The Road to ILTACON 2026: Why AI Governance Is Becoming Legal Tech’s Next Big Test
ILTACON 2026 brings the legal technology community to the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville from August 23–27, 2026 for peer-driven education, practical programming, business partner conversations, and face-to-face networking. This blog continues Kraft Kennedy’s Road to ILTACON 2026 series, following Sulabh Upadhyaya’s look at what comes next for legal technology.
For greater insight into the upcoming conference, Beth Anne Stuebe sat down with Dan Paquette, Practice Group Leader – Modern Work at Kraft Kennedy, ahead of his ILTACON panel session on AI governance and Microsoft Purview. This session brings together perspectives from Dan, Faith Drury of Bryan Cave, and moderator Rich Lily of Refoundry to explore one of the most urgent questions facing legal technology leaders: how can firms move quickly with AI without losing control of their data, workflows, and risk posture?
Below are some of Dan’s insights on why 2026 may represent an inflection point for AI in legal, why governance is becoming inseparable from adoption, and what firms should be thinking about as they leave Nashville and turn AI interest into responsible legal business use.
From Experimentation to Applied AI
For the past few years, many legal organizations have approached AI with timid curiosity. Firms have piloted tools, tested prompts, explored productivity gains, and watched the market evolve at an extraordinary pace. That experimentation has been valuable, but Dan sees 2026 as a turning point.
He believes that the conversation is moving from “What can this do?” to “How do we apply it safely, consistently, and at scale?” AI is no longer just a collection of productivity features or isolated use cases. Firms are beginning to look at more mature applications, including agentic automation, that require deeper integration with business data and workflows that connect AI tools to the everyday systems attorneys and staff already use.
That maturity is not evenly distributed across the legal market. Some firms are already using platforms such as Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude in constructive, business-focused ways. Others are still evaluating costs, benefits, use cases, and internal readiness. And some aren’t even using it, focusing more on the worry than the why. But across the market, the direction is clear: AI adoption is becoming more practical, more consequential, and more closely tied to how legal work actually gets done.
Why Governance Is Moving to the Center of the AI Conversation
As firms become more serious about AI, governance becomes harder to treat as an ancillary concern. It is one thing to let a small group experiment with a new tool, it is another to decide how that tool should be deployed across practices, matters, clients, and data environments where confidentiality, ethical obligations, and auditability are central to the work.
That’s the focus of Dan’s ILTACON session: helping firms establish the right guardrails as AI becomes increasingly integrated into legal workflows. Microsoft Purview is central to that conversation because governance, compliance, data security, retention, labeling, auditability, and oversight all shape whether firms can use AI responsibly.
Dan noted that the differences between platforms matter. Microsoft Copilot benefits from the first-party governance capabilities of the Microsoft ecosystem, while other tools may require closer scrutiny depending on the version, configuration, or enterprise controls available. Anthropic’s Claude, for example, may be compelling from a capability standpoint, but firms still need to ask practical questions about audit trails, data handling, administrative visibility, and whether the right enterprise governance features are in place.
For legal technology teams, those questions are not theoretical. If attorneys, paralegals, or technology staff cannot explain where data goes, how use is monitored, or what controls apply, it becomes difficult to recommend a tool confidently to clients or internal stakeholders. Governance is not a blocker to innovation. It is what allows innovation to move forward with credibility.
AI Adoption Is Also a Market Maturity Story
Dan also sees the AI market entering a new phase. The early wave of legal AI has produced enormous energy, rapid product development, and a crowded field of providers. But as expectations rise and investors look for profitability, the market may consolidatequickly.
Larger players may gain ground as smaller companies face funding pressure, integration challenges, or the difficulty of meeting law firm governance requirements at scale. At the same time, major firm investments in AI signal that the legal market is not treating this as a passing trend. Firms are watching closely, investing carefully, and trying to understand which tools will endure.
That creates a complex decision-making environment. Leaders have to evaluate capability, cost, vendor viability, security, governance, user experience, client expectations, and business impact. The question is no longer simply which tool looks impressive in a demo. It is which tools can be governed, adopted, supported, and measured over time.
What Firms Should Be Asking Before They Scale AI
One of the most useful takeaways from Dan’s 2026 perspective is that AI readiness is as much an operational question as it is a technology question. Before scaling a tool broadly, firms should be asking whether they have the policies, controls, data foundations, and governance structures needed to support responsible use.
That includes questions such as: who is allowed to use the tool, for what purposes, with what data, under what client restrictions, and with what monitoring? It also includes the human side of adoption. Attorneys and staff may be excited about AI’s potential, but they need clear guidance on what is approved, what is risky, what should be escalated, and how success will be measured.
Without those answers, firms may find themselves with isolated pockets of AI use, inconsistent practices, and limited visibility. With them, AI initiatives can become more strategic: tied to business goals, supported by governance, and measured by outcomes rather than excitement alone.
Moving from Momentum to Responsible Scale
ILTACON gives legal technology leaders a concentrated view of where the industry is headed. This year, AI will be everywhere (cue shocked faces): in sessions, business partner conversations, peer discussions, and it will definitely be the start of a few hallway debates. Firms can benefit from that momentum, or they return home empty-handed. Either way, ILTACON, and Dan’s session, will arm them with sharper questions and a clearer framework for deciding what to do next.
For Dan, and for the Kraft Kennedy team, AI adoption is not just about access to powerful tools; it is about whether firms can build the governance, oversight, and trust needed to use those tools responsibly. Purview, auditability, enterprise controls, and information governance may not always be the flashiest parts of the AI conversation, but they are increasingly the parts that determine whether AI can move from pilot to practice.
For firms heading to Nashville, the question is not only which AI tools will generate the most excitement. It is which tools can be governed well, trusted by users, explained to clients, and connected to real business value. That may be the difference between AI experimentation and AI maturity.
Ready to connect at ILTACON 2026?
Visit Kraft Kennedy’s ILTACON 2026 event page for registration details, agenda information, Golf Outing tickets, booth updates, featured session details, and much more.