By Alisa Groom – Manager of Advisory Services
If you were at ILTACON 2026 in Nashville, it was impossible to miss the scale of the AI story. From advertising throughout the Gaylord Opryland and some of the largest exhibits ILTA attendees have ever seen, coupled with sponsored events, packed sessions and one-to-one conversations, AI was everywhere.
Opening keynote speaker Jim Abbott spoke about creativity, accountability, trust and adapting to the circumstances in front of you. That message felt particularly relevant to the week. Law firms don’t have the luxury of waiting for technology to slow down, or for a perfect roadmap to emerge. The challenge is to build the capability to adapt deliberately—and keep improving as the environment changes.
And the promises from ILTA sponsors this past week are big: autonomous agents, dramatically faster work, better access to knowledge and new levels of productivity.
Much of that potential is real. But what struck me most—particularly in conversations with firm leaders—was how quickly the discussion moved from what AI can do to what has to be established inside a firm before it can deliver meaningful value.
Vendors can show what is possible in a product, but firms must do the harder work of deciding how tooling addresses key needs and use cases against their strategy. From there, firm leaders are also responsible for preparing the data and technology around new tools, changing how people work, governing it appropriately and determining how the capacity it creates will translate into better business performance.
Here are the themes I believe matter most coming out of ILTACON 2026.
For many years as AI has established its domain in the legal industry, conversations have started with the technology: What should we buy? Which use cases should we test? Which platform is winning?
The better starting point is: Where do we have opportunity to improve? How can we increase our market position, competitive advantage, employee experience and employee productivity?
Is the goal to accelerate matter delivery? Reduce administrative work for lawyers? Improve knowledge reuse? Strengthen client service? Create capacity for growth? Improve margins?
Without that context, firms risk creating a collection of AI experiments rather than a coherent AI strategy.
Our 2026 Law Firm Performance & Future Readiness Benchmark found that 91% of firms consider AI a priority, while only 40% have deployed it firmwide.
I don’t think that gap exists because firms lack access to AI. Increasingly, it reflects the difficulty of moving from ambition to execution.
Scaling AI requires clear priorities, defined use cases, workflow and operating model design, and strong governance & leadership. In other words, AI strategy has to connect directly to business strategy.
One of the realities that gets lost in the excitement around AI is that the technology depends heavily on the environment around it.
AI needs access to the right information. That information needs to be usable, governed and secure. Applications need to connect. Permissions need to make sense. Workflows need to be understood well enough to know where automation helps and where human judgment remains essential.
A sophisticated AI tool layered onto fragmented data, disconnected applications or inconsistent processes doesn’t fix those problems. In some cases, it makes them more visible.
That’s why I think AI readiness needs to be considered much more broadly than an AI platform decision.
For many firms, some of the most valuable AI work may actually begin with data architecture, document and knowledge systems, Microsoft 365, application integration, security, information governance or workflow redesign. Firms are jumping in headfirst and spending hundreds of dollars per user before they’ve addressed the underlying infrastructure and processes that the AI will run on.
Another theme I heard repeatedly was adoption.
There is a tendency to think about adoption as the final stage of a technology project: implement the platform, train the users and move on.
In practice, adoption starts much earlier.
People are more likely to change how they work when the technology solves a recognizable problem, fits into the flow of their work and has clear expectations around when and how it should be used.
That means understanding current workflows before introducing technology. It means involving the people doing the work. It means defining ownership and governance. And it means continuing to refine the process after launch.
People are still a critical part of the formula for success.
This is particularly important with AI because the technology itself will keep changing. Therefore, adoption management will no longer consist of scheduled trainings and skills assessments but rather must become a cultural adaptation to law firms. When change and continuous improvement become culturally embedded in firms, we will see the highest levels of success and ROI from AI initiatives.
The first wave of AI business cases often centered on time saved: a task that used to take two hours can now be completed in 20 minutes.
That’s useful evidence, but it isn’t the end of the ROI calculation.
If a lawyer gets 100 hours back over the course of a year, what happens next?
AI can create capacity, however firms still need a strategy for how to use that capacity. This is one reason we believe technology performance needs to be measured alongside broader measures of firm performance, not separately from them.
The firms that get the most from AI will be those that can connect technology investment to productivity, profitability, client value and growth.
Walking away from ILTACON, I don’t believe the dividing line between future-ready firms and everyone else will simply be who adopts AI fastest.
The stronger differentiator will be whether the firm has a repeatable way to assess new opportunities, prioritize investment, prepare the underlying environment, implement change, govern it, measure the results and then improve again.
This requires a moder operating model that connects strategy, technology, data, security, workflows, people and performance.
This challenge is especially relevant for mid-sized firms as they increasingly face many of the same expectations as the largest firms—around cybersecurity, AI, availability, client requirements and innovation—but often without the same depth of internal resources.
Future readiness doesn’t mean recreating an Am Law 50 technology organization. It means being deliberate about the capabilities the firm needs, what it should own internally and where external expertise can provide leverage.
The vendors at ILTACON showed an impressive and exciting view of where legal technology is heading. There are many meaningful use cases and platforms available to firms today that can greatly accelerate and enable delivery of legal services.
But the product is only part of the equation.
The bigger work happens inside the firm: setting the strategy, connecting the data, improving the workflows, preparing the people, putting the right governance around the technology and deciding how improved capacity will translate into better firm performance.
Now that we understand the technology landscape, let’s start the conversation of how to realize the benefits of these platforms.