Bio

Carolin Monsees is a senior associate at Taylor Wessing’s Technology, Media & Telecoms group in Germany and advises clients in the tech industry in data protection and IT law. She focuses on the contractual aspects of international digitalization projects as well as European and international data protection requirements. Being an expert in the field of privacy litigation, she represents clients in court and conducts negotiations with the competent supervisory authorities.

Contribution to Legal Tech

From the implementation of new KI algorithms to the design of legally compliant consumer platforms: Carolin’s advisory and consulting service is to enable digitalization. This work is indispensable without appropriate legal tech tools. Therefore, Carolin uses and further develops Taylor Wessing’s legal tech tools for managing complex contract structures and modules.

Bio

Priya is a corporate finance lawyer by background. She moved into knowledge management in 2009-10 when the legal industry began to grapple with the ‘more for less’ challenge. Inspired by the disruption in other industries, Priya started to focus on (Legal Operations) process design and use of technology to disrupt and innovate the practice of law and future proof the profession.

As a woman charting her own path, Priya believes we need to break down silos between disciplines, increase collaboration and improve diversity and inclusion to accelerate the pace of change in legal. She co-founded She Breaks the Law on International Woman’s Day 2019 – bringing together a community of 1000s of women from across the globe. She Breaks the Law supports and empowers women (#lawbreakers) of all backgrounds and disciplines in their strive for change and a more progressive, collaborative and inclusive legal ecosystem and gives them a safe space to come together and connect, develop, share and create.

Contribution to Legal Tech

A long-standing champion of human-centred design and legal technology, Priya has streamlined hundreds of legal processes and led transformational projects in private practice and corporations (including a Fortune50 and several FTSE100 clients). She is dedicated to helping legal teams adopt new ways of working that are supported by the effective use of technology and automated solutions to enhance the efficiency of legal service delivery and improve user experience. 

In addition to her day job and her work at She Breaks the Law, Priya mentors and advises legal-tech start-ups and entrepreneurs as well as students and young professionals, sharing her industry knowledge to inspire the next generation.

Bio

Lawyer by day and a (future) self-taught programmer by night, Barbora is passionate about the ongoing transformation of the legal profession. She graduated summa cum laude from Charles University, where she set herself up for a big law path, thinking she would spend her professional career drafting, analysing, and pleading. Upon joining Dentons, however, she was quickly swept off her feet by the challenge of bringing innovative approaches to client work, and by the endless possibilities that the legal tech universe has to offer. She hasn’t stopped being excited about it ever since.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Barbora usually acts as a bridge between legal and tech within the broader Dentons innovation strategy. Her goal is to streamline and make implementation easier and innovation more accessible for everyone. Aware of the importance of excitement and positive change management and excitement, Barbora acts as an Innovation Ambassador, which is an internal innovation advocacy group that reaches minds at Dentons all around Europe. In particular, she likes to spark collaboration on client-facing solutions, educate her peers, and facilitate discussion among lawyers, IT and business services professionals. She is honoured and humbled to be recognised among so many inspiring women.

Bio

Maria has 5+ years in consulting IT and digital companies in the spheres of Data Protection, Intellectual Property, Marketing Compliance. She is a 2020 TEDx speaker with a topic on cybersecurity. She studied law at the National Ukrainian University and she is now heading a leading position in AVITAR law firm.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Maria is an ambassador of the Women in Tech (W.Tech) community on legal matters. She regularly consults rising startups free of charge and guides them in their legal path. Also, she is an official consultant in the Governmental organization that is responsible for the digital transformation of Ukraine. (diia.business)

Bio

With a strong history spanning over two decades as a thought leader and doer in the ALSP market, Sinead continues to successfully push the role of technology in innovation and transformation of large highly regulated corporate legal functions. Her leadership on advisory projects at some of the largest and most complex European financial institutions has seen her introduce technology-enabled managed services initiatives, technology-enabled legal spend transformation initiatives, technology-enabled self-service models, and more. Sinead is an achiever that any team would fight tooth and nail to have access to.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Sinéad is an Industry Expert at Morae, providing consulting services around the strategic planning, implementation and delivery of large-scale transformational projects. Sinead also provides coaching/mentoring services to leaders of the legal sector.  
 
Prior to joining Morae, Sinéad was a key player in initiating and developing Herbert Smith Freehills’ Alternative Legal Services Group. In her role as Director of the APAC region, Sinéad was responsible for teams in Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Shanghai and Sydney, and for the delivery of these services to the firm’s clients globally. This included services around commercial litigation, class actions, arbitrations and regulatory investigations across a range of highly regulated sectors. Sinéad also provided non-contentious services to the financial and corporate sectors, utilising a range of applied legal technologies and resourcing models for the delivery of large projects within M&A, Capital Markets and Contract Review. In 2017, Sinéad was honoured to accept, a FT Innovative Lawyers Award for Innovation in New Business and Delivery Models in the Innovation in the Business of Law category on behalf of Herbert Smith Freehills for the opening of the Shanghai and Melbourne hubs in 2016.
 
Sinéad was Associate Director at Janders Dean International. During this time, Sinéad worked with a range of clients in private practice as well as in-house legal teams on a number of strategic projects from designing a new fee-earning practice group for litigation services within a global law firm to advising a global bank’s inhouse team on strategic transformation (including structural, technology and cost-management initiatives). 
 
Sinéad holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from University College Dublin (French & German). She was called to the Bar of England & Wales in 2005 and is a member of the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. Sinéad was admitted to practice in Australia by the Supreme Court of New South Wales and held an Australian practicing certificate for 7 years. Most recently Sinéad completed a Diploma in Personal & Business Coaching at the Irish Lifecoach Institute. She is currently based in Ireland.

Bio

Uzunma leads data privacy projects at several multinational clients, providing advise on European and cross-border data privacy compliance and on wider regulatory matters governing the use of personal information. Uzunma is admitted to the bar in three jurisdictions; New York, Nigeria and is on the Roll of solicitors in the United Kingdom. She advises clients on behavioral advertising, digital analytics, and cookie preference management. Her experience includes leading international data privacy compliance reviews and audits; developing and coordinating rolling privacy compliance programs. 

Uzunma partners with product development and business divisions to craft and implement the privacy design and policies of AI mobile applications in the health, fitness and gaming industry; 

Prior to her work in data privacy, Uzunma worked as an IP attorney, providing advise in the US and Germany with a focus on information technology, e-commerce, licensing and distribution transactions. In her role at a fast-paced tech startup, she created and negotiated software development and licensing agreements for company transactions in the United States and Asia. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

Uzunma is fascinated by mobile app technology and works extensively with businesses in assessing their apps for data protection compliance. She leads data privacy design, implementation and audit projects for several mobile apps in the gaming, nutrition and entertainment industry. 

While she has supported established mobile app providers, Uzunma believes that personal data privacy in technology should not be limited to large scale operations but considered at all levels of the ecosystem. Through her work with small, innovative tech startups and SMEs, she delivers scalable privacy solutions and supports in ongoing compliance of several AI apps, some dealing with children’s data and other special categories of personal data. 

Uzunma spearheaded the European privacy compliance program for a leading data analytics nutrition insights platform. She also supports privacy by design with apps implementing advanced augmented reality, machine learning and Internet of Things. She is currently guiding several mobile app clients through appropriate design and transparency changes in light of the UK Age Appropriate Design Code. 

Uzunma is working on a series of guidelines and workshops targeted at providing women app developers and other typically disadvantaged business owners within the app development landscape with free, practical and easily implementable support required to design and deliver privacy compliant mobile applications to the market. Her vision includes matching these developers and businesses with privacy advisors equipped to provide the needed support in terms of practice experience, language and an understanding of their unique business challenges.

Bio

Larissa is a marketing professional from Germany. She studied Political Science at University of Pisa in Italy with a focus on Anthropology. Currently she is enrolled in a User Experience Design Professional Diploma course and working for a Germany based legal service company specialized in family law.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Larissa is the initiator of Skillerator. Skillerator is the winning solution of 2020 Global Legal Hackathon in Cologne, Germany and currently in the global finals. Solving a major gap in migration law and access to justice, Skillerator proposes a holistic approach to workforce migration allowing small to medium sized businesses and start-ups to recruit internationally easily and reliably. The legally compliant process is mapped out logically and transparently to both applicants and employers. Making the process easy and accessible for everyone is crucial for economic growth in our cosmopolitan society.

Bio

Heidi combines years of experience as a Corporate lawyer with an inquisitive, creative mindset and a solutions-focussed attitude. Moving into legal technology full time in May 2019 she started her legal technology career at DLA Piper at a break-neck pace, quickly becoming a key member of the legal technology team at the International firm (which forms a part of the DLA enhanced legal offering, Law&, delivering solutions beyond legal services to help clients succeed), where she is trusted by lawyers across the globe to deliver tech-based solutions to solve client problems across multiple jurisdictions with her trademark enthusiasm, drive and endless positive energy.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Leading the firm’s fast-evolving international electronic signature solution in response to the unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis, Heidi has worked tirelessly to build the firm’s DocuSign centred solution, keeping deals running and clients happy across the globe in universally difficult circumstances. Thanks to her hard work and dedication to the delivery of a quality tech solution, Heidi and her specialist DocuSign team are now trusted by hundreds of lawyers and clients, driving change by challenging lawyer’s attitudes to the “usual way of completing deals” encouraging greater adoption of legal tech across the UK, Europe and Australia with passion and tenacity.

Heidi has used her expertise in digital signatures to contribute her knowledge into guidance which was put to the Land Registry in the UK to assist with the creation of their digital signature policies. In addition to leading the firm’s work on electronic signatures, Heidi is also part of a change team revolutionising the firm’s approach to M&A by driving the use of machine learning technology Kira, using vRoomPlus technology and deal management tools like thedocyard to drive longer term change and greater efficiencies in the way that lawyers complete M&A deals; and is working with a wider team to develop software to aid in the generation and completion of due diligence reports.

She also forms part of the Working Group on LegalTech Adoption in International Arbitration, a team seeking to effect global change in the arbitration community through the better use of technology, who published in July 2020 the Protocol for Online Case Management in International Arbitration, helping arbitral participants develop efficient, safe and consistent procedures if adopting a shared online case management platform in their arbitration proceedings. Heidi is also an advocate for careers in legal technology, for example, speaking at a cross campus panel event on legal technology for the University of Law, encouraging future generations of legal professionals to develop core skills in technology.

Bio

Lina is the Managing Partner and co-founder of “This is Legal Design”, a consultancy and think tank, specialized in innovation at the intersection of law, design and technology. She founded the company in 2018, convinced that the digital transformation of the legal industry can only succeed if human needs are placed at the centre of every technical development. Lina is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Handelsblatt legal innovation journal “REthinking Law”. As a member of the Legal Policy Advisory Board of the ROLAND-Rechtsschutz-Versicherung-AG, she covers the topic “Digitalization”.

After her 1st Legal State Exam, Lina studied Design Thinking of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute and worked at SAP, where she contributed to designing user-centered software solutions in co-creative formats with customers & users. To get even deeper into legal digitization topics Lina did her legal clerkship i.a. at the Committee on the Digital Agenda (German Parliament), worked as a Customer Success Manager for LAWLIFT GmbH, a legal tech startup for document automation & knowledge management, and became a certified SCRUM Product Owner. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

As a co-founder of “This is Legal Design”  Lina has been pushing the digital transformation of the legal industry, voicing human needs to be placed at the centre of every technical development. Her contribution lies mostly on doing the hard job: working with traditional law firms and legal departments to take the bumpy road of digitalization. Particularly, in her role as Advisor to the Board at the ROLAND legal Insurance, she brings in new perspectives, defending the relevance of legal tech and legal innovation to make the legal system better.

She serves as a model not only to younger generations but also to experienced legal professionals. When she was questioned about the ethical implications of legal tech, she answered: “ethical conduct should not ever mean to put a stop to tech development, because we fear it. Instead, our commitment must be to find the ways tech and law come together to assure the rule of law, access to justice, and social peace”. Lina’s contribution to Legal Tech is beyond particular projects, but her vision of tech, law, and humanity. 

Bio

Claire leads the Customer Success team at Juro – the contract collaboration platform. This means getting hands-on in the implementation of Juro for in-house legal teams. Previously, Claire held senior positions at Auth0 and at Swrve; establishing regional Customer Success teams and delivering world-class support to enterprise customers. Claire specializes in building and growing stellar CS teams in fast-paced environments. She believes that the most successful CS teams make their customers heroes.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Claire is an outstanding example of someone who not only talks about legal tech but actually enables lawyers to adopt legal tech. Where traditional contract management deployments can take up to a year to get going, Claire has got customers to value in an average of 14 days. This takes a keen understanding of customer pain points, a real passion for legal tech and the ability to take legal tech projects away from pure theory and into real applications that people use.

An example of Claire’s contribution has been onboarding and enabling Reach plc. Claire worked with Jane Clemetson, Commercial Legal Director to roll out Juro across the business. Jane says: Claire has been a huge asset to Reach, because although adopting Juro is a huge benefit to the legal department and the business, implementing it has been a bit of a logistic challenge, especially as we were starting from scratch and resources are tight. Without Claire, embarrassed as I am to say it, we might have just given up, excellent though Juro is. And as far as Reach is concerned, it is Claire who is the hero.