What Clio's Innovate Legal Summit revealed about where large law really stands on AI
The legal profession has spent the better part of three years debating whether artificial intelligence would transform how law is practiced. At Clio’s Innovate Legal Summit in London, that debate felt settled.
The question occupying the 660 professionals who filled The Chancery Rosewood in Mayfair, guided through the day by MC Robert Hanna of the Legally Speaking Podcast, was no longer whether AI would reshape their industry, but how quickly, and at what cost to those who hesitate.
Now in its third year, the Summit has grown from a single evening of networking into a full-day conference and the centerpiece of a broader “Innovate Legal Week” of partner events, enterprise workshops, curated dinners, and press briefings. The audience reflected the ambition: partners from global elite firms and enterprise legal departments sat in the same room as mid-sized firms and sole practitioners, united not by the scale of their practice but by the urgency of the same set of questions.
What emerged was a day notable for its candor. Speakers were less interested in promoting the possibilities of AI than in confronting the organizational, cultural, and commercial realities of deploying it.
The enterprise platform thesis
Jack Newton, Clio’s CEO and Founder, set the tone early: the industry doesn’t need another argument for AI adoption. The convergence of trusted legal AI, authoritative research, and enterprise-grade practice management into a single platform is no longer a roadmap item. It is an operational reality, and the firms treating it as such are pulling ahead of those still running pilots.
Central to that platform story were the two acquisitions that completed Clio’s enterprise offer. Vincent by Clio, brought in through the acquisition of vLex, delivers cited, court-ready answers grounded in over a billion curated legal sources across 110 jurisdictions. It takes on the research, analysis, and drafting overhead that prevents lawyers from focusing on the work that demands their judgment. Clio Operate, built on the ShareDo foundation, is the central operating system that standardizes matter execution and governance across practices while connecting to firms’ existing core systems, eliminating the administrative drag that keeps highly paid fee earners from their most valuable work. Newton described the pairing as the realization of a long-held vision, a platform that addresses the practice of law and the business of it simultaneously, under one partner.
He also announced the launch of the Vincent by Clio mobile app, bringing its capabilities to smartphones for the first time. Looking ahead, he described the upcoming rollout of agentic capabilities: AI that moves beyond answering individual queries to understanding the context of work and executing multi-step tasks toward an outcome.
The broader message, however, was about tempo. The firms extracting the most value from AI, Newton argued, are not the ones that moved fastest. They are the ones that treated adoption as an organizational change program with governance, training, and cultural buy-in built in from the start.
What transformation truly looks like
If Newton’s keynote offered the macro view, the customer panel that followed supplied the ground truth. Chaired by Ronnie Gurion, Clio’s Chief Operating Officer, the session brought together Adam Creasey of Adam Benedict, a firm barely two years old that has already won Best New Law Firm; Dr Peter Fields, Barrister at The Barrister Group; Lyn Harris, a Partner at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer responsible for digital delivery at a global elite practice; and Marcin Durlak, Managing Partner at IMD.
The range was deliberate, and the honesty was striking. Panelists described what is working and where adoption breaks down: the governance gaps, the cultural friction, and the senior partners whose skepticism can quietly undermine a firmwide initiative. The recurring question, posed by Gurion and echoed throughout the day, was what distinguishes firms making genuine progress from those trapped in a cycle of inconclusive experimentation.
The answer, from every seat on the panel, pointed to people rather than technology.
The human bottleneck
That theme intensified across the afternoon breakout sessions, which split the audience into two parallel tracks. On the main stage, Katie Best, author of The Ten Toughest Leadership Problems and How to Solve Them, reframed technology adoption as a leadership challenge rather than a procurement decision. Jo Sidhu, Clio’s Director of Legal Architecture, chaired the session, which resonated with firm leaders grappling with how to bring resistant partners and cautious teams along on the AI journey.
In a neighboring salon, a panel of implementation specialists offered the view from the front lines. Vin Chauhan of SP1 IT Solutions, Vicky Simpson of Apply Compliance Today, Darren Kantor of Jameson Legal Tech, and Matthew Letts of Codified Strategy described what happens after the platform is purchased and the real work of integration begins. Their assessment was blunt: transformation sticks when firms invest as seriously in change management as in software.
A second round of breakouts sharpened the focus further. Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer, one of the sector’s most respected independent commentators, moderated a panel on AI deployment inside global firms with Gareth Dickson of Mishcon de Reya, Geoff Dragon of Shoosmiths, Kim Wedral of Taylor Wessing, and Editha Nemsic, Development Manager for forward-deployed engineering at Clio. Tromans pushed past generalities, and the result was among the day’s most concrete discussions of what enterprise-grade AI adoption demands in terms of governance, senior buy-in, and cultural readjustment.
Running concurrently, a session chaired by Kirsty Pappin of Aries Legal Practice Management, featuring Carrie Stephenson of GRACE Legal, Hannah Beko, author of The Authentic Lawyer, and Patrick McCann, CEO of City of London Law Society addressed a dimension the technology conversation often sidelines: how to build firms that talented people actually want to join. Clio’s own research suggests 73% of UK firms find attracting next-generation lawyers difficult, lending the topic commercial as well as cultural urgency.
Lessons from orbit
At any technology conference there is a risk that the conversation becomes self-referential. Tim Peake’s keynote broke the pattern entirely.
The former Apache pilot and European Space Agency astronaut, the first British ESA astronaut to visit the International Space Station, brought a perspective forged in environments where the stakes are existential and the margin for error is nil. Across 186 days in space, more than 250 scientific experiments, a spacewalk to repair the station’s power supply, and a military career spanning Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, Peake has spent a career performing under conditions of extreme risk and incomplete information.
His argument to the room was simple. The human capabilities that matter most in high-stakes environments (leadership, communication, and the capacity to make sound decisions under uncertainty) are precisely the capabilities that become more valuable, not less, as machines absorb a greater share of routine work. For a profession wrestling with what AI means for the nature of legal practice, the reframing landed with force.
What makes a firm irreplaceable
Ed Walters, Clio’s Vice President of Legal Innovation and Strategy, took the stage after the break with what became the day’s defining question. An adjunct professor at both Georgetown University Law Center and a lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School, Walters occupies an unusual vantage point at the intersection of academia, technology and professional practice. His session, titled Building an Irreplaceable Law Firm, asked what it is that makes a firm genuinely essential to its clients when AI can handle an increasing share of the underlying work.
His answer resisted the obvious framings. He made a more considered case for positioning: the firms that endure will be those competing on the quality of their judgment, the depth of their client relationships, and the strategic value they deliver, rather than on the volume of work they produce. It is the argument that shapes much of what Vincent is designed to do, not replace legal reasoning, but absorb the case preparation, analysis, and drafting overhead that prevents lawyers from focusing on the work that requires it.
The concept of the “irreplaceable firm” threaded through the remainder of the day and shaped how many attendees interpreted what they had heard.
Beyond the conference hall
The conference itself was only part of the story.
The week opened on Monday with an invitation-only EMEA Partner Summit at The Connaught, where Clio’s senior leadership spent a half-day with the consultants, implementers, and technology advisors who form the backbone of its go-to-market operation in the region. A fireside chat with Newton, Gurion, and Sarah Murphy, General Manager of Clio International, moderated by Walters, was followed by product roadmap and partnership strategy sessions led by David Thompson, Vice President of Engineering, and Lisa Del Real, Vice President of Channel Partnerships. The timing was intentional: hosting the partner event the day before the Summit allowed the ecosystem to attend both. The pairing was designed to connect platform vision with on-the-ground delivery.
On Tuesday evening, after the Summit closed, a curated group of enterprise clients and guests gathered for dinner at Bob Bob Ricard City in the Leadenhall Building, hosted jointly with Future Lawyer UK. The format was deliberately conversational. Newton spoke briefly as guests sat down, then returned later in the evening for a more substantive reflection on how AI is shifting from the periphery of legal work into the work itself: research, drafting, and advice. The boundary, he told the room, is no longer between the technology and the practice. It runs through the middle of both.
Wednesday brought two events tailored at different segments of the industry. In the morning, Clio hosted its first Clio Operate Customer Workshop at The Goring Hotel: an invite-only session with 17 attendees from 11 large law customers, including Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, DLA Piper, Weightmans, Slater and Gordon, and Leigh Day. Newton and Gurion opened with an “Ask Me Anything” before the group moved into live demonstrations and an interactive workshop in which clients directly shaped the product roadmap.
That evening, a separate dinner at Bacchanalia on Mount Street assembled a curated group of mid-sized firm leaders. Newton shared, the AI opportunity is less about wholesale transformation than about practical decisions that compound over time: saving an hour a day, reducing friction for the team, and delivering faster for clients.
A press program running throughout the week saw Newton sit down with journalists from the Law Society Gazette, Non-Billable, City A.M., Legal IT Insider, and The Lawyer. Podcast recordings with Bradley Collins of Legal Tech Talk and Ashley Williams, partner and head of technology at Mishcon de Reya for the Matters by Clio podcast extended the week’s themes into longer-form conversation.
The numbers behind the narrative
The Summit drew on Clio’s 2026 UK and Ireland Legal Research, which provided the empirical backdrop for much of the week’s discussion. Among the headline findings: 89% of UK legal professionals now use AI, though only 27% have embedded it widely across their firms. In the past twelve months alone, 70% made the shift. Half of UK lawyers are losing more than 44 working days per year to inefficient or outdated systems.
The week’s most discussed finding concerned the gap between perception and reality on AI disclosure. Of firms surveyed, 81% say they disclose AI use to clients, but only 7% of clients recall that disclosure happening. Despite actively encouraging AI use, 17% of firms have no formal AI policy.
The billing patterns, too, are shifting. Fixed-fee billing now accounts for 53% of matters, with hourly billing down to 32%, a structural change that AI is accelerating rather than causing.
The Innovate Legal Summit has grown from a London networking evening into the most substantive annual gathering for a profession actively working through one of its most significant transitions. This year’s edition, and the week of programming around it, surfaced a conviction shared by speakers and audience alike: the competitive advantage now belongs to firms that have stopped treating AI as a technology question and started treating it as an organizational one.
Clio’s work with large law reflects that same conclusion. Through Vincent and Clio Operate, Clio is partnering with AmLaw 150 firms and Fortune 500 legal departments to help the world’s most sophisticated legal organizations pursue transformation at scale. The conversation continues at ClioCon 2026 in Boston this October, and at Clio events throughout the year.
Clio’s Innovate Legal Summit 2026 took place on April 14, 2026 at The Chancery Rosewood, London. For information on future events, visit clio.com/uk/events.