IT Law Conference on Legal Technology 2016
The IT Law Conference 2016 focused on Legal Technology. It took place on May 26, 2016 at Nordic Hotel Forum, Tallinn, Estonia in the framework of the Estonian ICT Week 2016. It was organized by the IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu and Estonian Legal Hackers Meetup in cooperation with NJORD Law Firm, Fondia and several other partners.
Speakers
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8:45 |
Registration and Coffee |
9:15 |
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Taavi is the Estonian Government Chief Information Officer. He has been recognized as the European CIO of the Year 2014 (by ICT Spring), was the president of the Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications (ITL), and was elected as an Entrepreneur of the year 2011 in Estonia (by Ernst&Young). Taavi is a board member in many ICT initiatives in Estonia and has been the brainpower behind many Estonian e-government innovative initiatives like e-residency, data embassy, no-legacy policy and others. Helen is the Director of the IT Law Programme at the University of Tartu. She is the founder of the IT Law research and study area at UT and the main liaison between the professors, entrepreneurs, public sector representatives, members of the advisory board, researchers, students, and administrators connected to the programme. After defending her doctoral degree at Yale Law School, she has focused her research on the theoretical foundations of law, disagreements between the economic and philosophical theories of private law, as well as fundamental dilemmas in information technology law. Her forthcoming works focus on the relationship between justice and legitimacy as well as the logic of legal regulation underlying secure e-services. |
9:30 |
Opening Remarks
Ülle is the Chancellor of Justice and Ombudsman of the Republic of Estonia and a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Tartu. She is currently also a member of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance. She has previously worked as Legal Adviser to the President and prior to that been a member of the National Electoral Committee. Additionally, she has worked several years for the Ministry of Justice, Auditor General and Estonian Parliament Riigikogu. |
9:45 |
Hannes is the Chairman of the Estonian Bar Association and the Managing Partner at Derling Law Firm. He is an expert in the fields of banking and finance, M&A, corporate law, IT and technology law. He is also member of the Listing and Surveillance Committee of the Tallinn Stock Exchange and a big enthusiast in the field of legal technologies. He has published articles on financial and commercial law, public international law and human rights law. |
10:15 |
Innovative Technologies Influencing the Legal Sector
Ermo does research on automated legal content capture and visualization methods, which is originated from practical experience, gained from public sector. Complex system of legal acts, which is constantly evolving and changing, is challenging matter for anyone. Visualization is one way to deal with such complexity, but inevitably alters the way we are used to handle the subject. Ermo will talk about different ways of visualizing legal information with some visualization examples provided and discuss over potential benefits of these approaches. |
10:45 |
Interoperability between IT and Law
E-government services and information systems must comply with and be traceable to the law. This interoperability between law and IT, the fundamental principle of legality, places strong demands on public sector IT. Despite the promise of various technologies - ontologies, semantic web etc, it is not that easy to attain frictionless alignment between legal texts and machine code in practice. Priit will talk about lessons learned in semantic and legal interoperability projects and offer a look ahead towards more lightweight approaches. Priit is the lead architect of the Estonian public sector metadata catalogue. He also works in other Estonian governmental infrastructural systems and has served as an expert in various EU semantic interoperability and metadata projects. |
11:15 |
Extracting Information from Court Decisions with TEXTA Toolkit
Publicly available court decisions constitute a resource that is heavily used but only a fraction of their full potential has been exploited. The question is how to extract meaningful information from them? Raul Sirel will explain and show how natural language processing techniques have helped us to extract metadata from free text when public metadata is not available and how TEXTA toolkit brings searching and analysing court decisions to a whole new level. Raul, founder of Texta OÜ, has background in text mining, natural language processing and machine learning. He has worked as a researcher in data and text mining projects at the University of Tartu, Software Technology and Applications Competence Centre, University of Western Sydney and National ICT of Australia. Raul is currently pursuing his PhD in computational linguistics and leading the development of TEXTA Toolkit. |
11:30 |
Blockchain Technology and the Law
Alex’s presentation gives first an overview of how blockchain technology affects society with disruptive innovations. The latter also have significant implications for the legal profession, e.g., smart contracts that are machine readable. He will also give an overview related to smart contracts based on his recent research publications. Alex is the Associate Professor at Tallinn University of Technology. He was a researcher at the Oulu University Secure-Programming Group (OUSPG) after having been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his MSc degree (2001) from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria and his PhD degree (2007) from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. |
12:00 |
Lunch Break Grab a lunch with other conference attendees at one of the restaurants in the hotel or around it |
13:00 |
In this panel, we will introduce the projects in the IT Law Lab as well as the general idea behind the cooperation between the Estonian Bar Association, the IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications in setting up the IT Law Lab at the University of Tartu. Laura is currently working at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications as the legal advisor at the Department of State Information Systems. She is responsible for legislative framework of Estonian information society and currently focusing on eID and trust services. Additionally, her task has also been promoting public-private partnership in e-government technologies. She is involved in many innovative projects with the Estonian government, including on data embassies and digital continuity. Currently she is obtaining a PhD degree in Law at the University of Tartu where her main research topic is cloud computing in public sector. Laura has been the main coordinator of the projects conducted in the framework of IT Law Lab from the perspective of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications. Ave is an expert in the fields of IT and technology, data protection and intellectual property law matters and heads the IP/IT law practice group at COBALT Law Firm in Estonia. She also has experience in advising on mergers and acquisitions, as well as venture capital investments especially concerning the technology, communications and media sectors. Ave is the vice president of the IP, technology, media and telecommunications commission of AIJA (the International Association of Young Lawyers). As the head of the IP/IT law commission at the Estonian Bar Association Ave has been one of the main initiators and coordinators of the projects conducted within the framework of the IT Law Lab. Karmen is a litigation attorney at Triniti Law Firm and a Visiting Lecturer in IT Law at the University of Tartu. She is also an Expert in the Committee on Cross-border Flow of Internet Traffic and Internet Freedom in the Council of Europe. She has an outstanding expertise in human rights, intellectual property, media and international law. Merike is an advisor at the Estonian Ministry of Justice and an MA student in the IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu. At the Ministry of Justice, Merike is responsible for ensuring the accessibility of court information, which includes developing all the needed information systems and making sure of their compliance with existing legislation, composing all the summaries of Estonian Supreme Court decisions and publishing in the State Gazette. Kätri is a lawyer for the Tallinn Centre District Administration and an MA student in the IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu. At the Tallinn Centre District Administration, she is mainly responsible for public procurement. Kätri has previously worked as an assistant to a member of the European Parliament and studied at the University of Burgundy. |
14:00 |
Launch of the Legal Tech Competition
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14:15 |
The New Way for Legal: Avokaado's Vision for the Future
Siim will talk about the concept of Avokaado and its vision for the future. Avokaado is a new online platform for legal services, which enables users to create legal documents and use other services related to the legal industry. Siim is the co-founder of Avokaado. He has background in acting as in-house council and as an attorney. He has worked as in-house council in Lindorff and KredEx and as an attorney in law firms Teder, Magnusson, RaidlaEllex and Glikman Alvin & Partnerid. |
14:30 |
Keynote Address: From Research to Innovative Legal Tech Products
Anna will hold the second keynote address of the day, introducing legal technologies and their impact across the globe based on her own research in this field. She is an artificial intelligence and law scholar doing research at the intersection of IP law, cognition and vague norms, with over 15 years of experience in linguistic software development including many successes in project and product management. Anna is teaching the first ever program in a Northern European law school (University of Turku) on Legal Technology and Innovation. Anna is also a co-founder of TrademarkNow, a Finnish legal tech company developing solutions for trademark law based on artificial intelligence, used by many industry leaders, law firms and branding agencies across the world. Founded in 2012, it combines one trademark attorney’s frustrations with existing solutions with a decade of earlier research and a world-class development team. Anna will elaborate on the company’s back story and demonstrates the current product line, including latest features. |
15:30 |
Coffee Break |
16:00 |
Compliance and Digitalization. Launch of MyFondia Legal Platform
MyFondia is a tool for Legal Department as a Service providing efficient management of legal aspects in a company. Brad is a Senior Legal Counsel of Fondia. Brad has advised multinational organizations in a broad range of legal and business capacities for over 18 years. Brad has most recently worked in the Ethics and Compliance departments of Microsoft and Nokia, and currently specializes in helping companies to build, implement and improve their compliance programs. Brad has practical experience in developing and implementing compliance programs including: conducting risk assessments, drafting compliance policies and procedures, implementing reporting hotlines, conducting and managing investigations, designing and providing training, and advising on best practices. In addition to his work in compliance, Brad also has a strong background in legal issues related to supply chains and procurement, open source software licensing and development, and dispute resolution. Brad is originally from the United States, and is a native English speaker. He has lived in Finland since 2000, became a Finnish citizen in 2012. Anti is the managing director of Fondia Baltic. Before joining Fondia, Anti obtained legal knowledge and expertise from both sides of the legal provision service – as an in-house counsel in SEB and as an attorney in VARUL law firm. Anti is intrigued by new ways of providing legal services and goes by the principle: excellent legal service starts from understanding the business. Legal has to provide solutions and efficient ways to do business in a suitable risk-reward ratio. |
17:00 |
The Future of Legal Services
Legal industry has been one of the slowest in adoption of new technologies and changes of business models. While many industries have already witnessed dramatic changes due to new technologies, disruption of the legal industry is yet to occur. This panel session will explore what are some of the current changes taking place in the legal industry and what are some of the innovative ways for legal services delivery, including how legal technology can assist legal professionals, as well as what are some of the new ways for in-house counsel to find value and better organise their work. The panel session will also discuss what could be some of the major challenges that legal professionals will be facing in the future. While others have been introduced above, let us give you a little background on Risto and Tanel Erik. Risto is the chief legal officer of an ICT and business consultancy enterprise Nortal, Visiting Lecturer in IT Law at the University of Tartu and founder of the Estonian chapter of Legal Hackers, forming part of a global movement of lawyers, policymakers, technologists, and academics who explore and develop creative solutions to some of the most pressing issues at the intersection of law and technology. Previously he has worked as an attorney at Law Office Tark Grunte Sutkiene and advisor at Estonian Parliament Riigikogu. His expertise covers IT and technology, data protection and intellectual property law. Tanel Erik is the legal counsel at the mobile payments platform provider Fortumo. Previously he has worked as a lawyer in Law Office Raidla & Partners, Swedbank and SEB. In Fortumo, Tanel deals with day-to-day legal advice, compliance, agreement negotiations, legal disputes, intellectual property and anything else that ends up on his desk. Hence, Tanel is a true in-house counsel, legal project manager who deals hand-in-hand with the business side and supports the core business of Fortumo. |
17:45 |
Closing Remarks
Anne is an Associate Partner and an Attorney-at-Law at NJORD Law Firm. She is also a visiting Lecturer of the IT Law Programme at the University of Tartu, one of the organizers of Estonia Legal Hackers and a legal angel at crowdfunding platform FUNDWISE. Her legal expertise covers the areas of venture capital & private equity and alternative finance. She is a passionate legal technology and blockchain enthusiast. |
18:00 |
Networking and Snacks |