Register for :Harvey: FORUM Chicago 2026

When AI compresses the work, what happens to how it gets priced, staffed, and delivered? This session brings GCs and firm leaders together for an honest conversation about a relationship shifting in real time and what firms find when they treat AI as an opportunity rather than a threat. AI is opening revenue streams that didn't exist, making service lines viable that were never economic before, and forcing a rethink of the billing model underneath all of it. It's also changing who can credibly compete for a given matter: boutique and regional firms are taking on work they'd have turned away three years ago, without adding headcount. When does speed create real advantage, and when do the wheels come off? Can AI help firms understand their clients' businesses better, or does the gap widen as clients move faster and pull more work in-house? When both sides are transforming at once, who captures the value?

The legal department of the future won't just deliver advice, it will shape how the enterprise governs, competes, and grows. But getting there is more of an operating model problem than a technology one. This session gets specific about structure: how to size and spend a legal budget when the cost curve is moving, what to build versus buy, which roles belong on the team in three years and which don't, and how work gets routed between in-house and outside counsel when both sides have the same tools. Panelists will talk through what they've restructured, what they got wrong, and how the answers differ for a ten-person department versus a hundred.

AI adoption depends on leadership buy-in. The tools, the pilots, the innovation committees mean nothing if the people leading the work don't believe in it, use it, and model new ways of working. This session puts the profession's most forward-thinking partners and in-house leaders on stage for a candid conversation about the personal side of leading through this moment. How are they using AI in their own practice, day to day? How do you build conviction in a team that's watched three technology promises come and go? What do you do about the senior lawyer who won't move? And what does waiting cost?

Firms without a dedicated innovation function operate under a different set of constraints than global firms — smaller budgets, leaner teams, and no one whose full-time job is figuring this out. They also have advantages the giants don't — less bureaucracy, faster decisions, and partners who are still close to the work. This roundtable brings together leaders from those firms to compare notes on what's working. Where AI is delivering measurable ROI, how they built the internal consensus without a formal business case process, what they tried that didn't stick, and what they'd tell a peer firm still sitting on the fence.