Bio

Jin is one of the co-founders of the Legal Tech Lab Cologne. She contributes to the extraordinarily successful podcast “Talking Legal Tech”. She’s a law student at the university of cologne and her background, holding a degree in business informatics, qualifies her as one of the most promising young women in legal tech. Besides engaging for the progress of legal tech, Jin works for Prof. Dr. Dr. Frauke Rostalski, where she also reasons about the challenges of digitalization and law.

Contribution to Legal Tech

The Legal Tech Lab Cologne is a student initiative which aims at emphasizing the importance of legal tech for the legal education and improving awareness and knowledge of the students as well as the professionals. Jin is part of the podcast team and works for the Tool-Taskforce, which produces – surprise – tools for legal tech. One of her projects was smart sentencing, a database designed for harmonizing the sentencing practices in Germany. Jin has participated in several interviews for national newspapers, the radio and podcasts, promoting the advantages of digitalization in the legal area. Lately, she won the Legal Tech Summer Challenge by ML Tech and Baker McKenzie.

Bio

Jolanda Rose is the founder of the online-magazines LAWTECHROSE and Digital Humanists. There she writes about digitalization, law, ethics, and innovation besides her law studies. In addition, as CCO, she heads the communication of the NGO “Institute for Internet & the Just Society”. As a working student, she supports KPMG Law at Legal Process & Technology and projects on KPMG’s global technology strategy. She is a mother of two and dedicates her time besides her studies completely to the mentioned topics.

Contribution to Legal Tech

In her online-magazines she makes the developments of the legal tech scene visible, stimulates new discussions about legal innovation, business and education. She also helps to connect science, practice and the public with Digital Humanists by providing a platform for controversial topics that will shape our digital society in the future. Nevertheless, she not only writes about the developments and pursues these topics on a scientific level while still studying, but also contributes to their practical implementation in her jobs as a legal engineer, product owner and working student.

Bio

Helena is a contract strategist and a Proactive Law pioneer. She is Associate Professor of Business Law, University of Vaasa, Finland, and director of Lexpert Ltd. Her research and practice focus on enhancing the functionality, usability, and user experience of contracts.

As the co-leader of the Nordic School of Proactive Law and of the ProActive ThinkTank she works with colleagues and designers to transform contracts from legal instruments to valuable business tools. This includes rewriting and redesigning complex texts using simplification and visualization. She has designed and conducted training on Contract Design, Legal Design, Proactive Contracting, Contractual Risk Management, and related topics around the world. Her mission is to fundamentally change the way contracts and the law are designed, communicated, perceived, and taught. Helena is a Fellow and network leader of World Commerce & Contracting.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Helena has published extensively at the intersection of law, design, and technology. Her research strives to merge human-centered design, proactive law, and legal technology to create contracts that are both human and machine-readable. She is one of the co-authors of the Legal Design Manifesto and one of the co-founders of the Legal Design Alliance. She is the co-creator (with Stefania Passera) of the World Commerce & Contracting’s ‘Contract Design Pattern Library’, an ever-growing collection of contract design patterns – effective, repeatable solutions to commonly occurring usability and understandability problems in contracts.

Bio

Almudena de la Mata is Founder and Managing Partner of Blockchain Intelligence and President of the Blockchain Intelligence Law Institute (BILI). BILI is the first and leading blockchain think and action tank that brings together regulators, lawyers, compliance officers, businesses and civil society to foster the sustainaible development of blockchain technology for social good. It is also the leading training center for lawyers, regulators and compliance in technology.

Almudena holds a PhD from the University of Hamburg, Max-Planck-Institut, BA of Law and business law from ICADE, Business Executive by HEC, Certified Capital Markets, Regulation and Compliance, University of Reading, Certified Coach, RCS London and NLP Practitioner. She speaks five languages.

Almudena has also been a scientific researcher at the Max Planck Institute (Hamburg) and the Center for European Policy Studies-CEPS in Brussels where she was Head of the European Credit Research Institute. University professor, visiting lecturer, and key note speaker since 2000. Specifically Blockchain Lecturer in Blockchain Intelligence Law Institute, the Spanish National Bar, EOI Ministery of Economy, IE University, ESADE University and visiting professor/key note speaker on Blockchain in several events, congresses and universities (San Pablo CEU, Universidad Pontificia Comillas-ICADE, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, among others).

She has supported the growth and internationalization of more than 500 startups through different European acceleration programs and is an ecosystem builder.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Almudena has built an essential bridge between technology and law. She has created a unique ecosystem where lawyers (and regulators) meet techies and businesses in order to understand the risks and opportunities of technology with the ultimate goal to bring value to society. She has created open spaces for solid, critical and constructive dialogue and reflexion.
She uses collaborative tools and methodologies in her Labs.

Almudena has created the first and leading traning in Blockchain for lawyers and compliance officers. In her view this was a condition sine qua non to unleash the full potential of the blockchain technology.
She has developed with success a full palet of tools to open up the public administration to innovative products and visions.

As a University Professor since 2000 (Humboldt University, Hamburg University, EOI-Ministery of Economy and IE University) she has created the first Blockchain Certified Course Legal & Compliance Expert in Blockchain, Smart Contracts, Tokenization and STOs (currently on its 15th edition).

She has been appointed member of the Royal Academy for Jurisprudence and Legislation and Blockchain Expert at “Los 100 de COTEC” by the Foundation COTEC for Innovation; Academic Advisory Board of INATBA and Editorial Board of the British Blockchain Association.

Bio

Dr. Katharina Kaesling, LL.M. Eur., is a Research Coordinator at the international and interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Study “Law as Culture” and habilitation candidate at the University of Bonn. A graduate of the renowned College of Europe, she holds an LL.M. in European Law with a specialization in Intellectual Property Protection. She successfully completed her First Examination in Law in February 2011 and the Second State Examination in July 2017, following her legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court Cologne, with secondments to the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Washington, D.C., Bird&Bird LLP’s department for patent litigation and the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg. Her comparative law doctoral thesis on post-marital responsibility in France and Germany, published 2017, was awarded three awards. As postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Kaesling’s combination of qualifications and research interests have led her to explore data protection, children’s rights as well as intellectual property rights in the process of digitization. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

Katharina has impacted the academic world of law with her integrative approach to children’s rights, data protection and intellectual property. She specifically works on the impact of algorithmic decision making on children’s rights to participation. With her unique set of qualifications, she has brought family lawyers, privacy scholars and data protection and copyright experts as well as representatives of other disciplines including media studies, computer science and philosophy together.

In 2020, she organized an international and interdisciplinary conference on “Digital Transformation in Law&Society: Comparative Perspectives on Families and New Media with Professors Nina Dethloff and Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, University of Bonn. Students of their seminar “Family and Internet”, reflecting the high-level conference’s topics, were specifically invited to the Conference. With her research on children’s capacities and participatory rights in digital contexts, she makes valuable contributions at the interface between law, technology and innovation, which have prompted a number of international interventions in writing, a number of which will be published shortly, and in person, such as at the upcoming 2021 Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference.

Bio

Doruntina Berisha started as a student assistant in 2017 at the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law at the Law School of Vienna. She is studying law and physics at the University of Vienna. In the fall semester 2019 she finished her exchange semester at the Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley (California, USA), where she specialized in IT-, IP and data protection law with a special focus on Artificial Intelligence and Legal Tech. She has published two chapters of a law text book on data protection and an article on IP law.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Doruntina created and hosted the most important online tool at Vienna’s law school for teaching during Covid-19 shutdown. This online platform „Survival Guide“ was built within 24 hours after the shutdown of the universities in Austria and provides guidelines in form of self-made videos, screencasts and text on how to successfully switch to online teaching and digital exams in times of Corona. After a week, more than 260 people (professors, teaching staff) had joined the platform, after a month it was further shared with several universities within and outside of Austria.

During her stay at the Santa Clara Law School in California Doruntina worked for Prof. Colleen V. Chien, leading a legal tech project as part of the „Second Chance Hackathon“ in Silicon Valley. She transformed expungement statutes of the US into if-conditions and provisions of basic Code for computer science students. The main goal was the automatization of the expungement process in the US..

As a student assistant of Prof. Nikolaus Forgó at the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law, Doruntina has also co-developed and managed the course „Legal Research“ which was probably the biggest mandatory online class with over 4000 law students at the University of Vienna. Apart from that she has also organized the Legal Tech Start Up Day in Vienna as well as the Legal Tech Hackathon, which aims to bring together law students and computer science students to develop new legal tech tools.

Bio

Stefania is an all-rounder, with one foot in academia and one in business. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Vaasa, Department of Business Law (Vaasa, Finland), and has earned her doctoral degree from Aalto University (Espoo, Finland). Stefania also runs her one-woman consultancy PasseraDesign, where she helps her clients transform their contracts and policies into user-friendly, effective tools that work for business. With over ten years of experience in the field, her work ranges over information design, service design, human-computer interaction, proactive and preventive law, and legal innovation.

She is a co-founder of the Legal Design Alliance and a co-author of its Legal Design Manifesto. She is also the creator of Legal Design Jam, the first workshop format aimed at innovating legal documents and prototyping hands-on. She has been the first (and so far only) designer awarded Fellow status by World Commerce & Contract for her innovative work on contract design and simplification. 

Stefania has considerable experience as a keynote speaker, facilitator, lecturer, and trainer. She has lectured at prestigious institutions such as Stanford University, Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, KU Leuven, UC Louvain, European University Institute, ESADE Business and Law School, California Western School of Law, and Domus Academy.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Stefania frequently publishes scholarship at the intersection of law, design, and technology. Her empirical dissertation on how visualizations can enhance user comprehension and experience of contracts (and foster better business relationships) is a seminal work in the field of legal design. Her most recent articles investigate the role of design patterns in contracts and privacy notices, as well as theoretical and practical approaches to bring closer human-centered design and legal technology and create contracts that are both human and machine-readable.

Stefania is a passionate advocate for making the complexity of law and technology accessible, intuitive, and human-centered. She collaborates with World Commerce & Contracting on various initiatives focused on contract simplification and standardization, which were shortlisted for the FT Intelligent Business Awards 2019. She is the co-creator (with Helena Haapio) and curator of the WorldCC Contract Design Pattern Library, an ever-growing collection of contract design patterns – effective, repeatable solutions to commonly occurring usability and understandability problems in contracts. She is also a member of the WorldCC Contracting Standards steering group, an initiative that leverages mass contract analytics to distill standard, balanced, and streamlined contract templates and clauses.

Bio

Rachel Rietveld is CEO / head of research and development at ArbeidsmarktResearch UvA BV (ARR), a private company related to the University of Amsterdam. Rachel’s daily activities are at the intersection of law and technology. Her own research is about the use of expert systems and Machine Learning for interpreting open norms in law and with ARR for example, she is creator of the labor-law orientated website magontslag.nl. Here, people find legal expert systems that provide the user-specific information about or, an estimation of their legal position in comprehensible ways. The purpose is to make the law more accessible in innovative ways.

Besides that, she teaches at the University of Amsterdam, as well as at Universities of applied sciences and in (post-academic) courses. Rachel set up her own course for master students, the Legal Tech Lab, where law students learn about the wide scope of Legal Tech, the behind lying techniques and the benefits and pitfalls. Together with companies that act as clients, the students work on their own Legal Tech solution.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Rachel has been Specializing in the field of Legal Tech since 2014 and has been the driving force behind Magontslag.nl. As the CEO and Head of research and development at ArbeidsmarktResearch UvA B.V. (2017-present), she is in a leading role in several projects on improving access to law and justice through Legal Tech. For example, with the Dutch Board of Legal Aid and the University of Western Cape (South-Africa). Rachel also contributes content for study books on Legal Tech and has written several articles about legal tech and the digitilization of law.

Bio

Lili Birnbach studied law in Berlin, Paris, and Beijing and New York. She is currently clerking at the Highest Regional Court of Berlin (Kammergericht) while doing her PhD under the auspices of Prof. Dr. Ignacio Czeguhn (Freie Universität Berlin). Within this framework, Ms. Lili Birnbach is investigating and addressing the development and handling of law through social transformation processes and recently completed a research stay in New York at Fordham University School of Law.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Keith Hardie, Director of Innovation Marketing & Business Development at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP, describes Lili as the “Innovation Unicorn in Germany” and her accolades extend beyond the confines of her workplace. Lili was one of the recipients from all of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany to be awarded the Women of Legal Tech in Germany in 2018.

As a Trainee and Legal Engineer, she developed automated digital contract drafting and created templates and programs that optimized contract creations and due diligence processes, benefiting a world renown law firm. Furthermore, she also supported the firm’s Client Technology Team on an international level in the selection of tools and steps into innovation. Additionally, Lili is the youngest member of the Editorial Board of the journal Recht innovativ (Ri), one of the first professional journals in Germany that deals exclusively with digital progress in the legal sector, the future of law and legal advice itself in the face of ongoing technical innovations.

In this capacity, she has published various articles on the subject of digitization, disruption, and law and is constantly informing herself and her colleagues on the newest developments worldwide. Lili’s efforts have unequivocally enhanced our firm’s productivity across its international branches, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together we were able to implement new technologies that optimize workflows, and cost-effectiveness across European teams.

Bio

After graduating from the Schloss Hansenberg boarding school in 2018, Chiara began her studies in bioinformatics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. In addition to her passion for programming, Chiara became enthusiastic about legal tech shortly after starting her studies, joining the Legal Tech Lab Frankfurt e.V. in 2018. Since 2019 she is the chairwoman of the board of the Legal Tech Lab Frankfurt a.M. e.V. She works as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and the Frankfurt Institute for Applied Sciences.

Contribution to Legal Tech

After one year in the Marketing and Events Team she was elected as chairwoman of the board in December 2019. The Legal Tech Lab is a student initiative that deals with the digitization of law and the combination of law and computer science in a practice-oriented way. In addition to her work on the board of directors, she heads the marketing department and organizes events on current Legal Tech topics. She is responsible for the technically accomplished projects as well as the social media appearances of the association. Furthermore, she participated with a team of the Legal Tech Lab in a Legal Tech Hackathon and won a prize for the best design for the developed tool.