2018-11-19
Legal Techathon UGent
Law students and technology students at UGent joined forces in the weekend of November 9 to 11 in Belgium's first Legal Techathon. Five teams of five students presented the result of 36 hours of work to a jury on Sunday November 11. I was part of the jury, and I was amazed by the amount of work that was done in two nights and one day. We decided to award two winners:
JustYou presented a system that
- Allows you to protect your online presence,
- creating a legal framework for the use of private content,
- making it possible to retract that content at any time, and
- to identify the culprit in case of a breach of confidentiality.
HuddleUp showed a service that connects consumers, lawyers and investors in cases of systematic and general abuse by large corporations, in such a way that:
- the threshold for consumers to get a compensation is lowered,
- by transferring the case to an investor,
- who hires a lawyer to start litigation.
The three other projects were very interesting too:
- DocuMentor showed a system that could categorize scanned legal documents, and analyze them in such a consumer was able to understand what the document is about,
- Share was a similar system with a focus on share holder agreements and articles of association in order to facilitate share holder meetings,
- Finally, there was a project that kept track of the bulk of a company's agreements, sending out notifications when an agreement is due for renewal. The system would also be able to create a renewal agreement using the previous agreement as a template.
The jury members agreed to meet again in April to follow up on the progress of all projects. To be continued...
Pictures: © 2018, Ghent University