Bio

Mary is the CEO and co-founder of F-LEX, an bespoke online technology platform to connect law students and lawyers to law firms and in house legal teams on a flexible, on demand basis. Mary is passionate about using technology to help law students get their first step into the legal profession, and breaking down barriers to entry. She also wants to help keep more lawyers in the profession by showing and helping people have a more flexible career path. She was named  in Management Today’s 35 under 35 2020 and is an alumnae of the Goldman Sachs 10k Small Businesses Programme. She has been shortlisted for Entrepreneur of the Year at the Women in Law Awards 2020.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Mary and her co-founder designed and built the F-LEX platform – our legal technology company allows us to provide flexible, cost-effective legal resourcing at point in time need to law firms and in-house teams changing the way legal advice is resourced. Mary is an inspiration to the next generation of  legal technologists,  speaking and encouraging thousands of students from around the globe to look at the legaltech route alongside a more traditional legal career. F-LEX have provided paralegals to ThoughtRiver, Juro, IManage, Crafty Counsel and multiple other legaltech companies to highlight the different paths open to law students. She was recently featured in the Legal Technologist Magazine.

Mary has also supported and mentored students through the F-LEX platform, enabling them to get their first step on the ladder with their legal careers, directly helping over 350 students get training contracts, and helping many more indirectly.

F-LEX has won multiple awards for its contribution to the legal sector. It was: – “Winner of the LexisNexis Legal Awards 2018 – Legal Supplier Innovation”, – “Winner of the Legal Business Awards 2018 – Legal Innovator of the Year”, -“Winner of Legal Week Innovation Awards 2019 – Resource Management” -“Runner up of The Lawyer Awards 2019 – Best Technology Product”.

Bio

With a background in Industrial Design Engineering (MSc. Design for Interaction at Delft University of Technology) Liekehas worked as a service/UX designer and researcher in many different contexts. Since 2015 she is focusing on the legal sector to create access to law and access to justice by facilitating lawyers and designers to work together from a Legal Design Thinking perspective. In June 2017 she launched the platform Visual Contracts which offers all the tools and materials to learn how to create visual contracts. With her team she is now developing a visual contract builder that makes visual contracts more accessible to a broader range of people.

Contribution to Legal Tech

With a legal design thinking approach Lieke pushes for legal tech to become more human centered. With her company Visual Contracts she helps change the mindset in legal innovation first towards a more human centered approach before focusing on the automation and technology element of legal tech innovation. This makes the visual contracts builder that her team is working on a unique tool in the legal tech industry, focused on user centricity and understandable legal content first.

Bio

Marie Potel-Saville is the founder and CEO of amurabi, a legal innovation by design agency. She was a lawyer for over 10 years at Magic Circle law firms such as Freshfields and Allen & Overy in London, Brussels and Paris. She then became EMEA General Counsel at Estée Lauder Companies and Chanel, before creating her own legal design agency, Amurabi. After having seen the results of Legal Design in her own legal division, she trained at ENSCI, obtained a Master in Innovation by Design and founded Amurabi to share its potential.
She does not know of any laws which impose legal documents to be incomprehensible. She likes to dive into complexity to make it accessible: simple, never simplistic. She works to bridge the gap between law and its users.
She is a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, Singapore Management University and Assas and contributes to initiatives of social service (access to justice, civic education, prevention).

Contribution to Legal Tech

Marie is one of the pioneers in human-centric legal innovation. While embracing the possibilities of Tech, she does not believe in tech for tech’s sake, but rather as a tool to empower users, after having fixed “real” issues. For example, she leverages all the various design dimensions, and neuroscience, to avoid online blind signing of T&C’s and privacy policies. Her professional thesis “Shaping the law to restore its function” is accessible here. Starting from scratch over 2 years ago, her agency now has a portfolio of over 30 projects, for clients like Google, the Serpentine Galleries, HSBC in Hong Kong and Singapore, the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL), the National School for Judges (ENM), Ubisoft, Airbus, Shiseido, LexisNexis, Moet Hennessy… Beyond individual projects, she’s committed to creating systemic impact and created a user testing lab with Mathilde da Rocha, PHD in cognitive neurosciences, to measure the value of legal design with precise KPI’s and share learnings. She’s particularly happy and proud to have gathered an amazing team of designers, lawyers and neuroscience experts, which is growing and shining.

Bio

Nina Mohadjer combines multinational document review experience with customized client needs and develops workflows in cross-border data transfer. For the last decade, Nina has worked across all areas of the EDRM in various jurisdictions (USA and Europe). She has lead the collection team of one of the largest Swiss banks, set-up a Managed Review Centre in Switzerland and assisted her clients in finding the most effective and efficient workflows for their review needs.

Her cross-border experience as well as her multi-lingual capabilities help managing reviews, as well as organising teams of document reviewers to support her clients.Prior to FTI Consulting, Nina has worked for law firms, financial institutions, as well as global Audit firms. Presently, Nina is obtaining her DBA.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Nina has led consulting and project teams to create solutions in numerous spaces including contract management and due diligence, transaction review for FATCA compliance, regulatory review, PII identification and redaction, and fully managed e-discovery environments for law firms, government agencies and corporations.

Aside from the above, she has initiated the Women in eDiscovery- Germany chapter. It´s presently for all women in the DACH region, regardless of the name. As the start-up founder of this group, she is encouraging women to speak up and is an advocate for womenpower. Additionally she is brining awareness to the Legal Tech field for women.

Bio

With over 20 years’ experience in management consultancy and senior executive roles at EY, Clifford Chance and Integreon, Janet made the decision to create a legacy for the benefit of the future world of law, and its communities, by setting up Cognia. The aim was to integrate the best of the legal industry through a trust-based ecosystem.

Contribution to Legal Tech

As founder and CEO of Cognia Law, Janet has championed the approach at Cognia, which moves beyond the hype, demystifying the plethora of legal tech to deliver a tech-enabled advisory capability and modular platform architecture that transforms legal operations. Seven years on and Cognia has invested in the people, capabilities and systems needed to deliver human-centred, digitised solutions, particularly around AI and digital transformation. Cognia’s team has the market knowledge and capability both to advise clients in their tech selection, as well as to configure and manage customizable solutions through Cognia’s modular platforms, such as contract management and regulatory reform. These include strategic partnering with iManage RAVN, Kira, Onit, and BRYTER.

One of the winners of the 2019 North American FT Innovative Lawyers award for Innovation in Collaboration, Cognia – inspired by Janet – has a reputation for really making a difference and being focused on solving clients’ problems, enabling sustainable change in the legal sector. Janet continues to build on Cognia’s legacy by investing her time, energy and enthusiasm in developing the next generation of legal tech innovators and mentoring with a specific focus on social justice.

Bio

Gina-Maria Tondolo is the founder and creator of LAWRENCE, a legal tech tool for law-firm marketing. Gina has more than 18 years of experience in legal marketing and business development as marketing director and consultant for digitalization. In 2017, she founded her own company to dedicate herself fully to designing legal tech solutions and to create a tool that is taking legal marketing to a whole new level.

Contribution to Legal Tech

The day-to-day challenges of legal marketing are pretty much the same in every law firm:

Requests for tailor-made pitches coming in on a Friday afternoon, due on Monday morning; 50-page-plus submissions already past deadline, and lawyers involved unavailable. Matching references to be put together, which have yet to be found somewhere; Countless emails flying around with different versions of submissions, credentials, and pitches; Endless time spent on organizing emails, versions, final approvals, and sign-off. 

Lawrence was created to simplify and automize these processes and to make the relevant data easily available at the push of a button. Lawrence keeps track of references and referees, compiles the latest entries, and gets the submission ready to go. With technology-driven data, Lawrence connects all the dots between lawyers, their files and references, including their recognitions, rankings, quotes, and awards. Customized pitches can be created on the fly according to the firm’s standards and design. No formatting, no searching for CVs, no copy-pasting, never again old templates. Lawrence uses state-of-the-art data processing technology and offers smart automatization of the core legal marketing areas.

Bio

Astrid Kohlmeier is a lawyer and consultant for legal design & legal tech-based in Munich, combining the disciplines law and design for 15 + years. She studied law at the University of Munich and media design at the Mediadesign Hochschule für Design und Informatik in Munich. Awarded as ‘Women of Legal Tech 2018”, she develops user-centric solutions and legal services with focus on the digitalization and digital transformation and works independently for legal tech companies, law firms, and legal in-house departments.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Astrid uses legal design as an instrument to shape innovative legal products and services in a human centered way. This means to make complex legal content easily accessible and understandable, to simplify legal processes and workflows and to create intuitive legal user experiences. Astrid is also a lecturer for Legal Design, as a member of the executive faculty at the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession. Besides she is co-founder of the non-profit association “Liquid Legal Institute e.V.”, whose goal is to research and promote cross-disciplinary collaboration for common standards and sustainable, technical solutions for the legal market.

Bio

Zoë Andreae is a young entrepreneur in the legal tech space, having taken over the legal software business LECARE in Hamburg at the age of 23. In between her business studies at EBS University, ESADE Business School, the London School of Economics and St. Gallen University, she gained international work experience in venture capital, global venture development, digital and strategy consulting all over the world. Besides her current role as CEO, she actively engages in devising innovative and competitive strategies for her software company by taking courses such as Disruptive Strategy at the Harvard Business School and by enrolling in the one-year Stanford Graduate School of Business LEAD Certificate Program in Corporate Innovation.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Zoë’s main focus in legal tech lies on accelerating the digital transformation of legal departments in Germany through her work at LECARE, where she combines her company’s thirty years of legal technology experience with the latest methods of customer-centricity, legal design, and legal operations to customize legal tech solutions to the individual needs of each legal department. She fosters awareness for legal tech through frequent university lectures and keynotes at industry conferences (across Europe, and among others in New York), as well as through university innovation and collaboration projects.

In 2018, Zoë was named Woman of Legal Tech 2018, for her pioneering Master Thesis on Legal Tech Startups and their Role in the Digital Transformation of the German Legal Industry and her efforts in advancing the legal tech scene in Germany. Moreover, Zoë is a founding member of the Hamburg chapter of the Legal Hackers and is a member of the supervisory board of the Liquid Legal Institute e.V.

Her article about the 2019 Harvard Legal Technology Symposium and its takeaways for the German legal industry was published on the Harvard Law Record. In 2020 her chapter about The Common Legal Platform Revolution was published by Springer in the second volume of Liquid Legal – Towards a Common Legal Platform. Furthermore, she is a contributing author and cooperation partner of the newly launched GoingDigital online legal magazine by Deutscher AnwaltSpiegel with her article on how Covid-19 has accelerated the digital transformation of legal departments in Germany.

Bio

Petra is the co-founder of the Swiss Legal Technology Conference + Hackathon, which was first held in 2017 and the founder of Davos Digital Forum. She is also the co-author of the book ‘Legal Tech’, published in 2018.

Contributions to Legal Tech

Since 2017, the Swiss Legal Tech Conference has taken up the actual Legal Tech topics, particularly in an international context, and presented them to an international group of lawyers. The Davos Digital Forum (‘DDF’) is a think tank that focuses on topics around issues such as Smart Cities and Villages. Legal aspects are always involved (embedded law) and must be considered when dealing with (digitization) issues such as logistics, mobility, participation + communication, education, and new work practices. The forum is an open source event which gives everyone the opportunity to participate in an ever-changing world, were Legal Tech is just one, however important component.

In the future we will only be able to solve problems in mixed teams with different professional and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, Legal Tech should always be considered in this context. Through this approach Petra has won the support and partnership of companies like Google Developers, e-Estonia, the Think Tank of UBS Y and the Hoffman Global Institute for Business & Society to name a few.

Bio

Hanny Vonderstein graduated as MBA with a focus on International Innovation Management at the RWTH Aachen University. Since 2006 she was focused on elaborating and supporting the development of Speech Recognition as a Project manager located in France and Germany. Her main goal these days was to maintain the first gentle steps of legal professionals to digitalize the document creation process. Today she is accompanying the Legal Software Business Unit at Wolters Kluwer all over Europe to implement Legal Tech Tools into the Legal Industry to automize ever-recurring tasks.

Contributions to Legal Tech

Hanny advises, accompanies, and supports legal professionals on their rethinking regarding the usage of technology and their path to digitalization. Since 2014 she is responsible for the Product Management Center “Document Applications” with various software solutions throughout Europe.

In her role as Global Product Manager, she always acts in a solution-oriented manner. Due to her combination of experience of how legal professionals work, the closeness to technology, and the interaction with clients, she brings the ideas of legal practice into the products. She so drives the adaptation continuously to the needs of the legal departments and law firms.