By Lorraine Chimbga, Senior Technology Strategy Consultant, at Legal Futures Associate Codified Strategy
Five thousand legal professionals walked into the InterContinental O2 last week. Most of them likely left with a longer list of tools they’d seen demoed than when they arrived. Whether they left with better clarity on what to do next is a different question.
The gap between what looks compelling on a stage and what works in your firm is exactly the problem Codified Strategy was founded to close. And LegalTechTalk 2026 made it more visible than ever.
Here is what stood out from two days on the floor.
The AI conversation has grown up
A year ago, many LegalTech conference sessions were still asking, “Should law firms use AI?” That question has been retired. At LTT 2026, the sessions that drew the most engagement were the ones asking harder, more practical questions: How do you govern the use of AI? Who is accountable when it goes wrong? What does a real implementation actually look like, twelve months in?
Trust and governance emerged as one of the dominant themes across the eight stages. Not as a compliance checkbox, but as a genuine competitive concern. Firms that move fast without governance frameworks are starting to encounter real consequences: reputational, regulatory, and operational. The sessions that resonated most were the ones delivered by practitioners who had already made mistakes and were candid about what those mistakes cost.
That shift in tone matters. It means the industry is starting to have the conversations that lead to better decisions, not just better demos.
One observation doing the rounds on LinkedIn since the event captures this well. Michael Vasalos, Director of Innovation at Harbottle & Lewis, argued that the real test of any legal technology is not whether firms adopt it, but whether clients can genuinely feel the difference. AI will reshape parts of legal delivery, but only if firms use it deliberately to improve how work is communicated and delivered. If clients cannot feel the difference, it is not innovation. It is marketing.
That is a harder standard than most firms are currently holding themselves to. But it is the right one.
What 5,000 people are going home to think about
The scale of LTT 2026: 5,000 attendees, more than 400 speakers, over 100 sessions across eight stages – means thousands of legal professionals have spent two days absorbing a huge amount of information about tools, trends, and possibilities.
And then they go back to their firms.
Back to practice management systems that are not quite right. Back to AI tools that were purchased on the strength of a demo and are now underused. Back to partners who want to know what the technology budget is delivering. Back to compliance obligations that the vendor did not fully account for when they built the product.
The event creates urgency. But urgency without strategy is how firms end up with technology that costs more to manage than it saves.
This is the work Codified Strategy exists to do. We embed qualified lawyers, people who have sat at fee-earner desks, navigated billing targets, managed client money, and dealt with SRA compliance requirements – into law firms, chambers, and in-house legal teams to help them make better technology decisions. Not after the fact. Before, during, and alongside implementation.
Matthew Letts, who founded Codified Strategy, put it well in a piece published here on Legal Futures earlier this month: Why the best legal tech demo is rarely the best decision. Events like LegalTechTalk are brilliant at showing what is possible. The harder work is understanding what is right for you specifically: your workflows, your data, your people, your risk profile.
Non-lawyers are building legal tools, and that changes the conversation
One of the most interesting additions to this year’s programme was the Vibeathon, a hackathon-style competition redesigned for people who cannot write a line of code. Working with vibecode.law, Replit, and Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, LTT gave attendees the tools to build legal technology prototypes using natural language prompts across three categories: lawyer training, access to justice, and freestyle.
The significance here is not the Vibeathon itself. It is what it signals. Legal professionals no longer need to wait for a vendor to build the tool they need. The ability to prototype a solution (however rough) is now within the reach of anyone with a clear problem and a few hours. That changes the relationship between lawyers and legal technology in ways we are only beginning to understand.
For firms and in-house teams, this raises a question worth sitting with: are you building internal capability, or are you permanently dependent on vendors for every workflow problem you encounter?
The conversations worth having now
If you attended LTT 2026 and came away with a shortlist of tools you want to explore, here are the questions worth asking before any procurement decision moves forward:
- Does it fit how your firm actually works, not how the vendor assumes it works? Most legal technology is built for an idealised version of a law firm. Real firms are messier, with legacy systems, inconsistent processes, and lawyers who have strong views about how they prefer to work.
- What does implementation actually look like? A demo is a controlled environment. Your firm is not. The gap between the two is where most technology projects get into difficulty.
- Who owns it internally? Technology without internal ownership drifts. Someone needs to be responsible for adoption, training, and ongoing governance, or the investment will not deliver.
- Does it meet your compliance obligations? SRA requirements, AML obligations, data residency, and client confidentiality are not afterthoughts. They are constraints that shape which tools are viable for your practice.
- What does success look like six months from now? If you cannot answer this question before you sign, you will not be able to answer it after either.
LegalTechTalk 2026 was, by any measure, an impressive event. The energy was real, the conversations were sharper than in previous years, and the shift towards governance and practical implementation as central themes is genuinely encouraging.
But the value of what happened at the O2 last week will be determined by what firms actually do with it. That part, the translation from inspiration to decision to outcome, is where the real work begins.
If you would like to think through what that work looks like for your firm, we would be glad to help.
Lorraine Chimbga is a Technology Strategy Consultant at Codified Strategy. Matthew Letts, founder of Codified Strategy, is a Legal 500-recognised solicitor. Codified Strategy embeds qualified lawyers inside law firms, chambers and in-house teams to help them make better technology decisions. Contact Matthew or Lorraine on LinkedIn, or visit https://codifiedstrategy.com/ for more information.
