Bio

Marisa is a Portuguese Lawyer with professional experience and an academic background namely in data protection, mediation, legal management and contract and commercial management. Besides having experience in Portugal as a Lawyer, Marisa worked on Maritime Law, Construction and Logistics across the European Union.

Contribution to Legal Tech

As the Portuguese Ambassador of the European Legal Tech Association –  whilst being headquartered in the Hague – Marisa helped spread legal tech’s discussion across these two countries. As a social entrepreneur, Marisa is one of the Founders of the Inov@Legal(Portuguese Institute of Legal Innovation and Technology) and was the creator of the first Symposium on Legal Innovation in Portugal, which had the participation of Government Officials, Supreme Court Judges, University Professors, Public Prosecutors and Representatives from the Portuguese Bar Association and whose goal was to discuss Technological Innovation in the Justice System.

Besides, Marisa created local chapters of the Legal Hackers organization in Porto and the Hague, thereby establishing a vibrant community of legal thinkers and fostering the discussion around legal tech. Marisa has established herself as one of the leading voices in Portugal regarding legal tech, having also published works related to the subject of legal design and Legal Practice 4.0 in Brazil. Marisa’s participation in ELTA CON 2019 Madrid, in the panel on the future of legal tech, was recognized by her colleagues “as a voice of critical thinking and as having the capacity to contribute to the future of the legal tech industry”. Also, the participation in ELTA CON 2019 of AnabelaPedroso, the Portuguese Secretary of State for Justice, was the result of Marisa’s personal invitation to this highly regarded Public Official.

Marisa was also a speaker in the first official government event “Jornadas de InovaçãonaJustiça” (Conference on Innovation in Justice) that occurred in Lisbon in July 2019, alongside the Minister of Justice, the President of the Portuguese Bar Association, and many other highly regarded participants. With ELTA Portugal, Marisa has also been the connector between the Portuguese-speaking legal communities, namely Brazil.

Bio

Dr. Nadja Harraschain is the founder and CEO of breaking.through and a legal clerk at the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court. Before beginning her legal training as a legal clerk, Nadja completed her Ph.D. thesis on „Multiple Proceedings in Investor-State Dispute Settlement” supervised by Prof. Dr. (em.) Ingeborg Schwenzer, LL.M. In parallel, Nadja founded breaking.through, worked for several renowned international law firms, spent three months as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School in New York and worked as a lecturer for business law at the Administration and Business Academy Freiburg. Until recently, Nadja was also Pre-Moot Director at the Moot Academy. 

During her law studies at Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, Nadja was a scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and worked at the chair of intellectual property law. Nadja is author of numerous publications on legal issues and on gender equality and is regularly invited as a speaker on both topics.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Nadja uses the means of the digitalization to transform the actors in the legal sector. 

As the founder and CEO of breaking.through, Nadja empowers female jurists with career ambitions by providing them with a digital platform full of inspiration and support. Since 2018, breaking.through has published over 100 interviews on its website with outstanding female role models in the field of law on personal questions relating to career in general, career as a woman in particular, and on how to combine having a family with a successful career. In addition, breaking.through connects its community via panel discussions, workshops and a service that gives female jurists the chance to seek advice from a role model. Inspired by its success in Germany, breaking.through launched an additional Swiss chapter in spring 2020.

In her position as Pre-Moot Director at the Moot Academy, Nadja hosted one of the biggest pre-moots in the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Court, the Moot Academy Pre-Moot, for several years. Annually, the virtual pre-moot provides numerous teams worldwide for the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot with the opportunity to improve their pleading skills and connect with other teams around the globe. Since the pre-moot is open to all participants free of charge, it contributes to leveling the playing field between student teams with the resources to participate in non-virtual pre-moots and those teams lacking these resources.

Bio

Ramak Molavi Vasse‘i is a lawyer for digital rights and an expert for innovation law. She is the founder of The Law Technologist, an independent initiative for a humane digitalisation and AI development. Ramak is an academic speaker and guest lecturer at the University of Potsdam and IE Law School in Madrid, where she teaches Legal Tech, Ethics of Technology, Privacy/Digital Rights and Regulation of innovation.

Also being a Policy Advisor (AI Alliance, iRights Lab Thinktank) she develops strategies and practical solutions for shaping the transformation of the digital world. As a Senior Legal Design Thinker, she has been advising the legal department of Deutsche Bahn on innovation and implementation of legal technology since January.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Her interdisciplinary work is dedicated to sustainable and public welfare-oriented technology and innovations.
Ramak’s work brings law and technology together, improving the technical competence of lawyers and citizens on the one side and supporting companies on the other. She advises on the implementation of “Privacy by Design” and “Ethics by Design”, especially in AI-related projects. She is one of the few Legal Tech experts who also focus on the ethical side and sustainable use of Legal Tech.

Ramak regularly publishes on the social impact of digitalisation in general and the use of technology in particular and works in projects such as DaSKITA for the use of technology to support access to law, e.g. by developing tools to improve privacy.

Bio

Kathrin Shahroozi is Co-Founder of the non-profit Legal Tech Initiative. She is a sought-after speaker on innovation and the challenges of digitization in the legal industry in Austria and abroad and develops digitization concepts and strategies. Her focus is on the human factor, especially the next generation. Kathrin Shahroozi studies law at the University of Vienna and works as a Legal Trainee at leading Viennese business law firm Wolf Theiss.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Prior to this, she has already developed and implemented digitization concepts as a chief officer in municipal administration. As part of the so-called Next Generation, it is just as important to her to promote this group through information and further education as it is to encourage dialog between opponents and supporters of digitization.

Kathrin is responsible for the organization and coordination of discussions, think tanks, meetups and workshops on the latest challenges concerning Legal Tech with leading experts from law firms, businesses, politics, civil society, and science 

Bio

Helen Avakyan is a well-known figure in the legal and legal tech communities of Russia. She started her career as an expert in securities law and was instrumental in forming the legal groundwork for a regulated securities market in Russia.

Helen is on all taskforces for each stream of the governmental program for Digital Economy with the Skolkovo competence centers and an expert at the Expert Advisory Board for Improvement of the Financial Market and Banking Sector Regulation and the Expert Board for Digital Economy and Blockchain Technologies with the State Duma. Helen was the Head of the Analytical Department of the Russian  Supreme Commercial Court. She was an ideologist and a manager of the e-justice system implementation project in Russia.

Since 2019 Helen has been a member of the Russian Federal Chamber of Lawyers Council. Since 2018 she has been a member of the Expert Board for Legislative Support of the Securities Market Development with the Russian State Duma’s Committee for the Financial Market. A member of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Committee on Intellectual Property.

Helen is an Active State Counsellor of the Russian Federation, 2nd class. She was awarded the Russian Judicial System honorable charter and is commended by the Court of Intellectual Rights. In 2016, Russian Presidential Commissioner for Entrepreneurs’ Rights Boris Titov awarded a letter of commendation to the Firm for Helen’s persistent “pro bono” efforts in the protection of entrepreneurs’ rights at a session of the Business against Corruption Public Center.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Apart from her instrumental role in the development and implementation of KAD, the electronic filing and case management system of the commercial court system in Russia (which is a crucial infrastructure element for most legaltech solutions in Russia), Elena is managing the design and implementation of a digital collaboration platform for over 70.000 members of the Russian bar. This system will substantially improve the workflow of members of the bar and make legal services more accessible for the general public.

Bio

Since her days at the German Bundestag, Attorney-at-law Dace has been engaged from the early 1990s with legal drafting of laws and teaching legislative drafting to lawyers in different European EU Member States, EU candidate countries, and EU association states as a consultant on behalf of the European Commission. Since then, she has been gaining a broad in-depth overview of the mechanisms and possibilities of how to shape and reform the legal framework of a nation-state by means of supranational law for the benefit of society. She is currently investing her vast experience in her honorary work as the Secretary-General of the European Women Lawyers Association in Brussels. She is admitted to the German and Latvian Bar, with an EU Law Master’s degree (Nancy 2), IT Law Diploma (TU Cologne), Data Engineering & Data Science Certificate (Hasso Plattner Institute).

Contribution to Legal Tech

During her time as Board Member of EWLA her particular emphasis has been for years to influence European legislative initiatives in the area of the Transformation of Society into a Digitised World that simultaneously observe ethical standards. Being a member of the European Artificial Intelligence Alliance and actively contributing to the work of the EU High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence being a spokesperson for women interests, she has continuously made efforts to raise public awareness that the technical processes and coding as well as the selection of data sets need to take gender equality issues into account and to prevent discriminatory outcomes.

Dace L. Luters-Thümmel is also a Member of the Consultative Committee of the common Project of the American Law Institute and European Law Institute “Principles for a Data Economy”. Additionally, she is also engaged on the national German level as Vice-Chairperson of the Working Group “Digitalisation” of the German Women Lawyers Association (djb) that is taking up the new technological developments and phenomena to assesses their impact from a legal and female perspective. In addition, she volunteers as an honorary coach for young founders and IT-startups at Start2Grow.

Bio

After her Legal Studies in Münster and Paris, Nicole moved to Berlin for her Referendariat and completed her Second State Exam and law degree in 2011. Following that, she started working for the German Bar Association.

Contribution to Legal Tech

In 2015, she became a director to take over responsibility for the fields of IT-Law and Digitalisation among other things. Nicole has been in charge of planning the annual German lawyers Meeting 2017 (Deutscher Anwaltstag) that was arranged under the theme “Innovationen und Legal Tech” with the first-ever Startup area for Legal Tech firms on an event with ELTA. Nicole is working with the Legal Tech Task Force within the Bar Association and she is a certified Digital Legal Counsel (BUJ). Within the Association she is thriving to improve the interaction between lawyers and legal techies.

Bio

Isabelle Biallaß is a German judge. She currently works at the Ministry of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia. Her fields of responsibility are European and national e-Justice projects and related legal matters, including AI and Legal Tech. She coordinated the EU-funded project “IRI for Europe” concerning the digital interconnection of insolvency registers and will represent NRW in the European e-Justice project “EXEC II” on behalf of Germany.

She was previously head of the IT-department at the Local Court in Essen and successfully piloted e-Justice use-cases. She spent more than two years at the Higher Regional Court in Düsseldorf as an expert for Legal Information Technology, where she furthered the development of the JUDICA, a case management system in use at civil and criminal courts in NRW.

She also worked as research assistant at a Chair for Civil Law, German and International Trade and Business Law, Media and Information Technology Law in Bochum. She is a member of the executive board of the “Deutscher EDV Gerichtstag e.V.” and responsible for the topics AI and trial by videoconference (§ 128a ZPO).

Contribution to Legal Tech

Isabelle has a long-standing interest in e-Justice and especially promotes the use of AI in Justice while keeping in mind the legal and ethical limitations. She has been part of the efforts to establish the use of the electronic case file and the electronic data exchange in the German justice for years. She also aims to further the electronic exchange of judicial data within the EU.

Isabelle is a frequent speaker on topics such as e-Justice, AI in Justice and Legal Tech. She is the author of publications on IT-Law, e-Justice, AI and Legal Tech since 2006, eg. the chapter on AI and Legal Tech in the “juris-Praxiskommentar zum ERV”.

She has organized several workshops on the use of AI in Justice and Legal Tech. Isabelle supports the German Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJV) with the organization of the e-Justice-conference of the German EU-presidency due to her experience in AI and digital electronic exchange on EU-level. She is a member of several expert groups on e-Justice and Legal Tech on national and EU-level.

Bio

Khira was born in Frankfurt am Main and moved to Cologne in order to attend law school. Growing up with her grandmother for the most time influenced her a lot, which led to her co-founding the “Senioren-Rechtshilfe Köln e.V.” in 2015. She always wants to broaden her horizon which is why — while building the “Senioren-Rechtshilfe Köln e.V.” from scratch — she also did the “Certificate in United States Law”, which she passed with Magna Cum Laude. She also spent a year abroad, studying law and economics at the Università degli Studi di Firenze in Florence, Italy. In the summer of 2020 she passed her first state examination in law.

Contribution to Legal Tech

The main goal of the “SRK” is to provide support for senior citizens, who are overwhelmed by the demands of our now technologized world where oftentimes information about legal help can only be obtained online. Through the voluntary work of law students, SRK functions as an interface regarding these matters, providing free access to those seeking help, for example, by giving initial legal assessments or helping with (official) applications such as legal aid or advance payment of court costs. In doing so, the SRK works together with the city’s senior citizens’ networks, the specialized advisory services of social organizations such as Caritas, and also with properly qualified lawyers.

Since the founding of the association, Khira has been in charge of Legal Services Act (RDG) compliance and public relations. From the beginning of 2019 on, in particular, she built it up and expanded it into a functioning association, almost exclusively through her own work. This meant not only organizing permissions, an office and legal support to meet the requirements of the RDG, but also team motivation alongside her ongoing studies.

Bio

Julia von Buttlar is managing complex administrative offense proceedings at BaFin’s Directorate for Securities Supervision. Her practice includes all aspects of financial markets related to delinquency and achieving better compliance. She provides legal advice and regulatory policy guidance as an enforcement specialist not only in national but also in European and international fora. 

Admitted to the German and New York Bar as attorney-at-law in 2001 she spent her early career as an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton’s Frankfurt office. She holds a doctorate from the Technical University of Darmstadt. She is a demanded public speaker on the subject of enforcement and compliance. In addition, she is a lecturer at the EBS Law School (Wiesbaden).Over the years, she added numerous profound publications in the field of Financial Markets Regulation, lately mostly with relevance to Legal Tech and FinTech.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Julia was working on formulating best practice requirements when dealing with market changes triggered by digitalization. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly being used in a variety of fields, none more so than the financial industry. AI offers great opportunities; it can enable companies to automate manual processes and meet their regulatory requirements at a higher speed with a lower error rate and less effort. Based on fundamental right and ethical principals, she developed key requirements that AI systems should meet in order to be trustworthy and to avoid sanction risks. She is editor of the new NJW Zeitschrift Recht Digital (RdI), among others responsible for FinTech/InsurTech.