Bio

Ramona Weber is studying law at the Westfaelische Wilhelms University in Münster, with a focus on international and European law. She is a board member of Europe’s leading student-driven legal tech association recode.law, where she is responsible for the Event Department.. She has interned at various international law firms and public institutions, including the German Parliament. Ramona is the founder of “Up To Us”, a pro-European initiative aimed at raising awareness of the impact the European Union has on its citizens and in the world. Further, she is District President of the Leo Clubs Germany.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Ramona was the project leader of Germany’s first Digital Justice Conference with 400+ participants including associates and partners at international law firms, Supreme Court judges, students, researchers and federal politicians. The Conference featured speakers from Canada, California, UK, Austria and Germany, giving them a platform to discuss their ideas to a German audience. As a result, the conference made an impact beyond the local legal tech community by bringing pioneers of legal tech and German authorities closer together, encouraging the local development of digital justice and inspiring students to implement legal innovation in their law studies. This conference, along with other events Ramona has organized has increased public awareness of legal tech.

As part of recode.law, she also engages in the design, the content-creation and the execution of events concerning legal tech.

Bio

Julia is a law student from Münster, Germany. She put a special emphasis on technology and media studies and just finished her first state exam.  Julia has co-founded and is leading Europes biggest student-driven legal tech-association recode.law, which promotes education and enthusiasm for legal tech and legal innovation. Furthermore, she works on public law matters as a student assistant at the KW-Institute (WWU) and is a member of several other non-profit organizations.

Contributions to Legal Tech

recode.law has reached 1000+ students and young professionals by organizing workshops, conferences and various other events. It aims to shape lawyers of the future with a deep understanding in legal tech. 

Julia helped raise recode.law to another level by co-leading its expansion and growth process in several other German cities, recruiting the majority of recode.law- members up to date and spreading awareness about the importance of digitalisation and legal tech. Further, she helped organise educational events and worked in content-creation for recode.law.  

Julia and all the other members contribute voluntary and unpaid hours in addition to their legal studies.

Bio

Madeleine Heuts is a lawyer, founder and CEO of RAKETENSTART, the digital legal department for start-ups, self-employed, and entrepreneurs. She has generated a comprehensive network in the national start-up and legal-tech scene and reaches her listeners with her weekly podcast to awaken her own entrepreneurial spirit and motivate people to self-realization in the form of starting their own business. 

Due to her many years of expertise and her authentic feel for business positioning in the media and public perception, Madeleine also advises various companies and personalities on brand building, online marketing, social media and public relations.

Contributions to Legal Tech

While still being a law student at the University of Bonn, Madeleine found her mission to create innovative and digital access to the law for entrepreneurs when her schoolfriend asked her for help to found his startup. He had neither the legal knowledge he needed nor the financial possibilities to get in touch with a law firm to help him solve his legal issues. Madeleine then quickly realized, she could use the combination of her skills tech & legal to build a bridge between legal expertise and non-lawyers and decided to found RAKETENSTART.

With e-learning courses and legal-tech tools, RAKETENSTART generates the Access to Law for young entrepreneurs, which has hardly existed outside of traditional law firms so far and has made it its goal to expand and rethink access to law for non-lawyers with the help of digital tools. Through many years of experience in online marketing and branding, Madeleine originally combines conservative legal approaches with modern communication media, thus working close to the pulsating digital zeitgeist of the 21st century.

Bio

Laura Kistemaker is co-founder and COO of Justice42. Justice42 is a legal tech company that developed the online divorce platform Uitelkaar.nl. Previously, Laura worked at The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law. There she was involved in Uitelkaar.nl’s predecessor Rechtwijzer and in various other innovative legal projects. 

Contributions to Legal Tech

Laura has been a driving force behind legal tech integration into the justice system, and bringing online dispute resolution to the market for more than six years. Her company has enabled more than 2000 couples in Europe and North America to navigate their divorce in a modern, less burdensome, and less costly way – from the initial stage all the way to the end of formalisation in court. She has been pioneering way ahead of the ODR curve and is a global leading example for any court initiative to integrate technology in their procedures. Laura’s leadership has uniquely led to legal tech with all the right balances: between technology and personal care, between do-it-yourself and professional support, and between standardised technology and tailored services. 

Bio

Antonia completed her studies in Media and Communication Management at the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2019. In her final thesis she dealt with digital transformation and decision making in change management processes. Since 2019/2020 she has been working for the legal-tech company Nominandum where she first underwent training as a certified Scrummaster. Since March 2020, she has been taking on tasks as a product owner. Antonia is co-founder of Nominandum (Founder: Product) together with Max Dancau (Founder: Tech) and Nikolai Klute (Founder: Legal).

Contributions to Legal Tech

Antonia has been taught the theoretical basics of modern working methods during her business-oriented course of studies in Media and Communication Management at the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. Before and parallel to this, she immersed herself early on as a non-lawyer in the working world of modern law firms, where she quickly learned that workflows, digitalization processes and traditional lawyer software are still on a level that other industries have long since left behind. The knowledge she gained there, combined with knowledge of modern management methods, Scrum and agile work processes, has brought her to where she is today.

As Product Owner she is responsible for features and decides on the UX design of the Nominandum legal software. Her software brings modern workflows and a suite of tools to the world of lawyers, with which unprecedented levels of efficiency can be achieved. She and her team live agile work with Scrum, Standups, Sprints, Reviews and Retros. In product development, she has her finger on the pulse of the stakeholders and, together with a small but highly efficient team of developers, designers and entrepreneurs, makes sure that user experience and the efficiency of individual modules of the Nominandum software are more than just empty promises, but make work for paralegals, lawyers and law firm owners more tangible and measurable. Nominandum will enter the market step by step in early 2021.

Bio

Veronika Haberler has been nominated for her achievements in the fields of automated legal research and narrow-AI solutions. Veronika, a pioneer entrepreneur and innovator living in Vienna (Austria), holds university degrees in sociology and cultural management, and she is also a Master of Legal Studies. When some litigation lawyers in her team addressed the pain point of slow manual legal research in 2013, she started the first conceptual designs for what was going to become the multiple award-winning legal tech tool LeReTo. 

Contributions to Legal Tech

With a strong focus on the target group and on user-centered solutions, LeReTo soon began to conquer also the German, Dutch and other markets. What once was a stand-alone online research platform once grew into a powerful technology framework for legal tech: with data visualization, semantic recognition, multi-document analysis and sources from over 35 European legal databases.

Bio

Eva Marie Kürsch is a law student at the University of Cologne, currently in the 8th Semester and exam preparation for her first state examination. Due to her prior experience in different law firms — such as an internship at Linklaters LLP and working as a student assistant at Luther Rechtsanwaltsgesellschaft GmbH — she was able to develop the idea of ReStudy together with her colleagues Su Reiter and Lucas Kulczycki. She is now looking forward to expanding her company in the field of legal tech. 

For this matter, she’s currently learning to code Python to expand her coding skills, which she already acquired while participating at the RoboCup German Open for several years during her school time. Additionally, she works voluntarily at Legal Tech Lab Cologne — a student group at UoC — in the tool development department to improve her tool designing and coding skills.

Contributions to Legal Tech

Through ReStudy, Eva Marie wants to digitalize the work of student assistants and research assistants in the legal field. ReStudy’s goal is for law firms and lawyers to not need student assistants and research assistants to work for them in their firm anymore, by digitalizing their processes and save on time, money, and also workspace. Further, Eva Marie participates in designing legal tech tools at Legal Tech Lab Cologne.