Global Legal Hackathon day 1: Regtech is the new fintech

23/2/2018

The Global Legal Hackathon is underway. Developers, privacy professionals, court administrators, former judges, students, entrepreneurs and of course lawyers teamed up at Synch in central Stockholm friday afternoon. Legal design, parking tickets, GDPR class actions, immigration and access to justice, translation of legal information and compliance were some of the themes thrown around as the funneling process began.

Markus Mild from NASDAQ, who won the stock market’s hackathon last year, kicked things off with an encouraging message to the participants:

- Ditch the fintech label for regtech and increase the value of your business by a billion. Compliance is big, there’s a lot of money being invested in this.

Mild went on to describe NASDAQ’s blockchain solutions and other cutting edge products and elaborated on how hackathons help the company to try out new ideas.

Sergii Shcherbak, developer of digital services at Synch and organizer of the hackathon, has high hopes for the weekend.

- We have really dedicated people joining the event. They’re very creative and we have many ideas to choose from. I think we will deliver great ideas towards the end of the hackathon.

I’ve covered hackathons in the past – see here and here – but as far as I know the #GLH2018 is the first of it’s kind in Sweden. And it’s probably the first of it’s kind worldwide in terms of sheer size (listen to our podcast with the organizers here).

- I think this will spark some curiousity in the Swedish legal sector, adds Shcherbak.

Judging a hackathon is also a first for me personally. The aim is to ”support rapid development of solutions to improve the legal industry worldwide”, and our task as judges is to identify the most viable ideas. Stay tuned - the winners will be announced Sunday evening.