As we wrap up a phenomenal year of events at The Legal Innovation Forum, we’d like to thank everyone for your support and participation throughout 2025.
From in-person forums in major cities around the world to hands-on workshops, exclusive roundtable dinners, and online webinars on key themes, we broke new ground in exploring the most significant drivers and emerging trends at the intersection of business, innovation and law.
2025 highlights include our live forums in Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago, our inaugural Middle East Symposium Series, a symposium in Montreal, and workshops in Toronto, Atlanta and Nashville.
We also held webinars throughout the year—ranging from our popular ongoing AI Masterclass series to our in-house counsel leadership series—and explored key practice areas including estates, data protection, capital markets, and real estate.
Here’s a look back at some of the key themes that emerged in 2025:
1. The shift from experimentation to real operationalization of AI
- Firms and legal departments moved beyond pilot projects toward embedding AI into daily workflows to deliver measurable value
- In-house teams and law firms are collaborating to ensure ethical AI adoption
- Excitement is surging around agentic AI systems that perform multi-step tasks, while ensuring a focus on governance and risk management
2. Cross-functional collaboration is essential for transformation
- Legal is increasingly partnering with IT, procurement, finance, and business teams on technology adoption
- Multi-disciplinary working groups are forming to align goals, workflows, and data standards
- Organizational culture and workforce training emerged as key success levers for modernization and talent retention
3. Legal teams are navigating risk from trade and supply chain disruption in a volatile geopolitical climate
- Legal leaders played a key role in helping businesses stay resilient amid shifting trade policies, regulatory disruption, and cross-border realignments
- Teams emphasized practical approaches to managing global risk, including stronger contract management, proactive regulatory monitoring, and more robust compliance frameworks
- Lawyers increasingly served as strategic advisors, guiding business decisions and operational pivots in a rapidly changing and unpredictable global landscape
4. Data foundations are a new priority in today’s risk-on world
- Firms invested heavily in data cleaning, governance, and system consolidation to support AI accuracy and mitigate digital risk
- Organizations worked to break down data silos and ensure information could flow seamlessly across platforms
- Teams are prioritizing building centralized, structured data environments to improve reliability and usability for AI-driven workflows
5. Legal leaders are redefining their roles to seize business opportunities and navigate disruption
- Legal leaders are leading in new and strategic ways as they navigate an increasingly complex risk landscape, from data privacy and cybersecurity to regulatory shifts and geopolitical uncertainty
- In-house teams are balancing urgent business demands with long-term resilience to protect the organization and ensure growth
- The legal function continued to evolve into a proactive driver of opportunity, collaborating with the C-suite, law firm partners and service providers to shape strategy and guide the business through disruption
Stay tuned as we gear up for an exciting line-up of events exploring new themes and emerging risks, and opportunities in 2026!