'The Berlin Legal Tech 2017 Hackathon: Retrospective and Future Roadmaps'
While my mind is still trying to grasp the magnitude of the last three days, I feel compelled to share a first glimpse into what happened…
A Legal Hacker, thinking about Problems, Services and Solutions. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
The Berlin Legal Tech 2017 Hackathon: Retrospective and Future Roadmaps
While my mind is still trying to grasp the magnitude of the last three days, I feel compelled to share a first glimpse into what happened here on our blog.
To condense it into one sentence: the Indian goddess that we chose to represent the event, unleashed her full creatively destructive energy.
For two days, more than a hundred Legal Hackers created a unique atmosphere of collaboration and knowledge exchange.
DAY 1 — Wednesday, February 8th
On February 8th a crowd of 100–120 legal hackers gathered for the first hacking.law Legal Tech Hackathon at the Berlin office of our awesome sponsor IOTA Foundation.
After a healthy breakfast, Stephan and me welcomed the gathered crowd and invited them to disperse throughout the office, where we had prepared various rooms according to our three pillars of technology-driven innovation in law: Blockchain, AI and Industrialization.
Our Idea Hacking Process was designed to generate ideas from our legal hackers’ creative input, structure them according to a pre-defined set of categories with the help of the legal engineers present and to yield the spontaneous formation of teams around common ideas, goals and visions.
My friend and partner in crime Gernot Halbleib together with whom I had come up with the specific process design, compared the concept with the self-organized formation of stable molecules based on the attraction of individual atoms.
Legal Engineering done right
Legal Engineers is what we called those participants that are both lawyers and tech-savvy and the same time. Despite the bad rep that lawyers have gained in the IT domain, there is a growing number of such unicorns that are both mastering digital tools and capable of legal reasoning.
The hacking.law community connects lawyers, developers and legal engineers.
To do Legal Engineering right, however, it needs more than just Legal Engineers. According to our vision of how Legal Engineering will unlock new levels of access to justice and the scalability of law itself, a positive digitale future requires the collaboration of Lawyers, who are the domain experts, Developers, who are masters at digital tools and Legal Engineers, who are the translators between the other two.
We were very positively surprised when a survey among our group of participants shortly before the event yielded the following statistics in terms of the self-identified skillset of our participants:
Distribution of self-identified skillset of our Hackathon participants
Idea Hacking
Our Idea Hacking sessions enabled all participants to get into a creative mood. Guided by legal engineers and legal tech pioneers, ideas were categorized, channeled and sharpened.
One of six different rooms around our three pillars of technology-driven innovation in law. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Ideas were collected on huge amounts of paper, which we then plastered all over the beautiful walls of our space.
Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Ultimately though, it were the voices of our legal hackers that guided the idea finding process.
Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Team Building
Repeatedly during the Idea Hacking phase, our legal hackers gathered for idea pitching sessions, both to sharpen their own concepts as well as to inspire others to collaborate further on their idea. Dozens of ideas were pitched, sometimes repeatedly as they evolved.
Philipp pitching his idea which would later become RenoJane and win the Hackathon! Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Our team that flew in from Ukraine that would late become the ConsumeRanger! Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Our American lawyer Stuart Mast pitching his online abitration idea, which would later get a special mention by the jury at our Pitching & Award Ceremony. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Tanya, about to gather one of two big privacy groups that we had at the Hackathon, one of which would win second prize. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Lukas, who got people interested in his idea of rebuilding corporate entities on a Smart Contract basis. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Prototype Hacking
A core tenet of Hackathons is the “getting-your-hands-dirty” part, where you go from idea to prototype. The huge motivation we felt from our participants made it easy to make that jump. According to plan, groups emerged that perfectly mirrored the overall distribution of skillsets: interdisciplinary groups of lawyers, developers and legal engineers gathered around the dozen+ tables we had spread throughout the IOTA Foundation’s Office.
Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Fotos by Merav Maroody.
The space was fully packed, but left enough room to breath. Thanks again to IOTA Foundation for giving us their beautiful office. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Our London Team! Shoutouts to Kimia. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
One of the masterminds behind the scenes that made all of this possible, Natalie Eichler ❤
Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Our Team Building was concluded with each team filling out an idea sheet, that provoked them to rethink and sharpen the outcome of their collaborative work process.
Hauke filling out an idea sheet. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Workshops
In some industries, Hackathons are a well-established concept. Accordingly, Hackathons become more focused on high-stake awards and exposure to media and investors. In our case, it was the very first Hackathon-like event that many of our participants, especially the lawyers, attended. Therefore, it wasn’t that much about competition but rather collaboration.
Based on principles of inclusion and self-organized knowledge-transfer, we offered a set of external stimuli to kickstart the desired processes. On the first day, we offered a set of on-site Bootcamp Prototyping Workshops, that helped our non-technical participants to get some useful guidelines of how to get from idea to prototype.
UX Designer Erasmus Hagen shares basic concepts of UX and UI designs. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Another course held by Gernot Halbleib introduced several hands-on examples of what can be done with leading document automation tools such as XpressDox and Abbyy, two of our Technology Partners. Fittingly, the course introduced basics of algorithmic thinking to lawyers, as well as typical workflows in legal practice to the developers present.
Gernot Halbleib demonstrates how to work and conceptualize processes with document automation tools. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
On the second day, Thursday Februrary 9th, we had a full-day workshop track in a second space, thanks to support from legalBase. You can rewatch the morning sessions on Youtube or watch it right here right now in the embedded video player below:
Overnight Hacking
Our hacking space was open 48hours for our Legal Hackers, complete with free food and drink supplies for 100+ people. Thanks to our sponsors for making this possible!!
Our Legal Hackers used the opportunity and stayed overnight, hacking away on their ideas, prototypes and presentations.
The amazing Schönheitsreparaturklauseln Team, developing a sophisticated algorithm to predict the validity of specific contract clauses. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Make Zeitarbeit great again — our team that unbundled temporary work relationships based on blockchain principles. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Final Pitches & Award Ceremony
Towards the end of the second day, a big bus drove all our Legal Hackers to Ahoy! Berlin, for the final pitches in front of a jury, as well as some after show party with networking, drinks and some good old Berlin techno.
In front of a crowd of roughly 100 people, including a jury of four, comprised of community figures, legal tech entrepreneurs and VCs.
The outcome was simply incredible. Our interdisciplinary teams had managed to build really sophisticated implementations of their ideas in form of apps, websites and function algorithms.
Fotos by Merav Maroody.
The audience was stunned, when a virtual legal secretary suddenly started to speak and organize documents and emails in front of the audience’s eye.
Philipp presenting RenoJane — the virtual legal assistant, with a stunning live product demo. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Our Jury Members, paying close attention to the ideas that are being pitched. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Another team that got a special mention for working out a sophisticated model of how to unbundle three-sided work relationships. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
The Dataprotectionbuddy that won second prize for its very practical use case. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
Our Ukrainian Team that worked all night to present an impressive demo of a chatbot that solves legal problems of consumers at very low cost. Fotos by Merav Maroody.
The Road Ahead
Our first but certainly not last Legal Tech Hackathon was an incredible event — a feeling that was shared by many participants. The positive atmosphere emerging from constructive, thoughtful interactions between more than a hundred like-minded Legal Hackers created a breeding ground for ideas and collaborations that will outlast the two-days for which the often-untapped potential realized itself somewhere in a West-Berlin apartment.
We invite everyone who is inspired by what we do to join our Community.
You can Join our Slack Channel (that link might load a little while)
Or get in touch directly at we.are@hacking.law
We are looking for collaborators world-wide to create many more events like this and people interested in volunteering for various community tasks.
If you’re interested in making your own Legal Tech Hackathon, get in touch with us so we can exchange helpful tipps.
If you’re interested in contributing content to this blog, get in touch via Slack or shoot us a mail
hacking.law podcast | coding the future
We’ve planned a series of podcasts, for which we did filmed many interviews at the Hackathon. Our hacking.law journalist Alice Kohn has led our media team at the event and travelled to various Blockchain hotspots in the world and gathered material from there as well. You can expect two full episodes soon on our hacking.law website.
I guess that is my first retrospective. Looking forward to what’s to come!
By Florian Glatz on February 12, 2017.
Exported from Medium on January 3, 2025.