Reinvent Law is continental Europe’s first legal innovation hub. Aiming to build a legal innovation ecosystem, Reinvent Law is structured by a membership model and connects four important areas: Law firms, corporate legal departments, legal tech ventures and universities. Members include international powerhouse Baker McKenzie and legal departments leading in the field of legal innovation – Bosch, Daimler, ING and ZF Friedrichshafen. Reinvent Law serves as a platform connecting these legal counsel to the tech and educational world – with two resident legal tech ventures and close to ten other legal tech ventures as community members and universities, as well as close ties to a number of law schools such as Bucerius Law School in Hamburg.
Collaboration is key
When building an ecosystem, it’s crucial that everyone who gives something to the ecosystem also has a chance to get something from the ecosystem. Our members have understood that the best way for progress is an open environment where everybody shares their experiences – good and bad – and thus has a chance to learn.
BRYTER’s contribution to Reinvent Law’s ecosystem
We’re happy to have BRYTER as a resident legal tech in our hub, as it’s the perfect example for what we’re trying to achieve: serve as a fertilizer for different parts of the legal innovation landscape and lowering the barriers for the actual application of tools that help lawyers in their daily work. Stop talking, start doing.
Focus on the really important tasks
A lot of our work revolves around freeing precious time lawyers in law firms and legal departments spend on tasks that have nothing to do with actual legal work. Copying and pasting the names of entities doesn’t require a bar exam. Understanding why certain information is needed and where, does. BRYTER makes it easy to build a structure that can provide answers to internal and external clients or produce legal documents in batches.
The case for automation
The real power of BRYTER shows when you can reliably establish processes you just couldn’t bring to fruition before: Providing your salespeople with a toolset to draft their own contracts in line with your internal best practices is one thing. Attaching multiple automated processes to the creation of such a contract is a completely different ballgame: IF there’s a new contract to be signed with a client in Venezuela, THEN send an email to the compliance officer. Hard to enforce as a process, easy with a tool such as BRYTER.
It’s hard to admit, but: very little legal work is actually tailor made.
In countless meetings with legal counsel, we’ve heard over and over again that almost everything in their daily work is tailor-made and can’t possibly be automated. When they see what others have built on the BRYTER platform and how it takes tedious workload off their shoulders, you instantly see their faces light up and can almost see the gears shifting in their heads. Sounds corny, but it’s true.
No lawyer does really long to answer the same question for the 48th time in a month – but there just was no tool before to provide self-service capabilities for client’s needs.
Lawyers need a toolset that corresponds to the way they work and think.
Let’s be honest: Most of the time, legal work is not rocket science. It’s just really, really comprehensive. Every day, we run countless number of decision trees in our heads: Classifying information, amending facts of a case, adjusting our classification, approve of disapprove precedent, always keeping in mind our clients’ needs. If you want a toolset that resembles this workflow, it has to be quite versatile and needs to be easily adjusted by the
lawyer himself.
No-code, self-service
You don’t want to call an external agency every time your internal workflow changes, there are amendments to the law you have to reflect in your decision trees or you just realize that you have to amend certain nodes or actions. Decades ago, lawyers were dependent on typists if they wanted to make changes to any written document they’ve produced. We then
got accustomed to the power of personal computers and Word. BRYTER takes this another step further, opening decision trees and automation for everyone. Lawyers included.
Become a member
Learn more about Reinvent Law and how your legal department can become a member in their member section.
Daniel von Devivere is Founder and Managing Director of Reinvent Law, continental Europe’s first legal innovation hub, with members such as Baker McKenzie, Bosch, Daimler, ING and ZF. A trained lawyer, Daniel has worked in corporate M&A at a major international law firm and then switched from the legal to the business side, founding and incubating a number of ventures in the fintech space and advising a family office, setting up a fintech venture studio with a number of active ventures and overseeing operations management for other investments of the family office. At Reinvent Law, Daniel is exposed to the changing requirements law firms and legal departments are facing and how they are dealing with those challenges.