Around 70 visitors came to LegalWorks at Convendum to experience what the legal tech industry could offer for in-house lawyers. 13 exhibitors representing both local legal tech start-ups, like Precisely, OneFlow and DPorganizer, and international established players like Canon, Wolters Kluwer, SAI Global and Diligent, were there showing they latest technology offerings.
Karl Chapman from Riverview Law opened up the event with an inspiring speech about the development of the legal industry and how technology will transform the legal function. Two themes that Karl addressed in his speech were value chain disruption through disintermediation (Uberization) and the importance of triage, i e “the right work is done by the right people, in the right place, at the right time, at the right price, whether that work is undertaken internally or externally”. Karl pointed out that in all these changes the customers are the winners.
The main sponsor was effacts by Wolters Kluwers, who has developed a tool to manage contract, legal entities and litigation.
“We are happy to learn that legal counsel in Sweden are enthusiastic about adopting legal tech. They realize that spreadsheets and generic tools don’t give them the details they need. Legal counsel are taking on a strategic role, and need tools such as effacts to help them extract value from their information and become a strategic player,” says Eveline Willigers, Commercial Director of effacts.
Jorma Vartia from Laissa in Finland presented the results from the Nordic GC Survey about data protection readiness. The result showed consensus by the GC about the growing importance of the data protection issues and, at the same time, a somewhat low degree of GDPR readiness. There is a large group of companies that have not even started yet. A complete report will be published soon.
For the first time the Legal Innovation Prize was awarded. This prize has been established by legaltech.se in collaboration with LegalWorks and Legal Hackers. The first winner of this prize was verksamt.se, an online tool for entrepreneurs to form companies, manage legal formalities and tax registrations developed by Bolagsverket, Tillväxtverket and Skatteverket. The person of the year award went to Egil Bergenlind . Bergenlind is the founder of DPOrganizer, a data protection management and compliance tool, and a former lawyer at Bird & Bird and iZettle.
”The Swedish legal tech scene is in a dynamic phase and there are a number of really interesting projects in the works. It´s more than exciting ideas. My bet is that we will see an increased use of smart cloud-based tools within the next years – they offer a lot of value for small money and are easy to implement. I look forward to see how far we have come at next year´s Tech Day.” says Ulf Lindén, CEO of LegalWorks.
