Not surprisingly, the Ukraine crisis featured strongly in this year's Global Legal Hackathon - billed as the 'world's largest learning laboratory for legal industry innovation'.

The hackathon idea, originating in the cyberpunk movement of the 1990s, is for ad-hoc teams of enthusiasts and experts to blitz the development of new software against a deadline on a diet of pizza and energy drinks. With the issue of access to justice crying out for technology-based solutions, law has become a focus for bright ideas. Last weekend saw the opening heat of the fourth global event, held in 100 cities around the world.  

Obiter caught up with the action in Manchester, where a heat was hosted by The University of Manchester and sponsored by Bruntwood property group and international firm Addleshaw Goddard. 

Four teams emerged from a multi-skilled assembly of lawyers, architects, designers and computer scientists on the Friday night. They raced the clock to turn bright ideas into concepts capable of being demonstrated to a panel of judges on the Sunday. They were:

  • Charify.  A platform to improve trust by helping potential donors to validate credible charities and track financial transactions, drawing data from sources such as the Charity Commission and Companies House. 
  • Fastlaw. A system to connect lawyers with pro bono availabiliy to charities - especially smaller ones - in need of assistance, and to log the time spent. 
  • Navigate. An app to connect people in crisis - such as refugees - to first-line legal response, with a triage system to identify more complex queries.  
  • NFDeeds. Applying non-fungible tokens to property deeds allowing property owners to track factors such as sustainability ratings throughout a chain of transactions. 

All four teams met the deadline, and three make it through to the next round:  Navigate (Eversheds Team); Charify - ESG and blockchain stream and Fastlaw. (Trial by Fire) access to justice stream. 

Navigate was designed by Eversheds'  Kirstyn Forward, legal technologist, Sarah Murray, legal service design project manager and Faye Temperley, data visualisation analyst. Remarkably the three, based in separate offices, said they hadn't met before the event. It was a double for the firm, which won the previous Manchester heat, back in 2020. So no pressure on next year's entry...

 

 

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