Global Legal Forum 2026: Play-by-Play from The Hague
March 5 to 6, 2026 | NH Hotel, World Trade Centre, The Hague
The 6th Annual Global Legal Forum brought together general counsel, legal ops leaders, compliance professionals, and law firm partners for two days of sessions and panels in The Hague. It is a smaller, European-focused event with an interactive format. Speakers get challenged by the audience. Panels feel more like real discussions than rehearsed presentations.
Here is what happened, session by session.
Day 1: Plenary Sessions
Shruti Ajitsaria: Where Is the Productivity Gain?
The event opened with Shruti Ajitsaria from A&O Shearman. She talked about tools like Harvey, Legora, and Claude AI, and was clear that none of them are the final answer. They are steps in a much longer journey. But the real point of her session was a question that set the tone for the rest of the forum.
Where is the productivity gain if we use these tools all day but don't actually get more done?
That question hung in the room. It was a genuinely honest moment from someone who runs an innovation program inside one of the world's largest law firms. The tools are there. People are using them. But the output is not necessarily increasing.
Right after, an audience member raised data privacy concerns, asking how you even get started with AI when clients are already skeptical about it. The back-and-forth that followed showed early on that this is a forum where people actually talk, not just listen.
Shruti also presented on Fuse, A&O Shearman's collaborative tech innovation space. Fuse is a program unique among global law firms where A&O Shearman lawyers, clients, and technology companies come together to explore, develop, and test legal, regulatory, and deal-related solutions. It has supported over 90 businesses across 9 cohorts (with a 10th in progress), contributing to advances in contract automation, AI, data privacy, blockchain, and regulatory compliance. Selected companies are allocated an A&O Shearman partner to act as a mentor and advocate. The current cohort includes companies working on autonomous AI agents, regulatory intelligence, time capture and billing, and prediction and simulation.
Nishat Ruiter: What Can't Be Automated
Nishat Ruiter is the General Counsel at TED (yes, that TED, the talks). She has decades of experience in legal leadership and works in a deeply multicultural, global environment. Her session was one of the most grounded of the forum.
She shared survey results showing that 58% of legal professionals learned about AI through self-exploration, not formal training. Only 19% received any formal AI education. But the numbers were not the point. The point was what comes after the tools.
Her core argument: the right idea, delivered with conviction, can change how someone thinks. That is something AI cannot do. Becoming more human, more of a leader, will be a moat as AI handles more of the routine. She called it the art of context-switching. Knowing when to be the strategist, when to be the advisor, when to just listen.
She was also direct about what general counsel need and want from law firms: humility, asking good questions, and the ability to collaborate well. She talked about how her team picks firms. Cultural competence matters, not just strictly legal quality. When you work in a global, multicultural organization like TED, the ability to understand context across cultures is not optional.
She mentioned working with Luminance on the AI side, but the session was really about the human capabilities that no tool replaces.
At the end, she shared how these ideas around leadership, context-switching, and cultural competence are now being taught through the TEDLaw program.
Panel: What Would the Perfect In-House and External Counsel Partnership Look Like?
Panelists: Julia Taddei (Petrobras Netherlands), Aminata BA (Menzies Aviation), Edith Nordmann (ACG International), and Rita Paukste.
The first panel got straight into the relationship between in-house teams and law firms. The tone was honest: these partnerships are more collaborative now than they used to be, but trust is still earned differently on each side.
Aminata from Menzies Aviation gave a detailed explanation of how her team handles it. It comes down to culture. Understanding the business. Actually talking to people and adapting, not just delivering documents. Menzies has even developed a custom AI tool to monitor the value add of their external counsel, measuring what they actually get from each partnership.
Julia Taddei from Petrobras raised a sharp point: sometimes you are just paying for the letterhead. You need an external firm to commit to an opinion, to put their name behind it. That is a real part of the value, and in-house teams are willing to pay for it.
Rita Paukste was the master of simplification. She boiled down what in-house counsel actually cares about to three things:
And then, as she put it: "As long as it is legal."
General counsel have to know a little about everything. External practitioners can afford to be deep experts. And in-house teams are ready to pay for that expertise, for the complex, high-stakes work that requires real specialization. Not the grunt work.
The discussion then turned to AI in these partnerships. Some law firms are open about the tools they use. Others are not. From the in-house side, the expectation is clear: transparency.
You are using AI, so it has to be cheaper.
If AI makes the work faster, the pricing should reflect that. Multiple panelists said they want to know what tools are being used and how it affects the bill. From the external counsel side, the response was measured: pricing has always been a discussion and will always be. But the pressure is real, and the firms that embrace transparency will build stronger relationships.
Panel: The Future-Ready Legal Department
Panelists: Dr. Thomas Barothy, Marita Rance, Kerry Westland (Addleshaw Goddard), Claudio Elia (STMicroelectronics). Moderated by Volker Weisshaar.
This panel tackled a question that every legal department is dealing with right now: how do you future-proof a legal team?
Claudio opened by framing two paths. You can get a tool and roll it out across the organization. Or you can build a proper roadmap first: understand where you are, where you want to go, and what needs to change to get there. The panel quickly agreed that the roadmap approach wins, even if it is slower.
Kerry Westland brought up self-service. How much routine work can you push to the business so they handle it themselves? More than most teams think, she argued, but it requires building the right guardrails. Thomas added that no repetitive work should be done by legal professionals if it can be avoided. It frees up capacity for the strategic work that actually moves the department forward.
Maybe we are not as strategic as we think. Now we have the time, but we are already used to just doing the work.
That quote from Volker landed hard. Even when legal teams free up time, there is a gravitational pull back toward the operational grind. The habits are hard to break.
Claudio shared a story about building an automation that worked perfectly. Everything functioned exactly as designed. Nobody used it. Kerry's response: it is not enough to just deploy a great tool. You need rewards, incentives, and culture to make transformation stick. The tool is the easy part. Changing behavior is the real work.
Claudio brought up that legal teams need legal designers, people who can bridge the gap between legal expertise and new technology. And Thomas closed on an optimistic note: the demand for legal services is only growing. The cake is getting bigger. The question is not whether there will be enough work. It is whether legal teams are set up to handle it well.
Day 2: Deep Dives
Day 2 split into parallel tracks. We followed Track 1: In-House Counsel, Legal Operations & Legal Tech, plus the combined afternoon sessions.
Manuel Mesquita: Beyond the AI Hype
Manuel Mesquita from MM Legal opened Day 2 with what turned out to be one of the most impactful presentations of the forum. His talk was titled "Beyond the AI Hype: Legal Operations as a Mindset for Digital Transformation." Manuel runs a transformation consultancy that helps legal teams change their processes, technology, and operating models. He is the person who walks alongside you through those transitions. (Hope we got this right, Manuel.)
His opening point: the real advantage is not having AI. It is being change-ready. AI is not just a new toolset. It is an accelerator of change. And it will enhance everything you already have, good and bad.
AI will enhance everything you have. Good and bad.
He showed how the tech cycle, the gap between when technology is developed and when it is actually used, is getting much shorter. Regulatory cycles used to span 15 years. Tech cycles were around 10. Now everything is compressed. But adoption still lags behind, and risk rises when change is improvised.
He used the iPhone 17 as an example for readiness to change. If the change is genuinely expected to be good, people are willing to adopt. Otherwise new iPhones would not sell. The problem in the working world is that most change experiences have been bad. That is why there is resistance. Not because people are against change. Because they have been burned before.
His framework was built around three plays for legal operations:
Play 1: Intake and Triage. Legal departments should work like triage in a hospital. Every request needs to be measured for urgency and risk. Establish one front door for all legal requests. Categorize and capture data at intake. Implement SLAs, routing, and self-service. Three lanes: auto-route, manual review, and self-service. If you want to be open to change, you must see change early.
Play 2: Contracting. Standardize first, then augment. Get your playbooks and fallback positions right. Build CLM workflows with structured data. Then apply AI for summarization, comparison, and drafting. If templates are unclear, AI outputs will be inconsistent. The ROI is a consistent risk posture.
Play 3: Knowledge. From documents to reusable answers. The problem is not that knowledge does not exist. The problem is that the answer is on someone's laptop, or the person who wrote it already left the company. Build a curated knowledge base, not a dumping ground. Align tagging and taxonomy with legal services. Power assistants with retrieval of approved sources.
A good assistant isn't magic. It's a great knowledge system plus governance.
A few more points that stuck:
- AI transformation is not copy-paste from one organization to another. It is a continuous cycle. Always in beta.
- If you try to sell CLM with a big bang and go from zero to 100 immediately, it is not going to happen. You are not going to change the workflows overnight. Small, consistent victories are better.
- Make everything reusable first. Then augment.
- Legal cannot operate in a silo when it comes to technology choices. Respect the overall AI guidelines of the company and respect the budget.
The session closed with a discussion about law firms versus in-house legal. The pain points are the same, but the buying process is very different.
Aku Pollanen: Effective Utilization of Agentic AI
Aku Pollanen, Co-Founder and CEO of Bind, spoke right after Manuel. Where Manuel's session was about getting the foundations right, Aku's was about what becomes possible once you do.
He opened with a reality check. Bind has spoken with roughly 100 general counsel in recent months, and the market is so fragmented that making a decision feels impossible.
Most teams have tried AI in some form. The tools are there. But the experience has been underwhelming. General purpose tools like Copilot do not understand legal work. Custom workflows built by IT barely cover one use case. And dedicated legal AI tools still lack the organizational context that makes their output trustworthy.
We piloted a legal AI tool. It doesn't understand what actually matters to us and makes too many mistakes.
Aku's argument was that the problem is not AI itself. It is that most legal teams are using the wrong type of AI for what they actually need. He mapped out three layers:
General purpose AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot) is good for brainstorming and first drafts, but knows nothing about your organization. Legal AI tools (Harvey, Legora, Spellbook) bring domain expertise to contract review and research, but you still drive every step manually. AI agents are different. They do not just answer questions. They take action. They reason through complex requests, check against your actual documents, adjust as they go, and review their own work before handing it back.
The difference between asking someone for advice and having someone do the work alongside you.
Not all agents are the same though:
1. Automated pipelines. Fixed steps in a fixed order. Useful for simple tasks, but calling it "agentic" is generous.
2. Autonomous agents. Truly autonomous, but fire-and-forget. No visibility into reasoning, no way to step in. Hard to trust for legal.
3. Collaborative agents. Work alongside you with full autonomy when needed, but you can see the reasoning, step in when it matters, and set the guardrails. The best fit for legal work.
With a traditional AI tool, you get one shot. If it misses something, you only catch it if you happen to notice. An agent can make multiple passes. It checks against your contract archive, your playbooks, your negotiation history. Self-correction is built in.
But the bigger point was not about better tools. It was about a fundamentally different operating model.
- Each lawyer handles more contracts per day
- Legal still reviews every agreement
- Bottleneck is reduced but not eliminated
- Linear scaling: more work requires more lawyers
- Routine contracts flow without legal involvement
- Legal focuses on exceptions and high-stakes deals
- Bottleneck is removed for standard work
- Platform scaling: more volume without proportional headcount
Making each lawyer 2x faster is incremental. The real shift is when routine contracts flow without legal involvement at all. Business teams self-serve. Legal focuses on exceptions and high-stakes deals. That is the 10x gain. But it only works with a complete, reliable platform your team trusts. Not point solutions stitched together, but contract archive, playbooks, e-sign, workflows, and AI agents in one place.
He closed with five questions for evaluating any platform:
Panel: What Does Legal Innovation Actually Look Like?
Panelists: Isabel Cervantes (Legal Innovation, Volkswagen Group), Nishat Ruiter (General Counsel, TED), Marita Rance (Former Group General Counsel, Glovo).
This panel brought together three very different perspectives on what legal innovation looks like in practice. Not the shiny conference version. The real one.
Marita Rance's approach starts with a simple question: "Let me know what you need." No complicated intake forms. No bureaucracy. Just tell me what you need and I will figure out how to help. From there, she builds process. And process is what lets you move faster.
Simple rules that scale. That was Marita's consistent message.
Nishat Ruiter brought the TED perspective. Innovation looks different in every company. At TED, everything is about ideas. In some parts of the business, technology moves fast. In others, like IP, things are inherently slower. You cannot apply the same playbook everywhere.
She shared an example that stuck with the audience. Sales teams were complaining that contracts were too tight. They were losing deals. The easy legal response would have been: these are the contracts, too bad, take it. But that does not work. Instead, Nishat's team went and captured data on what was actually wrong. They surveyed customers directly. Would they be more interested in doing more business with slightly different terms? The answer was yes. That data gave legal the ammunition to change the contracts in a way that made both sides happy.
Isabel Cervantes from Volkswagen Group brought the most grounded perspective. What comes before innovation? Fear. Reluctance to try new things. Lack of time. Innovation is not only about technology. It is about getting people comfortable enough to take the first step. She is agnostic about tools, focused on being dynamic and adapting to different cultures across a large organization. Implementing AI is not her KPI. She is not chasing AI for the sake of having AI.
She told a story about a process improvement project where, once they dug in, the team was not being honest about how things actually worked. The real process was different from the documented one. That happens more often than people admit.
If you try to go too fast, you don't have time to listen.
Driving legal innovation has to happen step by step. Listen first. Understand what is really going on. Then build from there.
Alexandre Schaff: Building a Data-Driven Legal Department
Alexandre Schaff, Group Legal Director at Socomec, gave a case study presentation that was one of the most practical of the forum. He started by painting an honest picture of where they came from: strong company growth (EUR 1 billion in FY25, up from 600 million in FY21), which meant more customers, more contracts, and more legal challenges. High volume. More complexity. More regulation.
And no database. No overview on global legal exposure. No shared contract management tool between regions. No negotiation leverage across the organization. Heavy workload, time-sensitive projects, growing frustration from internal clients, and too much time lost on standard documents like NDAs and forms.
Alex was worried about his team's wellbeing. They were stressed because they could not serve internal clients fast enough. He also had a real fear: losing control of contracts entirely if salespeople started doing deals without legal involvement. That was the risk that pushed them to act.
His team evaluated what they needed from a platform:
They tested eight platforms. Two were eliminated immediately because they could not pass cybersecurity review. Alex deliberately did not participate in the testing himself. He did not want to buy a tool he liked but his team did not actually use.
- Include internal clients. Adhesion of internal clients is key. Make it a shared tool. Take existing processes into account.
- Test multiple platforms. Take your time. The AI roadmap is evolving fast.
- Do not forget cybersecurity. Embark IT and cybersecurity teams as soon as possible.
- Use figures to explain efficiency gains. Build a solid business plan with ROI, payback, and opex savings.
His conclusion was simple: evaluate your needs and be proactive about it. Embark everyone, because the team will be the main users. And keep it alive by maintaining human supervision, enriching the database, and adjusting your playbook over time.
Panel: Data-Driven Legal
Panelists: Alexandre Schaff (Group Legal Director, Socomec), Marielle Reints (VP Legal and Deputy Corporate Secretary, Elastic N.V.), Claudio Elia (Group Vice President, STMicroelectronics), Rita Paukste (Head of Legal, ILTE Bank).
The panel that followed picked up where Alex's case study left off. Who should push for digital transformation in legal? The company or the legal team itself?
Alex's view was clear: do not wait for someone else to say "how can legal become more digital." Take the initiative yourself. Marielle from Elastic added that cycle time is important, and acknowledged that Elastic is not ahead on this yet. Honesty about where you stand matters.
Claudio from STMicroelectronics has multiple CLM and legal tech tools in place. His advice: start simple. An NDA tool, for example. Something where people see value quickly before you try to expand. Once the team experiences what a good tool does for a simple use case, they are more open to the next step.
He also expressed a belief that the human touch will remain essential for making compromises in negotiations. Agentic AI cannot do that. Not yet.
Tina Fernandez: The Forgotten Contracts
Tina Fernandez from Consolidocs gave a presentation that really got the in-house counsel audience's attention. Her topic: what happens after contracts are signed? In most organizations, the answer is nothing. Contracts get signed, filed, and forgotten.
That is where value disappears. On the buy side, cost leakage. Auto-renewals nobody catches. Discounts that keep running indefinitely because no one is tracking them. On the sell side, revenue leakage. Favorable terms that were negotiated but never enforced. Pricing escalations that were agreed but never applied.
Her core argument was that contracts should not be static documents that get buried after signature. They should be dynamic components of the business. Living assets that are actively managed, tracked, and optimized. Who owns the contract after it is signed? In most organizations, nobody does in practice. Customer success teams often do not know what is in the contracts they are working with. Procurement does not track post-signature obligations systematically.
The message was clear: businesses need to take ownership of their contracts and use modern tools to make sure the value in those agreements is actually realized. Both on the buy side and on the sell side. It is one of the most overlooked areas in legal operations, and Consolidocs is building specifically for this.
Pawel Lipski: Contracting for AI
Pawel Lipski from Bird & Bird delivered one of the more technical sessions of the forum, covering both the EU AI Act and the practical realities of contracting with major AI providers. It was the kind of session where most of the value was in the live detail, but a few points stood out for any legal team working with AI today.
He started with the EU AI Act's risk-based approach. The Act classifies AI systems into categories from prohibited (social scoring, predictive policing, inferring emotions in the workplace) through high risk and transparency risk down to minimal risk. Each category carries different obligations. The key insight: this applies to everyone doing business in or offering services to the EU, not just EU-based companies.
The penalties are real. Non-compliance with prohibited AI practices can lead to fines of up to EUR 35 million or 7% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher. Other provisions carry fines up to EUR 15 million or 3%. Even supplying incorrect information to authorities can result in fines up to EUR 7.5 million or 1%.
He also made a point that stayed with the room: the EU AI Act may be the first law that gets amended before it even goes fully into effect. The Act has been adopted, but the implementation infrastructure is not ready. There are delays in setting up national authorities and notified bodies, and harmonized standards and compliance guidance are still being developed. The result is a risk of formal non-compliance by design, not by fault. The Commission's response is what Pawel called targeted recalibration, not deregulation.
On contracting, Pawel shifted to the practical side of dealing with the major AI model and tool providers. His advice was direct. Read the terms for what the models cannot be used for. It is hard to list everything they can be used for, so the restrictions are where the important information sits.
A fundamental distinction he drew: you do not get deterministic results from AI. You get probabilistic ones. AI systems are software, but with unique characteristics. The internal workings are not visible. That black box reality matters for how you write contracts, define deliverables, and set expectations.
Klaas Ehmen: Legal as Risk Competence
Klaas Ehmen, Chief Legal Counsel at STARCAR Group, delivered one of the most personal sessions of the forum. He told the story of his own company going through insolvency, openly and in detail. It is the kind of talk you rarely get to hear at a conference. Someone who lived through it, sharing what actually happened.
STARCAR was a successful German car rental company. Revenue had grown to over EUR 510 million in 2024. Best practices were in place. Governance was solid. And then, in October 2025, the company filed for insolvency. A EUR 240 million syndicated loan with strict financial covenants, combined with the inability to reach an agreement with banks, triggered proceedings. By January 2026, the company was fully wound up. No buyer was found. Of 615 employees, around 170 remained to manage the liquidation of more than 10,000 vehicles.
The broader context matters. Germany is seeing record corporate insolvencies driven by weak growth, high interest rates, rising costs, and global competition. This is not an isolated story.
Klaas made a sharp distinction between risk management and crisis management. They overlap but are not the same. His argument: the general counsel must be at the heart of both. The traditional setup where legal handles legal and compliance risks while business handles economic risks is formally correct but often disconnected from the company's actual risk exposure. Where do the real contractual risks lie? His estimate: 20% legal, 80% economic. And legal usually does not verify whether the operational content of contracts aligns with the overall strategy.
Legal and compliance correctness alone does not protect a company from existential risks.
When crisis hits, the GC faces questions that no playbook fully prepares you for. Was legal involved too late? Did I overlook or misclassify risks? Am I advising the company or protecting the board? Are the decisions being made in crisis transparent and properly documented?
His practical advice for general counsel: crises are stressful and emotional. Many decisions will have to be made in a very short period. Keep a cool head. Document everything. And do not wait to bring in specialized external advisors. That becomes necessary at a certain point in every crisis, and being prepared is better than being surprised.
Panel: Why Compliance Is a Culture Problem, Not a Checklist
Panelists: Lizzy Peijs (Bencis Capital Partners), Alexandre Schaff (Socomec), Rita Paukste (ILTE Bank). Moderated by Volker Weisshaar.
The message from this panel was clear: compliance is a culture problem, not a checklist problem. If your compliance program lives in e-learning modules and tick boxes, it is not really working.
Doing the right thing has to be the norm. Always. Even when it costs you money.
Rita framed it as resisting the urge to do anything out of line, throughout the entire company. The CEO's attitude toward compliance sets the tone for the whole organization. If leadership treats it as a formality, everyone else will too. Compliance needs to be something that protects the business, not just something you do to participate in tenders. Integrity as a competitive advantage.
Lizzy Peijs pushed back on the tick-the-box mentality. Compliance has to be principle-based, not just strict rules. She also argued for a human-based approach to training. Switch things up. Do not rely only on e-learning. People stop paying attention when every training feels the same.
Alexandre Schaff had a practical take: after the training and the tick boxes, your real job as a compliance professional is to be a trusted advisor. A talk buddy. Not the person who sanctions, but the one who helps people navigate difficult situations before they become real problems.
The hardest question was about what happens when things go wrong. The panel agreed: reduce blame as much as possible. If people fear punishment, they hide issues. If they trust the system, they surface problems early. That is not easy, but it is essential.
Iris Steyer: Building a Legal Function from Zero
Iris Steyer from Alpitronic closed the formal sessions with one of the most practical talks of the forum. Alpitronic is an electric vehicle charging company, but Iris has done this before in other companies. She has walked into organizations that have no legal function in place and need to build everything from scratch, sometimes under pressure like an upcoming IPO.
She started with a reality check that many in-house lawyers will recognize. When you arrive, the business is not necessarily welcoming you with open arms. The first question you face is: who are you and why do you cost so much? Before you can change anything, you need to justify the existence of the legal team itself.
Who are you? And why do you cost so much? That is the first question you have to answer before anything else.
Her framework was a step-by-step playbook for building a legal function inside a growing company.
On tooling, she recommended JIRA for legal ticketing. The key point was not the tool itself but visibility. Let people know what you are doing. Track against KPIs. Produce quarterly reports. If the business does not see what legal does, they will keep questioning why you exist.
Her final point: in a high-growth environment, the focus is overwhelmingly on revenue. Compliance often gets less attention. And when everyone is responsible for something, nobody is.
About the Global Legal Forum
The Global Legal Forum is an annual event organized in The Hague, focused on general counsel, legal operations, compliance, and legal tech. The 2026 edition was the 6th annual forum. The format is smaller than major legal conferences, with a focus on interactive sessions where audience participation is encouraged. Attendees are primarily from Europe, with a mix of in-house legal leaders, law firm partners, legal tech companies, and consultants.
The event runs two parallel tracks on Day 2, covering in-house counsel and legal operations in one track, and compliance and regulatory in the other, with combined plenary sessions in the morning and afternoon.
For anyone interested, the Global Legal Forum typically takes place in early March each year in The Hague.
What We Took Away
The sessions are one thing. The patterns that kept appearing across unrelated panels are another. We wrote a separate piece on the 9 trends we took away from the two days: Where Legal Is Heading: 9 Trends from Global Legal Forum 2026.
About Bind
Bind is an AI-native contract automation platform built for in-house legal teams. Instead of bolting AI onto a traditional CLM, Bind was designed from the ground up around a conversational workflow where contracts are created, reviewed, negotiated, signed, and managed in one place.
At the forum, Bind CEO Aku Pollanen presented on effective utilization of agentic AI in contract management, demonstrating how collaborative AI agents can handle routine contract work end-to-end while keeping legal teams in control of exceptions and high-stakes decisions.
Here is a walkthrough of how Bind works:
If you are an in-house legal team looking to remove contracts as a bottleneck, Aku is happy to walk you through how Bind works and whether it fits your workflow. You can reach him at aku@bindlegal.com or find him on LinkedIn.
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