LegalTechTalk 2026
17 June 2026 · London · In person · LegalTechTalk
Europe's largest legal-transformation event, at the O2 in London, with a programme on AI adoption, governance, access to justice and the disputes community's stake in legal technology.
What happened
Locus Standi editorial
LegalTechTalk returned to the InterContinental at the O2 on 17 and 18 June 2026 as the largest edition yet, around 5,500 attendees and more than 400 speakers, with a trade-fair energy that attendees variously called Glastonbury and the Met Gala of legal tech. Behind the nail bars and the sponsor pubs, though, the substance had shifted. The recurring observation, on stage and on the floor, was that the room had stopped asking whether AI can do the work and started asking how its output holds up under scrutiny. That move from novelty to accountability was the real story of the two days.
The inflection point The framing keynote came from Nikki Shaver of Legaltech Hub, who described an industry in an unusual position: law firms are thriving financially while sensing that something underneath is changing. She set out the squeeze, incumbents pressed from below by competitors pricing for outcomes rather than billable seats, and from above by foundation-model providers entering legal work directly, a textbook innovator's dilemma now playing out in real time. The closing keynote landed in the same place from the leadership angle, with Norton Rose Fulbright's Christy Bentz arguing that most firms are still optimising rather than reinventing, and that the inflection point is where a firm can measure impact rather than just adoption.
People before tools A strong thread pushed back on the idea that this is a technology problem at all. A session with voices from BlackRock and KPMG Law made the case that AI adoption is change management first, that lawyers already carry real anxiety about their role shifting, and that the work starts with how and why people will use a tool rather than the tool itself. The point recurred in a negotiation workshop run by BlackRock's Kenneth Damien, whose argument was that however layered the tools become, what makes a good negotiator has not changed, fundamentals executed precisely still win, and cannot be faked with prompt-engineering bravado. Across these sessions the message was consistent: start with the problem, not the model.
Governance, regulation and access to justice The harder questions were regulatory. A compliance panel captured the bind neatly, that AI governance frameworks were built for a world that no longer exists, one with time to apply rules before the next cycle arrives; the panel's prescription was a fixed floor of non-negotiable standards with room to flex to local regimes, treating uncertainty as a permanent operating factor rather than a passing phase. The session closest to Locus Standi's own world asked whether legal AI widens access to justice or entrenches the gap, with the LCIA's Director General Kevin Nash alongside the chief executive of JUSTICE, Al Tamimi and Jus Mundi, weighing who actually benefits from these tools and who is left behind. A separate panel brought Argentine supreme court and justice-ministry figures to the question of judicial independence under political pressure, a reminder that the technology debate sits inside a wider one about institutions.
Building, not just buying The format that drew the most attention was the Vibeathon, the event's first hackathon, where more than a hundred legal professionals built over fifty working applications using natural-language AI coding tools without writing code. The winning entry in the people, planet and justice category, Chartered Territory, mapped public data to let buyers assess property risk in India, the kind of tool that would normally stall in committee rather than get built in a weekend. Alongside it, sponsor sessions on cross-border investigations and on tying legal strategy to enterprise value pointed the same way, that the practical question has become less whether a tool is impressive and more whether its output survives a hard look.
Why it matters for disputes LegalTechTalk is a legal-tech conference rather than a disputes one, but the overlap with arbitration and ADR was substantial: an LCIA-led panel on access to justice, repeated attention to how AI-generated evidence and analysis hold up before a tribunal, and a steady stream of disputes practitioners in the room. For anyone working in dispute resolution, the useful takeaway was the change in register. The field has moved past the demo. The questions that matter now are about reliability, governance and trust, which are, in the end, the questions arbitration has always asked of its evidence.
The detail
Date: 17 June 2026
Location: InterContinental London - The O2, London
Format: In person
Field: Arbitration
Cost: Paid
Organiser: LegalTechTalk
Hosts: LegalTechTalk