The winning team of the recent “Global Legal Hackathon” hosted by Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in San Francisco seeks to provide a platform to fund and expedite class action suits using blockchain technology.

The nine-member group, consisting of an Orrick lawyer, two law students and six engineers and developers, came together on Feb. 23 at Orrick's San Francisco office to participate in a worldwide hackathon designed to create concepts and technical solutions to address justice and law practice issues.

“It is not that the legal industry is reluctant to adopt the technologies, it's just the design problems the legal industry faces are much harder,” said Mohamed Shakir, who brought with him a team of five engineers and designers from consulting firm Keystone Strategy LLC. Shakir is a technical engagement manager and head of Keystone Labs.

Zac Padgett, a managing associate at Orrick in Portland, Oregon, echoed Shakir's sentiment.

“The legal industry is not immune to disruption,” he said. “The industry, just like other established industries, is susceptible to technology. Change is inevitable [and] it is time to focus on it.”

Andrew Glidden, a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, and head of legal research at Blockchain@BerkeleyLaw, said that the structure of private law firms doesn't put them in the best possible position to invest in new technologies.

“Lawyers definitely want to be innovative and don't always have the market structure or the technological help that they need to make that happen,” Glidden added. “So, an event like this that focuses on building out legal technologies is so important for our work.”

Together, Glidden, Padgett, Shakir and other legal and technology enthusiasts formed a team called the Spicekit. Their idea was to build a decentralized platform that enables individuals to create a bounty to incentivize lawyers to pursue class action suits, such as potentially fraudulent initial coin offerings.

“Our platform is mostly targeted to these class action suits that are not 'traditionally' attractive to this big financial firm,” Shakir explained.

Spicekit was one of the four teams that joined the competition in San Francisco. The Global Legal Hackathon, which took place from Feb. 23 to Feb. 25, was held simultaneously in 40 cities across six continents.

Orrick of counsel Jason Somensatto in Washington, D.C., who mentors the teams in San Francisco, said the hackathon is the first global-scale event the firm has engaged in that brings together legal and technology professionals to compete with one another to develop legal technology solutions.

“This is probably one of the first opportunities for big firms to really put their toe in this water, on an area that has been a smaller group before today,” he said.

A panel of experts including Owen Byrd, general counsel and chief evangelist at LexisNexis Group-owned legal analytics provider Lex Machina Inc., Margaret Hagan, director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School, and Jennifer Kelleher, directing attorney at the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, acted as judges for hackathon-related pitches.

The runner-up team, Justice League, designed a system called Circuition to bring clarity and transparency to the legal process by allowing clients to see the progress a lawyer has made on a particular case. Tied for third, team A2J.AI, created a chatbot using artificial intelligence technology to help simplify document procedures for litigants dealing with domestic violence, while keeping sensitive information private. TeamGiga pitched a system named RΞSOLV that uses blockchain technology to create a globally distributed contract dispute resolution network for mediators. TeamGiga also won the Hadfield Challenge Award for creating a new model of dispute resolution.

“I hope some of the vision will continue and maybe [they'll] start a company themselves,” said Shawnna Hoffman, another mentor to the teams and a global cognitive legal co-leader at International Business Machines Corp.

The Spicekit squad will go on to compete in the second hackathon round online, and the global winner will be announced on April 21 after final presentations in New York.