Aileen Schultz, co-founder of the Global Legal Hackathon, kicks off the final and third round of the competition in New York. Photo Credit: Rhys Dipshan/ALM

The third and final round of the first ever Global Legal Hackathon—a legal tech development competition that boasted participants from across five continents and over 40 cities—concluded in New  York on April 21.  From among the 14 finalists, who had to present live prototypes of their solution to the events' judges, four winning teams were selected, two of which developed solutions to serve the private sector, and two for the public sector.

Winners from the private sector category included Budapest, Hungary-based Revealu, an app through which users can request their personal data from tech providers, and Denver-based LexLucid, an online website where attorneys review and grade online consumers contracts, such as terms of services,  to help consumers understand their agreements.

From the public sector category, Hong Kong-based Decoding Law, a machine-learning powered browser extension to help users wade through local legislation and RightsNow, a legal knowledge repository accessible through voice services like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa or Google Home, also came out on top.

The private sector solutions focused on helping to protect and promote consumer privacy during a time when many are concerned about their online rights and personal data. Marton Elodi, a developer and part of the team that created Revealu, noted that the app “acts like a middleman between companies and users to help users exercise their rights” under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The regulation, which comes into effect on May 25, mandates that companies turn over all data they have on EU users upon request.

Elodi added that the app works both for companies and their users alike. It is an “off the shelf product that companies can use to provide the data to consumers” as well as a data portal for consumers themselves, he said.

LexLucid also took a broad approach to privacy with their app, which seeks to enable “consumers to make educated decisions online and encourage businesses to make their contracts fair,” said Otto Hanson, attorney at Davis Graham & Stubbs and founder of LexLucid.

Though the solution relies on the manual review of contracts by registered attorneys, in the long term, the goal is to automate more of the process. Hanson noted the “hope is that artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms will be able to do a lot of the contract grading for us, but that is very complex work for AI algorithms and we are just not there yet,” he added.

At the other end of the spectrum, the public sector solutions focused on making the law more transparent and  understandable to everyday consumers.

The Decoding Law team, for example looked to help Hong Kong locals find and understand their city's legislation. The proposed solution, which the Hong Kong Department of Justice expressed interests in, “is essentially a chrome plug-in where you enter in your situation and questions and we will find you the exact provision under the legislation” to help, said Alison (Pui Wun) Li, a student at the University of Hong Kong, and part of the team that developed Decoding Law.

The solution functions as an AI-powered chatbot that helps find relevant legal provisions. It also allows users to highlight relevant provisions in legislation text, and has a sentence structure analysis feature that helps translate the complex legalese of highlighted provisions into easy to understand language.

RightsNow is also working on making legal information easier to find and comprehend. The app “saves time by not having to shift through all the information that Google will provide,” Matthew “Zeke” Hughes, senior director of business development at Mindcrest Inc., and co-founder of the app, previously told Legaltech News.

Maximilian Paterson, senior director of education and community programs at Neota Logic and the other co-founder of RightsNow also told Legaltech News that the aim of the app was to have a more seamless channel through which to access legal knowledge. Through voice services, “you can actually give law information on a very human level and it's accessible. So it's not only access to justice, but accessibility to justice as well.”

After the end of the Global Legal Hackathon, the winning teams were optimistic about the future, and wanted to hit the ground running on further developing their application.

“I think this is a really huge encouragement for us to seriously consider out next step, to go back home to discuss with our potential partners and seriously think about and submitting applications for funding to make this idea realized,” Decoding Law's Li said.

Likewise, LexLucid planned to figure out how best to expand their prototype. “We're going to launch a crowdfunding campaign probably over the next three or four months and use that crowdfunding campaign to test the market to see if this is something that consumers want,” Hanson said.

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