Agenda

The Modern Firm & AI: Transforming Workflows, Talent, and Legal Business Models. A practical commercial blueprint for the modern legal landscape.

08:15 – 09:00

Conference registration and networking

09:00 – 09:10

MC welcome

09:10 – 09:35
Opening industry keynote

Reimagining work: firm-wide transformation

Kim Trajer

Kim Trajer

Chief Operating Officer

McCullough Robertson

Session Details

Moving past scattered, individual software pilots to build a cohesive, firm-wide operational strategy.

  • Aligning leadership and commercial goals: Ensuring your technology strategy directly supports the firm's long-term revenue models and business objectives
  • Scaling from pilots to practice: Designing a structured framework to transition from small-scale trials to full, firm-wide technology adoption
  • Redesigning organisational workflows: Restructuring internal processes and roles to maximise the efficiency gains of a fully integrated digital workplace
09:35 – 10:00
Principal

AI integration and business alignment

Session Details

Building long-term operational resilience through strategic, firm-wide technology investments.

  • Building a tech-driven infrastructure: How to effectively integrate AI tools into your firm's unique, end-to-end workflows
  • Capturing the economic upside: Designing tiered service models to distinguish between automated work, AI-augmented work and pure human advisory — and pricing each deliberately
  • 70/30 rule for legal resilience: Ensuring automation handles up to 70% of routine tasks, leaving the remaining 30% to human lawyers for judgment, creativity, and quality assurance
10:00 – 10:30
Panel discussion

The next era of profitable legal practice

Jenae Webb

Jenae Webb

Associate Director, Digital Legal Delivery

HSF Kramer

Jan Hards

Jan Hards

Partner and Head of AI

Johnson Winter Slattery

Rebecca Kelly

Rebecca Kelly

Managing Partner - Australia

Clyde & Co

Session Details

Maintaining your firm's financial margins and revenue when technology slashes the time it takes to complete legal tasks, forcing a shift away from traditional hourly billing.

  • The client ultimatum: Meeting corporate client demands for transparent fee structures, fixed pricing and strict data security
  • Shift from time to value: How to successfully transition to flat fees, subscriptions, and value pricing to protect your profit margins
  • Turn efficiency into growth: Practical strategies to convert rapid, tech-driven time savings into new business and scaled profits
10:30 – 10:50
Platinum

Fixing the infrastructure: centralising siloed records and internal knowledge

Session Details

Cleaning up fragmented legacy files, emails, and document management systems so your modern tools can actually find and use your firm's collective expertise.

  • Audit your data footprint: Mapping where your firm's information lives before executing a data migration
  • AI-Ready Knowledge Ecosystem: Transforming passive fragmented storage into a highly searchable repository that fuels your firm's digital tools
  • Ensuring long-term data hygiene: Establishing everyday protocols for document naming, classification and storage to prevent future data silos
10:50 – 11:20

Morning tea and networking

11:20 – 11:40
Industry keynote 2

Accelerating AI programs

Iain McGuire

Iain McGuire

Partner, Chief Technology and AI Officer

Wotton Kearney

Session Details

Establishing strategic initiatives focused on innovation, capability building, and long-term strategic alignment through collaborative partnerships and specialised adoption teams.

  • Strategic Partnerships: Creating collaborative organisational partnerships to explore safe, and scalable generative AI solutions
  • Client-Facing Innovation: Collaborating with cyber-security partners to harness real-time intelligence to protect clients from emerging threats
  • People and Capability: Establishing specialised teams across local and global functional groups to drive AI adoption
11:40 – 12:00
Platinum

Automated legal workflows at scale

Session Details

Shifting from basic text tools to proactive systems that can independently handle multi-step legal processes and drive meaningful cultural change.

  • Building the discipline of legal operations: Achieving adaptability, foresight, and a new level of partnership between technology and the legal team
  • Agentic Workflows: Shifting legal operations from reactive process to proactive, strategic function empowered by advanced data insights for better decision-making
  • Driving change readiness: Building stakeholder buy-in, user adoption and governance framework for AI success
12:00 – 12:30
Panel discussion

Governance and compliance

Gary Adler

Gary Adler

Chief Digital & AI Officer

MinterEllison

Eugene Fletcher

Eugene Fletcher

Head of Technology

Hamilton Locke

Session Details

Establishing clear, everyday compliance rules and safety guardrails that protect client confidentiality and intellectual property.

  • AI literacy training: Building the right guardrails so your team can trust, verify and best leverage the output
  • Human-in-the-loop protocols: Establishing non-negotiable verification workflows to ensure human reviews of all automated outputs
  • Proactive risk auditing: Auditing how your teams are using these tools, identifying which vendors meet enterprise-grade security standards, and spotting gaps in your current workflows
12:30 – 13:30

Networking lunch

13:30 – 14:00
Panel discussion

Closing the Training Gap: Upskilling Staff and Overcoming Partner Risk-Aversion

Nikki Rollason

Nikki Rollason

Director of Legal Operations & Innovation

Norton Rose Fulbright

Mary McEachern

Mary McEachern

Head of Review & Integrated Services

Allens

Lisa Ziegert

Lisa Ziegert

Director Client Solutions

Hall & Wilcox

Session Details

Building practical training programs to prevent unapproved "shadow" software use, reduce mistakes, and ease the anxiety of risk-averse senior partners.

  • Eliminating "shadow tech" risks: Designing firm-wide upskilling programs to prevent the use of unapproved software and protect sensitive data
  • Easing partner anxiety: Strategies to demonstrate technology guardrails clearly, helping risk-averse senior partners trust new workflows
  • Standardising quality control: Establishing clear training protocols to eliminate errors, ensure consistency and maintain accuracy
14:00 – 14:20

The new frontier in eDiscovery: making sense of modern digital evidence

Session Details

Piecing together fragments of evidence from messy modern data sources — like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and encrypted chat apps — into credible, court-ready timelines.

14:20 – 14:55
Industry keynote 3

The next generation pipeline: developing junior lawyers when the basics are automated

Session Details

Rethinking career paths and training models for junior lawyers when the entry-level tasks they traditionally used to learn on are now fully handled by software.

  • Reorganising capabilities: Transforming the nature and pathways of legal work toward the strategic roles that will define the modern legal practice
  • Redesign training programs: Adjusting compensation structures and developing new metrics to evaluate junior lawyers
  • Building supervision skills: Delivering deliberate apprenticeship models focused on verification, critical analysis and professional judgment
14:55 – 15:00

MC Closing Remarks

Session Details

Followed by Australian AI Awards 2026.