#GLH2019, NYC
Held as part of a robust series of global ‘hacking’ events over three days, from February 22-24, 2019, the #GLH2019 was an outstanding success. The New York City event, co-sponsored by ILTA, had over 125 technologists, lawyers, and innovators gathered to produce pitches and plans for one purpose: “Rapid development of solutions for improving the legal industry world-wide.”
Beginning Friday after the end of the typical 9-5pm working day, and gathering in the Orrick offices, attendees flocked into a sophisticated and vibrant place: perfect for innovation. After opening remarks by the founder of the Global Legal Hackathon, David Fisher, attendees and mentors were tasked to get to work on developing their pitches. A piece of advice that carried through the weekend: “Don’t get caught in the humdrum; focus on how will this impact someone? Go out and talk to people: interview someone. Ask them what they need.”
As the night progressed, and after multiple iterations of pitch ideas that went back and forth among tables and peers, mentors and attendees tried to find their voice for law, and after being encouraged to build something, at long last we came to the pitch presentations; and in total, 15 full pitch presentations were given.
Presented Friday Night Pitches:
- An app that serves as a “motivation system” for legal docs that are updated infrequently.
- Pitch to make an app to access, by address, to municipal laws; described as a social issue.
- Suggestion to use Wiki violence reporting, through third-party app, to use data to show where to go and not to go in US cities. Suggested that this anonymous reporting will also help law enforcement manage crime.
- Presented as an app to help automate the negotiation part of contract life cycle. Planned use of compartmentalized bots, verified via block chain.
- Public policy app presentation: tasked with figuring out what an issue really is for lawyers and public policy. Offers messaging feature and uses, and machine learning.
- A fully woman-led group pitch (#GROWL) presented an idea for a privacy consent app, which, while storing data, can be used via Apple wallet.
- Another fully woman-led group pitch (#GROWL): “What if we can bring students into law firms, using a matching system, and increase student’s chance to practice before they go get a full-time job?”
- A proposal to create an app to identify and search jurisdictional (federal) lines.
- A pitch to use AI to find patentable inventions; DLT for intentional ownership.
- This group posits: “Is there a more efficient or secure way to update IOLTA?” Would use block chain for their process.
- An app to use passive block train to do smart contracts — certain measures are made via process, people don’t have to be in the room to finalize. Won’t lose contracts in order due to timing.
- This pitch presented an end-to-end solution app for the whole legal process.
- Another fully woman-led group pitch (#GROWL): An app that would allow citizens to work with a lawyer who would answer questions, offer template solutions, and links all within an app.
- Another fully woman-led group pitch (#GROWL): Pitch offers to build a scalable solution for access to justice app for developing countries.
- And lastly: this group asks, “How unhappy are lawyers?” There’s only so much you can do: group suggests using an app to remind you of what you need to do to be happy and successful. They want to gamify life needs via app that lends itself to self-care for lawyers.
And with that last pitch, Friday night closed as people rushed to join these newly announced pitch groups, plan for the following day, and close out the evening.
Saturday’s hackathon session opened bright and early at 8am in Times Square at the stunning Microsoft headquarters. All day Saturday, which was solely a planning, building, sourcing, discussion day, teams met on and offsite to continue their pitch work. Teams consolidated, broke apart, and hashed out logistics in their apps, technology, and innovations. Rounding out the day was the knowledge that in under 24 hours, full apps and proposals were coming into fruition and the hackathon attendees, mentors, and volunteers were excited for the final day to come!
Rain met the innovators first thing Sunday morning as they arrived back onsite to Times Square and Microsoft. Throughout the day, groups met and worked frantically, as presentations of their pitches were to begin at 6pm. From the original 15 pitches presented Friday night at Orrick, 10 fully-sourced and planned presentations were to be offered and judged by the panelists assembled by the Global Legal Hackathon. Those presentations would be scored and reviewed by six industry leaders and, before the night was over, a winner would announced.
After dinner, promptly at 6pm, pitch teams assembled and, in five-minute presentation increments, followed by an additional five minutes for judge’s comments and questions, groups would be reviewed. The following ten pitches evolved heavily from Friday’s original 15 pitches and became more robust and serviceable.
Sunday’s final pitches:
Up first was an app “GetSecure” that would help address security worries in the transition of data via physical to digital identity.
The second presentation kicked off with a staggering statistic: 46% of people are their own “self-help” lawyer when confronted with a legal issue. This group’s app aims to make it easier to find a lawyer and will also be paired with a website to help track your legal health.
Next was a presentation with safety in mind: using AI processed crime data, the developers believed they could make a more reliable method of collecting crime data.
Up fourth was a contract app presentation to give off-the-shelf functionality to help standardize an NDA. It would include software/content to make legal documents more automated.
The fifth presentation was from an all-woman group, Femme Legal (#GROWL) which was composed of 8 women from 6 countries. Their presentation covered people coming to a website if “they were legally lost” and they would then be “legally found”. They offered a solutions-based gamification to legal questions.
Next, the sixth presentation of the night was an automated app for “access to justice”; it offered a configurable platform to automate workflows and put law in the end-user’s hands.
“Tiny Toronto” was the seventh presentation of the night and focused a sustainable housing app to help deal with the legality of placing tiny homes on already existing land plots. The idea of the app was to help share legal costs among benefiting homeowners.
Team Watchdog was next up, and they offered a seamless track and monitor document product aimed at tackling legal challenges in tracing and reading the ‘fine print’ in required contracts (like in Apple music or in other terms and required conditions).
Up ninth was Classify: a class action lawsuit app aimed at bridging the gap between what a person has purchased and what could be eligible for a class-action lawsuit. The app would use blockchain to verify purchases and claimants and would be a good business non-compete solution as well.
Last but certainly not least was an interesting presentation called “Gag the Swag”. The women leading this movement don’t have a pitch, per se, but wanted to get the message out to the legal industry that “swag” and plastics are detrimental to the earth and that we, as tech innovators, can do without trinkets and pens and water bottles, and help clean up conferences and the earth.
After the presentations and judges’ questions had concluded, for the next half an hour, the six onsite judges conferred and convened, scoring presentations. After the onsite volunteers tallied the final scores, all presenters, mentors, innovators took their seats and the top three presentations were called out, with Shivam Satyarthi and Bliss Hu’s incredible project, ‘Classify’ coming in first place!
The NYC GLH event was a success and all presenters and presentations came together in just 52 hours! The 2019 Global Legal Hackathon was innovative adventure and we are looking forward, already to the 2020 event!
#innovation #events #womenwholead #peerpowered #authorforILTA