AI Legal Practice Summit

2026 AI Legal Practice Summit Saturday, April 18, 2026 | Capital University Law School

AI isn't coming to the legal profession. It's already here. The question is whether you're using it well, wisely, and ethically.

The 2026 AI Legal Practice Summit is a full-day, practice-focused event for Central Ohio legal professionals and state and local agency employees who are ready to move beyond the hype and get practical about AI in legal work. From ethical guardrails and tool evaluation to workflow integration and hands-on tool building, this program covers the full arc of responsible AI adoption, with sessions led by practitioners and technologists who work at the intersection of law and innovation every day.

This course has been approved by the Supreme Court of Ohio Commission on Continuing Legal Education for 4.00 hours of general instruction and 1.00 hour of attorney professional conduct for a total of 5.00 hours.

The Summit runs alongside Capital University Law Library's annual Law Library Bootcamp, a skills-intensive program for law students and new attorneys covering professional readiness, legal research, and legal writing. Both events share synchronized breaks and a common lunch hour, and attorneys attending the Summit are welcome to sit in on any Bootcamp session that interests them — experienced practitioners looking for a refresher on research fundamentals or writing best practices may find these sessions especially worthwhile. CLE credit from the Supreme Court of Ohio Commission on Continuing Legal Education has been applied for an additional 4.5 hours of Bootcamp sessions and is pending approval.

Lunch will be provided.

Info: This session will help attorneys to understand the technology and their ethical obligations in legal practice, including tool selection. This session will look at Generative AI’s implications for Model Rules 1.1, 1.4, 1.6, 2.1, 3.3, 5.1, and 5.3. This session will do a deep dive into these rules, with a special focus on competence and confidentiality, using real life examples from a variety of cases and news stories.
For instance, when discussing contractual terms to focus on in tool selection, attendees will consider a news story discussing how some law firms knew to negotiate to prevent data from entering the training data but had to renegotiate later when they realized that the tool had an abuse clause that allowed for third party data review to ensure acceptable use. This will be compared to the Ohio ethics opinion on Virtual Law Offices that discusses an attorney’s requirement to oversee their technology vendors under 5.3.

Info: Until now the primary focus of AI has been on standalone tools rather than on the process of integrating tools into practice. This CLE session will discuss how legal professionals can incorporate both general and legal-specific generative artificial intelligence tools in their day-to-day workflows and will cover strategies for successfully leveraging both types of tools. We will also discuss the trend toward building more workflow-specific legal tools and provide a live demo of a new workflow-specific legal AI tool.

Info: This session focuses on what you can actually use today. We will explore practical applications of AI across law firm operations covering the skills, tools, and frameworks needed to integrate AI throughout a firm's tech stack and embed it into the rhythm of daily practice. Through real-world use cases and AI-first workflow examples, attendees will see how a thoughtfully connected AI ecosystem can deliver greater value to clients while meaningfully reducing the cognitive load on attorneys.
We will also tackle the ethical dimensions that come with operationalizing AI in an integrated way. That means examining how firms can balance the efficiency gains of AI adoption against their core obligations around data privacy, client confidentiality, and the duty of supervision, and how to build the kind of calibrated trust in AI tools that allows lawyers to delegate confidently without abdicating professional judgment.

Info: What if you could build a custom tool for your practice — a client intake form, a deadline tracker, a fee calculator — just by describing what you need in plain English? In this hands-on session, attendees will do exactly that, using AI to go from idea to a working web application in under an hour.
"Vibe coding" is the practice of describing what you want in natural language and letting AI generate the code. No programming knowledge required. Participants will craft prompts, iterate on designs, and create a real project, learning a skill that extends far beyond this session. The same techniques used to build a tool from scratch could apply to automating routine workflows, creating custom dashboards, or prototyping solutions to practice-specific problems that off-the-shelf software doesn't solve.
Attendees who want to build along during the session should bring a laptop and sign up for a free Google Gemini account at gemini.google.com prior to the session.

Info: The pressure to "do something about AI" has never been greater, yet for many the question is not which AI to adopt, but where to start. This session delivers a structured, vendor-neutral framework for evaluating a legal technology stack, with attention to AI products entering the market at unprecedented pace. Attendees will learn to assess workflow gaps, identify tools that address them, and apply an evaluation methodology covering functionality, security, data privacy, cost, and integration before a vendor contract is signed. Special consideration will be given to compliance-sensitive environments, including HIPAA-regulated settings. Designed for state agency attorneys, solo and small-firm practitioners, law students, and non-attorney professionals in health and human services tasked with selecting AI systems meeting rigorous regulatory standards, attendees will leave with a practical checklist they can apply on day one and a clear-eyed view of the risks of rushing AI adoption.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Capital University Law School, 303 East Broad Street, Columbus, United States

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