This year’s Cowen SOLID Summit provided great industry-specific insight into the legal profession. Here’s what the professionals are saying and how we all need to adapt.
ayfie had the pleasure of attending the Cowen SOLID Summit from September 14-15 in New York City with hundreds of legal professionals. From law firms and in-house counsel to executive level and department heads—we connected with the best and brightest in the legal industry to understand their struggles.
The format of the summit is simple yet effective; 4-5 ten-minute provoking legal “ted talk” styled presentations followed by a 25-minute table discussion. Listening to topics like “AI and the Bussines of Law – What Works Now”, “Making Your Legal Team More Effective by Leveraging New Tools and Technologies” and “Agile Lawyering” truly solidified ayfie’s vision – How can we empower legal professionals through our technology?
ayfie could not agree more with Mark Smolik from DHL that the legal industry is rapidly changing and we all need to adapt. We learned that if legal professionals do not challenge the current Business of Law and adopt new technologies, the performance of law firms and in-house counsel will be affected.
How can we tackle the changing landscape of our industry? By gathering thought leaders to round table discussions, creating working groups, and drafting action plans. At SOLID, we participated in tackling “How to Deploy AI Technologies Within you Organization” and “Creating Next-Gen Business of Law.”
Summing It Up
An important topic that resurfaced multiple times throughout the summit was information governance. The industry is on a pilgrimage for tools that can extract value from the information it has and reduce potential organizational risk.
Information governance can give legal professionals a consistent and logical framework for handling their critical data. Overall, employing some form of informational governance seemed to be one of the main concerns of summit attendees and lucky for us, we were able to throw our hat in the ring.
The two-day event gave us amazing insight into where the legal industry is heading. We’re looking forward to participating again next year and connecting with the brilliant thought leaders and legal professionals that we had the pleasure of engaging with at this year’s event.