Bio

Serena is a Public International Law specialist from Italy. She has experience in international advocacy and legal research, with particular focus on refugee issues. She first joined European Lawyers in Lesvos in 2018 as a legal assistant.

Contribution to Legal Tech

Since 2019 she coordinates the Lesvos team as Project Officer. As part of the role and together with her colleague Anna Graff, she set up and implements BRYTER’s legal tech tool, which allows the organisation to be more efficient and increase its ability to provide legal support to more refugees.

ELIL is an NGO providing free, independent legal assistance to asylum seekers on the Greek islands of Lesvos and Samos. The organisation is committed to upholding the rule of law, protecting human rights and ensuring the asylum procedure is fair, efficient and robust. 

In Serena’s role as Project Officer, she set up the BRYTER app, which facilitates the collection of data and helps to streamline the legal registration process, and implements and trains the legal teams on Samos and Lesvos to use it and to appreciate its significant benefits. As a result, the organisation has noted a significant improvement in its operational ability, increasing efficiency at a time when many services were restricted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Given the ongoing challenges of the context, Anna and Serena are continuously working on new tools to further improve ELIL’s legal services and support asylum seekers on the Greek islands.

Bio

Anna-Lena von Hodenburg is a trained television journalist and has worked in news reporting for RTL and NDR. She has been a part of Compact e.V. where she was responsible for campaigns against racism and digital violence. In 2018, she cofounded HateAid, the only counselling centre in Germany. HateAid exclusively supports victims of digital violence and finances their civil court cases.

Contributions to Legal Tech

Through HateAid, Anna-Lena helps victims take civil action against digital violence such as insults, threats or defamation on the internet, where law enforcement has been shamingly scarce. In appropriate cases, HateAid covers the costs of legal advice, representation and even proceedings. From the start, HateAid has been working to develop in-house legal tech solutions to maximise cases and help as many victims as possible.

Bio

Anna-Lucia Graff is a sociologist of law. She is passionate about questions of human rights and migration policy and has held roles in non-partisan research institutes providing actionable policy advice, as well as working for the UN in Tajikistan on access to justice.

Contribution to Legal Tech

In April 2020, she joined European Lawyers in Lesvos (ELIL) as a Project Officer for a pilot programme on Samos. As part of the role and together with her colleague Serena Ariello, she set up and implements BRYTER’s legal tech tool, which allows the organisation to be more efficient and increase its ability to provide legal support to more refugees.

ELIL is an NGO providing free, independent legal assistance to asylum seekers on the Greek islands of Lesvos and Samos. The organisation is committed to upholding the rule of law, protecting human rights and ensuring the asylum procedure is fair, efficient and robust. 

In Anna’s role as Project Officer, she set up the BRYTER app, which facilitates the collection of data and helps to streamline the legal registration process, and implements and trains the legal teams on Samos and Lesvos to use it and to appreciate its significant benefits. As a result, the organisation has noted a significant improvement in its operational ability, increasing efficiency at a time when many services were restricted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Given the ongoing challenges of the context, Anna and Serena are continuously working on new tools to further improve ELIL’s legal services and support asylum seekers on the Greek islands.

Bio

Sina Dörr is a judge at the Regional Court in the district of the Higher Regional Court of Cologne and is currently seconded to the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (BMJV). Between 2014 and 2017, she headed the internal IT organization of a regional court and was involved in the first pilot projects for the introduction of electronic legal transactions. From 2017 to 2020, Sina Dörr worked for the Higher Regional Court of Cologne in the area of IT and organizational matters with a focus on the effects of digital change on the judiciary. Since March 2020, she is working as a legal officer at the Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJV), where she has taken over tasks of the project group “Legal Tech and Access to Law”.

Contributions to Legal Tech

Sina Dörr took part in the organization of numerous workshops for the Higher Regional Court District of Cologne for authority managers and practitioners, which dealt with questions about “Justice 4.0” and the use of Legal Tech. With internal and external keynote speeches on the challenges facing the judiciary in the age of digitization, she promoted the development of a digital agenda and the examination of the possible applications of Legal Tech in the judiciary.

Finally, she was able to initiate and support one of the first justice hackathons at the Higher Regional Court of Cologne. By designing possible Legal Tech pilot projects, she helped to make the results achieved there a success at state level. Sina Dörr is a member of nationwide project groups on Legal Tech. In particular, she was actively involved in the preparation of the theses of the working group of the presidents of the higher regional courts on the modernization of civil procedure, which aims to expand the use of Legal Tech instruments in the field of justice.

For the BMJV project group “Legal Tech and Access to Law”, Sina Dörr was significantly in-volved in the conceptual design and implementation of the international online conference “Access to Justice in the Digital Age”, which also dealt with an expansion of the use of Legal Tech or artificial intelligence in the field of justice.

Bio

Melanie Epe is 25 years old and lives in Düsseldorf. She holds a state exam in law and a Bachelor & Master in Business Administration from EBS University. Melanie is currently doing her doctorate in white-collar crime law at the University of Potsdam. Besides this, she is an author and editor of legal essays and books. She also holds tutorials for students in criminal law and public law. Melanie is also an elected member of the board of the German Association of Women Lawyers (DJB) in Düsseldorf.

Contributions to Legal Tech

Melanie is a grandiose example of a woman who puts all her energy into Female Empowerment in the Legal Tech area. Despite the fact that there are many female law students, there are few female lawyers in the management levels. Melanie loves to inform about such problems in society. By doing so, she would like to make a contribution to the fact that professional equality is not really reached yet. With her Blog “Business in Rosé”, Melanie is empowering other women. The use of technology plays a special role in female empowerment topics, which is why Melanie is passionately committed to the development and dissemination of legal tech.

Bio

Andrea is the Administrative Chief at Helsingborgs District Court in Sweden since 2011. She is an expert in Legal Design and an advocate for equality in the legal industry. Andrea graduated from Lund University (law) in 2009. During the lasts few years, she has focused on issues relating to the presence of the courts and judges on social media and how digitalisation affects the courts. Andrea has initiated and produced the podcast ”Domstolspodden” about different legal issues from a courts’ perspective. 

Contributions to Legal Tech

She brings legal design to the courts and the legal world as a whole. Andrea, through her illustrations and art concepts, makes legal design and technology less frightening, and easy to grasp for lawyers and court officials. She is a strong leader with a passion for legal and policy design.

In March 2019 Helsingborg District Court arranged Sweden’s first legal tech & design workshop in the public sector with representatives from the Swedish Enforcement Authority, the Swedish Prosecution Authority, the Swedish Police, members of the Swedish Bar Association, the City of Helsingborg, the Swedish Agency for Participation and the Swedish Prison and Probation Service. Andrea was awarded Legal Innovator of the Year in 2019. In Spring 2020 Andrea and two other colleagues initiated the webinar series From Crisis to Action.