With 4,000 attendees and 300+ speakers, Legal Tech Talk hit London on 26 and 27 June. Graham Archbold was there.
At one estimate, there are currently 505 Gen AI solutions vying for the attention of buyers and sellers of legal. As delegates at LegalTechTalk 2025 discovered, distinguishing real progress from hype is still a challenge. Last week’s London conference convened lawyers and technologists, along with the odd VC investor for what has become a leading event in the legal innovation calendar. With 112 technology exhibitors, the two-day event gives lawyers a platform to scrutinise new offerings and exchange tales of breakthrough AI successes and tech investment horror stories.
The build vs buy dilemma
Among many speakers, some of the sharpest observations came from Matheson’s Head of Digital Services, Kyle Gribben. He proposed a practical 8-part framework to help firms navigate the growing thicket of legal technology options. Gribben argues that efficiency is a much overstated benefit and that besides direct and indirect financial ROI, firms should focus more on technology for improvements in the quality work. He also promotes using the marketability of digital products for improving the firm’s profile and helping attract talent who are drawn to accessing the best tools available.
Several speakers returned to the same tension: whether to build proprietary systems or buy off-the-shelf solutions. New tools are seductive but risky. Talking to delegates from smaller law firms in particular, there is a fear falling behind, while also recognising the hazard of overcommitting to unproven platforms. As Cleary Gottlieb’s Ilona Longvina put it, “We’re at a Netflix moment where the VHS tapes might still be flying off the shelves but we know that we depend on algorithms for future success.”
Many like KPMG Law’s Phillip Glock related how they had begun building tools only to realise the expense of maintaining such solutions. Instead he recommends a combined build and buy approach, accepting that law firms don’t make good tech vendors. Other speakers echoed the importance of balancing ambition with pragmatism but by contrast Tom Hambrett, Revolut’s Chief Legal Officer, insists “You can build 90 per cent yourself rather than have countless siloed solutions that don’t integrate and are underused”.
Collaboration and the long slow death of the billable hour
All the in-house lawyer panellists were clear: they want fewer external advisers not more, and they want genuine partners, not just transactional service providers. And yet while most recognise technology as an enabler of this expectation, the billable hour continues to be a structural drag on progress.
Former Clifford Chance Managing Partner, Matthew Layton, pointed out that it’s been 20 years since the Eversheds-Tyco tie up where the corporations panel went from 250 firms to just one. He feels that such partnering hasn’t become mainstream because legal buyers aren’t using technology to set firms up with the right incentives to replace the billable hour. For example, rewarding firms that collaborate with rivals and judging value based on business impact rather than hours. The challenge, as his example of Pfizer which adopted then abandoned such a system, is that monitoring and cultivating such relationships takes time and effort on the part of the in-house team.
Goodwin’s General Counsel, Chris Grant, comes to the same conclusion that the power is in the hands of those procuring legal services and that buyers of legal must utilise increased access to data to control costs and incentivise the behaviours they want from firms.
After procurement: The challenge of embedding technology
One of the most candid discussions focused on the post-purchase reality. Too many firms, it seems, are proficient at buying technology but poor at embedding it. Shruti Ajitsaria, Head of A&O Shearman’s Fuse, makes the point that for long-term success, “Some of it’s about having the tech, some of it is price, but then the rest is relationship.”
Indeed many cite culture not technology as the challenge. Isabel Parker of White & Case concurred, explaining how firms need more people capable of implementing transformation, familiar with creating comms plans, stakeholder maps and the like, to ensure technology gets adopted and embedded. Other law firm representatives described the importance of ongoing training and change management. The notion that a technology investment ends with procurement is now widely seen as outdated.
Simon Ridpath, Managing Partner of Charles Russell Speechlys, pointed out that ability to invest in new technology is difficult because it requires long-term planning and not just paying partners hand to mouth. He believes firm’s can best embed technology by first looking within the firm for evangelists but also embracing the sceptics as the eventual most fervent converts.
A necessary forum
Alongside showcasing the latest technology, the value of the LegalTechTalk conference lies precisely in surfacing these implementation realities. This year’s gathering offered no easy answers, but did provide a space where lawyers and technologists could confront the frictions that hold the sector back.
Looking at the array of agentic AI and other new technologies on offer, some products promise more than they can realistically deliver. Others are solutions in search of a problem. Yet the underlying direction of travel feels genuinely disruptive on a large scale.
Tom Brown, General Counsel of Nyca, gave a short history lesson on what happened to the millions of people who worked ‘in service’ over a hundred years ago. They were replaced by irons, vacuum cleaners and other such tools by people who had previously outsourced tasks to specialists.
By the time the conference returns in 2026, it’s questionable how many lawyers will have been replaced by clients using all these new tools, but one can only expect that there will have been a further advance from overhyped promises towards proven, practical solutions.
Graham Archbold is the founder of Chorus Insight, a specialist market research business focuses on client experience, brand perception and employee engagement.