Beyond the Playbook: 7 Strategic Frameworks from the 2026 LMA Annual Conference

Why frameworks won the conference

The 2026 LMA Annual Conference did not produce a single agreed-upon answer to any of the major questions facing legal marketers. What it produced instead was frameworks. A lot of them. Better ones than usual.

That distinction matters. In a moment when AI is rewriting the work, procurement is restructuring around new tools, and change is no longer episodic but constant, tactical playbooks expire faster than they can be written. A framework gives you a way to think rather than a way to do, which is the only kind of guidance that holds up when the underlying conditions keep shifting.

What follows is every named framework that came off the LMA 2026 stage that legal marketers should know about. Use them, adapt them, and give credit to the speakers who built them.

1. The Curiosity Compass and Applied Curiosity Method

Session: “Applied Curiosity: The Hidden Power Behind Breakthrough Ideas” (Opening General Session Keynote) 

Speaker: Carla Johnson, author of “Rethink Innovation” and nine other books

In Monday evening’s opening keynote, Carla Johnson divided the work of strategic thinking into four zones laid out like a compass: efficiency, execution, discovery, and imagination.

Efficiency and execution are where AI is your best friend. AI can produce more output faster, more reliably, and more cheaply. The competitive advantage in those zones is shrinking by the week.

Discovery and imagination are where humans still drive value. The imagination zone in particular, where “what if” meets long-term vision, is where Carla argued legal marketers need to spend more time if they want to be the team that drives strategy rather than executes it.

Her three-step Applied Curiosity Method is the tactical companion to the compass:

1. Sit with the problem (resist the urge to jump to solutions)
2. Dive down the rabbit hole (treat tangents as invitations, not distractions)
3. Swap hats (look at the problem from your client’s, your vendor’s, and three different partners’ perspectives)

The frame to remember: 88 percent of executives expect the pace of change to keep accelerating, but 80 percent don’t believe their people can keep up. Curiosity is the gap-closer.

2. The Three Principles of Transformative Leadership

Session: “Transformative Leadership: Succeeding in Difficult Environments” (Tuesday General Session Keynote, sponsored by Litera) 

Speaker: Cassi Chandler, former Assistant Director at the FBI and former enterprise risk compliance leader at Bank of America

Cassi Chandler spent nearly 24 years at the FBI, where she became its first African American Special Agent and Assistant Director and its first female National Spokesperson and Director of Public Affairs. 

Her framework for leading in chaos has three principles:

1. Know your power (center self-awareness as your foundation)
2. Extend your power (use influence to lift others, build networks, and build vision)
3. Embrace the champion within (take a stand and be a servant leader)

The moment that gave us all pause and deep reflection, she called #5minutes. 

She shared that on September 11, 2001, while running the FBI’s Strategic Operations Center, she was completely overwhelmed with work and went the entire day without calling her family. Her 11-year-old son was the last child left at school, certain his parents had been killed at the FBI building. Her conversation with him nearly broke our hearts as she shared she had checked in with everyone but her people. 

The principle she pulled from that day: nothing in the work is more important than the five minutes it takes to check in with the people who matter to you. Transformative leadership prioritizes you, too.

3. The Five Pillars of AI Visibility

Session: “The Five Pillars of AI Visibility: A Framework for Being Found, Not Ignored” 

Speakers: Robyn Addis, CRO at 9Sail; Joseph Giovannoli, CEO at 9Sail

The most tactically useful breakout of the conference came from Robyn Addis and Joe Giovannoli of 9Sail, who laid out the five pillars firms need to address to show up in AI-generated answers:

1. Authority architecture (entity recognition, schema markup, EEAT)
2. Structured content (designed for AI to parse, not just for humans to read)
3. Citation-worthy insights (depth that generative engines actually quote)
4. Multi-platform presence (visibility across the surfaces AI pulls from)
5. Technical infrastructure (the foundation underneath everything else)

The opening anecdote of their session is the one to use when you need to make the case to a partner. A Philadelphia CMO told them her firm lost a client because their attorneys did not appear in an AI-generated response and a competitor did. The line that anchors the framework: good SEO is good Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). 

Major takeaway for us: You don’t need to throw out your search foundation; instead, build the rest of the pillars on top of it.

Their take-home action: build a simple AI monitoring log of 10 to 15 queries that matter to your firm, and check whether you appear. For every query where a competitor shows up and you don’t, ask the AI engine why, and use the answer as your content roadmap.

4. The Four-Bucket AI Value Framework

Session: “Demystifying Legal Operations for Marketing: How Firms Can Work With and Procure Corporate Legal Services” 

Panel: Charles Spoor, CEO at Latitude Legal; Kimberly Bell, Director of Innovation at American Express; Kara Kepler, Legal Innovation Partner at Harvey); Mike Haven, Global Head of Legal Operations at Meta

The Tuesday afternoon legal operations panel brought together four perspectives on how in-house teams now buy legal services. Mike Haven’s contribution was the framework that should travel.

He shared the four-bucket model he uses to evaluate AI investments at Meta:

1. Deflection (work that never reaches legal at all)
2. Outside counsel avoidance (work kept in-house instead of going outside)
3. Internal opex reduction (less internal cost, headcount, or budget)
4. New capabilities (things you couldn’t do before but now can)

His standard: if an AI use case isn’t doing one of those four things, it’s useless. This framework belongs in every conversation between marketing and IT about which tools deserve a budget. It’s also the lens in-house buyers are increasingly using on the firms they hire.

The full panel reinforced a complementary point: AI is now being applied on both sides of the firm-client relationship, with firms using it to prepare proposals and in-house teams using it to evaluate them. The right point for humans to add value in this stack is the open question.

5. The Donkey Kong Method (and Cialdini’s Three Levers)

Session: “Change Management + Lawyers: Why Trying to Persuade a Persuader Doesn’t Work” 

Speaker: Julia Montgomery, Director of Practice Enablement at King & Spalding

Julia Montgomery has spent 30 years in legal and 15 of those specifically in change management. Her Wednesday session offered two interlocking frameworks worth taking home.

The first is structural – plan a change initiative the way you’d plan a Donkey Kong run: 

• Start with the easy levels where you have champions and quick wins. 
• Build a base of social proof. 
• Save the hardest, most resistant senior partners for the final boss battle, when you have an army of internal advocates behind you. 

Most firms get this exactly backward by trying to win over the most resistant person first.

The second is tactical, drawn from Robert Cialdini’s work on indirect social influence. Three levers work especially well on lawyers:

1. Social proof (“Lawyers like me are using this”)
2. Scarcity (“This is limited; not everyone gets in”)
3. Reciprocity (“I went out of my way for you, here’s what I’d ask in return”)

Her broader argument: modern change management for legal is more behavioral psychology than process methodology. 

The certifications still matter, but they aren’t enough on their own anymore. The Caliper Profile data she cited is the receipt: lawyers consistently score outlier results on seven of 21 behavioral traits, including skepticism. They are different. The change playbook has to be different, too.

6. The Inverted Funnel and the Systems Question

Session: “Navigating Transforming Landscapes: Building Client Success with DEI” 

Speakers: Gia Altreche, Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Manatt; Sona Spencer, Chief Legal Talent Officer at Troutman Pepper Locke

In the Tuesday session on building client success with DEI, Gia Altreche and Sona Spencer offered a reframing that also serves as a working framework for any client development function.

Stop running the traditional sales funnel that focuses on volume at the top. Invert it. Look down through the funnel as if you’re standing in the client’s shoes. Build a client-centric ecosystem of connection, brand, and trust. The few clients you end up with should be the result of intentional design, not whatever survived the volume game.

Their working diagnostic question, which belongs on every legal marketer’s whiteboard: how are our systems either including or excluding people? Apply it to RFP timelines, team selection criteria, award submission processes, and succession planning. A checklist is a system. A standard is a system. Most exclusion happens through systems no one questioned.

7. The Four Themes of Innovation from the Inside

Session: “Innovating from the Inside: How Legal Marketers Drive Firmwide Transformation” 

Speakers: Kate Cain, Chief Knowledge Innovation Officer at Sheppard; Kelly MacKinnon, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Gibson Dunn; Cindy Bare, Chief Data and Innovation Officer at Frost Brown Todd

The closing Wednesday panel structured their advice into four themes that function as career guidance for any legal marketer trying to drive transformation from within:

1. Embrace the adventure (career paths are non-linear; the loops are the point)
2. Make friends (cross-functional relationships are the key)
3. Be curious (ask questions in a way that earns trust, not eye-rolls)
4. Invest with intent (small wins beat big launches; pilot programs beat press releases)

The closing line that should travel, from Kelly MacKinnon: “We are not saving lives, and we are not producing live television. Find the fun, because it’s infectious.”

What to do with all of them

Pick one.

The temptation when you come back from a conference is to try to use everything. But that’s how nothing gets used. 

The frameworks above each solve a different problem. Diagnose which one your firm needs most this quarter. Make it the lens you carry into your next leadership meeting. Earn one win before introducing the next. The reason frameworks won LMA 2026 is the same reason they’ll keep winning: the answers are changing too fast to memorize. Better thinking is the only durable advantage.