The Canadian Legal Summit 2026 brings in-house counsel and law firm leaders to Toronto for discussions about AI, the relationship between legal departments and outside counsel, and the changing business of law.
Canadian Legal Summit 2026 at a Glance
Detail | 2026 Summit |
|---|---|
Date | October 14, 2026 |
Venue | The Carlu, 444 Yonge Street, #7, Toronto, Ontario M5B 2H4 |
Organizer | Canadian Lawyer and Lexpert |
Format | One-day, in-person conference with three content streams |
Audience | In-house counsel and law firm professionals |
Program | 60-plus speakers and 25-plus sessions |
Registration | Individual and group rates; food and refreshments included. Confirm current price, currency, and taxes when registering. |
CPD | Ontario Professionalism and British Columbia CPD details available; credit depends on attendance and applicable criteria |
Which Agenda Streams Matter for In-House Counsel?
The conference focuses on three streams running in parallel:
AI and Innovation
GC and Law Firm Partnership
Small and Mid-size Firms
AI and Innovation
The opening AI panel asks what legal AI gets right, what it gets wrong, and what lawyers should stop doing manually. Later, “Getting Reliable Results from Legal AI: Prompts, Workflows, and Emerging Agents” turns to due diligence, drafting, repeatable workflows, and emerging agents, while “The Invisible Threat Layer: Shadow AI, Fraud, and Data Exposure” addresses unapproved tools, confidentiality, and governance.
If you are deciding how an AI request should enter the department, AI governance intake covers the questions to settle first: the use case, information involved, reviewer, and escalation path.
GC and Law Firm Partnership
The GC and Law Firm Partnership stream asks how the relationship between in-house teams and firms is changing as GCs expect faster advice, clearer scope, greater transparency, and stronger commercial alignment. “Is AI Changing the Billable Hour: What GCs Now Expect from Law Firms” considers how firms should pass technology-driven efficiencies through to clients, rethink hourly billing, and respond to new expectations for turnaround and resourcing. Later sessions look at how firms are re-engineering legal delivery, how legal departments can manage work with data, and what sustains a long-term GC and firm relationship.
That shift changes how a department decides what to keep in-house and what to send out. An in-house team may be able to prepare and check a first draft or analysis before a firm steps in, then define the specialist work, scope, and fees, the division of work at the center of Outside Counsel Management After AI.
The billable-hour question is tied to what a department can show about the work: response time, quality, spend, and capacity. Those are the measures in corporate legal department metrics, alongside the broader shift described in The End of the Billable Hour.
Small and Mid-Size Firms
The Small and Mid-Size Firms stream focuses on how smaller practices grow, modernize, and stay competitive without losing agility. The opening panel on running a small firm in 2026 covers pricing and profitability, changing expectations for speed and transparency, talent, client service, and whether to buy or build technology. A later session on the size advantage turns to value proposition, operations, and technology investments that help firms respond faster without sacrificing the bottom line.
The program then gets into the management work behind growth: a case study on AI, workflow redesign, and outsourcing versus building in-house capability; succession planning for partner transition, ownership, and governance; and burnout as a business issue tied to capacity, client relationships, and revenue.
The workflow and technology questions underneath those topics start with the same sequence: identify repeatable work, define the output, assign a reviewer, and decide when to escalate, the sequence behind AI in legal operations.
If the buy-versus-build discussion prompts a platform comparison, start with the work you need the tool to support, then compare security and fit alongside the use case, as in legal AI tools.
GC AI at the Canadian Legal Summit
Come talk legal AI with us in Toronto. GC AI is an enterprise legal AI platform built for in-house teams. More than 2,200 legal teams, including 300+ public companies, use it. Legal teams at TIME, Gusto, SoftBank, Riot Games, and Nestle use GC AI.
Join Solutions Attorney Stacey Weltman at the peer discussion table, “From Adoption to Impact: How Legal Teams Are Using AI Today”.
The discussion covers contract review, legal research, triage, and drafting, as well as training, adoption, privacy, and security. Bring a question from your team and compare how other in-house lawyers are approaching the work.
If you want to keep working through those questions after the summit, GC AI's legal AI courses include Legal AI Ethics for In-House Legal. The 60-minute class connects ABA Formal Opinion 512 to day-to-day in-house work, with live practice on privilege, confidentiality, verifying AI output, and supervision.
Want a first look before October 14? Watch the demo below.
