Exchange.
Both Sides of the Table. One Room.
A convening of the legal marketplace, where legal demand meets legal supply, to shape how pricing, predictability, and partnership evolve in a more disciplined legal era.
Debevoise & Plimpton · 66 Hudson Blvd E, New York, NY 10001
Agenda
Registration & Coffee
Arrive, collect your materials, and settle in with coffee. A chance to reconnect with familiar faces and meet counterparts from across the marketplace before the day begins.
The Legal Services Market Is Being Repriced
- Jim Delkousis, Founder and CEO, PERSUIT
The opening session aligns the room on the forces reshaping how legal work is bought, sold, and valued: AI-driven efficiency, budget pressure, panel discipline, and a generational shift in how clients and firms work together. It frames Exchange as a marketplace conversation with both sides of the table in the same room.
Candid Corners: The Pressures Each Side Is Carrying Into the Marketplace
A candid thirty minutes in peer space. In-house counsel and firm leaders split into separate rooms. Each table works a Rose, Bud, Thorn card: what is working (Rose), where the real opportunity sits (Bud), and where the pressure is building (Thorn). The discussion feeds directly into the Market Calibration that follows.
In-house leaders examine where volatility, forecasting breakdowns, panel fatigue, and internal scrutiny are putting pressure on their outside counsel models. Each table will identify key structural pain points and internal pressures that may not be fully visible to firms.
Law firm partners and pricing leaders explore margin pressure, scope volatility, competition fatigue, and evolving client expectations. Each table will identify structural pressures firms are facing and client expectations that may feel misaligned with economic realities.
Market Calibration: Where Are We Aligned, and Where Are We Not?
- Maui Gevero, Director, Legal Advisory, PERSUIT
- Jordan Weinstein, VP, Data & Product, PERSUIT
The full room reconvenes for a facilitated discussion with the audience on the patterns that surfaced from the Rose, Bud, Thorn exercise: where in-house and firm views converge, where they sharply diverge, and what that tells us about the current state of the marketplace.
Common Ground: A Fireside Chat on the Shared Responsibility of Clients and Firms for the Profession
- Shannon Klinger, Chief Legal Officer, Moderna
- Heather McDevitt, Chair and Partner, White & Case
As AI and other forces reshape the delivery of legal services, law firms and in-house legal departments face a shared challenge: how to preserve the strength, quality, and sustainability of the legal profession while adapting to rapid change.
In this candid fireside conversation, Shannon Klinger and Heather McDevitt will explore what it takes to make the modern client–firm relationship work in a period of disruption. Together, they will discuss how clients and firms can confront AI disintermediation head-on, rethink traditional models of collaboration, and ensure that innovation strengthens—not erodes—the foundations of the profession.
The conversation will also address a critical question for today's legal leaders: what responsibility do we have to the next generation of lawyers, and how can firms and clients work together to protect the training, mentorship, judgment, and sense of purpose that make the law an extraordinary profession?
Lunch & Networking
Tables are deliberately mixed so in-house counsel and firm leaders can continue the morning's conversations across the aisle.
Co-Designing the AI Operating Model
- Will Holman, Sr. Manager, Legal Advisory, PERSUIT
- Nicholas Ziebell, Head of Practice Systems & Applied AI, Debevoise & Plimpton
Inspired by the April 2026 PERSUIT Perspectives piece, "AI Is Killing the Billable Hour. It's Also Repeating Legal's Worst Mistake," mixed tables of in-house counsel and firm leaders work through a structured exercise together, using AI to help scope and price a matter, build a budget, and identify the areas with the most variability and risk.
Each attendee leaves with a personal framework for the AI conversation with their counterparts, and every table contributes to a composite PERSUIT AI Framework that is anonymised and published back to every attendee after Exchange. Each participant leaves with their own canvas for the specific relationship they came here to advance.
Break
A short reset before the final block.
The Buyer's Seat: How Legal Executives Are Allocating, Measuring and Partnering
A panel of senior legal executives on where the market is headed from the buyer's seat: where spend is going over the next 12 months, how performance is being measured, and what it will take to compete for work in this market. Plain-spoken views on allocation, panel composition, and partnership from leaders who set the direction at their companies, so the room leaves with clear pricing, panel, and partnership signals to act on next.
- Jim Delkousis, Founder and CEO, PERSUIT
- Mark Smolik, CLO, DHL Supply Chain Americas
- Joanna Wade, Head of Litigation, Equitable
- Scott Flood, Managing Director and General Counsel, SMBC
- Additional speakers to be confirmed
From the Room to the Roadmap
- Jim Delkousis, Founder and CEO, PERSUIT
- David Falstein, VP of Product, PERSUIT
A synthesis of what we heard, where the marketplace is heading next, and what each side of the room can do about it starting Monday morning, alongside a clear look at the PERSUIT roadmap and the infrastructure being built to support the shift: AI-enabled scoping and pricing, panel discipline, and measuring the value of the client–firm relationship itself.
Drinks Reception
An informal way to close out the day. Relationship-building continues across the marketplace over drinks, unhurried and open.