Bio

Nadine’s career in LegalTech was born from frustration.  Frustration sparked a passion.  A passionate belief that there must be a more efficient way to practice law and deliver legal services.  The past 20+ years have seen Nadine pursue this passion, across Europe, the US, and ASIA.  She has designed and leads numerous engagement for Fortune 500 companies in re-engineering their Legal and IP functions, embracing digitalization, innovation, change, and transformation.  Nadine is currently Managing Director (EMEA and APAC) for Duff & Phelps Legal Management Consulting team.  

Contribution to Legal Tech

Nadine’s contribution is immense from several aspects. First and foremost, she passionately believes in mentoring the ‘next-generation’ of LegalTech experts, and serves as a true inspirational and visionary leader demonstrating there is an alternative legal career path.  Her passion and energy are infectious. Her time and commitment endless.  That passion and energy are bought to every engagement, every project, every Client.  The passion mixed with her exceptional ability to question the status quo is a skill in itself.  Nadine takes up every opportunity to transform teams and embrace LegalTech.

Nadine’s depth and breadth of knowledge regarding IP-tech and operational efficiency are unmatched.  Always thinking of truly innovative, out-of-the-box solutions to business challenges with a fresh mindset. Nadine has endless ideas and vision for the sector.   

Due to her truly unique comprehension of this sector, skills and knowledge, Nadine frequently serves as an advisor to the LegalTech vendor and investment community in terms of M&A, business and product strategy and market expansion. 

Bio

Stéphanie is passionate about strategic selection and implementation of technology in a way that enables legal functions to offer true value to their stakeholders, and to operate as strategic enablers, rather than cost centres.

At Barclays, Stéphanie was the operations leader which set up a number of collaboration initiatives to help the industry co-create solutions. She led the team that was named “Legal operations team of the year” at the 2019 UK Legal 500 Awards.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Stéphanie’s extensive experience in both law firms and in-house has allowed her to ‘bridge the gap’ between lawyers and technology, helping legal functions to identify true pain points and problems, and to focus on a wider solution before the right tech is implemented. Taking this approach has allowed Stéphanie to support legal functions in choosing the right tool for them – that is one that enables them to support their business in the most effective way.

She is also one of the co-founders of the Bionic Lawyer project; the goal of the project is (humbly) to try and work out how to unlock the undoubted potential within the legal ecosystem.  It explores the three fundamental aspects of our industry; our people, our processes, and our technology. 

Bio

Magdalene is a principal associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and has worked in the firm’s Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and London offices.  She advises clients on a broad range of corporate law matters, with a particular focus on global investigations and corporate compliance.  Most recently, Magdalene was seconded to the firm’s global Innovation team in London.  Prior to joining Freshfields as an associate, Magdalene worked as Deputy Counsel at the ICC International Court of Arbitration in Paris.

Having a passion for lifelong learning, Magdalene holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School, and completed Executive Programmes on artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. 

Contribution to Legal Tech

Magdalene is one of the key members of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s Innovation team and was part of the firm’s (former) Global Associate Innovation Group.  She has led and supported a number of projects in the context of the firm’s digital transformation strategy, including shaping the concept for the Freshfields Berlin Lab at its early stages.  Magdalene has a keen interest in exploring the potential that AI has for the legal services industry beyond generating efficiency gains.  She believes in the importance of open innovation and has therefore initiated and led several collaboration projects with start-ups and academia.  Magdalene has also shared her experience as a speaker at legal tech conferences.  

As her first legal tech project, Magdalene designed an Innovation award-winning customised legal tech solution and led the multi-disciplinary team implementing it.  It took document automation to the next level by combining it with machine learning.  The document automation solution was subsequently used by over 1000 lawyers across a number of major law firms in Germany.  

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer was named the Most Innovative Law Firm in Europe in 2019.  

Bio

Isabel trained as a finance lawyer at Freshfields, then moved from fee earning to design and deliver Freshfields’ Legal Solutions Hub in Manchester, Germany and Hong Kong. She then became Freshfields’ Chief Legal Innovation Officer and Head of Knowledge, shaping the firm’s digital transformation strategy and leading the development of client facing digital products. Isabel established the first Freshfields CX Lab in Berlin.  During her tenure as Chief Legal Innovation Officer, Freshfields was named the Most Innovative Law Firm in Europe in 2019.  Isabel now consults for the legal sector, providing advisory services to law firms, law companies, alternative legal services providers and legal tech start-ups.  

Contribution to Legal Tech

Isabel has spent her 24-year long career consistently pushing the boundaries and driving change in the legal profession.  She was an early adopter of SaaS legal tech solutions into legal workflows, and has advocated widely over the years for a move to the Cloud, for alternative resourcing and for use of legal technology to drive better client outcomes.  Isabel has always been passionate about the importance of the customer experience, and established the Freshfields Berlin Lab to help to foster a customer-focussed approach to digital product development in law.  She actively supports the legal tech community, has informally mentored a number of legal tech start-ups, and sits on the board of a legal software and services start-up.  She believes in the importance of practical, technology-focussed legal education and is a board member of a new, entirely digital College of Legal Practice.  She sits on a number of committees focussed on legal tech adoption, including the City of London Corporation Legal Tech Steering Group and is a mentor for the University of Oxford’s Law and Computer Science Programme.  Isabel was listed as one of the top 10 innovative lawyers in the FT Innovative Lawyers Report for 2018.   

Bio

Karol is a lawyer from Universidad Católica San Pablo, postgraduate studies at PUCP, and she is studying a law degree from the UEM in Madrid,Spain, in order to keep learning law. She works as a Legal Project Leader at eID and also as Legal Designer & Head of Innovation affairs at Lawcus. She develops private consulting and focuses on projects and services with a holistic perspective through her brand Karol Valencia (worldwide and in remote mode) and is the Chief Community Manager at Eye Z Legal (India).

Karol is an active researcher of the Institute for Internet & The Just Society as well for PsychoLAWgy (Behavioral Science & Law), she also works in the #Barpocalypse project for the redesign of legal education in the USA and she is the LATAM ambassador of ILSA (Innovative Law Studies Association), representing Peru. She is also an activist for mental health issues, member of Lawgic Tec Association and Founder of A11Y Peru (Tech & Accesibility). 

As a polyglot, she works on the translation of various technical documents, papers, books, articles, and more when requested or translates simultaneously as an interpreter at events.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Karol hosts many training workshops through innovation in the legal field: legal design, management 3.0, OKR’s & service design. She has written papers in different blogs and also books about AI, also about the intersection of legal, design & tech for The Crypto Legal, Pereko Foundation, her account at Medium, Idealex.press, and Impact Lawyers, The Smart Lawyers, Change The Block, among others.

Karol leads many projects with eID  & Lawcus team (currently work) related to the application of AI for onboarding processes for more than 20 cases. Moreover, she also leads intrapreneurship projects related to digital notaries.

Karol is also a teacher in some master classes worldwide about legal design & legal tech for: Anáhuac, LegalID, IE business school, IE Law school, UPN, among others.

Hacking of law curriculum into law schools in order to redesign it to have more innovative law schools with ILSA Project. She is an external advisor of  Arequipa Legal Hackers & active member of legal hackers Lima. Karol is an active supporter and contributor with the design & redesign of regulation  & public policies of the Peruvian government with SEGDI & PCM.  They are implementing digital transformation policies.

Bio

Catriona is a Partner and Innovation Manager at Weightmans LLP.  She is responsible for the development, delivery, and management of innovation and technology projects, working with internal and external clients to problem solve and foster a culture of innovation. Catriona is regularly interviewed for articles and research projects and frequently presents at legal/innovation conferences on topics related to innovation and future skills. She was shortlisted for ‘rising star’ at the Legal Week Innovation Awards 2019.

Contribution to legal tech

Catriona is passionate about enhancing the innovation skills of trainees and existing lawyers, and over the last 5 years has mentored approximately 50 students via schemes at the University of Liverpool, GROW and Legal and the City (both schemes aimed at increased social mobility and diversity). As part of the UK Legal Tech Association, Catriona has co-founded an innovation sounding board to promote collaboration and mentorship across law firms.  At Weightmans, Catriona has formed a team with a diverse skillset that is comprised of legal engineers, an innovation project manager, and, in a first for Weightmans an innovation trainee solicitor seat. Catriona’s team have been shortlisted finalists in 10 National Innovation awards since 2018, winning the Modern Law Awards 2019 for the ‘best use of technology’ as a result of a collaborative project with Kira Systems (AI software provider) and the Computer Science Department at the University of Liverpool that has also seen 3 peer review academic papers authored on the project.

Bio

Sophie Martinetz is a qualified lawyer with additional business administration training and international management experience in the corporate sector in London and Berlin. She is Managing Partner & Founder of “Future Law”, the independent platform for legal tech dealing with innovation and digitalization.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Sophie is the leading person in legal tech in Austria. She is a major initiator of the development of this sector, founder of Legal Tech Hub Vienna and entrepreneur herself. She is, among other things, editor of the magazine Legal Trigger, operator of the Legal Tech Hub Vienna, and founder of Women in Law.

Bio

Rachel Dabydoyal is Head of Alternative Delivery Solutions at Hogan Lovells.  Rachel has global responsibility for ensuring the delivery of our services in a flexible, efficient, and cost-effective manner, which includes leveraging the latest legal technology.  Rachel joined Hogan Lovells in 2016  to set up their Legal Delivery Centre in Birmingham.  Since then she has also set up the firm’s managed legal services partnership with Cognia Law, Cape Town and the firm’s delivery Center in Phoenix, in collaboration with Elevate.   Rachel also manages the firm’s flexible lawyering platform and Resource Management team in London.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Rachel has been responsible for the implementation of AI contract review solutions, such as Kira, and digitised decision tree tools, such as BRYTER, across the firm globally.  She has trained her teams in the legal delivery centers as well as lawyers across the firm’s practice groups and regions, with a focus on demystifying AI to make it accessible, user friendly, and embedded in the firm’s culture.  

Rachel is a firm believer that, as an industry, it is imperative that we embrace legal tech in order to evolve and deliver the best value for our clients and that through collaboration with others, shared best practices and processes around the use of legal tech make for a stronger and more valuable client offering.  Rachel was a co-architect of the firm’s award-winning LIBOR solution, along with Sharon Lewis (Partner and Head of Financial Institutions Sector Industry Group), and in collaboration with Cognia Law, FTI Consulting and Elevate.  This solution stacks technologies such as Kira, FTI’s Contract Intelligence tool, and Draft Xpress to deliver an end to end solution for clients facing the challenge that is the transition away from LIBOR at the end of 2021. 

The stacked technology model has been repurposed to assist clients with their EBA outsourcing guidelines projects and to meet clients’ contract review and remediation needs arising from the pandemic.  Rachel continues to develop the model, bringing in new technologies as appropriate, to ensure the solution keeps up with latest developments in the legal tech space.  Rachel, along with her colleagues in the firm’s Technology Assisted Review team, are also using the model as the basis of other products they are designing to assist the firm’s clients with some of their largest and most challenging projects.

Bio

Prof. Maryna Steger, EMBA is a business development professional at the German law firm P+P Pöllath + Partners Rechtsanwälte Steuerberater mbB. Her main responsabilities include legal technology and digital marketing. Recently she became a Visiting Professor for Digitisation and Legal Tech at the Belarusian State University in Minsk. After completing her Dual-Degree Executive MBA in January 2019, Maryna will additionally complete a programming course at Harvard University in September 2020. Maryna’s experience in different organisational structures including a corporation, a medium-sized company and a law firm, allowes her to better understand innovation processes and digital change management.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Together with the partners of the law firm, Maryna has been designing the digitization strategy with a focus on digital solutions for clients and optimization of internal processes using contract generators and automated work solutions. Since 2018, she has been a central contact point for legal technology providers and internal employees and has tested and evaluated legal technologies for the management of the law firm. She initiated the events “Frankfurt Legal Tech Talks” as well as the internal Legal Tech training courses “Legal Tech / Tax Hackathon” and “Legal Design & Legal Tech Workshop”.

Her Executive MBA dissertation was the first at Durham University to focus on legal technology and its impact on the legal industry in the EU. She earned her Executive MBA degree with distinction and to start a series of publications about legal technology and innovation management.

Currently, she is in the process of publishing her research paper on innovative behaviour of law firms and their future business models in connection with legal technology in the internationally renowned scientific journal “Technological Forecasting and Social Change”. It will be the first publication ever on legal technology foresight in context of the law firms.

Bio

Silke Graf is Head of Legal Tech & Managed Legal Services at PwC Legal Austria. She was an attorney-at-law and is currently a counsel, focusing full-time on Legal Tech.
Prior to this, Silke worked for a renowned Viennese boutique law firm, where she specialized in intellectual property law, in particular in the areas of unfair competition, trademark law and copyright law. She also gained experience as a product owner as well as a product manager in companies in the field of software development for the legal industry.
In 2018, she was one of the winners of the Women of Legal Tech Award.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Silke takes care of the implementation of software at PwC Legal Austria and of the development of digital business models and products for clients. In doing so, she plans and supports the onboarding in the law firm, leads the project management of the development of digital products and services and develops new applications herself with no-code platforms in close collaboration with all practice areas.

She also supports Christian Oehner (Managing Partner of PwC Legal Austria and Global Legal Tech Leader) in shaping the Global PwC Legal Tech Agenda and supports the network with related inquiries.
Furthermore, Silke is a board-member of the association Disruption Disciples Austria and as such planned, organized and moderated the Vienna Legal Tech ’19, a one-day conference on Legal Tech. She is again working on the program for the next VLT that had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis.
Silke has also been publishing articles on Legal Tech and is a speaker/lecturer on Legal Tech and related topics.