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
