Legal Tech Academy: Recent Episodes
Legal Tech Academy
The Legal Tech Academy is a community focused on legal tech and innovation initiated by Assistant Professor Alexandra Andhov from the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen and the Danish legal tech company Contractbook. The aim of the Legal Tech Academy is to create a platform and space, where the most important trends within the legal industry and technology are discussed and analysed. We invite, researchers, practitioners and industry specialists to share their knowledge, opinions and visions. By creating this space we hope to spread the knowledge and support innovation among law students, junior lawyers and other legal professionals.The Legal Tech Academy frequently organises webinars, talks and presentations, so be sure to check all upcoming events at our events overview. These webinars are turned into small videos, podcasts and whitepapers.
Expanding your business to the US market is hard. As we have covered in our article series on the topic, there are challenges in most aspects of your operations. Your brand needs and go-to-market strategy needs adjustments. Your legal work must be updated. And your employment strategy also needs to be revisited.
There are so many things to consider: Timing, location, the degree of dedication. It's a nightmare.
Well. It doesn't have to be. We invited Joanne Farquharson, CEO in Foothold America and expert on American business expansion to a conversation about challenges and solutions.
To celebrate International Women's Day, Legal Tech Academy invited 5 women pioneers to discuss the female contribution to legal tech.
What is it like to work in legal tech? What are the struggles? And what can the industry do to become more inclusive? Those are just some of the topics, we discussed with our panel.
Enjoy the first session of 2021 with:
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Malin Männikkö, DLA Piper
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Mariana Hagström, Avokaado
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Maya Markovich, Nextlaw Labs.
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Aikta Wahi, PacerPro
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Orsolya Szabo, Legal Tech Consultancy
How do you pitch for VC-funds in Silicon Valley?
In December 2020, Contractbook has announced that it has closed on a $9.4 million Series A investment round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from existing investors, including Gradient Ventures. It comes less than just one year after, the leading Nordic VC-fund byFounders and Gradient Ventures, which is Google’s AI-focused venture fund, led the company’s $3.9 million seed round.
In this extra-show of the Legal Tech Academy, we have asked Niels Martin Brøchner, CEO of Contractbook, to tell us how it all went down. Brøchner gave us some tips on the art of the deal and took us through the investment deck that secured the investments.
We asked him what it takes to raise money in Silicon Valley, and he shared his advice on how to approach the venture capitalist market in the U.S., how to structure a fundraising deck and what to say when talking to investors from the big VC-funds in Silicon Valley.
After two record-breaking years for legal tech investments, this year has been a bit slower. In 2021, however, the investments are expected to pick up speed again with the general economic recovery. Legal tech is going from niche to something that every major VC-fund is looking to invest in. But how is the market exactly, what are the VC's looking for, and how do you go about it?
Listen to our podcast to find out.
To build or buy - that is the question!
Creating well-functioning legal tech solutions is not an easy task. You need a good business case, proper project management, the right people to execute it and then you need to take it to the market and ensure that it is used in the right way. Most will also say that it requires a truly user-centric mindset and a fundamental understanding of how to agile processes.
Some law firms have decided to develop these products inhouse. They form incubators, organise hubs and make in-house tech teams, so they gain competitive advantages. Others believe in buying these products off the shelve. They let technologists and digital experts do their job and develop the tech for them.
What is the most efficient way to operate? And what does it, in fact, take to develop a really successful legal tech company?
For this discussion, we invited top experts on legal tech and innovation Henrik Fagerholt (former CTO in Bahr Leap and current CTO in Coright, John Engholm who is the co-founder of InsiderLog - and finally, Sophie Martinetz from Legal Tech Hub Vienna.
Computational law is an emerging new field of law that attracts a lot of attention. But what is it exactly? How does it work? And exactly how much legal reasoning can be automated and managed by machines.
In this 4th Legal Tech Academy event, we dived into the world of computational law to figure out how lawyers should approach it: To what degree is it relevant for the legal industry to know about computational law? And what can lawyers do to learn more about it?
To answer all those questions, we invited two members om the new MIT Computational Law Report.
One is Daniel “Dazza” Greenwood who is a researcher at MIT Media Lab, a lecturer on computational law and legal engineering at MIT Connection Science, the Executive Director of Law.MIT.edu, and the publisher of MIT Computational Law Report.
The other is Bryan Wilson who is a Fellow at MIT Connection Science and the Editor in Chief of the MIT Computational Law Report. Legaltech News listed him as 1 of the 18 Millennials Changing the Face of Legal Tech for work he completed as a fellow with the inaugural class of fellows with ABA Center for Innovation.
We have since transformed this conversation into a podcast.
How much will AI impact our future law? How much legal work can it be entrusted with? And how should we regulate it?
Those are some of the key questions in the acclaimed author Frank Pasquale's new book New Laws of Robotics. The Legal Tech Academy invited him to present his work and discuss it with an expert panel. The panel included Raphaële Xenidis who just started a Marie Curie fellowship at the Univesity of Copenhagen on the topic of algorithmic discrimination and EU law, Jacob Livingston Slosser who is a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen and an expert on algorithmic decision making in law - and finally, we invited Niels Christian. Ellegaard who is managing partner in the large danish law firm Plesner where he is responsible for IT, telecom and outsourcing. Last year, Niels authored the book Robots Entering the Legal Profession.
Their fascinating conversation was then transformed into this webinar. The robots are coming - so stay tuned and get prepared.
Legal design, agile methods and design thinking is making its way to the mainstream legal industry. But what is it? What can it be used for? And how do you convince your clients to buy a legal design product. We invited Antti Innanen from the tech law firm Dottir, Susanne Scott Levinsen who is head of law in EY Denmark and Ross Barbash, former Atrium, now SPZ Legal, to discuss just that.
Here the second part of Legal Tech Academy's second webinar - now turned podcast to get fully updated on legal design.
We invited Antti Innanen from the tech law firm Dottir, Susanne Scott Levinsen who is head of law in EY Denmark and Ross Barbash, former Atrium, now SPZ Legal, to discuss the future legal industry. What role will lawyers play? What impact will new legal technologies play? And are we moving towards a global legal market?
These are just some of the interesting questions we discussed in this first part of the Legal Tech Academy's second webinar - now turned podcast!
The Legal Tech Academy's very first event we ask how young lawyers and law students can prepare themselves for a more digital future. What skills will they need? What level of tech literacy should they acquire? Should they learn to code? And who is responsible for preparing the younger generations for that future?
We invited Anders Spile from Contractbook, Dirk Harting from Bucerius Law School and Cat Moon from Vanderbilt Law School for their perspectives - and it turned out to be a thrilling debate about hard skills vs. soft skills, coding-abilities vs. fundamental understanding of computer logics, and much more.