When AI isn’t the bottleneck, knowledge is
February 2, 2026
AUTHOR Inside Practice
Most firms will arrive in 2026 with no shortage of AI tooling. The harder problem is what sits underneath it: whether your firm’s knowledge foundations, governance, and operating model are strong enough to make AI reliable, scalable, and defensible in practice.
That’s the premise of AI x KM 2026 - Knowledge Management as infrastructure, not support, and treating the “knowledge backbone” as the real differentiator in the next phase of legal transformation.
Hosted by Inside Practice as a one-day, in-person forum, AI x KM 2026 is built for senior KM, innovation, and operational leaders who are done with abstract AI talk, and ready to compare notes on what it actually takes to move from experimentation to sustained capability.
The conversations to watch
- Adoption isn’t a rollout. It’s alignment.
Featuring Barbara Taylor and Elisabeth Cappuyns of DLA Piper our day opens with a direct attack on the #1 execution risk: tools that don’t stick because workflows, roles, and incentives never changed. “Driving Adoption in Law Firms: Aligning Knowledge, Workflows, and AI” is framed around selection, implementation, feedback loops, and change management, so AI becomes a usable part of practice, not another tab attorneys ignore. - KM “lifecycle” models are being replaced by living systems.
Moderated by Katya Linossi of Clearpeople, “From Lifecycle to Living System: Reimagining Knowledge in the AI Era” pushes on a key tension: the moment AI reshapes how knowledge is created and reused, static models break. Expect a discussion centered on capture, governance, reuse, culture, and continuous transformation. - The vendor question is really a taxonomy and curation question.
AI success hinges on what you feed it, how you structure it, and who decides. “KM, Lawyers, and Vendors Working Together: Partnering with AI to Power Law Firm Expertise” is oriented around building effective taxonomies, deciding which assets become AI-ready, and translating outputs into lawyer-ready playbooks and workflow artifacts, done well, this is where KM becomes a multiplier. Panelists come from Ballard Spahr. - Pilot design is strategy, because vendor evaluation is now a core capability.
“Designing Pilots with Purpose: Turning AI Vendor Evaluations into Scalable KM Solutions” is a case study Led by Tom Trujillo of McGuireWoods LLP, built around the unglamorous work: vetting, selecting, proving value, planning financially, and avoiding adoption theater. - Future-proofing means planning for tool depreciation and governance debt.
AI stacks won’t stand still. The “Future-Proofing Your AI Strategy” led by Morgan Llewellyn of HIKE2 tackles total cost of ownership, the speed of tooling change, and why strong knowledge/data foundations are the only sustainable hedge.
The afternoon then turns to where KM strategy becomes visible to users: search, UX, and matter-level intelligence:
- “Aligning Knowledge Strategy with AI” with Michael Korn of Paul Hastings LLP
- “Reimagining Enterprise Search” with Nicole Bradick of Factor Law
- “Transforming Legal Knowledge into AI-Driven Case Intelligence” with Scott Kaiser of Mayer Brown
- (And yes, there’s a networking reception to close.)
Key details at a glance
Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Time: 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM (EST)
Location: New York
Early bird: Confirm by February 13, 2026 to save $300 (code AIKMNYC)
Bottom line: If your firm’s AI story is starting to sound like “we bought tools,” AI x KM 2026 is designed to pull the conversation back to what actually determines outcomes: knowledge design, governance, adoption, cost, and the operating model required to make AI trustworthy in practice.
The Last Mile of Client Intelligence: A First Look at the 2026 Chicago Agenda Law firms have spent years building the machinery of client intelligence: CRM platforms, experience databases, financial analytics, competitive intelligence functions, relationship-mapping tools and, increasingly, AI. The volume of available information has grown considerably. The commercial return remains uneven. While 78% of firms have a CRM, only 7% use it effectively. The difficulty is rarely a complete absence of data. It appears when that data must reach the right person, at the right moment, in a form they trust enough to act upon. That operational challenge shapes the agenda for Inside Client Intelligence , taking place in Chicago on November 4, 2026. The one-day program brings together leaders working across business development, CRM, marketing, analytics, knowledge, innovation and client strategy to examine how firms can convert information into sharper decisions, stronger relationships and measurable growth.
The AI performance gap is, at its core, a knowledge management problem. Firms are discovering that powerful tools do not automatically produce results. Only 19% of firms report measurable AI productivity gains, according to PwC, even though 85% are at some stage of AI adoption. PwC's 2026 AI Performance Study sharpens the point across the wider economy: 74% of AI's financial gains are being captured by just 20% of organisations, while the majority remain stuck in pilot mode. The tools are not the bottleneck. The knowledge infrastructure beneath them is. Where KM is genuinely AI-ready, firms report retrieval time falling by as much as 65%. That realisation is driving the most significant transformation in legal KM since the profession first formalised the function in the early 1990s, and it is the organising premise of Inside Legal KM: London , a one-day, in-person working forum taking place at 10 Union Street on September 17, 2026. This is not a showcase. It is a peer-led, implementation-focused programme built around real architectures, working patterns, and production controls, convening KM leaders, PSLs, knowledge lawyers, librarians, legal operations, IT, innovation, and risk teams.
Inside Practice has launched a dedicated Legal Wellbeing platform and made two recent webinar replays publicly available ahead of Legal Wellbeing London this September. The pressures affecting wellbeing in the legal profession are often difficult to see. A lawyer may appear to be performing at a high level while expending enormous energy masking neurodivergent traits. Another may continue delivering for clients while repeated exposure to traumatic material, distressed individuals or high-conflict matters gradually changes how they think, feel and respond. Over recent weeks, Inside Practice has examined both forms of hidden strain through two specialist webinars. The full replays are now publicly available, giving legal leaders, people teams and practitioners an opportunity to revisit the discussions and share them more widely. The webinars also form part of a broader development: the launch of Legal Wellbeing , Inside Practice’s new dedicated intelligence platform for the profession. The site brings together regular briefings, research and data, event information and resources covering lawyer mental health, neurodivergence, psychological safety, leadership accountability and the future of legal work. It gives these discussions a permanent home and creates continuity between briefings, webinars and live events. That continuity matters. The challenges raised in both webinars do not fit neatly within a single wellbeing initiative or annual awareness week. They affect how work is allocated, how performance is interpreted, how managers respond to warning signs and how firms discharge their responsibilities to people working under sustained pressure. The platform will keep those questions visible between live discussions.
Legal AI Toronto brings Canadian legal leaders together on October 27 to turn AI pilots into governed, measurable, enterprise-wide value.
