Bio

Christina Blomkvist is a concert organist and business lawyer with more than 15 years of experience practising law. She started coding 30 years ago and as a lawyer, she created applications to handle her own and others’ tedious work. Three years ago, she founded GreenCounsel to automate everything that a human does not need to do and bring in the lawyer where and when he or she brings the most value. When not succeeding to get external funding, she built the SaaS platform on her own and today it is up and running, saving 80 % of lawyers’ time.

Contribution to Legal Tech

On GreenCounsel’s platform, customers start simple or complex legal matters online. The matters are automated from start to end, using building blocks such as information collection, custom automatic analysis, approvals, document generation, e-signing, online meetings as well as a multilingual chatbot with machine learning. The building blocks are configured in a map which a software robot use to push matters forward ensuring that the right person does what he or she should do in the right time. Some of the workflows available are sale and purchase of shares and commercial arbitration.

Christina Blomkvist has also pushed for more equality in the legal industry, both as inhouse counsel initiating the first larger private procurement of legal services with equality as a criteria in Sweden and as a frequent debater on the subject. She is also a frequent debater on the huge investment gap for tech startups.

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. 

Bio

The “fil rouge” of Anna’s activity has always been to make the legal matters engaging, comprehensible, inclusive, easy to actuate. Last but not least, beautiful to read and work on. Legal language has to be partner of the business, not blocker. Anna pursued it having been the General Manager of a legal information publishing company in Italy which has deeply innovated the industry. She had been leading it since its real beginnings (they were four, all-around a desk) for more than twenty years, affirming in the industry, for example, very clear and straight to the point language, shorter time to get valuable solutions, a new way to use communication and social media in the legal services landscape. Anna is still pursuing it in these recent years with still more focus on legal design, human-centered approach, and client centricity, especially when regarding tech adoption and legal procedures in the startup ecosystem, by mentoring startups and young legal innovators, lecturing about these topics and participating to the works of legal innovators groups like #makelawbetter.org

Contribution to Legal Tech

Anna has always put the focus on the humans that have to use the technology, so she has always been acting to improve the environment and training of people to get the best from their tools to foster their goals. This has been mainly concentrated in effectively structuring legal information, with plain language and logic structure, which helps to understand legal contents and their use by technology tools. Adding to this, legal design concepts and visuals to make legal information engaging and interesting. With a special attitude to coach people to think out of the usual schemes about how to create value from legal information and share it, also building bridges among competences, experiences and cultures.

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.