Reflections from LegalTech Talk London. It Was Worth the Trip.

I’ve been to enough legal tech conferences to have a sense of what separates a good one from a great one. LegalTechTalk fell into the latter category, and I’ve been thinking about why since I got back.

Part of it was the scale — 7,000+ attendees, eight stages, GCs and Legal Ops leaders from France, Morocco, Germany, the UK, and across the US all in one place. But honestly, what made it work was that the conversations felt substantive. People were showing up to have real conversations and they were genuinely wrestling with hard questions.

And the hardest one — the one that kept surfacing across panels no matter what the topic was — wasn’t really about technology at all. It was about change management. How do you get people to actually work differently? How do you bring a team along when the ground is shifting under everyone’s feet? The technology, it turns out, is often the easier problem to solve.

A few things from the panels that I attended were worth noting:

The efficiency vs. transformation debate is far from settled. There’s a tendency in our industry to conflate the two, and panelists pushed back on that pretty directly. Deploying a tool that saves hours is valuable, but it’s not the same as rethinking how a legal function is structured and what it’s actually there to do. That harder conversation requires change management as much as it requires technology, and most teams are still in the early stages of both.

The best leaders are building for a business that doesn’t fully exist yet. In two of the panels that I attended, several panelists made the point that if you’re designing your team and workflows around today’s reality, you’re already a step behind. If you are a GC, it requires a certain kind of intellectual honesty (with yourself and with the business) to plan for that kind of uncertainty and creating an environment where questioning the status quo is expected.

The junior lawyer question is real and unresolved. This was an important point that I heard time and time again in many conversations: AI doesn’t eliminate the need for developing lawyers, but it does change what that development looks like. The old model is gone. What replaces it is still being figured out and that transition is as much a people challenge as it is a technology one.

Legal’s seat at the table has to be earned. The GCs who resonated most on stage weren’t talking about legal as a support function. They were talking about it as a source of business intelligence: a way to help leadership make better decisions, not just safer ones. Getting there requires legal teams to show up differently, which is its own change management journey.

Tool selection deserves more scrutiny than it’s getting. With AI models improving as fast as they are, some panelists suggested a significant portion of today’s LegalTech landscape could look very different in a short period of time. One panelist suggested that 20% of the legaltech start-up ecosystem will be gone in the next two years. Regardless on who said it, the message was to think carefully about durability, not just capability, and to bring your team along on that evaluation journey rather than handing down decisions from above.

Internal clients are already diagnosing themselves. One observation that landed for me: lawyers are now navigating something doctors have dealt with for years: clients who’ve done their own research before coming to you. It’s not going away, and getting ahead of it is more productive than resisting it.

On a personal note, one of the highlights of the trip was watching SmartEsq, Inc. win the LegalTechTalk LaunchPad pitch competition. Really proud of that team and what they’re building.

If you haven’t made it to LegalTech Talk, it’s worth putting on your radar. For the US audience, Legaltech Talk is coming to Miami in March of 2027!