Today, the Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (ALITA) launched the ALITA SOLIA Awards 2021, the Asia-Pacific’s first set of community-based legal innovation and technology awards. Powered by industry stalwarts such as Linklaters, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), Clifford Chance, the Singapore Academy of Law and Prophet.ru, the finals of the Awards will be held on 24 September 2021 – the closing day of TechLaw.Fest 2021.
By Josh Lee | Edited by Elizaveta Shesterneva
Supported by: Lenon Ong, Utsav Rakshit, Benjamin Peck, Ong Chin Ngee, Tristan Koh
“In a year when a certain pesky virus turned the world upside down, how can a conference engage, encapsulate and elaborate upon all of the disruption seen in one year?”
This must have been the key question on the minds of the planners of TechLaw.Fest 2020, as they went about organising Asia’s largest law and technology conference. What followed was a signature conference held with a virtually (pun intended) uniquely signature.
In this article, LawTech.Asia will take our readers on a quick recap of TechLaw.Fest 2020, as we look forward to another exciting edition of TechLaw.Fest in 2021. LawTech.Asia is grateful for our ongoing strategic media partnership with the Singapore Academy of Law (“SAL”), and for the opportunity to be a media partner for TechLaw.Fest once again.
Written by Josh Lee Kok Thong
LawTech.Asia is proud to be a partner of the HKU LITE Lab’s LawTech and RegTech Sandbox Student Virtual Showcase 2021.
To be held on 3 May 2021 at 6pm HKT, the University of Hong Kong’s (“HKU“) Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Lab (“LITE Lab“) invites industry players and students to learn more about how future legal professionals are co-designing proof-of-concepts with legal, compliance and operations professionals to create self-help, triage and document automation solutions for real-world issues.
Legal and compliance departments are increasingly expected to “do more with less” and work “faster, cheaper, better”. As studies like LITE Lab’s report in conjunction with the Association of Corporate Counsel and Eversheds on Illuminating the New Normal: Asia Pacific Counsel in a Time of Unprecedented Change (2020) confirms, however, many in-house lawyers and compliance officers face limited budgets and limited time to learn and implement new tech platforms. Some, alas, are also tech averse.
LITE Lab launched its Lawtech & Regtech Sandbox to allow students to be part of the solution and at the same time develop hands-on experiential and interdisciplinary skills solving real world problems. LITE Lab has been contributing towards the talent development of Hong Kong’s international legal and financial hub status, and is working on innovative collaborations with Hong Kong-based teams of leading companies and financial institutions such as HSBC, FedEx Express, Goodman and Angelhub. LITE Lab’s students are also developing impactful access to justice lawtech tools to assist our ordinary and disadvantaged communities.
LITE Lab counts organisations such as Association of Corporate Counsel Hong Kong, Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, Fintech Association of Hong Kong, Asia Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (“ALITA“) and the Asian Academy of International Law as its supporting organisations, and it looks forward to viewers joining in on 3 May (Monday) via Zoom to witness the growth of the Lawtech and Regtech community in Hong Kong and beyond, together.
Interested participants should register using the button below.
Written by Josh Lee Kok Thong
LawTech.Asia is proud to be a partner of the HKU LITE Lab’s Access-to-Justice Lawtech Virtual Student Showcase.
To be held on 21 April 2021 at 6pm HKT, the University of Hong Kong’s (“HKU“) Law, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Lab (“LITE Lab“) cordially invites industry players and students to learn more about what it is doing to better serve under-resourced impactful organisations in Hong Kong, including co-designing and creating proof-of-concepts in collaboration with Hong Kong NGOs to improve access to justice (“A2J“).
In past years, the LITE Lab@HKU student team EC Bank addressing employment compensation were the Georgetown University Iron Tech Lawyer Invitational 2020 winners, and have since set up Litex as a natural language processing (“NLP“) lawtech startup. LITE Lab’s inaugural A2J lawtech virtual student showcase, with an esteemed panel of invited judges, will decide which of this year’s undergraduate student teams will represent HKU with their projects co-designed with impactful NGOs Equal Justice, Justice Centre and SoCO to assist victims of human trafficking, refugees/ asylum seekers and low income housing tenants utilising document automation, search engines and computer vision.
The A2J Lawtech Student Virtual Showcase will also feature other LITE Lab@HKU supported student initiatives, including A2J lawtech projects created both within and outside the LITE Lab course curriculum that assist with issues such as social and environmental impact measurement, unrepresented litigants, divorce court forms and wills.
The event counts organisations such as Asian Charity Services, PILNet, Pro Bono Hong Kong, the Asia Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (“ALITA“) and Legal Hackers Hong Kong as its supporting organisations, and welcomes participants to join in on 21 April 2021 (Wednesday) via Zoom as it seeks to grow the A2J Lawtech community in Hong Kong and beyond.
Interested participants should register using the button below.
Written by Josh Lee
LawTech.Asia is proud to be an official media partner of the CLOC Global Institute, an online event that focuses on outstanding educational content for legal operations and the business of law. It will see esteemed speakers like Adam Becker, CLOC Vice-President and Anushree Bagrodia, Vice-President at Mastercard, speaking on such topics as growing the influence of legal operations, planning for 2021, and using legal operations to increase diversity and inclusivity.
LawTech.Asia has also been receiving exclusive updates from CLOC, and we understand that as a body and a movement, CLOC intends to shift its focus from in-house professionals to embrace its identity as a global community focused on redefining the business of law. “The wording was intentional,” CLOC President Mary O’Carroll says. “It is more than just in-house legal departments and teams. It is about transformation”.
While more details are expected at CLOC Global Institute, which will be happening in a few short hours, we understand that CLOC intends to leverage scale to solve problems collectively. This means shifting CLOC’s global and long-term strategy, and scaling up its organisational infrastructure, to gather voices perspectives and resources to answer global questions, and to allow individuals to find support, resources and networks to find answers to the global disruptive challenges facing us. Ostensibly, this means bringing in new entrants, new technology firms and new law firms onto the CLOC table.
When asked about how CLOC intended to facilitate conversations between groups of stakeholders who often talk at cross-purposes or, by dint of culture, find it challenging to build understanding, Mary was hopeful: “We must first start with opening the conversation, and we are here to learn through that expansion. It has always been in our DNA to take risks and try. The important thing is not be an echo chamber, and to build conversations that can be rich and engaging. There may be difficulties in communicating, but I believe that creates a learning and teachable opportunity that CLOC is uniquely positioned to bring.”
Greater collaboration is always helpful and appreciated, but the devil, as always, lies in the detail. LawTech.Asia will be here to provide more clarity as CLOC makes a more detailed announcement at the 2020 edition of CLOC Global Institute.
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