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If you work in law and you’ve ever sat in a conference room listening to someone talk about billable hours like it’s still 2005, you’ll understand why Law Biz Con exists.

Law Biz Con 2026 took over the QT Hotel on the Gold Coast on 14–15 May 2026, and it was nothing like a standard legal conference. There were no long-winded theoretical panels. No speakers phoning it in. What filled those two days, across the Visionary Room, the Growth Room, and the Foyer was a concentrated mix of candid conversations, practical workshops, and the kind of peer-to-peer exchange that you rarely get anywhere else in the legal industry.

The overarching theme this year? Where Law Meets Business. It sounds simple, but for many law firm owners, the gap between being a great lawyer and running a great business is where firms quietly stall. Law Biz Con 2026 was built entirely around closing that gap.

Here’s what went down across both days.

Day One – Thursday 14 May: Building the Foundations for a Scalable Firm

It Started Before Sunrise

Caralee Fontenele, the Director of Scalable Law and the driving force behind Law Biz Con, kicked off the event the way she always does, by walking the beach with attendees at 6:30 in the morning.

It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. There’s something about being outside, away from a screen, watching the sun come up over the Gold Coast coastline with a room full of people who are all trying to figure out how to build better law firms. Conversations that might take three cocktail parties to get to tend to happen in the first ten minutes.

Registration and coffee followed back at the Foyer, and by 9:00 AM the Visionary Room was full for the Opening Session with Nick Britt.

Nick Britt and Caralee Fontenele: Setting the Tone

Nick Britt is an MC who has hosted events for over a million people around the world, and his ability to read a room is evident from the moment he steps on stage. Together with Caralee, the opening session didn’t just run through a welcome address — it set an expectation for the two days ahead. This wasn’t going to be passive. Attendees were expected to work, think, and engage.

Breakout Sessions: The Talent War and AI Disruption

The first proper breakout sessions of the conference ran simultaneously in the Visionary Room and the Growth Room, and the split said a lot about where law firm owners’ heads are right now.

Jennifer Little, Founder and Managing Director of Insource, took the Visionary Room with her session on winning the talent war to build a scalable law practice. Jenn built Insource specifically because she’d spent years as a legal recruiter watching firms waste time, money, and goodwill on hiring processes that didn’t work. She talked about how AI-powered talent intelligence is changing the way firms find candidates — not just faster, but smarter — and shared that firms using the Insource platform have collectively saved over $2 million in recruitment costs in the past year alone.

For any firm owner who has handed a recruiter a four-figure fee and waited three months for a candidate who left after six, this session landed hard.

Over in the Growth Room, Matthew Eddy, CEO of Everingham Legal, was tackling something that keeps a lot of law firm owners up at night: AI. Not in a vague, buzzwordy way, but in the specific, structural way that only someone who has worked across private practice, government, ASX 100 consulting, and legal technology actually can.

His session, “Disruption, Magnitude & Velocity: A Guide for Legal Leaders in the Era of AI” — was about what it actually means to lead a firm when the tools, the client expectations, and the competitive landscape are all changing at the same time. Matthew’s message was less about fear and more about decisions: which technology investments make sense, how to govern AI risk, and what an operating model looks like when it’s built for an AI-enabled future rather than retrofitted for one.

VXT: A Quick but Useful Interlude

At 12:00 PM, Luke Campbell from VXT took ten minutes in the Visionary Room to walk through what their voice message management tools do for law firms. It was a tight session — no padding, no sales theatrics, and it fit well into a morning that had already covered a lot of ground.

Caralee Fontenele: The Law Firm Data Scorecard

One of the most-talked-about sessions of the entire conference was Caralee’s workshop on the Law Firm Data Scorecard, which ran in the Visionary Room from 12:10 PM to 1:00 PM.

The premise is deceptively simple: most law firm owners don’t actually know the numbers that drive their business. Not because they’re careless, but because no one ever taught them which numbers matter, or how to read them in a way that connects to real decisions.

Caralee has spent 17 years running her own firm and the past several years helping over 400 other firms improve their profitability and performance. The Scorecard is one of the most concrete tools to come out of that work. Attendees walked through it in real time, identifying where their firm was leaking profit and where the genuine growth opportunities were sitting unnoticed.

Afternoon: LinkedIn, Delegation, and Michael Crossland

After lunch, the breakout sessions continued with Kylie Chown in the Visionary Room, running a practical workshop on using AI and LinkedIn together specifically around how lawyers can build visibility and client trust without falling into the trap of posting content that sounds like it was written by a committee.

Kylie’s approach is based on the idea that LinkedIn for lawyers isn’t about chasing viral posts. It’s about being consistently useful and recognisably human to the exact people you want to work with. She walked through practical content strategies, AI tools that support rather than replace a lawyer’s voice, and how to use the platform in a way that actually converts to referrals and new instructions.

In the Growth Room, Ben Deverson ran a session that flipped the usual delegation conversation on its head. Most workshops on delegation focus on how to hand tasks down. Ben’s session, built around the concept he calls upward delegation — explores how team members can take ownership in ways that genuinely reduce the burden on firm leaders. It’s a management insight that sounds counterintuitive until it clicks, and from the conversations happening at afternoon tea afterward, it clicked for a lot of people.

The afternoon’s keynote was from Michael Crossland, and if you know anything about Michael’s story, you’ll understand why putting him on a stage in front of a room full of people carrying the weight of running their own businesses made sense.

Michael has survived a rare and life-threatening cancer not once but multiple times, has spent nearly a quarter of his life in hospital, and has built a career as a businessman, elite sportsman, bestselling author, and internationally sought-after speaker, that most people would consider impossible given the hand he was dealt. His session, “The Power of Perspective,” was raw and genuinely moving. It was also practical in the way only someone who has had to fight for their own life can be practical. The takeaway wasn’t motivational-poster inspiration. It was a concrete shift in how you measure what actually matters.

After Dark Party

The evening ended with the After Dark Party in the Ballroom from 6:30 PM, a formal gala night that is as much a Law Biz Con institution as any of the daytime sessions. There was a Hollywood guest, entertainment, photo booths, and the kind of energy that only comes when a room full of driven people have had a day that genuinely moved them.

Day Two – Friday 15 May: Scaling, Exiting, and Leading with Energy

Nick Britt: Opening the Final Day

Nick was back to open Day Two at 9:00 AM, bringing the same precision and energy that makes him one of the most effective MCs in the country. For an event that covers as much ground as Law Biz Con, having an MC who genuinely understands the content, not just the format, makes a measurable difference to how well the room stays engaged.

Lisa O’Neill: Energy is Your Edge

The opening keynote of Friday came from Lisa O’Neill, and it was one of those sessions that is genuinely hard to describe without making it sound like a self-help seminar, which it wasn’t.

Lisa has spent over two decades working with major organisations including Ray White, Foodstuffs, and L’Oreal. She’s authored seven books. She speaks to audiences of 5,000 or more. And her specific skill is delivering hard truths, about energy, leadership, habits, and the stories we tell ourselves about why we can’t change, through humour that actually lands.

Her keynote, “Energy is Your Edge,” hit on something that law firm owners rarely talk about openly: that you can have the best systems and strategy in the world, but if you’re running on empty, none of it works. The session was funny, direct, and left people with specific things to do differently, not just a vague sense that they should be better.

Breakout Sessions: Estate Planning Profits and VA-Powered Teams

The 10:45 AM breakout sessions split the room again between the Visionary Room and the Growth Room.

Tara Lucke, founder of The Art of Estate Planning, ran a session in the Visionary Room on something that many firms leave money on the table with: estate planning. Over 17 years as an estate planning lawyer and with more than 600 law firms now using her precedents, education, and mentoring resources, Tara has a clear view of where the value is and where firms are chronically undercharging.

Her session, “Turning Estate Planning into a Profit Engine: Value Pricing, TTs and What Firms Are Really Charging,” was not theoretical. It was full of real numbers, real pricing conversations, and the kind of frank discussion about fees that the legal industry still finds surprisingly uncomfortable. Attendees came away with a clearer picture of what the market actually charges, and how to have the value conversation with clients in a way that doesn’t feel awkward.

In the Growth Room, Nathan Lu, Principal Solicitor of ABP Lawyers and co-founder of Law Assist, ran a session on building legal teams with virtual assistants. Nathan has operated a seven-figure law firm himself, so when he talks about how to use VA support to reduce staffing pressure while maintaining quality and margins, he’s drawing on lived experience rather than theory. The practical guidance on where VAs fit within a legal team structure, and how to onboard them effectively, was among the most immediately actionable content of the two days.

Lisa O’Neill Workshop: Visible Leadership

Lisa O’Neill returned for a leadership workshop in the Visionary Room from 11:40 AM to 12:30 PM. This session went deeper into the interpersonal and behavioural side of leading a law firm, specifically around visibility, communication, and how leaders show up when things are difficult. For a group of people who often have to be the first ones in and the last ones out, the conversation about what leadership actually looks, sounds, and feels like in practice was both challenging and useful.

Panel Discussion: The Scalable Firm — How Smart Owners Build for Exit

The afternoon panel, moderated by Caralee Fontenele and featuring experienced law firm owners Hayder Shkara, Caralee Fontenele, and Kristen Porter, was one of the most candid sessions of the entire event.

Building a firm for exit is something a lot of law firm owners say they want and very few actually plan for. The panel got into the specifics: what structures need to be in place, how dependent the firm can be on the owner’s personal client relationships, what buyers actually look for, and what the difference is between a firm that has real enterprise value and one that’s essentially a solo practice with employees.

The conversation was honest in a way that industry panels often aren’t. These were people who had made mistakes, changed course, and built systems that worked — and they talked about all of it.

Mastermind Round Tables

Following the panel, Mastermind Round Tables in the Visionary Room gave attendees time to work through specific challenges with their peers. This is consistently one of the most valued formats at Law Biz Con because it shifts the dynamic from being spoken at to actually solving problems.

Caralee Fontenele – Planning Session

The final structured session of the conference was a Planning Session with Caralee, giving attendees a framework to take everything they’d absorbed across two days and turn it into specific actions for their firm. This is where the conference pays off — not in the inspiration of the moment, but in the decisions that get made and the work that starts on Monday morning.

Nick Britt: Wrap Up

Nick closed Law Biz Con 2026 with the wrap-up session at 4:30 PM, pulling together the threads from both days and leaving the room with a clear sense of where to go next.

What Made Law Biz Con 2026 Different

Every year, law firm owners in Australia have to choose how they spend their professional development time and budget. There’s no shortage of options.

What Law Biz Con offers that most alternatives don’t is a combination of three things that are rarely found together: speakers who have actually run businesses (not just studied or consulted on them), content that is specific to the legal industry rather than generic, and a community of peers at similar stages of the journey who are genuinely willing to share what’s working and what isn’t.

The 2026 event brought all of that together and added a program that was squarely focused on the two biggest pressures facing law firm owners right now: navigating AI and building firms that work without being entirely dependent on one person.

From Matthew Eddy’s session on AI disruption to Jennifer Little’s data on talent intelligence, from Caralee’s Scorecard to the panel discussion on building for exit, the through-line across both days was the same: you need to understand your numbers, build your systems, develop your people, and lead with enough energy and clarity that the whole thing actually holds together.

Stay Tuned

The conversations that started at Law Biz Con 2026 are the kind that don’t end when the event does. The connections made in the Foyer over morning tea, in the round tables, and at the After Dark Party are the ones that lead to referrals, partnerships, and the kind of long-term peer accountability that most law firm owners are desperately missing.

If you weren’t there this year, make sure you’re watching for what comes next. Stay tuned to the Law Biz Con blog and socials for highlights, speaker content, and news about what’s coming in 2027.

The legal industry is changing faster than it ever has. The people who were in that room in May 2026 are not waiting to see what happens.