Anticipation is building ahead of ILTACON 2026, the legal technology industry’s flagship annual conference, scheduled for the week of 23 August in Nashville.
The event arrives at a pivotal moment, with artificial intelligence reshaping workflows, client expectations, and firm-wide strategy across the legal sector.
Rawia Ashraf, Head of Product for CoCounsel Transactional and GCO at Thomson Reuters, says the profession’s relationship with AI has fundamentally shifted over the past year.
“One of the biggest changes we’ve seen is lawyers have shifted from asking ‘can AI do this?’ to ‘can I trust it?'” Ashraf said, describing the new standard as “Fiduciary-Grade AI with reasoning you can see, sources you can check, and work you can stand behind.”
Aisling Fenelon, Chief Revenue Officer at Aderant, is watching for integration over isolation at this year’s conference.
“What I hope we don’t see is more disconnected technology and standalone innovation,” Fenelon said, pointing to Aderant’s partnership with Harvey and new Collections and Appeals capabilities as examples of connected ecosystem thinking.
Chuck Kellner, Strategic Discovery Advisor at Everlaw, warns that fragmentation continues to impose a hidden cost on legal teams operating across multiple platforms.
“Fragmentation carries a toggle-tax: duplicated work, disconnected data, and wasted time,” Kellner said, predicting that within a year, the advantage will belong to professionals using MCPs and APIs to unify their systems.
Laura Saklad, Vice President at Intapp, draws a clear line between two distinct categories of AI emerging across law firms in 2026.
“The distinction that matters now is between practice AI and firm AI,” Saklad explained, noting that firm AI addresses risk, compliance, business development, and institutional knowledge at an enterprise level.
Preethy Prakash, Vice President at eBrevia, argues that selective and strategic AI deployment is outperforming blanket adoption across the organisations seeing the strongest results.
“The organizations seeing the biggest returns aren’t using AI everywhere, they’re using it where it makes sense,” Prakash said, adding that demand for independent AI strategy guidance is also expected to grow.
Ahmed Shaaban, Founding Member at Fulcrum Global Technologies, believes the legal sector must treat human oversight as a non-negotiable part of any technology rollout this year.
“In 2026, the legal sector must prioritize change management, upskilling, and a strict ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach,” Shaaban said, arguing that true ROI depends on continuous education bridging the gap between sophisticated tools and human expertise.
Renzo Delvecchio, Marketing Director at TitanFile, notes that client awareness around data security has grown sharply alongside broader AI adoption within legal practices.
“Clients have become more aware of how their information is stored and shared, increasing demand for solutions that combine strong security, seamless collaboration, and ease of use,” Delvecchio said.
Haydn Jones, Vice President at Benchly, identifies trust as the missing ingredient preventing full utilisation of the tools already available to most legal professionals.
“When lawyers trust the technology, they use it fully,” Jones said, urging firms to prioritise tools with built-in verification so attorneys can rely on AI-generated outputs without constant second-guessing.
Bianca Zavala of SurePoint Technologies Product Management and Ivy Grey, Legal Solutions Adviser at iManage, both stress that foundational infrastructure work remains the prerequisite for any meaningful technology transformation in law firms.
Grey offered a three-part framework for 2026 readiness, advising firms to educate their workforce, operationalise successful AI use cases, and prepare now for emerging challenges including consumption-based pricing and data governance risks.