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

Alexandra is a hyperactive and optimistic Paris based lawyer. Mother of three, she is the founder of the innovative law firm SAGAN Avocats specialised in Labour Law and of the legal tech mesindemnités.com that calculates all the legal severances in case of a work contract breach. 

She is a convinced legal designer and a plain language believer, helping legal departments of French big firms to implement legal design methodologies in their day to day practice.

Contribution to Legal Tech

She is driven by her passion to improve access to law and lawyers for everyone. She is a legal revolutionary who strongly believes that law practice needs deep changes through legal design methodologies, which are powerful weapons to reach that goal. 

Very much inspired by the new ways of consuming brought by the digital transformation, she aims to create legal services and products for employers and employees that match with the new needs and requests : simplicity, instantaneity and possible interaction between the consumer and the product or service. 

Through SAGAN Avocats and mesindemnités.com, she offers a new legal user experience based on empathy, client centricity, creativity and high level legal expertise.

Bio

Joanne Anderson is the Chief Product Officer of Clifford Chance Applied Solutions. Jo is responsible for ensuring Clifford Chance develops and maintains products which truly meet client needs. Jo started her career as a lawyer at Mayer Brown International and became a partner there in 2000.

She joined the Practical Law Company in 2005 and established the Product Management function during a time of high growth. Jo worked closely the Technology and Editorial teams and established a culture, processes and systems to bring agility and clarity to product development, putting clients at the center of everything. Jo joined Thomson Reuters following Thomson Reuters’ acquisition of Practical law in 2013, working as the Business Change Lead on a variety of product and platform integration projects. Jo is also a Business Coach, working with senior lawyers.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Joanne took the leap from being a partner at a top international law firm into legal tech back in 2005 on a mission to demystify the practice of law and to be the Steve Jobs for legal tech, making beautiful products that people love to use! She is continuing on that mission at Clifford Chance Applied Solutions creating new products that meet client needs using sophisticated product management techniques and blending these with the firm’s deep legal expertise.

Despite her many years working in Technology teams, she sees her contribution as being on the people-side: being open and curious especially when things go wrong, listening hard to lots of people who know things she doesn’t, telling stories about her experience so others can learn and trusting the team to collaborate to spot solutions (often hiding in plain sight) as is the case with the recent refinements they have made to their award-winning, automated drafting solution, CCDr@ft. 

To Joanne, it is important to remember those less fortunate. She is a huge advocate of designing products for those with disabilities (they tend to work better for everyone) and she is very proud that Clifford Chance Applied Solutions has given free access to their new Data Privacy tool to a number of different charities. Clifford Chance have also recently concluded a pilot collaboration with Coca Cola and Thomson Reuters on a series of webinars to develop legal tech solutions for four charities.

Bio

Laura Fauqueur is a Director for the Masters in Legal Tech of the CEU Institute of Advanced Management, the first onsite Masters fully dedicated to Legaltech taught in Spanish language. Apart from giving lectures, she also works as a consultant in innovation, digital transformation and tech implementation for the legal industry, and as a Service Design facilitator. She is the co-founder of Madrid Legal Hackers.

Laura holds a BA in English and French philology and translation, and a Masters in Conference Interpreting. She started her carrier as a court interpreter. Originally French, Laura has been based in Madrid, Spain, for many years.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Laura has worked within a law firm as a legal translator, then as a marketer, and she understood the legal industry needed to (but didn’t!) embrace technology. She then trained and became a legaltech enabler and evangelist. Before her current positions, Laura co-founded the “Instituto de Innovación Legal” and was an ambassador for the European Legal Tech Association.

Laura was awarded with the European Tech Women 2020 Award – Legaltech category – by the Department of International Trade of the Government of the United Kingdom. 

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.