Legal Geek North America Conference: Innovation in Jeans and Birkenstocks

I’m thinking of heading back to Chicago in a couple of weeks for Legal Geek North America—a one-day conference on Tuesday, June 17. I’d make a week of it to meet with clients and partners.

Legal Geek has its roots in London, where I first attended back in 2018. Unlike legal conferences in hotels and convention centers, Recess, the site of Legal Geek North America is an indoor-outdoor space in the West Loop that is more creative agency than corporate. It’s billed as “a playground for grown-ups.”

Glib, but well described for the small plywood stands for exhibitors, low stages and beer next door, afterwards, that I experienced in London. 

The format is brief TED-style talks and roundtables. With an impressive group of over forty authorities, the vast majority of the sessions are dedicated to AI. 

Working in legal publishing, what stood out to me on the agenda was the inward focus of AI—how to streamline, cut costs, and do more with less. What’s missing is an outward look: how an understanding of AI can be used to grow a law firm’s business, not just run it more efficiently.

For law firms, the terrain of business development is profoundly changing. Authority and expertise, the foundation of growing business, is being established by open-source and closed-corpus LLMs alike. Law firm marketing strategy will never be the same.

That said, Legal Geek isn’t built for deep dives into business development through AI—that’s a different kind of conference. But if you’re in or near Chicago, it remains one of the more energizing and inspiring events in legal tech.

The people who gather there—startups, innovators, in-house teams, firm leaders are fun to meet and talk with.