April 14, 2026
AUTHOR Inside Practice
From Experimentation to Infrastructure:
AI x KM Returns to New York on April 29
The legal profession has crossed an inflection point.
Generative AI adoption among legal professionals has more than doubled in the past year. According to the 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report, 69% of legal professionals report personally using AI. The Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer 2026 report paints an even sharper picture: more than 90% of lawyers surveyed now use at least one AI tool in their daily work.
The experimentation phase is over.
The question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but whether firms have the knowledge foundations to make it reliable, scalable, and defensible in practice.
That question sits at the center of AI x KM, a one-day, in-person program taking place at the SUNY Global Center in New York City on April 29, 2026.
The event brings together Chief Knowledge Officers, innovation leaders, technology executives, and partners to address what may be the most consequential infrastructure challenge facing law firms today: building the knowledge backbone that AI depends on.
The knowledge gap behind the AI hype
Most firms have launched pilots, rolled out chat interfaces, and invested heavily in vendor platforms. Far fewer have addressed the harder, more structural question: do they have the governance, data quality, and operating models required to make AI trustworthy at scale?
This institutional gap between individual enthusiasm and organizational readiness, is exactly the territory AI x KM is designed to explore. Framed around the idea of moving “from artificial intelligence to orchestrated intelligence,” the program goes beyond the usual AI showcase. It asks harder questions about knowledge as business-critical infrastructure, the “knowledge osmosis” crisis accelerated by hybrid work and changing leverage models, and the governance frameworks needed to align AI capability with professional responsibility.
A practitioner-led faculty from leading firms
The faculty brings together senior leaders from firms and companies actively shaping this space, and the agenda is built around what it actually takes to move from AI experimentation to sustained, firm-wide capability.
DLA Piper’s Barbara Taylor and Elisabeth Cappuyns join Nexl's CEO, Philipp Thurner to open the substantive program with a session on driving AI adoption by aligning knowledge, workflows, and people.
In “From Lifecycle to Living System,” Katya Linossi of Atlas by ClearPeople and Sarah Hirebet of Stradley Ronon examine what happens when AI reshapes how firms create, manage, and reuse knowledge, and why static lifecycle models are beginning to break under that pressure.
Morgan Llewellyn of HIKE2 tackles the sustainability question head-on with a session on future-proofing AI strategy, including total cost of ownership, tool depreciation, and why well-governed knowledge is the only sustainable hedge against a rapidly changing AI market.
One of the day’s standout sessions brings together Jacob Weiner of Harvey and Amanda Gudis Stuart of Holland & Knight to compare two real-world AI rollouts, exploring timelines, governance decisions, resistance, and the client-facing messaging that supported successful adoption.
Tom Trujillo, Chief Innovation and AI Officer at McGuireWoods, joins Rizwan Khan, VP North America at iManage, for a case study on how to design vendor evaluation pilots with purpose.
A later session on aligning knowledge strategy with AI features Michael Korn of Paul Hastings, Catherine Bernard of McDermott Will & Emery, Kevin Walker of Centari, and Conan Hines of Fried Frank.
Nicole Bradick of Factor Law then turns to enterprise search, examining how AI is transforming the experience from keyword retrieval to intelligent, contextual discovery.
The day’s final session brings together Scott Kaiser of Mayer Brown, Brittney Novison of Paul Hastings, and Sara Miro of Sullivan & Cromwell to explore how AI can be embedded into everyday legal workflows, from case preparation to surfacing insights from related prior matters.
Why this moment matters
AI x KM arrives at a moment when the gap between AI capability and knowledge readiness has never been wide, or more consequential.
The ACC/Everlaw GenAI Survey found that 64% of in-house teams now expect to rely less on outside counsel as their internal AI capabilities grow.
Thomson Reuters research shows that organizations with defined AI strategies are twice as likely to experience revenue growth, yet only 22% have achieved that level of strategic clarity.
Meanwhile, the regulatory landscape is tightening. The EU AI Act reaches full application for high-risk systems in August 2026. The Colorado AI Act takes effect in June. ABA Formal Opinion 512 has already established binding ethical obligations for lawyers using generative AI.
Firms without governance frameworks are not just strategically behind, they are exposed.
Against that backdrop, the event’s focus on knowledge as infrastructure rather than a support function feels less like a conference theme and more like an urgent mandate.
AI is accelerating. The question is whether your knowledge can keep up.
The Details
AI x KM takes place on Wednesday, April 29, 2026, from 9:00 AM to 6:15 PM EST, at the SUNY Global Center, 116 East 55th Street, New York, NY 10022. The day concludes with a networking reception.
The program is designed for Chief Knowledge Officers, KM and innovation directors, legal operations leaders, CIOs and data architects, pricing and legal finance leaders, and partners responsible for firm strategy and delivery transformation.
To register or learn more, visit
insidepractice.com/ai-x-km-2026 or contact the team at
contact@insidepractice.com.
