This year’s LegalWeek experience started before you even stepped inside. For as long as I’ve been attending—first LegalTech New York, then LegalWeek—the ritual was always the same: brace yourself. The cold. The wind. The gray Midtown winter that made you wonder why you decided to attend at all.  

This year, instead of bundling up and pushing through winter, we strolled into something entirely different — New York City on a warm, sunny, pleasant day.  The experience began with a 20-minute walk from Penn to the Javits. A walk that in any other year would have been brutal … but this year, it felt electric.

For once, the city itself felt like an invitation rather than an obstacle. That’s where it started to hit me. The difference between the Hilton and the Javits wasn’t just location.

That said, at the Hilton, the experience didn’t end when you stepped out— it expanded. You were in Midtown, surrounded by options, and within five minutes you could be sitting down for lunch, grabbing an early drink, easily continuing a conversation just steps away. The event naturally flowed outward into the City. Meetings turned into meals, introductions turned into drinks, and the day extended without effort because everything you needed was right there.

At the Javits, that dynamic shifts inward. The building is the experience. It’s massive, self-contained, and designed for scale. It can take five minutes just to walk from one end of the hall to the other and you stay contained within the venue. When you do step outside, there’s no immediate urban energy waiting—just the far west side, where restaurants and bars require real intention and a much longer walk. No quick lobby-bar catch-up. No seamless extension of the day into the city. The social heartbeat of the event condensed into the official Welcome Reception: two drink tickets, a tight window, a structured moment.

Inside, the differences ran deep. LegalWeek has always been rooted in litigation and eDiscovery, with sessions that, even when vendor-heavy, usually delivered something practical—ideas, processes, or takeaways you could actually use back at your desk. This year, that tangible value felt harder to find.

As one 2026 recap observed, “this year’s show seemed more commercialized than ever. Every keynote had a sponsor… many of the presentations were nothing more than vendor marketing.”

When nearly every session is tied to a sponsor or delivered by a vendor, the experience changes. The conversations sound different. The focus shifts. The topics may still center on litigation, eDiscovery, and now AI layered on top, but the delivery is less education grounded in practice and more positioning around product.

The Hilton itself shaped the experience in ways you didn’t fully appreciate. It wasn’t bright. It wasn’t expansive. In fact, it was darker, more enclosed, and the event — both the educational sessions and the expo — were spread across multiple floors, connected by escalators, hallways, and those in-between spaces where people naturally paused. That layering, that slight inefficiency, is exactly what created connection. You were constantly moving between floors, passing through shared spaces, running into people whether you intended to or not.

The Javits, by contrast, is built for scale and separation. With over a million square feet of exhibition space, it is designed to organize, not overlap. Education happens on one level. The Expo lives on another. And while that makes everything cleaner, clearer, and more efficient, it removes those natural points of intersection. You go where you mean to go. You attend what you plan to attend. And what disappears in that structure are the moments in between — the ones that, for years, made LegalWeek feel less like a conference and more like a continuous conversation.

Which is why one of the clearest “then vs. now” moments at LegalWeek isn’t about the technology — it’s about who is actually in the room. Back then, adoption followed functionality. The product had to work, solve real problems, and stand on its own.  Vendors had to go toe to toe with lawyers, explaining their product, answering questions on the fly, being accountable.

Walking the Expo floor this year, what stood out wasn’t just the brands, but the presence of the people leading them. The CEOs of companies like Stafi and Livewire Technologies — both women — were at their booths, in conversation, speaking directly with lawyers and potential partners. Accessible. Engaged. Present.

The contrast comes into focus when you looked around for the leadership of many of the larger, VC-funded companies. When asked where their CEO was, the responses felt almost scripted: “Oh — you just missed him.”

That difference matters. One approach is built on proximity to the problem. The other is built on distance from it.

When you step back and look at the full experience — from sponsored keynotes to branded receptions to vendor-led sessions — it is clear the center of gravity has shifted. What began as an event to help lawyers discover better solutions has become, in large part, a platform for solutions to position themselves in front of lawyers. That may make perfect business sense for the organizer, but it changes how the event feels—and how much real value it delivers to those who attend.

And that’s really where it lands. The question didn’t shift overnight — but it did change. It started when LegalTech New York became LegalWeek. A year after, I wrote, “Where’s the beef?” — asking for substance, for value, for something real beneath what looked impressive on the surface – for the lawyers taking days away from their practices and lives, spending thousands to be in the room.

Fast forward to 2026, standing in the Javits Center, watching thousands of attendees move through a system designed to guide them from one place to the next, it hit me like a stack of bricks.

The question has truly shifted and is no longer “Where’s the beef?”

Moo.

I hope you have enjoyed this post. If so, definitely stay tuned for LegalWeek 2026 Recap – Part II: the People.