Agenda

The sessions will feature three 15-minute presentations from subject matter experts followed by a joint Q&A session.

Actionstep – Your firm is not built to last: There’s still time to change that
Most mid-market law firms are built to perform, not to endure. They’re optimised for the next matter, the next quarter, the next hire, running processes held together by workarounds, institutional knowledge, and tools that were never designed to scale. When a senior partner exits, a billing system breaks, or a client’s needs outgrow what the firm can deliver, the gaps show. The firms leading their markets in a decade won’t be the ones that reacted fastest. They’ll be the ones that made a deliberate choice (early enough) to build on infrastructure that compounds: connected workflows, financial controls that hold under scrutiny, and operating models that don’t depend on any one person knowing where everything lives. Ben Gittins, Sales Director, UK of Actionstep, draws on experience working with hundreds of midsize firms globally to challenge firm leaders to look past operational survival and ask the harder question: what are we actually building here?
Presented by: Ben Gittins, Sales Director, UK, Actionstep

Nerdio – The Legal Desktop: Still catching up
The rest of the firm has moved. Microsoft 365, Teams, Azure, all consolidated, all under control. The Windows desktop hasn’t kept pace, whether that’s a laptop build or a virtual environment left to run quietly in the background for years.
The gap shows up day-to-day: client data on unmanaged devices, fee earners losing hours after a failure, data residency questions that take too long to answer, new joiners and acquired offices waiting days to be productive.
A growing number of firms are closing that gap with Azure Virtual Desktop, bringing the desktop into the same stack as everything else and building the foundation they’ll need as AI tooling requirements grow and evolve. From this you’ll come away with a clearer picture of where the legal desktop is heading and what good looks like once the gap is closed.

Agenda

• The evolution of the legal desktop: how we got here and why the gap exists
• A real-world story: what drove the change, what got in the way, what they’d do differently
• What becomes possible next, AVD, AI, and where this takes you

Presented by: Jacob Chew, Senior Corporate Account Executive – Professional Services, Nerdio

Thomson Reuters – The Intelligence Layer: How SME law firms can compete – and win – with AI
Growth in the UK legal market is concentrating around specific client risks – regulatory change, employment restructuring, data exposure and AI governance – and SME firms are better placed than they might think to capitalise on it. Drawing on findings from Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 State of the UK Legal Market Report, this session explores how AI can amplify what SME firms already do well: close client relationships, commercial judgement and the ability to move fast. With corporate legal teams adopting AI faster than law firms, and clients increasingly expecting to see the difference it makes, the firms that win will be those that focus on practical, high-value use cases – tailored risk intelligence, fixed fee service models, smarter capacity management – and convert AI from an internal productivity tool into visible client value. Because in a market where everyone has access to the same technology, trust and judgement remain the only true differentiators.
Presented by: Ben Firth, Client Solutions Director, Thomson Reuters

The sessions will feature three 15-minute presentations from subject matter experts followed by a joint Q&A session.

Katchr – Preparing for AI data strategy in the business of law: 3 Things to get right today
Much of the conversation around AI is focused on helping lawyers practise law. This session looks at the other side of the business: helping leadership teams run better law firms. We’ll explore the three things finance, business and IT leaders should be focussing on today, where AI is beginning to reshape commercial decision-making, and what leading UK law firms are doing now to prepare. You’ll leave with practical ideas you can take back to your firm to lay the groundwork for your AI strategy.
Presented by: Graham Moore, Founder & Managing Director, Katchr

Laurel – The era of work intelligence has arrived
Three hours of work per day goes unrecorded. Across the workforce, professionals work 55 hours a week and submit 39.5, and that invisible work never makes it into any report, any dashboard, or any decision. Your utilization reports, your capacity planning, your AI strategy: all of it is running on an incomplete picture. Work Intelligence is the missing layer. In this session, Eric Zaarour will show you what it reveals, what it unlocks, and why the enterprises closing this gap now are pulling ahead of the ones that aren’t.
Presented by: Eric Zaarour, Co-Founder, Laurel

Jungle IT – Aligned leadership, accelerated growth: Using IT to drive strategic direction
AI, changing client expectations and new delivery models are reshaping the legal sector and firms are under pressure to evolve without compromising the quality and trust they’re built on. From what we’re seeing across leading law firms, successful technology strategies start with alignment at the top. Where partners share clear priorities, that clarity flows into the wider business strategy enabling more focused investment, stronger decision-making and better outcomes. This is what allows technology to deliver real impact. In firms with clear direction, IT becomes a strategic enabler for growth and client experience. Where alignment is lacking, technology often becomes reactive and fragmented. This session explores how partner alignment creates momentum and how IT becomes a true growth engine for the firm and its clients.
Presented by: Jonathan Asquith, Founder & CEO, Jungle IT

Peer-to-peer roundtable discussions are 30-minutes, each led by an IT leader from a law firm.

1. Why adoption is still the weakest link in legal IT
For more than a decade, firms have blamed adoption for disappointing technology outcomes even as tools, UX and capability have improved. This discussion asks why the same adoption problems keep resurfacing and why? What is ‘adoption’ and why is it different to training? Do firms, and firm leadership, really understand the necessity of cultural and behavioural change to see improved outcomes? How challenging is this for technology leaders? Expect conversation around putting fire power under adoption. Whether it is Gen AI, or any other initiative in the technology landscape this conversation explores how to reset the mindset to one of success.
David Hymers, IT Director, Wedlake Bell & Lee Killner, IT Director, Howes Percival

2. Turning strategy into delivery: Aligning IT with business growth
It’s one thing to set business goals, it’s another to make sure your IT strategy actually supports them. In this session, Martin Lynch, Head of IT at Bindmans, will share how he’s worked closely with partners to align IT with the firm’s wider business objectives and modernisation plans. We’ll look at how that alignment has shaped both their overall technology direction and the delivery of key projects. This includes practical insight into their move to Azure, and how clear priorities at leadership level have made those projects easier to justify, deliver and adopt across the business.
Martin Lynch, Head of IT, Bindmans

3. AI everywhere, value nowhere?
Firms are investing heavily in AI, rolling out pilots, tools and capabilities at speed yet many struggle to point to clear financial or operational gains. This discussion asks why AI so often translates into activity, cost and distraction rather than measurable bottom line impact and whether the problem is less about the technology and more about how it is being applied.
The conversation focuses on real examples of how AI is delivering value in law firms and what those successes have in common.
Anthony Stables, Director of IT and Innovation, Capsticks

4. The Threat Evolution: Are firms ready for what’s coming?
Cyber risk is escalating rapidly driven by AI enabled threats such as deepfakes, social engineering and increasingly sophisticated attacks while IT capacity remains largely fixed. This discussion explores how IT leaders are managing constant threat environments where vigilance must increase, tolerance for failure is shrinking and teams are under sustained pressure.
Jonathan Smith, Director of IT and Facilities, Ward Hadaway

5. What does the future legal IT team look like?
As AI absorbs parts of traditional IT work and expectations continue to rise, the shape of the Legal IT team is already shifting. This discussion looks ahead to how roles, skills and team structures are changing and what that means for sustainability, capability and leadership.
The conversation focuses on which responsibilities are expanding, which are fading, and where new pressure points are emerging as service delivery models evolve. Participants will reflect on how IT teams are balancing innovation, operational resilience and capacity, and what today’s decisions imply for the long term shape and credibility of the Legal IT function.
Carol Skinner, Head of IT, Lewis Silkin

6. Beyond the headlines: Embedding AI into workflows that actually deliver
A year into firmwide AI adoption, many firms are seeing strong uptake at the task level, drafting, summarising, research but far less impact on how legal work is actually delivered.
This roundtable focuses on the shift from individual use to embedded, workflow-level automation that drives real improvements in efficiency, consistency and scalability. Drawing on Lewis Silkin’s experience, Michelle Taylor will lead a practical discussion on where AI has delivered measurable value, where it hasn’t scaled, and what it takes to make it part of everyday delivery. We’ll explore how to identify the right processes, what makes an agent work in practice, and how to move from experimentation to sustained impact. Expect a candid, experience-led discussion focused on outcomes, not theory.
Michelle Taylor, Head of Product Portfolio, Lewis Silkin

7. Tokenmaxxing: The economics of AI adoption, pricing power and competitive advantage
As AI moves from experimentation to core business infrastructure, organisations face a new economic reality: success will depend on extracting maximum value from every token consumed. This roundtable explores the economics of AI adoption, from cost optimisation and ROI to pricing power and competitive advantage. Attendees will gain practical insights into balancing innovation, adoption and profitability as AI scales across the enterprise.
James Grice, Head of Innovation and AI, Lawfront

8. Are vendors driving our strategy more than we admit?
Between pricing pressure, lock in and platform dependence, how much control do firms really have? This roundtable debates whether IT still has meaningful leverage and how much freedom firms actually have once they commit to major platforms?
Chris Jory, IT Manager, Bristows

9. The hidden leaks: Why your law firm is losing 10-15% of billable value before the invoice is ever sent
Ask any managing partner about their realisation rate and they’ll usually have the number close to hand. Ask them where the gap is actually coming from, and the conversation tends to get a lot vaguer.
That’s the gap this round table is really about.
The uncomfortable truth is that most of the value a firm loses doesn’t disappear at the invoice stage, it’s gone long before that. It’s the hour a fee earner forgot to log because the day got away from them. It’s the write-down a partner makes without really questioning why the time ran over. It’s the twenty minutes someone lost waiting for a system to come back online, which never even made it onto a timesheet because, well, what would they have written?
None of this looks like a problem on paper. It just looks like a slightly soft number at the end of the year that everyone quietly accepts as normal.
This roundtable is a genuinely practical conversation with someone who has years of experience dealing with these same problems, giving you the chance to compare notes, ask questions and generate workable ideas.
Emma Judge, Digital Adoption Manager, VWV

10. Legacy to AI-ready: MSB Solicitors’ journey to modernisation
Every law firm talks about digital transformation. Fewer are willing to go into detail about what that looks like from inside the firm.
James Whelan, Head of Technical Systems at MSB Solicitors, joins us to walk through the last two years of MSB’s modernisation journey. The legacy infrastructure that had to go. The platform work that had to happen. The security foundations that needed to evolve.
Join James for a real-world account of what it takes to move a firm from legacy systems towards a genuinely AI-ready foundation – covering security, platform and data, and what “AI-ready” really means once you get past the buzzword.
James Whelan, Head of Technical Systems, MSB Solicitors

A COBRA-style crisis simulation interactive workshop facilitated by Duncan Eadie, Head of IT Strategy, Thomson Snell & Passmore LLP.

COBRA is the UK government’s crisis response mechanism, bringing the right people together to assess a fast-moving situation, make decisions and coordinate the response. CTRL takes that idea into the law firm environment, putting delegates in the room as the people who have to decide what happens next when a cyber incident unfolds.

What happens when a cyber incident stops being an IT problem and suddenly becomes everyone’s problem?

In this fast-paced, interactive workshop, Duncan Eadie will lead the audience through a live law firm cyber scenario, joined by a law firm leader and security specialist as members of the CTRL team.

As the situation unfolds, delegates become part of the crisis response. They will be asked to make decisions, vote on the options and deal with the consequences as the scenario develops. The panel will challenge the choices, bring different perspectives to the table and reveal what happens next.

Expect pressure, dilemmas and a few surprises as the session explores how firms respond when cyber affects clients, partners, people, operations and reputation.

No doom and gloom, one hour to test how your firm would respond when things go wrong.

Adoption is the weakest link, year after year. In this workshop, we’ll explore why adoption continues to be the biggest barrier to success in legal tech and AI rollouts, and what can realistically be done to fix it.

In this workshop, we will work in groups and look at real life examples to:

• Understand the what, why and who of adoption challenges
• Redesign the adoption approach from scratch – making it applicable to modern systems!

You’ll leave with:

• An adoption cheat sheet
• Practical knowledge to prevent recurring adoption challenges
• A clearer understanding of what IT can influence and change in firms, and where additional help and support is needed.