Setting the scene

Geelong played host this year to the 2026 ALPMA Summit + ALTACON Business of Law Summit, held 9–11 September at the Nyaal Banyul Geelong Convention and Event Centre. It’s the leading gathering for legal practice management and legal technology across Australia and New Zealand, drawing managing partners, C-suite leaders, practice managers, legal technologists and support services leaders from across the region.

The keynote lineup set an ambitious tone: legal sector analyst Jordan Furlong on where the business of law is heading, Olympian-turned-obstetrics-registrar Jana Pittman on resilience, innovation consultant Jason Clarke, bestselling author Donna McGeorge and clinical psychologist Jacqui Maguire on sustaining high performance in the profession.

Across three days of sessions, one thread was consistent: AI wasn’t confined to a single track or session – it was the undertone running through nearly every conversation on the floor, from vendor stands to keynote sessions.

The biggest takeaway

The clearest signal to come out of this year’s Summit is that AI has stopped being a discrete initiative that firms evaluate on its own merits and has instead become the lens through which practice management, governance, well-being and firm strategy are now all being discussed.

For legal professionals, that shift matters: the question is no longer “should we look at AI,” it’s “which of our existing decisions is AI already quietly reshaping.”

Three standout themes

AI is mainstream

The conversation around AI at this year’s Summit felt noticeably different from prior years, shifting from less about proving that AI works, to more about operationalizing it. In one large session, it seemed like 95% of the attendees raised their hand when asked whether they used some AI tool in their everyday work.

Good data and governance remain essential

As firms move AI into daily workflows, the sessions kept circling back to a familiar but sharpened point: AI is only as good as the data and governance underneath it including matter context, permissions, ethical walls and data lineage all have to hold up before AI can be trusted with real work. While every conversation and session involved AI, they almost all included concerns about relevance and security as well. Hallucinations and security concerns were consistent topics.

People are the key

Perhaps unsurprisingly given speakers like Jacqui Maguire on culture and sustainable performance, the human side of technology adoption came up again and again.

Change management, training, and firm culture were treated as seriously as the technology itself. This is because while AI is mainstream and is all the rage, consistent adoption and meaningful results are still elusive.

Multiple legal professionals discussed adoption concerns with their current AI tools.

What this means for legal organizations

Taken together, these themes point to a few practical questions every legal organisation should be asking right now:

• Technology foundation: Is your document and matter data structured well enough to actually support AI? Or is AI being bolted onto a system that wasn’t built for it?
• Governance: Do your permissions, ethical walls and data controls extend cleanly into the AI layer, or do they create new blind spots? Do your AI tools require document uploading and downloading, creating data sprawl concerns?
• Adoption strategy: Is there a real change management plan behind your technology rollout, or is adoption being left to chance?
• Existing workflows: Are you adding another disconnected tool, or extending the systems your people already trust and use daily?

Firms that treat these as sequential – first foundation, followed by governance, then adoption – tend to see AI initiatives stick. Firms that skip straight to the tool usually end up back at square one.

NetDocuments at ALPMA

NetDocuments was proud to join this year’s Summit as a Platinum Partner. I spoke in a large session about how context changes the way lawyers and their tools do legal work. I spoke about how NetDocuments is extracting, surfacing and organising this context through the Legal Context Graph.

The team drilled down on this reimagined user experience with a workshop demonstrating the power of the Legal Context Graph in a production environment and its ability to connect every project, matter, document and conversation in a real-time view.

Closing reflection

The conference confirmed that with AI being mainstream, those who are positioned to help organizations with the key foundational, governance and adoption aspects of AI, are heading for an exciting time in their business.

Thank you to ALPMA, ALTA, and the GEMS events team for another well-run Summit, to this year’s speakers for pushing our thinking, and to the customers, partners and attendees who stopped by to talk shop with us in Geelong.

Learn more

If the themes of trusted data, governance and AI-ready foundations resonated with you, join us at Inspire APAC in Sydney on 17 November to see how context changes everything.