The AI-Powered Legal Transformation Summit 2026 by ETLegalWorld will bring together General Counsel, in-house legal leaders, and technology innovators on August 7, in Bengaluru, to chart the next phase of legal transformation in an AI-driven world.
Recent surveys find that legal departments increasingly expect AI to take over a meaningful share of routine workload in the coming years, and most legal leaders believe AI will fundamentally reshape how law firms price their services, with growing momentum toward value-based billing as in-house counsel push outside firms to rethink traditional fee structures
Despite this momentum, a maturity gap persists: a notable share of organizations still lack any formal AI policy or guidelines, and even as legal departments continue ramping up AI investment, many have yet to see clear, measurable cost savings from these efforts.
Confidentiality, data quality and trust in AI outputs remain the most commonly cited roadblocks to enterprise-wide scaling, even as spending on legal AI tools keeps climbing and efficiency continues to stand out as the most tangible benefit realized so far. This tension between rapid individual-level adoption and lagging institutional readiness is precisely the gap that this summit is now positioning to address at the GC and boardroom level.
Discussions will span the full spectrum of AI’s impact on legal workflows, from contract management and compliance to dispute resolution and strategic advisory, while also tackling governance, risk and ethical deployment challenges that come with scaling these tools.
The full-day conference is expected to draw over 150 attendees and feature more than 30 speakers across six-plus sessions.
As artificial intelligence rapidly redraws the legal landscape, legal departments and law firms are moving beyond experimentation toward enterprise-scale adoption, and the summit aims to capture this inflection point.
The speaker roster for the summit brings together senior legal, compliance and technology leaders from across India’s corporate landscape. Speakers include Subhadip Sarkar, Vice President – Legal and Corporate Administration at Cognizant; Mukesh Kumar, Regional Compliance Manager for South Asia, Southeast Asia and India at Hitachi Ltd; Sudha Hooda, Executive Director, Legal and Member of the Nvidia Graphics Board of Directors at NVIDIA; and Panduranga Acharya, CXO and General Counsel at Zepto Limited.
Also on the lineup are Jagannath PV, Global Data Privacy Officer at LTIMindtree; Devraj Sanyal, Chief AI and Data Science Officer at the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH); Namrata Arora, General Counsel and Chief Ethics Officer at Blupine Energy; and Deepalakshmi Vadivelan, General Counsel, SVP Legal and Global DPO at Quess Corp.
The panel further features Dilip Manepalli, Vice President – Innovation and Analytics at Vodafone; Srijit Mukherjee, General Legal Counsel at Kocho; Dr. Suresh Kalarikkal, Vice President and Head of Legal, Board Director at Thoughtworks; and Dr. Prince Joseph, Global CIO at NeST Group and SFO Technologies.
Rounding out the speaker list are Saurabh Awasthi, VP and General Counsel at Kyndryl India; Damandeep Kaur, Regional Chief Legal Officer for TP in India and APAC at Teleperformance; Jaswinder Singh Shekhawat, Head of Legal and Compliance at MediBuddy; Lakshmi Menon, Director and General Counsel India at Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Karthik Kannappan S, Group General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Indegene Ltd; Kavitha Gupta, Director – Compliance Officer for India and Southeast Asia at SAP; and Kartikeya Rawal, Director – Legal at Swiggy.
The breadth of this lineup, spanning IT services, e-commerce, healthtech, fintech, energy and telecom, underscores the summit’s aim to bring cross-sector perspectives to the conversation on AI-driven legal transformation.
Key discussion points of this summit include generative AI for legal teams; how law firms are engineering AI for legal workflows; AI governance, risk and ethics; AI in contract lifecycle management; the growth of legal tech and how AI will shape the future of legal departments.
The summit is positioned as more than a legal-technology conference, it is framed as a platform to reimagine the legal function as a strategic, data-driven, AI-powered business enabler. Target attendees include General Counsels, Chief Legal Officers, Chief Technical Officers, In-House legal teams, legal operations heads, compliance and risk professionals.
Beyond content, the summit offers high-value networking opportunities through curated interactions, roundtables, and networking sessions, enabling meaningful engagement between corporates, law firms, and technology providers.
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