Legal Foresight Summit

Just think, if we knew in 2023 what we will certainly know by 2026 (only three foreseeable years into the future), how would we change our attitudes and actions with respect to how we practice law, the services we offer, the clients we target, and the ways in which we might choose to deliver our services?

There is no proprietary data about the future. Whatever you need to know about tomorrow is to some extent, already visible. However, law firms are not good at seeing around corners or disseminating how today’s trends may impact their future. Given the blinding speed of change in the current environment, law firm leaders must focus more attention on the external and strategic.

What is the cost of not anticipating change at all?

Significant and far-reaching implications stemming from the pandemic, geopolitical conflict, and social unrest – compounded by near-constant climate disruption and chaos – are accelerating the need for an earnest commitment to more sophisticated risk assessment and scenario planning within law firms.

Business leaders and owners must commit to gaining a deeper understanding around how today’s disruptions and dislocations impact their clients’ businesses and the markets they serve, enabling firms to better prepare for competitive threats, new practice opportunities and other probable futures that will directly impact the firm’s business.

The Legal Foresight Summit will bring together a cross-function of law firm leaders, the clients they serve, and some of today's leading Foresight subject matter experts. Together we will explore our capability to adapt to an altered risk management landscape characterized by abrupt change – while illuminating the utility and application of strategic foresight into our broader operational risk management efforts.

For law firms and their clients, this is the strategic dilemma of our time – the pursuit of operational resilience and business agility – parsing out risk and opportunity amidst constant disruption, systemic shock and abrupt change.

The most successful law firms 10 years from now will most certainly emerge from the choices made by law firm leaders today. Hence, long-term vision, innovation and strategic adaptation has never been more important.

Join your peers as we collectively explore new ways of critically thinking about risk and opportunity for the firm and its clients – delineating between factors that we can and cannot control, while expanding the picture with respect to what we can provide for our clients in an increasingly complex and competitive legal landscape.

Becoming Indispensable Strategic Partners: The Convergence of Legal Risk Management and Business Strategy Consulting
Demographic Trends that Should Inform Your Human Capital Strategy
What Does it Mean to be ESG-Aligned And How Does this Framework Inform Risk Mitigation Strategy?
Building Human Capital Systems to Address Emerging Domain Challenges – and Making them Sticky within Your Firm
The Opportunity of a Lifetime: Aligning Your Firm's Business with the Transition Plans of Your Clients

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Session Overview
Three years into the “era of converging crises,” demarcated by the declaration of a global pandemic in 2020, law firms and clients face constant disruption in the form of systemic shocks and abrupt change.
- How can law firms pursue operational resilience and business agility in an era where shocks are occurring more often and having greater impact on organizations and society?
- How can they comprehend a world of expanding risk and shrinking opportunity?
Firms need to know what is and isn’t in their sphere of influence when responding to this turbulent, uncertain, novel, and ambiguous contextual environment.

Sanjay Khanna, chief futurist of SK Futures Inc., and former futurist at Baker McKenzie, explains the role of foresight, how it can be used, and why it’s important for law firms to have internal foresight capacity.

Finally, this opening keynote will explore the evolving and expanding role of trusted advisory services at law firms, including those related to Environmental, Social, and Governance issues.

Session Overview
- Getting started: Illustrations from our panel
- Requisite internal expertise and skillsets
- Foresight as a risk management tool
- Scenario Planning: Origins and Applications
- Why law firms need to understand what’s on the horizon within their clients’ businesses in order to be able to synthesize data points with respect to what’s likely to transpire in the broader ecosystem
- Intent: Breaking the echo chamber: How can this be applied to law firms?

Session Overview

Law Students for Climate Accountability (LSCA) aims to push the legal profession in a direction that is compatible with human life, and believes law firms should embrace the transition away from fossil fuels as a way of building resilience into their business model. Join LSCA for a panel discussion exploring why law firms should re-examine not only their operations, but also their matters, from a long-term perspective, particularly centering climate as an issue that clients and young talent are increasingly prioritizing.

Law firms investing in the future will naturally be better positioned to take advantage of emerging opportunities, mitigating risk for both the firm and for its clients. In this context, we are witnessing an exponential increase in demand for legal services related to ESG as organizations continue to improve their environmental, social, and governance performance and reporting.

Law firms knowledgeable in ESG will be far better equipped to provide the necessary services and advice to their clients.

Today's law firm leaders need to understand the obligations they face and the opportunities ESG presents. This discussion will examine the current and future implications of the growing expectations from clients and other stakeholders of their outside service firms when it comes to ESG. We will discuss this from the perspectives of the "Practice of Law" (serving clients) and of the Business of Law (running your firm). Join this lively conversation to learn what your firm could be doing and should be doing to leverage ESG - now and into the future. Doing nothing is not an option!

Session Overview

This illuminating discussion will consider and evaluate some of the most common barriers and obstacles to innovation and transformational change within law firms – addressing culture, leadership and data—not to mention the need for visionary leadership willing to help seed a predominantly risk-averse culture with the ambition (and foresight) to experiment and adapt, proactively.

This discussion will explore real-world experience, trial, error and adaptation in driving new ways of critically thinking about risk for the firm and its clients. We will collectively consider what’s involved in convincing your partners and gaining the internal support and enthusiasm required to pioneer the application of any untested, emerging technology, framework or methodology – juxtaposed with the risk or cost of not anticipating change at all.

Session Overview
The father of modern management, Peter Drucker, believed that sooner or later, time will turn your most precious assets into liabilities and that the most powerful competitive advantage may eventually be neutralized by the shifting sands of a changing external environment.

Just think, if we knew in 2023 what we will certainly know by 2026 (only three foreseeable years into the future) how would we change our attitudes and actions with respect to how we practice law, the services we offer, the clients we target, and the ways in which we might chose to deliver our services?

There is no proprietary data about the future. Whatever you need to know about tomorrow is to some extent, already visible. However, law firms are not good at seeing around corners or understanding how today’s trends may impact their future. Given the blinding speed of change in the current environment, law firm Executive Committee and Board members must focus more attention on the external and strategic. Their role should be directed toward investing time to help guide your firm successfully into the future while also governing for the present. Your Executive Committee and Board members provide a valuable resource when they excel at not only providing oversight, but insight and most importantly — foresight. And foresight is all about – observing present trends to help us determine how we might intercept the future.

This dynamic panel discussion of Firm Leaders will discuss:
- the importance and process for identifying trends and transforming that data into valuable insights about the future of your clients and how to handle disruptive market changes;
- pathways to enable Executive Committee and Board members to discuss, debate, interpret and assimilate the lessons external trends have to teach us;
- transforming discovery into action plans as it pertains to necessary skills/talent, unmet client needs, and new practices opportunities to be pursued or competitive threats to be countered; and
- a process of field-testing selective new ideas to affirm assumptions and drive deeper consensus

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In a rapidly changing business landscape, the future of law has become murkier. To thrive, law firm leaders must embrace a culture of adaptation and collaboration. This keynote will explore the risks and opportunities abrupt and accelerating change creates and the crucial role of interdisciplinary professionals in shaping the future of the industry.

The presentation will also delve into the evolution of leadership in law firms, offering specific and actionable tips for law firm leaders tasked with navigating the road ahead. The presentation will close with thoughts about how the emerging power of Artificial Intelligence, including ChatGPT, creates unprecedented challenges and opportunities for the business of law. Join us for a thought-provoking, interactive discussion on the urgent need to move beyond traditional models of leadership and embrace an innovative, optimistic, action-oriented outlook on the future of corporate law.

Session Overview

Our systems, institutions, and worldviews reflect a world that no longer exists. Planetary change and the “polycrisis” have changed the context in which we all operate. Now we must change our behavior and how we relate.

This changes who we are as individuals and organizations; perhaps even the role of lawyer and law firm in society as we have known it. Law firms must not only respond to forces from “outside,” they also shape the broader systems of which they are a part, which in turn feed back onto the firm.

Amid converging crises and accelerating personal and business disruption, what do change and change management look like? In this discontinuous era, how can we begin to, think about, assess, and sense into the emerging potential for change?

In this highly-interactive session, we will aspire to understand the firm as a complex adaptive system 'in service of life'. We will offer new ways of thinking and being to help you to relate more closely to the nature of change we face in these challenging times. We will also introduce key concepts, tools, and frameworks in action to help inspire awareness and curiosity as it pertains to strategy, creativity, collaboration and the art of the possible.

Session Overview
- The opportunity in "getting it right" -- fixing your business to not only have the capacity to endure systemic shocks, but to grow and thrive
- An examination of the competitive/business value in moving in this direction
- What does it mean to be ESG-aligned - and how does this framework inform risk mitigation strategy?
- Exploring growth opportunities inherent to sustainability practices
- The client perspective: GCs asking, "what's your firm's transition plan?" - and why this matters to your clients
- Understanding your place and responsibility within the supply chain as a firm, and as a business

Session Overview
- Addressing the inherent shortcomings of the modern-day law firm “confederation model” and why it cannot adequately solve problems
- The Business Imperative for investing in allied support and how this expands a law firm’s competitive capability
- Docketing Case Study: We will use docketing as a case study - as it has undergone considerable transformation in the past 15 years - from court runners to (at some firms) a revenue generating market differentiator, critical for pitches, efficiency gains and litigation advantage in high stakes cases. We will explore what is driving this change, how some firms are capitalizing on this change, and what lessons docketing can teach us about law firm structure.

Session Overview

To compete at the top of their industry, law firms must become indispensable strategic partners with a deep understanding of their clients' businesses, relationships, processes, and products. By doing so, they can assist their clients' law departments in identifying legal risk exposures, quantifying potential legal losses, and integrating legal risk management into their broader operational risk management strategies.

In order to protect a company's future and help it thrive, how can law firms obtain a deep understanding of their client's businesses and associated legal and enterprise risks? Which processes and systems do law firms and clients need to manage business and risk information and support decision-making? How will law firms develop and sell tech-enabled services and compete with the Big Four, and others? These are just a few of the topics we will cover in this important discussion.

Session Overview
Specific topics of discussion will include:
- Future View: Predicting how technology is likely to further impact both the practice and the business of law
- New Opportunities: Emerging technologies such as blockchain, NFTs and web3 and their impact on the legal profession
- Maintaining requisite skillsets: New functions and new roles - solving new problems and addressing new opportunities
- AI, Data & Tech Investment Strategy: how the IT decisions you make today will impact your firm in the next 5-10 years
- Demographic trends that should inform your human capital strategy
- Reimagining the business (partnership) model such that it more closely considers the values of the next gen talent pool
- Expanding the value firms offer to existing clients, as well as methods to expand the client pool
- Technology’s impact on Access to Justice

INSIDEPRACTICE PRESENTS:

LEGAL FORESIGHT SUMMIT

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Risk has been building up within our systems as the pace of change itself has become inescapably disruptive...

Join your peers online for the Legal Foresight Summit on March 29th & 30th.

Sanjay Khanna

Jennifer Leonard

Noah Flower

Dr. Abir Haddad

Gabe Cervantes

Patrick J. McKenna,

Stephen Pike,

Vincent Cino

Gary L. Sasso

Pamela Cone

Timothy Wilkins

Jake Reynolds

Marcie Borgal Shunk

Rhonda J. Tobin,

Kevin B. Coon

Sona Spencer

Esther Cameron

Aladdin Tingling Diakun

Gabe Teninbaum

Chris Boyd

Gillian S.G. Scott

Vedika Mehera

Haley Czarnek

Kelsey Dunn

Tim Hirschel-Burns

Stinson Woodward Ferguson

David Kamien

Nancy B. Rapoport

Mark Ford

Scott Leeb

Anna McGrane

David Alfrey

Michelle Breslauer

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Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

Law Firm Future-Readiness: Navigating Converging Crises Today and Tomorrow

Session Overview

What is Foresight and How is it Used Strategically within Organizations?

Session Overview