The “Global Legal Hackathon” held the first round of its legal tech development competition from Feb. 23 to 25. Winning teams were chosen by local judges in over global 40 cities to go on to compete in the second round, which will narrow down teams to one per country.

At the local New York City hackathon event, which was held in the corporate headquarters of American Express, the focus was on using novel technology to expand access to legal information.

RightsNow, a prototype for an easy-to-understand legal knowledge repository accessible through voice services like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa or Google Home, was chosen to go on to the second round.

The local event judges, who relied on the Global Legal Hackathon's standardized judging criteria, included founders of the Delaware Blockchain Initiative, High Performance Counsel and IBM Watson, as well as executives from Barclays and American Express.

RightsNow was the brain child of a duo of legal tech professionals: Maximilian Paterson, senior director of education and community programs at Neota Logic, and Matthew “Zeke” Hughes, senior director of business development at Mindcrest.

Paterson noted that by using interactive and voice-activated 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.”

The team, he added, was trying to solve the problem of the law being out of reach to those outside the legal profession. “Sometimes there are a lot of barriers to law, especially the common law,” Paterson said. “It doesn't just live in statutes and regulations, but also in case law and judicial decisions and interpretations. And lawyers have traditionally been the gatekeepers of that.”

Improving access, Hughes said, had several key benefits for the everyday person. “It saves time by not having to shift through all the information that Google will provide,” and saves money by not having to rely on an attorney for every piece of legal information.

And more importantly, it “provides security in instances where people do not know their rights, so they will now have access in real-time way to receive that information back,” he said.

For now, the app is still in its early design stages, with Hughes and Paterson working through the initial considerations of bringing the product to market.

“Considering we're five days into the start of the company, we're deep into R&D mode right now,” Paterson said.

One of the many challenges the team will have to figure out is how to translate often obscure and technical legalese into a language that is accessible and readily understood. But Hughes noted that there are already movements to make legalese more accessible with things like “simple language contracts. And all these movements that have come forward, we are hoping we can piggy back on and support, because I think they would be very crucial to our product, and we would be adding to them as well.”

The idea to use voice technology for a new platform came from Paterson, who had recently purchased a Google Home smart speaker and started to ask it legal questions. “I found I was not satisfied with the answers,” he recalled.

Paterson aimed to work on a solution to that problem during the hackathon, but his initial teammate was unable to attend at the last minute. But having heard of his idea, Hughes approached him as a new partner eager to work on a voice-focused platform.

“I kind of theorized that voice is one of those next inflection points, one of the things that is going to change the way” we work in legal, he said.

For both legal tech professionals, the initial round of the Global Legal Hackathon represented not the potential start of a new company, but also a new working relationship.

“It's actually funny, Saturday morning was the very first time we have ever met,” Hughes said.

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Runner-Up

RightsNow wasn't the only prototype to be recognized at the New York Global Legal Hackathon event. Judges also selected a runner-up idea named Credible, which looks to be an accreditation management platform for CLE credits that operates on the Integra ledger blockchain.

The team behind the prototype was made up of participants from the “NYC Legal Tech Meetup” group, including including Davis Polk & Wardwell associate Martin Hui and former associate Christian Lang, who also founded the Blacklines & Billables blog, and John Scrudato, founder of Gordium Legal.

The team also included Stephanie Spangler, associate at Norris McLaughlin & Marcus; Ryan Kutter, legal solutions lead at Gust; Luke Espina, a New York City-based software engineer; and Sunny Wong, a software engineer with a biomedical engineer background.

Scrudato said that Credible was a much-needed solution in legal, explaining that “there hasn't been that many applications in the legal space that manage CLE certifications.” From a technical standpoint, he added, a CLE management platform “would be a good fit for blockchain” because certifications could then be easily retrieved and verified.

Like RightsNow, Credible is still in the initial phase of its development. “Our first priority is getting this designed and built, but we are obviously having conversations with people,” to inform them about the idea, Lang said. The team has launched a website and social media handles, for example, for the nascent company.

The idea behind Credible came from an experience Lang recently had when renewing his Bar Association membership. “I literally had to go to seven places to find my CLE certificates,” such as different email inboxes and Dropbox, he recalled. “And it took four or five hours to get things together.”