[EDRM Editor’s Note: The opinions and positions are those of Gina Taranto.]

If you haven’t yet checked out what’s on offer in the educational sessions next week at Legalweek 2026 – the time to engage is now! With over 100 sessions across dozens of educational tracks, sorting through the options could take some time. A nice feature of so much content is that at any time there’s bound to be a session of interest to you. The downside is that with multiple concurrent sessions – choosing is no easy task.

Heading into Legalweek 2026, I took a deep dive into sessions that relate to three topics that promise to engage our industry next week and throughout the year, as well as a bonus look at sessions that promise to be capital-F Fun. From the professional perspective of a language technologist and a career leader of teams who develop and deploy cutting edge language processing solutions, I’m especially interested in:

• Agentic AI – In particular, what do people mean when they use this term. Does it mean different things to different people, or when used generally versus as a term of art? How are agents are being used already, and what do we expect of them in the near future? And how is the buzz around “agentic AI” impacting what may be a paradigm shift in legal. And speaking of a paradigm shift for legal…
• A Paradigm Shift for Legal … are we there yet? – While “Legal” isn’t known for being quick-to-change, something in the air feels like bigger, faster change is coming, and there are lots of panels to attend to get a hit on any gap between what’s being said and what’s being done as relates to embracing new technology.
• Validation and Measurement – Where are we as an industry in terms of agreeing on how to validate and measure, and have we moved closer to identifying any standardly accepted benchmarks?
• Good, old-fashioned fun and learning – Some thoughts on sessions that promise to be interactive and especially fun.

Naturally, constraints of the time-space continuum mean that I’ll leave out mention of more sessions than I’ll discuss, and nothing should be inferred from any omissions.

Agentic AI

The hot topic this year is clearly “Agentic AI” – “Generative AI” and “LLM” still appear in the descriptions of many sessions, but Agentic AI is the belle of the ball in 2026. I counted 107 sessions (including keynotes) and at least 18 of them offer a perspective on Agentic AI. The themes include addressing what it is, why it matters, what it takes to deploy/adopt, as well as risks and mitigation strategies. Below are some candidates for your consideration. Note that as delightful as it would be to attend all of these sessions, the multiple concurrent track nature means that you’ll have to make tough choices):

• AI Agents 101: What they are and Why They Matter – (Tuesday 3/10, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Check this out if you are a newcomer to the Agentic AI party and need an overview. After all, before you can evaluate Agentic AI or build anything, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the basics. This session will likely provide conceptual scaffolding that will help demystify the technology.
• From Blank Screen to a Legal Copilot Agent in Two Hours – (Monday 3/9, 11:30am-1:30pm (double session))
  Check this out if you are looking for hands on practice to deepen understanding of Agentic AI and spark your own questions about around adoption, responsible data use, and governance.
• Strategic Legal Leadership in the Age of Agentic AI – (Monday 3/9, 10:15-11:15am)
  Check this one out to hear more about the bigger picture – now that you know what Agentic AI is, and what it has the potential to do, this session promises to address the harder, slower work of building a strategy, identifying high-impact use cases, and managing cultural and organizational change.
• The AI You’ve Been Waiting For: Integrated Workflows and Intelligent Drafting – (Tuesday 3/10, 2-3pm)
  Check this out to hear about the reality of the data and knowledge management and the requirements for clean, well-governed data that Agentic AI will demand if you’re looking for quality results.

Moving beyond the basics of Agentic AI and what it takes to make them “go” in terms of clean-data and leadership, several sessions promise to address concerns of responsible adoption and use. Some to consider include:

• Agentic Ops: Building a Self-Orchestrating Legal Department – (Tuesday 3/9, 3:30-4:30pm)
  Check this out for perspectives on governance, oversight, and integration in a “here’s what scaled deployment actually looks like” session.
• Out of the Shadows: Embracing AI Experimentation with Good Governance – (Tuesday 3/10, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Check this out for perspectives on dealing with Shadow AI and to hear about a framework for turning grassroots experimentation into a governed, defensible practice).
• Trust is the Product: How Proven AI Governance Builds Lasting Value – (Tuesday 3/10, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Check this out, especially if you are or are interested in the role in-house legal has to ensure transparency, auditability, and human oversight – so critical information for anyone who will be asked to approve and stand behind agentic tools.

A Paradigm Shift for Legal… are we there yet?

It is well known that the legal industry was not built to handle major paradigm shifts, in fact, even incremental change can feel like it moves at a snail’s pace. This is part of what comes in a field, industry, discipline that is built on procedure and precedent. To me what is especially noteworthy is the number of sessions contemplating change, fast-change, and paradigm-shifting change. I’m excited to hear from some of the many attorneys and enterprises who are deeply reconsidering what big-scale litigation needs. Among the sessions that caught my eye on this topic are:

• Starting Over: What Law Firms Would Change If They Built a New Firm Today – (Thursday 3/12, 10:15-11:15am)
  Check this out for what I expect to be a bold session that asks managing partners to imagine a zero-legacy firm from scratch. That the existing structure was built for a different time is implicit in the premise of this session, so directly on point for identifying where we are in terms of a paradigm shift.
• Change is Inevitable, Success Is Optional: Change Management Strategies for the Modern Law Firm – (Thursday 3/12, 10:15-11:15am)
  Check this out to focus on the human component of adoption, including discussion of the psychology of change resistance. This session frames adoption as a human challenge, rather than a challenge with technology and will offer strategies for change management.
• Building a Resilient Practice: Leadership, Values, and Decision-Making in Uncertain Times – (Thursday 3/12, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Check this out for a session that tackles the idea of change and change management as a leadership imperative, in addition to an operational and technical imperative.
• Agentic and Generative AI for Complex Litigation – (Wednesday 3/11, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Check this out for a session that provides a concrete example tied to a specific use case. Here, mass tort and class action litigation is the matter type used to showcase using AI systems for organizing, triaging, and prioritizing change at scale – a real example of a fundamental reimagining of how high-volume litigation works.

Validation and Measurement

As a linguist and language technologist, putting theory into practice, then validating and measuring results is my jam. It’s what I personally love the most about this field: the endless opportunities to develop technology and put it to good use responsibly and defensibly (in the company of amazing people, of course). I count at least 14 sessions that either directly or indirectly get at some of the most pressing questions emerging in our modern age of AI: Just because we can do something, does that mean we should? How do we measure quality and success? What is the true cost of adoption? And how do we measure value, especially when comparing cost to value isn’t always, as they say, an apples-to-apples comparison?

I’ll have more to say about the state of measurement and validation after next week. Based on the agenda, it looks like the community is approaching the measurement problem from at least three distinct angles simultaneously – requirements for a data ecosystem that upon which validation can build, financial ROI and TCO, and the quality of the AI-enabled work product.

The story that that emerges when looking at the range of sessions on this topic is that we have multiple measurement questions to answer, and we may be on our way to unifying these into a coherent framework or frameworks. To my mind, this is one of the most important things to watch coming out of Legalweek 2026. Here are some clusters of sessions that will touch on some of these important questions:

Sessions about the Importance of a Quality Data Foundation

• The New Data Reality: What Agentic AI Can Infer & What KM Must Still Control – (Wednesday 3/11, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Check this out for a session with critical information about data optimization, where governance matters, and the need for validation.
• Designing a Legal Data Ecosystem: KM, DMS, and LLMs in Harmony – (Wednesday 3/11, 2-3pm)
  Building on the premise that you can only evaluate what you can see, and most firms cannot yet see across their full data ecosystem, check out this session for insight and practical strategies for designing an ecosystem that will allow measurement and validation.

Sessions about Financial ROI and Total Cost of Ownership:

• Measuring TCO in AI-Driven Legal Operations – (Monday 3/9, 9-10am)
  Check this out for a session that explicitly mentions tackling the cost-side, including hidden costs that rarely appear in adoptions conversations.
• Beyond the Balance Sheet: Rethinking ROI for AI in the Legal World – (Monday 3/9, 10:15-11:15am)
  Check this out to examine metrics – traditional and emerging, in a session that directly challenges traditional ROI metrics and asks how success gets redefined when AI permeates workflows.
• Measuring What Matters: The Business of New Technologies – (Tuesday 3/10, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Check this out for perspective on KPIs and methods for measuring impact in order to quantify. This seems especially timely in a time when efficiency claims are easy to make but hard to substantiate.
• The ROAI of Switching: When a New Legal Tech Tool Truly Pays Off – (Tuesday 3/10, 2-3pm)
  Check this out for a broad view on cost calculations – beyond the “simple math” of licensing fees, this session will consider perspectives from across an organization – including IT and finance – and promises to talk through lessons learned from actual transitions.
• The Value Equation: AI’s Impact from Case to Career – (Tuesday 3/10, 2-3pm)
  Check this out for a session that explicitly frames the value discussion along multiple dimensions (impact on individual matters, impact on the business, impact on defensibility, and impact on people and their careers).
• Data That Speaks: Turning Metrics into Meaningful Stories that Drive Legal Impact – (Wednesday 3/11, 3:30-4:30pm)
  Check this out for what might be the “closing argument” when it comes to metrics; measuring cost, value, and impact is all important. These are necessary, but not sufficient for success. All the metrics in the world won’t matter if you cannot communicate them in ways that actually drive decisions.

Sessions about Technical Quality:

• The New Research Literacy: Evaluation Techniques for AI-Powered Legal Tools – (Monday 3/9, 2:15-3:15pm)
  Check this out for a session that appears to hit the nail on the head when it comes to evaluating whether an AI system is doing what it claims to do and addressing the skills required to measure.
• Cutting Through the Chaos: A Practical Framework for Evaluating Legal Tech – (Tuesday 3/10, 3:30-4:30pm)
  Check this out for a practical session that promises to provide a blueprint for navigating the new tech marketplace, including discussion of decision matrices, objective criteria, crowdsourced feedback. And a tip of the hat to the panel for highlighting the importance of defining the problem you are trying to solve as a core part of the process.
• Beyond the Hype: Practical Use, Procedural Risk, and Client Expectations using AI in Discovery – (Tuesday 3/10, 3:30-4:30pm)
  Check this one out if you are especially interested in the defensibility angle on validation, as well as procedural questions around disclosure. This session promises practical information beyond asking whether a solution works, but does it work well enough to stake your case on, and how does it fit procedurally into a case?
• Innovation in Disputes & Investigations: Three AI Case Studies – (Thursday 3/12, 10:15 – 11:15am)
  Check this out if hearing about practical applications best fits your learning style. Who doesn’t love a good case study? This session promises concrete measurement of GenAI costs and benefits versus other analytic tools in real matters.

Good Old-Fashioned Fun and Learning

Finally, you’re interested in interactive and fun sessions, that is, actively engaging with your peers and informative and practical session content, there are a few sessions built with interaction and participation in mind:

• From Blank Screen to a Legal Copilot Agent in Two Hours – (Monday 3/9, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Mentioned above as part of the overview of Agentic AI sessions, this is a hands-on, BYOC (bring your own computer) workshop in which you will build an agent in Copilot.
• The AI Escape Room – (Tuesday 3/10, 2-3pm)
  Not limited to Agentic AI, this interactive session promises to be fun, and likely extremely practical and informative as it will be your hands-on opportunity to pair “the right” AI functionality with different investigative needs.
• Creative AI Prompt Showdown – (Wednesday 3/11, 3:30-4:30pm)
  Don’t just “check out” this session – get in on the action and compete for recognition and bragging rights while you learn practical techniques for AI prompts.
• AI In the Courtroom: A Mock Argument on Generative AI for Document Review – (Wednesday 3/11, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  Watch plaintiff and defense counsel go head-to-head arguing for and against the use of AI in their case. Once the judge rules, the audience will have the opportunity to weigh in.
• Case Law Workshop Deep Dive Roundtables – (Monday 3/9, 2:15-3:15pm)
  Following The Most Significant Discovery Rulings and Their Impact session in the prior hour, the conversation will continue in a dynamic format with facilitated, guided discussion.
• The Law Firm Data and Reporting Roundtable: Legalweek Edition! – (Thursday 3/12, 11:30am-12:30pm)
  This session promises a candid and collaborative atmosphere, and access to data-focused peers in a discussion of what it takes to make great reports.

No matter what your primary focus and interests are at Legalweek next week, there are sure to be several panels to add to your experience.  

Assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies per EDRM’s GAI and LLM Policy.