Hackathon

Digitalization and constantly evolving technologies are changing not only the way our clients do business, but also the way we provide legal services. At Ashurst, we understand that the opportunities offered by digitalization must be seized by major international law firms. Our strong belief is that Legal Project Management and Legal Tech will be at the core of future legal advice. That is why we have positioned technology at the centre of our strategy.

For us, there is no question that we can find the best solutions for our clients only hand in hand with them. We analyse their needs in terms of tailor-made legal advice and take our excellent work to a new level implementing the latest technologies. Some of these needs formed the basis of the use cases for our first Ashurst Legal Hackathon, held in May 2019 with 22 student "hackers" from academic backgrounds such as law, business law and information technology the first of a series of events where practical digital solutions are developed for our clients. Together with Ashurst lawyers and members of our technology and innovation lab Ashurst Advance, the students had to solve complex legal issues and problems and provide solutions using the BRYTER platform. All this against the background of developing real, client-oriented tools and presenting the resulting prototypes to our experts. The presented tools were:

• a corporate policy analyser (the winning project);
• a tool for evaluating contracts from an antitrust perspective;
• a GDPR compliance tool which helps users deal with Subject Access Requests; and
• a security token offering term sheet generator.

Our first Ashurst Legal Hackathon in Frankfurt am Main was just the beginning of an emerging global initiative. The close cooperation with clients, technology providers and students of a technologically completely different generation forms the perfect basis for creating innovative prototypes which will be further developed by our experts. Excitingly some of these pilots will turn into client facing tools. We will continue to regularly conduct hackathons within the various practice groups globally to create prototypes for tools that our clients have on their wishlist.

The first Ashurst Legal Hackathon was distinguished by energy, creativity and a unique team spirit, as the following video impressively shows.