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

Eileen is the Co-Founder & CEO of Entrust GC and its new product Make Law Simple. She has a history of innovation and working in partnership with others.  When she was at Credit Suisse, she was COO of the General Counsel Division EMEA, where she drove digital transformation in procurement and billing through e-billing solution together with law firm partners.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Most recently she co-Founded Entrust GC and launched Make Law Simple which aims to use technology and new business models to make it easy for lawyers to access their next career opportunity and for organisations to be able to find the best legal talent in the most efficient manner.

Bio

During her Master studies in Business Law, Lea founded the Legal Tech Startup, LAWIO. The idea behind the company originated from the heating and hot water being out of order in her student accommodation. As a law student, Lea knew it was possible to help herself and applied for a reduction in rent. But she realized that this requires lots of effort and is a complicated process. Together with her roommate and co-founder, she developed a simple way to report damages in rented accommodation to receive a rent reduction. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

The technology behind LAWIO evaluates user-inputted information and compares it with previous case-law. By means of the extensive database of reference judgements, the system returns a comprehensible and fair result regarding rent reduction rates. 

Since its foundation, Lea’s team has grown considerably and the startup is rapidly bringing new services to the market. Among other things, it now helps tenants who do not get their deposit back.

LAWIO’s vision is to lower the access to justice with the help of technology, because they believe that an initial check to a legal claim is possible without expensive consultation.

Bio

Following qualification as a UK Solicitor and several years as a Law Firm Panel Director at AIG, Caroline has spent the last 10 years working in legal operations and legal technology. She has worked to build a bespoke services package specific to the European market, while still servicing global clients in all areas of legal spend. Her focus in recent years has been the development of proprietary legal technology, bringing her knowledge of the market into the tech she designs.  

Along with her co-founder, she has built a legal services business, whose client list includes global insurers, banks, one of the largest global automotive companies, as well as public sector organisations. These clients were all attracted to the unique tech / services combination offered by Coote O’Grady – the products bring the best of technological capability coupled with Caroline’s comprehensive knowledge of the markets she works in.

Before developing her own technology, Caroline helped to design and implement various legal tech products for global organisations.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Caroline has designed a bespoke invoice review technology, delivering legal invoice review, savings tracking and customer dashboard services (coupled with the services element of the Coote O’Grady invoice review team) – this gives the end-to-end service of data collection, human-led legal invoice review, and savings tracking. She also designed an insurance-specific portal for collection of key insurance law firm metrics, allowing insurers to performance manage their law firms, as well as use the data to drive general efficiencies and savings. This is a first-in-market product and supports a state-of-the-art performance management programme.

These products are in use within global Fortune 500 companies, saving their clients millions in legal spend.

In creating these products, Caroline and her co-founder have ensured they build a diverse and inclusive business, passionate about bringing women into the legal operations and technology space. She has coached and mentored women stepping into this sector, and ensured the business is constantly opening doors to those who have struggled in the past, most commonly working mothers. Gender diversity and equality is a cornerstone of Coote O’Grady, with over 80% of the staff being female. The company allow full flexibility in working patterns, remote working since its creation, and brings an open, family-friendly policy to working life, all while delivering a comprehensive and first-class service to global organisations.              

Coote O’Grady has grown over 60% this year alone, as a result of the services and products delivered by Caroline and the team.

Before this, Caroline was instrumental in the roll-out of various eBilling technology solutions both within the insurance and other sectors. She has niche experience in ensuring these products are tailored to the non-US market particularly.

Bio

Pilar is the CEO and co-founder of Forensic & Security, a company focused on digital Forensic analysis for court cases and cybersecurity. She is also CEO and co-founder of Developers Forensics Tools (DFTools), a company set up for the development of hardware and software solutions for digital forensics to maintain the chain of custody regarding evidence in court cases. Pilar is one of the Chief Security Envoys for ElevenPaths(Telefonica), a recognition to her professional career and helping her to promote cybersecurity and forensics in Spain as an expert witness. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

Pilar is the author of the book “Computer Forensic Analysis Techniques for Professional Judicial Experts” by the 0xWORD publishing house and currently preparing the doctoral thesis in Computer Forensics. Her main contribution is in the investigation of different ways and researching best practices in digital Forensics investigations. Always looking for the preservation and non-manipulation of digital evidence in court cases. Another large contribution of hers is shedding light and divulging know-how in relation to digital Forensic analysis and best practices in the legal sphere through cybersecurity courses and events. 

Her startup DFTools won different awards regarding the research, development and innovation in hardware and software for the digital forensic analyst with guarantees always looking for best practices. 

She teaches classes in different cybersecurity masters`s degrees and also to law enforcement agencies in digital forensics for judicial cases with an expert witness

Bio

Laia is the Co-Founder in 2017 of the alternative legal services provider Lawyers for Projects. Lawyers for Projects helps companies optimize and reduce their legal costs with independent top-tier lawyers and technology. She’s specialized in Competition Law and Commercial Law with a Law degree from the University of Navarra and Executive MBA from ESADE. Laia has developed her professional career during 18 years at PwC. She has extensive in-house experience acquired during a secondment in one of the world leaders in the automotive industry. Firm advocate that the legal sector needs to innovate in order to evolve.

Contribution to Legal Tech

For the past three years Laia has been preaching about legal tech solutions to a wide array of audiences contributing to the implementation and promotion of legal tech amongst in house legal departments.

She has participated as a keynote speaker in legal innovation and legal tech issues in various academic and legal events. She has an extensive knowledge of legal tech solutions in business law and she has been a pioneer in the legal tech and legal ops consultancy in Spain, helping in house legal departments of multinational companies move forward in their digital transformation strategies.