Do You Actually Need AI for That? Rethinking Technology Decisions in Legal

​Designed for In-House

​Every vendor pitch promises AI. Every conference agenda features it. But a quiet counter-narrative is emerging: some of the most useful tools being built for the legal profession right now are being coded by hand, without a single LLM in sight, and they work better for it.

This roundtable takes a deliberate step back from the AI-first consensus to ask a more useful question: how do in-house leaders actually decide what technology their teams need, and how do they evaluate whether AI is genuinely the right answer for a given problem? Using the real-world story of a practising IP partner who built a court-compliant bundle tool from scratch, out of legal domain expertise and traditional software engineering, not generative AI, the session opens a candid peer conversation about hype, decision-making, and what good legal technology actually looks like in practice.

Hosted by Tristan Sherliker, Partner at Bird & Bird, IP lawyer, and software developer, this roundtable invites senior in-house counsel to share their own experiences of evaluating tools, resisting pressure to adopt AI for its own sake, and building or commissioning technology that solves the right problem in the right way.

Key Takeaways:

• ​A practical lens for evaluating whether AI is genuinely the right tool for a given legal workflow, versus when traditional software, process design, or human expertise delivers better outcomes.

• ​How to ask better questions of legal technology vendors, and what the AI label does and does not tell you about whether a solution will actually work.

• ​What the rise of practitioner-built tools reveals about the gap between what the legal tech market offers and what in-house teams actually need.

​This session is part of LegalTechTalk 2026, Europe’s Event for Legal Transformation. A dynamic, annual in-person festival bringing together 5,500+ attendees from 75+ countries and over 400 industry-leading speakers across two days, on 17-18 June 2026 at InterContinental London - The O2.