von Nico Kuhlmann
On September 6, the sixth Hamburg Legal Tech Meetup took place at Google’s German headquarters in Hamburg. The Hamburg Legal Tech Meetup is an event series initiated by Nico Kuhlmann (Hogan Lovells). The gathering of stakeholders aims at elaborating new ways of adapting legal services to digitalisation by further enhancing interdisciplinary and inter-industry exchange in the field of legal tech.
This meetup’s technical focus was on artificial intelligence and particularly machine learningwhile the legal spotlight focused on how in-house counsel and external law firms are going to cooperate well under the influence of legal tech.
After a warm welcome by Arnd Haller (Legal Director, Google) and a brief introduction by Nico Kuhlmann, Christopher Denk (Customer Engineer, Google) reported on the basics of machine learning. Among other things, he spoke about the difference between structured and unstructured data as well as the various forms of supervised and unsupervised machine learning.
The second part of the evening was kicked off by Julia Schuermann (Senior Legal Counsel, Google). She gave an overview of the structure of a digital law department including the respective tools already at use at Google and how Google envisages to work in the future.
Against this background, a panel of experts discussed the cooperation between law departments and law firms in the 21th century. Alongside Dennis Kaben (Legal Director, Google), Christopher Denk (Customer Engineer, Google) and Ramak Molavi (Head of Legal & Regulatory Affairs, GameDuell), Hogan Lovells Partner Morten Petersenn participated in this panel discussion on current trends and upcoming developments. He particularly shared his view on what may be deemed crucial for an efficient cooperation of law firms and their business partners in today’s digital world. The panel also discussed so–called “knowledge tools”, which are software applications typically provided by a law firm to its clients solving certain pre-determined questions of law on demand. Another hot topic was how alternative ways of communication can make a difference in efficiency and quality of the final product.
In summary, this was a very entertaining as well as truly informative evening, giving room for topics essential for everyone who is interested in serving clients’ needs in a state-of-the-art way using the means of the modern digital world. Thus: we encourage you to participate in a legal tech meetup – take advantage of it!
[This article war first published on Limegreen IP News and is here republished with kind permission of Hogan Lovells]