as Focused as a Heart Surgeon”

Deputy GC & Chief Compliance Officer, Coherent Corp.

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.

Steve Drake's team at Coherent built something that eliminates that cycle almost entirely, scoring every draft against pre-agreed business principles instead of playbooks and markups. What that unlocks for the attorneys who used to run that redline cycle by hand is the real story here.

• How principles-based contracting replaces the traditional redline cycle, and why that 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

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.

Kim Wolfe — “What Happens After the Prompt?”

Senior Managing Director / SVP – Chief Administrative Officer for Legal / Global Head of Contracts, State Street

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.

In this interactive session, Kim Wolfe will put the room inside a deceptively simple decision. You'll get new information as the scenario unfolds, and make the call in real time. What happens next may surprise you.

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

Come prepared to choose. And to choose again.

Jamie Berry — “Should the Seat Be a Person?”

Chief Executive Officer, LDM Global

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

Jamie Berry became CEO of LDM Global 45 days ago and immediately started rebuilding the company around a single principle from a book he's read three times.

• 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 CEO is rebuilding a leadership team around a single interview question

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

Elizabeth Spector Louden — “What Happens When a Lawyer Spends Nine Years Around Engineers”

Founder & Managing Partner, Spector Louden Law, PLLC

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.

Elizabeth Spector Louden spent nine years in-house next to engineers and, without meaning to, learned to write law precisely enough that a system could execute it without her in the room. She's since built a solo practice with no staff around that instinct, and the numbers behind it reprice 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 running a solo practice with no staff 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 a legal practice can actually be.

Jasmine Sims — “Build Your Own Path”

VP, Global Legal Operations and Contracts, IBM

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

Jasmine Sims is VP of Legal Operations at IBM and completed Stanford's Emerging COO program in 2024. She is building an operations career, and legal is where she's deploying it right now.

• 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.