Goal of the Evening

It seems obvious that regulation does not encourage innovation in legal technology. At least that is what seems to be the general image. Nevertheless: there are good reasons to have legal services regulated. Legislators act to avoid unintended market outcome. They act by setting a framework which influences market participants and thereby hinders or corrects negative developments.

In our next meet-up we want to jointly work on how regulation would need to be modeled to foster Legal Tech while avoiding the unwanted. Should some limits be loosened? Would regulation need to support legal tech, as it is the only access to justice for major parts of the population? How can regulation support high quality and save us from dubious offers?

We are gathering enlightening short impulses (short videos of about 3 minutes) from various perspectives.

Building on these impulses, we will enter a discussion and collaboratively work on possible solutions in a world café format.

We encourage you to get familiar with the topic beforehand, so we have a productive discussion. Of course you can also do it spontaneously on site.

There will be ample opportunity for gleeful networking after the discussion.

Agenda

The event is structured as follows:

1. Introduction
   First of all we like to welcome the participants and give a brief introduction into the topic and the discussion format.
2. Impulses and World café:
   After listening to interesting impulses on the topic, we will enter into our discussion, which will be in a world café format with three (and a half) rounds. Here we openly discuss the topic in small groups and develop some ideas and findings.
3. Plenary:
   We then gather the findings of the groups into the plenary. Here we have a look on the key question: What is a appropriate regulation of legal tech?
4. Conclusion:
   we end the topic with an outlook to possible future developments.
5. Casual networking:
   Finally we will have some time for networking.

Introduction into the topic

We encourage you to get familiar with the topic beforehand. As assistance, we have gathered several questions and statements to think about.

Questions:

• How does the current regulation affect legal tech? What are the requirements for adaptation?
• How does your legal systems compare to other legal systems?
• How  should the legal market be regulated?

Statements:

• Regulation prevents innovation on the legal market
• The changes will surpass today’s legal requirements for the legal market and will make them redundant.
• Many have no access to the law; We therefore need flexible and lightly regulated service offers to enable inexpensive access to the law.
• Without regulation, provider will act against consumer interests and the legal system will suffer accordingly.
• The present market players are against innovation and are using regulation as a tool to keep off potential competitors.
• Regulation is nevertheless an opportunity for innovative provider
• The legal market can’t change too quickly, because the legal system provides for social stability.

Impulses

Here are some enlightening impulses on the topic of regulation:

• Videos:
  • Esther Roberton, Chair of the Independent Review of Legal Services Regulation in Scotland
    watch on vimeo (opens in new tab)
  • Maximilian Block, Founder and CEO of advocado and co-initiator of the legal-tech platform in the federal Association of german startups.
    watch on vimeo (opens in new tab) (German)
    
  • Markus Hartung, Director of the Bucerius Centre on the legal profession
    watch on youtube (opens in new tab) (German)
    
  • Anja Blaj, head of advocacy European Blockchain Hub, co-founder of Ljubljana Legal Hackers
    
    watch on vimeo (opens in new tab)
• Further impulses on site:
  • PD Dr. Martin Fries (University of Passau)
  • Prof. em. Dr. Reinhard Greger (Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg)
• Papers/journals:
  • International views
    • Liberty, Justice, and Legal Automata (externer Link)
      Marc Lauritsen in Chicago-Kent Law Review Vol. 88, Iss. 3 (2013)
  • German views are currently German only an can be found solely on the German language page.