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. 

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