Bio

Cristina Villasante is a partner in the TMT area of ECIJA and has more than 10 years of experience in intellectual property, technology contracting, digital services and information technologies. She has participated in advising on digital transformation projects in companies in all economic sectors. She is an expert in the negotiation and preparation of all types of contracts, in particular technological contracts, software licenses, implementation of systems or infrastructures and their exploitation. She has extensive experience in the management of intangible assets of companies and information management.

In addition, she has coordinated at the Firm a practice group dedicated to blockchain and distributed registry technologies, leading some of the most relevant operations that have taken place in the sector. Villasante joined ECIJA in 2018, after his previous stint at firms such as Eversheds, PwC and Accenture. As for teaching work, she is the director of the Center for Legal Innovation of the Camilo José Cela University and Second Vice President of the Spanish Association of Entertainment Law (Denae), as well as a professor of the Master of Intellectual Property at Icade.

Cristina is specifically an occasional speaker at specialized forums and business schools such as The Valley, IE or Blockchain Intelligence Law Institute. Villasante has participated in different academic articles related to his areas of knowledge. Collaborator in the collection “Actuality” of New Technologies by Tirant Lo Blanch and the Memento of New Technologies 2020-2021 by Francis Lefebvre. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

Spreading knowledge through different publications, workshops and conference regarding what is legal tech and the trends in the legal market – Being part of ECIJA’s legaltech team called “ECIJA Tech”, which is a new business branch that helps clients to digitize their legal departments. ECIJA Tech is a legaltech and cybersecurity one-stop-shop, which is capable of identifying the client’s pain points, mapping out the market in order to identify all legaltech tools available and give advice to the client of these tools implementation or ad hoc development of this technology according to the client’s needs. ECIJA Tech was born with the purpose of being the tech solution developed by and for lawyers, where Cristina Villasante has been the connection nexus between clients, lawyers and developers of these legaltech tools. Thus, Cristina Villasante has been part of the following legaltech developments: 1. Court hearings automatic transcription; 2. Secure channels for NDAs; 3. Scripts for machine translation; 4. Clause manager: a repository of contractual stipulations that allows having a search engine in the word processor itself; 5. IPBlock, test on blockchain: a management system for intellectual property rights; 6. Digital analysis of Spanish Agency for Data Protection resolutions; 7. Smart Box Negotation: a Saas solution that allows the management of agreement negotiation processes between two or more parties, controlling the flow of contract versions.

Bio

Carissa Schiller is the Legal Technology Advisor to the Global Financial Markets practice at Clifford Chance’s London office, bringing her previous experience in the legal tech industry to this magic circle firm. 

Carissa focuses on the adoption of the firm’s tech stack by designing tech-driven processes that are now embedded within the finance practice. She also pioneers the use of new tools and designs bespoke technology solutions to enhance the delivery of complex matters.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Carissa plays a key role in bridging the gap between IT teams and lawyers. She seamlessly integrates cutting edge technology within Clifford Chance lawyer’s everyday workflow. Carissa is able to do this by demonstrating clear benefits of solutions to both the firm and their clients and ensuring that technology is consistently delivered in a user-friendly way that is accessible to all lawyers.

Bio

Sarah Mack leads PwC NewLaw’s commercial partnerships with Legal Tech companies and assesses technology solutions that support the delivery of NewLaw client services. She previously established and led PwC UK’s first Legal Technology Scale-up programme and advised on the programme this year. The programme helps innovative fast-growing startups scale their business through expert masterclasses and connections with PwC’s global network and corporate decision-makers.

Sarah is a qualified Chartered Accountant and prior to her Legal Tech experience, led the implementation of a workflow product developed in Alteryx, automating tax analysis for client’s tax reporting requirements.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Sarah takes care of the development of internal business cases for internal pilots of new technology and commercial partnerships with Legal Tech providers. Through the Scale program, PwC has worked with 15 Legal Tech scale-up companies. Successful commercial outcomes for these businesses include paid pilots with PwC network, introductions to client networks, and securing follow-on rounds of fundraising.

Sarah has an understanding of the Legal Tech market, pain points, and solutions. She regularly shares knowledge with the PwC network about the maturity of the Legal Tech market, categories of Legal Tech, and key areas of focus for transformation within in-house legal departments. She also feeds her expertise into Legal Tech startups providing industry feedback through leading demos and discussions. This supports their growth/ helps them to pivot their product/service to align with industry demands.

Sarah has nurtured PwC’s relationship with the innovation ecosystem for Legal Tech, including start-ups, accelerators, funds, and supporting large organizations. She also supported the planning and delivery of PwC’s General Counsel Summit in Nov 2019, which showcased technology solutions to 60+ client attendees.

Sarah has a growing interest in Access to Justice use cases and is currently exploring how technology solutions can support the advancement of this impact industry, this includes understanding alternative commercial models for for-profit technology companies.

Bio

Marion Schumacher has been working as a partner secretary at Taylor Wessing Partnerschaftsgesellschaft mbB in Düsseldorf for almost 10 years. There she works in the Practice Area “Employment, Pensions & Mobility. As a certified legal specialist and prospective Bachelor of Laws, she manages the organization on a daily basis under legal and office management aspects and pushes the digitization of the Practice Area. During her training as a paralegal and notary’s assistant in Essen at that time, Marion was still using a typewriter. Just in 1999 the first computer moved in. Unimaginable in today’s digital working world 4.0.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Her know-how from years of legal assistance and her passion for new IT solutions help her to understand digital structures and to integrate them into her daily work sustainably and efficiently in the following. In doing so, she innovatively pursues the realization of a uniform digital structure for one of the largest departments in labour law at Taylor Wessing. As an interface between the team and IT, she works out solutions to problems and implements the knowledge gained in her strategic planning. She is committed to the further development of the IT infrastructure and already uses several tools developed by TW Legal Tech (a law firm start-up specialized in legal tech for companies) in her daily work.

Bio

Wendy is Innovation Manager at the Legal Tech Studio of ARAG SE NL. Her background is in Industrial Design Engineering at the University of Technology in Delft and she completed OneMBA at the Rotterdam School of Management in 2016. 

Prior to ARAG she worked for 8 years with high tech startups and SMEs in the healthcare and new energy sector. Her career started at the Strategic Futures group of Philips Design, the Design studio of Philips Electronics, in which she worked on Design and Design Research projects in healthcare, lighting and automotive.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Her background in Design and Technology enables Wendy and her team to support ARAG in the transition process towards becoming a Smart Insurer. Combining her Design skills and the opportunities that Legaltech offers, she develops new services and novel ways of customer interactions. 

Over the span of two years, Wendy initiated 15 experiments and 5 pilot projects with (Legal) tech startups. These experiments and projects bridged the gap between the corporate organization and start-ups and introduced 600+ legal experts to new technologies such as document automation, chatbots and speech recognition software.

In the past year she built up ARAG’s expertise and knowledge on decision tree software as a means to democratize legal knowledge. This enables ARAG to offer ever more people access to legal support through online self-service products.

Bio

 Marianna is an entrepreneur, International lawyer, Aviation law expert and CEO of AirLaw.Pro.

 Marianna graduated with Summa cum laude degree from Kyiv International University and received her LL.M. in University van Amsterdam. Before she started own business, she worked at various international and medium-sized law firms. As an avid traveler herself, Marianna founded AirLaw.Pro following a terrible experience on a disrupted flight. Marianna is creating a data driven, proactive service notifying passengers in real-time. Her goal is to make it as easy as possible for other air passengers to assert their legal rights, right at the moment when they are struggling at the airports.  She’s working tirelessly to raise public awareness of air passengers legal rights.

AirLaw.Pro was awarded as the winner of the leading European LegalTech program HiiL – Innovating Justice challenge in November 2019. Marianna also represented AirLaw.Pro on HiiL`s International Innovating Justice LegalTech conference on February 2020 in The Hague.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Marianna figured out the legal-tech project, able to help millions of passengers experiencing canceled or delayed flight pro-active way. Global aviation statistics are saying more than 20,000,000 passengers a year are affected by disrupted flights. 85% of them are not receiving any money even if they are eligible for compensation. Thanks to Marianna`s innovation, air-passengers can learn their right and receive the step-by-step manual, just in time when they experience problems in airports. It is useful mainly for occasional travelers, non-English speakers with poor language skills. Moreover, some passengers can claim compensation from airlines through Marianna’s company easier than ever before. This year Marianna tested her legal-tech startup and personally helped more than 500 air-passengers manually. She was able to verify her business concept and test minimal valuable product of her company. During this test period, Marianna was able to pay her clients thousands of euros on compensations, even if this industry was strongly affected by COVID-19. 

Bio

Marion is a bar-admitted lawyer at Media Kanzlei, one of Germany’s premier law firms for media and IT law. She advises private clients and companies on questions of copyright law, IT contracts, media and competition law. She has specialized in particular on open licensing and injunctive relief against Content ID and upload filters.

Contribution to Legal Tech

As an experienced IT lawyer, Marion is among the most engaging and outspoken advocates for open technology and knowledge commons in the German legal profession. She argued Germany’s first reported case against the abuse of Content ID, establishing that such abuse of filtering technology can itself be copyright infringement. In addition to her work as an attorney, Marion combines academic research with broader outreach activities that engage a wide general audience. In addition to her research on topics such as intellectual property and open data in film and media studies (DOI 10.17176/20180515-233758), Marion raises public awareness for issues of law and technology through a variety of communication outlets, such as blog posts (e.g., on iRights.info or oabooks.de), televized science slams (e.g., ZKM Open Codes 2018), or panel discussions (e.g., at OTOS, Open Technology for an Open Science). Marion is also a first-generation fellow in Wikimedia’s competitive Free Knowledge Fellowship, as well as a member of the German chapter of Creative Commons, further establishing the societal relevance of her research.

Bio

As Vice President, Client Services, Forensics, and Information Governance for Epiq in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, Bishu sets the strategic vision of consultative service delivery combining technology expertise together with her legal background to ensure that her team can offer as much value and support to clients as possible. 

Bishu is also a champion of diversity and inclusion and is currently the Chair of the D&I Governing Committee at Epiq. She has held the position of Assistant Chapter Director for Women in eDiscovery’s London chapter for 2 years, during which time she participated in numerous events showcasing the remarkable talents and expertise of women within the eDiscovery profession in the UK. She also serves as a mentor both within her organisation and to aspiring legal and eDiscovery professionals in Canada and the UK. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

Bishu began her career in law practice and fell into eDiscovery early in her journey after managing multiple successful and high profile document review projects for large scale litigation and competition investigations. Having worked in a law firm, consulting firm, and now a technology and services provider, she uses her insights and expertise to collaborate with product development and sales in the creation of custom workflows and solutions for law firms and corporate clients. This diversity in experience has solidified her belief in the power of technology to transform the practice of law. Beyond efficiency, advanced analytics offer the gift of meaningful intelligent insights into data sets that can make the difference between a satisfactory deliverable and a decisive claim. 

In her service delivery leadership role, Bishu is responsible for ensuring the successful launch and integration of new products and solutions within Epiq. From machine translation programs to advanced analytics tools and technology that simplifies the DSAR process, Bishu has been involved in the mapping and rolling out of key strategic products within Epiq’s portfolio. In her oversight of Epiq’s managed services business in EMEA, Bishu has also worked collaboratively with clients to facilitate stakeholder engagement discussions that enable the successful implementation of managed services agreements that span the globe.

Bio

Shilpa Bhandarkar is the CEO of Nakhoda, the Linklaters-backed technology start-up. She is responsible for the product portfolio of Nakhoda, including its flagship product ISDA Create, a document automation and digital negotiation platform built in collaboration with the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) to automate and streamline high volumes of sensitive and complex contractual negotiations in the derivatives industry. 

Shilpa started her career as a project finance lawyer but her interest in technology and entrepreneurship led her to found, build and sell a mobile app company as well as grow a legaltech start-up before re-joining Linklaters in 2018 as the Global Head of Innovation. She sits on the firm’s Innovation Steering Group which is responsible for the firm’s strategic approach to Innovation and Efficiency. She was listed as a leading ‘Disruptor’ in The Lawyer Hot 100, 2019 and an ‘Individual winner’ of the ‘TechWomen100 Awards, 2018’.    

Contribution to Legal Tech

Shilpa is a self-proclaimed non-techie who nonetheless believes in the power of technology to generate value – whether that is by giving private practice lawyers a significantly different experience of the profession than was common a decade ago, delivering a world-class service to clients in new ways that increase quality and efficiency whilst reducing risk, or leveraging Nakhoda’s products to unlock valuable data in legal contracts to drive better business decisions across organisations.  

This belief is reflected in her collaborative and user-centric approach to technology development. Some examples of recent work that reflect this approach include: 

Most recently, Shilpa has taken over leadership of Nakhoda, a Linklaters backed technology start-up that collaborates with clients to build bespoke tech solutions for lawyers who work alongside them to grow their businesses’.  

Outside of work, she invests in start-ups and mentors founders and young professionals interested in LegalTech, including via the LegalGeek Women in LawTech programme. 

In summary, even though responsible for a number of technology products, Shilpa’s contribution to LegalTech is most impressive in her approach to the space – bringing together various members of the Legaltech community into collaborative projects and initiatives so that we learn from each other, maximise our collective expertise and drive the legal industry forward together, for everyone. 

Bio

Katharina is a senior associate at the headquarters of Luther in Cologne. She advises clients on all matters concerning civil law litigation and alternative dispute resolution. Besides complex individual disputes, she is experienced in the handling of mass claims, including the development of Legal Tech solutions. Before joining Luther as a lawyer in 2017, Katharina worked inter alia as deputy manager for the German Chinese Business Association (DCW). She holds a degree in law as well as Chinese regional studies and has worked and studied inter alia in Beijing, Taiwan, Manila and New York.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Katharina, together with the in-house IT service team and her colleagues from the Complex Disputes team, has developed a solution for handling mass claims. It is a database that can be used to control the content and strategy of the proceedings, eliminating the need for additional platforms, calendars, etc. Each step of the proceeding is secured automatically: necessary and possibly forgotten steps are recognized in time and the caseworker or, if necessary, a third party is reminded. Comprehensive monitoring is also guaranteed. comprehensive reports can be created automatically, with only a few input details that are secured by automated data control and data quality. Deadline management runs via the same tool.

Even the coordination of the facts with the client is largely automatic, whereby only necessary questions are recognized and bundled. Personnel management also runs via the tool. Personnel data, absences and conflicting appointments are recorded and time-consuming coordination for the allocation of tasks is no longer necessary. Time recording, billing, and invoicing run automatically. Standardized drafts, letters or emails with the correct recipient and subject can be created and sent automatically. In the future, the tool will provide further great advantages and simplifications for diverse mass proceedings, not only for internal case handling but also for the clients involved in mass claim proceedings.
Luther is currently voted Juve Kazlei of the Year. The jury’s reasoning referred in particular to IT solutions in the management of mass claims.