Bio

Mariana Hagström is an attorney-at-law and legal tech startup founder who has been practising corporate and information technology law for more than 10 years before the transition from the legal practise to legal tech in 2016. She has been studying law in Tartu and Stockholm Universities, where she obtained a master degree in Information Technology and Law. The decision to make a career turnaround started to evolve from the managing partner position and from the need to find more efficient methods for delivering and packaging legal services for clients with scalable new pricing models.

Since founding Avokaado her mission has been to build a bridge between legal and business operations and make it cost and time efficient for both sides. She has said: “During my career in a law firm, serving the clients and my fellow lawyers in different positions, from young attorney to managing partner, I constantly struggled with inefficiency we had in the whole service delivery cycle. Long hours and weekends were all spent on generating a perfect document. Now my company  helps to generate this perfect document within minutes.”

Contribution to Legal Tech

For the past 4 years, Mariana has been a true legal tech pioneer and evangelist in the Nordics, giving workshops and talks to a wider audience and in the Universities on contract automation, legal tech, and the future of law. With her team she has published several case studies and white-papers on legal innovation and automation and helped to scale the mind shift to efficiency, digitalization, and legal automation among lawyers in law firms and in-house legal teams. She is a product owner and CEO of Avokaado and a driving force of the team to turn the vision and customer feedback into product functionality and features. She has been a mentor and a role model  for the next generation of young female lawyers, mentor and jury member for years for startup accelerator programs and hackathons, events organizers and an active member in the startup community.

Avokaado has helped with legal automation law firms and companies in the Nordics, Baltics, Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg etc. For more effective technology adoption Avokaado  has created a signature pilot program for the law firms with project management, advisory and workshops.

Bio

Julia is a lawyer and entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of Legl, cloud-based software for law firms that drive success in a  digital-first world. She previously founded CrowdJustice, an award-winning platform for giving more access to the legal system. Julia has won the Financial Times’ Legal Innovator of the Year award, Legal Week’s Outstanding Innovator of the Year.  Julia worked as a lawyer at Linklaters, and subsequently led the United Nations’ work on online dispute resolution. Julia studied at the University of Virginia, the University of Oxford, and the London School of Economics. She advocates for change in the sector through technology and also in respect of gender equality.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Julia Salasky is the founder of Legl and CrowdJustice, two values-led lawtechs established to simplify and improve access to legal services. CrowdJustice has helped change the way people fund legal matters; over 500,000 people have raised over £16M to enable thousands of people to get legal advice and representation. Launched in 2019, Legl gives law firms simple, flexible tools to run their business more digitally, driving revenue, reducing opex and – critically – enabling a better client experience. 

Bio

Katarzyna Abramowicz, is a legal adviser with many years of experience in government agencies and in the private sector. She is a former representative of KIRP in Brussels. She is the service co-founder of bilety24.pl, przelewy24.pl, specprawnik.pl, oduslug.pl, specfile.pl and sygnanet.pl

Katarzyna Abramowicz is also a speaker at the largest conferences on legal issues in Poland and new technologies such as the 7th Conference and the National Interoperability Test Electronic Signature CommonSign 2017, Modern Law Firm and Legal Department – data security, document flow and case management, Law Summit, Conference Cyber Security in the Media, LegalTech Poland, international conference CyberSec, Impact Fintech, LegalTech Forum 2020. Winner of StartUp Europe Awards Cyber and Law Category 2017.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Katarzyna provides legaltech services through specprawnik.pl which connects clients with lawyers and is the the largest service in Poland in this area. She is also the CEO of the Cybersecurity legaltech project – SpecFile – which provides a simple one-click data encryption. Through Sygnanet.pl – clients are provided with a secure anonymous channel for reporting abuse in companies (AML/compliance/HR)

Bio

Margarita Sivakova, Co-Founder & CEO of Legal Nodes; a platform for lawyers to work on bigger projects and for businesses to receive legal help seamlessly worldwide. She has graduated with the First-Class Honours in Law from the University of Kent and has completed a Legal Practice Course at the BPP Law School in London. She also had experience in working at various law firms from the multinational corporate law firms to medium-sized law firms and private practices in London. Seeing first-hand how legal market fragmentation, the bureaucracy involved at big law firms as well as the very high barrier to entry to the profession negatively impacts the end-customer and legal professionals, she became passionate about redefining the way the legal market functions today.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Margarita co-founded a legal tech start-up named Legal Nodes – a legal platform that provides full-cycle business legal support through the distributed network of lawyers worldwide. Its mission is twofold: provide freelance lawyers with an alternative model of working online and make it possible for companies to receive holistic legal support at transparent prices. Legal Nodes was among the winners of the Startup Grind Global Ukrainian Delegation in 2019. In September 2019 Legal Nodes won the Start-up Competition at IT Arena, one of the biggest IT conferences and startup competitions in Ukraine. This year they won a $50K Grant from Ukrainian Startup Fund. 

Bio

Rosa Espín is co-CEO and one of the founding partners of Ambar Partners, a disruptive legal firm which provides legal services on a flexible and tech enabled way with on demand high caliber legal talent. Rosa Espín is a lawyer specialized in Regulatory and Compliance with more than 12 years of experience in the legal sector. Throughout her career, Rosa has been selected in the Chambers and Partners ranking within the energy sector, as well as being recommended as Best Lawyer in Litigation. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

In 2020 she participated in the founding of the law firm Ambar Partners, of which she is co-CEO. Ambar has irrupted in the Spanish legal market with a disruptive and innovative model that relies on technology. Rosa Espín has helped to define the company’s technology strategy by partnering with leading companies in the industry implementing technology in machine learning, contract data, event-driven analytics (including M&A, complex litigation and other projects that require document review). In addition, she has designed for Ambar the first Bootcamp in Spain which gathers computer engineers and lawyers in order to develop new models and tools to automatize, digitalize and innovate in the legal sector.

Bio

Magdalena studied law and communication sciences at the University of Passau at the same time and is doing her doctorate at the University of Münster. Even during her studies, she realised that the search for the right employer is not yet digital as it is in other areas. So she founded TalentRocket together with Yacine Coco. TalentRocket is a tech-based HR recruiting solution for special professional groups, such as lawyers. Meanwhile TalentRocket is a leading platform for employer branding and recruiting in the legal sector. Together with Yacine Coco, she won numerous awards for her start-up.

Contribution to Legal Tech

With the Co-founding of TalentRocket, Germany’s leading legal career platform, Magdalena disrupted the conservative recruiting in the law-sector. The Company with its HR-Tech-Solution was founded in 2012 and contributes highly to an important component of the Digitalization of the legal market: Using complex matching algorithms, TalentRocket brings together jurists and legal employers efficiently.

Bio

Lilian is the co-founder and managing director of Legal OS. She studied anthropology, mathematics and computer science at Reed college. Before founding Legal OS she worked at the female health startup Clue and the accelerator Axel Springer Plug and Play. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

When Lilian began exploring the Legal tech scene in 2017, she saw a startling flaw with the incumbent offerings. Those products that addressed the pain points of contracts continued to treat contracts as plain text. In 2018 she founded Legal OS. Her startup’s vision is bold but simple: enable lawyers to write digital contracts that are innately machine readable. Subsequently, Lilian has become a thought leader in the field of digital contracts, publishing articles in Rethinking Law and other legal tech publications, and becoming a regular speaker at the Berlin Legal Tech conference.

Bio

Ivona recently finished her PhD on the topic of equity crowdfunding and initial coin offerings at Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She gained practical legal experience in law firms and multinational corporations such as AT&T and Philips. Besides her academic engagement, she co-founded an innovative legal incubator ehvLINC that connects startups, law students and law firms and provides an accessible legal and tax consultancy to startups in the field of intellectual property, business law and tax law. In 2019, Ivona together with Frank Rutgers co-founded Dutch LegalTech startup Suitless that aims to automate basic legal advice on various topics for innovative startups and starting entrepreneurs.  She is also a member of International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA), where she focuses on the regulation of crypto-assets.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Ivona is a cofounder of Suitless, a LegalTech startup that focuses on legal awareness of startups and starting entrepreneurs. Through carefully designed intelligent questionnaires, Suitless creates so-called modules on different legal topics such as intellectual property, data protection, and startup financing that generated fully automated basic legal advice for end users. Currently, Suitless cooperates with the Dutch government to develop an accessible online tool for raising awareness about intellectual property aimed at innovative startups and starting entrepreneurs.

Bio

Pilar Prados is a Spanish lawyer-turned-entrepreneur with 10+ years of experience in international business law practice in the main financial hubs of the world socially committed to making an impact.

Before founding Valencia-based legal tech startup Bounsel, she joined the team of an insurtech startup as Legal Counsel. Previously she worked at Spanish leading law firm Cuatrecasas within its highly competitive Pro-International Advocacy Program (PPAI), reserved for top young lawyers for their excellent academic record and passion for international law practice to rotate within different areas and offices, later pursue an LL.M. and work in a US law firm. After completing her LL.M. at prestigious Ivy League Columbia University, she worked in New York City at highly-specialized international dispute resolution boutique Chaffetz Lindsey and in Brazil as an M&A lawyer.

Contribution to Legal Tech

In 2019 she co-founded Bounsel, the all-in-one contract management platform powered by AI and Big Data that eases the hassles of legal by offering a collaborative workspace where you can do everything related to contracts and keep calm. She is currently leading a powerful R&D project on NLP applied to contracts to detect anomalies and trends and fearlessly works to make contracts more connected, more intelligent and more human. Among her numerous recognitions, she has recently put legal tech at the core of the startup worldwide ecosystem by being finalist of South Summit 2020 with Bounsel among 3800+ startups. She is also developing the social impact initiative Bounsel Academy to close the access to justice gap by applying legal design to contracts to make them easy to understand to everyone with the use of icons, illustrations and simple words.

Since the early days of Bounsel she has been an inspiration for younger generations by combining the development and launching of the MVP with her pregnancy and breast-feeding of her baby. She has lectured at ESADE Law School Tech Tools and Coding for Lawyers and actively serves as co-organizer of Valencia Legal Hackers and is a board member of the Consejo Joven of Fundación Mutualidad Abogacía, its think tank devoted to fostering innovation, entrepreneurship and the use of technology in the legal sector. She recently collaborated in the design of the ultimate initiative #LabEmprendimientoJurídico and is a regular speaker and contributor to the legal tech ecosystem.

Bio

Merete Nygaard was a business lawyer in Norway’s second-largest law firm Wiersholm before she left her career as a business lawyer to form what is today Norway’s leading legal tech company Lawbotics. In 2019, she was named one of Norway’s young leadership talents, amongst Norway’s 50 most prominent women in technology, and one of three finalists in the Female Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2018, Lawbotics was named one of Norway’s most innovative startups. The company has developed Lexolve, a digital in-house lawyer for SMEs powered by AI.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Merete has been a prominent figure within legal tech in Norway since 2017. In 2017 she created Oslo Legal Tech Meetup, a community that today consists of 1600 members meeting frequently to discuss legal tech in Norway, and is now one of the largest legal tech meetups globally. She has also taken the initiative and organized Oslo Legal Hackathon for two consecutive years, attracting 200+ participants to solve problems related to access to justice. 

She has given lectures within the subject of legal tech at universities in Oslo, Bergen, and Tilburg, as well as given presentations at the University of Copenhagen and many more. She is an adviser to the University of Oslo for introducing technology into legal education and invited by the Ministry of Justice to give input on how to improve access to justice within the society.