Students from several law schools across the country set their casebooks aside to join lawyers, legal technology innovators, web engineers and others in the first-ever Global Legal Hackathon last weekend.

For three days, Hackathon participants brainstormed how to harness technology to solve legal problems, formed teams to pursue those ventures, and pitched their ideas to judges. Local hackathons were held in 40 cities in 20 different countries, and the best eight ideas will be presented in New York in April.

For the law students, the Hackathon offered an opportunity to rub elbows with those on the cutting edge of legal technology and innovation and get hands-on experience developing the types of legal programs that are revolutionizing legal practice. (You can read more about the winning team in San Francisco, which included two students from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, here.)

We caught up with Hackathon participants from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law; Suffolk University Law School; Brigham Young University J. Rueben Clark Law School; and Pennsylvania State University School of Law to learn about the projects they developed.

 

Aram Ekimyan, University of Southern California Gould School of Law

Roughly 1 million Californians are eligible to have their misdemeanor marijuana convictions expunged now that recreational cannabis is legal in the state. Yet only 5,000 people have thus far cleared their records.

Aram Ekimyan, a third-year law student at USC, suggested at the Los Angeles Hackathon site the creation of a website that would make the expungement process straightforward, fast, and cheap.

“I thought it was something that was very practical,” he said. “It might seem very small, but [expungement] can change a person's life.”

Dorna Moini, the attorney founder of HelpSelf Legal, got on board and helped Ekimyan develop a prototype website that helps users file expungement applications. The site translates legalese into layman's terms and fills out the necessary paperwork. It also includes a function that helps users to quickly track down their criminal records, which eliminates a months-long wait if applicants have to request their relevant records from the California State Department of Justice. Finally, the site would cost users just $100, as opposed to $500 or more to hire a lawyer. It would also help users automatically apply for a waiver of California's expungement fee if they can't afford it.

“The whole idea was to make the process more efficient and cheaper,” Akimyan said.

The judges liked what they saw. The expungement website was selected as the winner of Los Angeles Hackathon, and Akimyan and Moini are moving on the next round of the competition.

 

Anthony Metzler, Suffolk University Law School

What if there was an equivalent of Amazon's Alexa for alternative dispute resolution?

That was idea that Suffolk second-year law student Anthony Metzler struck upon with a classmate and lawyer who formed a team at the Boston Hackathon. They wanted to figure out how to eliminate the emotional elements of mediation and automate the process to ensure impartiality. Online alternative dispute resolution tools already exist, so they settled on a unique twist: employ a hologram.

Under the team's proposal, parties would sit in separate rooms and interface with a hologram serving as the mediator. The hologram would function much like a legal Alexa, answering questions and offering impartial guidance.

“Our mediator would take the human element out of it, and everything would be backed up factually,” Metzler said.

For example, if a divorced couple disagreed about the amount of money to spend on their child's summer camp, the hologram mediator could instantly and impartially provide the average cost of summer camp in the area, Metzler said.

The software would initially be made free to courts in order to build the product's reputation, the team decided, but would ultimately cost a fee.

The Boston judges picked a different project as the local winner—a shared database for non-profit legal services providers to store client intake information—but developing a legal technology product idea and creating a business plan was a valuable experience, Metzler said.

“I think people get caught up in the idea of, 'I'm not a programmer so I can't do that,'” he said. “This weekend proved that you don't need coding experience to come up with good ideas.”

 

Brianna Rosier, Brigham Young University J. Rueben Clark Law School

Initial lawyer consultations take time and don't always bear fruit for either the attorney or the potential client. That's why BYU second-year Brianna Rosier and her two teammates at the Provo, Utah, Hackathon site decided to create a chat bot to help people determine whether or not they need a lawyer.

“We called it The Legal Concierge, because it directs you to where you need to go—whether that's a lawyer, or just to information or to a government website where you can get forms and things like that,” Rosier said. “The idea is to eliminate some of the time and money concerns that come with initial consultations for both lawyers and consumers.”

Rosier offered the example of someone who slipped and fell while at work. The chat bot asks questions about where the accident occurred, what type of accident it was, and other questions related to the potential claim. It would then determine whether or not the user should contact an attorney for assistance.

Rosier worked on the chat bot with an MBA student from BYU as well as a computer programmer. She supplied the legal knowledge and worked on the business plan, while her teammates did most of the work developing the site, which is functional though bare-bones at this point.

The Legal Concierge would be free for users, but attorneys would pay to have it embedded on their own websites. Attorneys could also contract with the site to receive referrals when users are directed to contact an attorney, Rosier said.

The Legal Concierge was chosen as the winner of the Provo site, with the judges noting that it could be deployed in the self-help areas of courthouses.

 

Hamed Azimi, Pennsylvania State University School of Law

Hamed Azimi, an LL.M. student from Iran, noticed that many of his fellow international law students were struggling to keep their class notes organized.

So when he heard about the upcoming Hackathon, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to tackle the problem. He partnered with two undergraduate students from Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology to create a note taking application for law students.

“It creates notes in a very efficient way. You just need to open the note creator, take your notes, and leave it. There's no upload or confirmation process. The concept is something that has been done before, but we decided to do it in a way that will save you time and increase your productivity.”

The application gives users the ability to create reminders for upcoming exams or other deadlines. It also includes a recording feature to allow users to go back and track lectures, as well as options to customize notes. (It also features a two-step deletion process, meaning users can't accidently trash their notes.) The application would be free.

“I was talking to other international students,” he said. “They needed some tools—some were taking notes manually on paper. But the existing note helpers have two problems. One is that you have to pay for them, and the other is that they usually have lots of features. But having tons of features doesn't necessarily mean they're good. I listened to the international students to see what they really need, not just what I can implement.”