The Legaltech & NewLaw Observatory Garrigues-ICADE (Observatorio Legaltech & NewLaw Garrigues-ICADE) is part of Comillas Pontifical University’s Law School (ICADE) and is supported by Garrigues.
ICADE is one of the most prestigious Law Schools in Spain and Garrigues is one of the largest international law firms with 2,000 people spread across offices in 12 countries. ICADE and Garrigues believe in investing in the future of the legal profession, which is why they created the Observatory.
As part of the Observatory’s Program, ICADE and Garrigues aim to make the benefits of legal technology more tangible to society, offering real hands-on experience. To do so, the Observatory partnered with BRYTER to host a hackathon, where ICADE’s Legaltech Masters’ students and Garrigues associates had the opportunity to build their first digital legal application in under two hours using BRYTER’s no-code legal development platform.
We spoke with Ofelia Tejerina, Coordinator of the Observatory at ICADE, and with Albi Rodríguez Jaramillo and Belén Aguayo, from the Legal Digital Transformation department at Garrigues, about the hackathon and why they chose to partner with BRYTER.
Inspiring the next generation of lawyers
“At the Observatory, we believe there are different ways of approaching how legal services are delivered. We think lawyers can change the way they work and the structure of their day-to-day. The challenge is that lawyers may not know about all the possibilities, which is why we want to help empower the future generation with the knowledge of what is possible”, they explain.
“Students are the future of the legal profession. All major law schools across the world are looking at technology and that’s what we’re bringing with the Observatory”.
“The feedback we got from students was that they wanted to understand legal technology in a practical way. They were confused with everything being so abstract. They wanted to see how it all worked in practice,” they also explain. “That’s why we decided to organize a legal hackathon. Using the BRYTER platform for this was the obvious choice because it enables lawyers to build an actual, viable application very quickly. We wanted students to experience building a complete digital tool, and to understand that this was a real possibility for lawyers and BRYTER is a platform that makes it possible.”
Getting started quickly with BRYTER
The legal hackathon took place over one day. The challenge? To build an NDA generator using the “oneNDA” model by the end of the day! The Observatory brought together Garrigues’ junior associates from the firm to collaborate with the Master’s students. In the morning, participants were given access to BRYTER and trained on how to build their first legal application. After only one hour of training, by the afternoon they were already well on their way to building with BRYTER.
“Using BRYTER, Garrigues associates and ICADE law students built an NDA generator in 1.5 hours. This would have been impossible to do if BRYTER was not so easy to use,” explains Belén. “The fact that BRYTER is so intuitive, and lawyers can get started so quickly, is one of the key reasons we chose to use it as our no-code development platform over anything else on the market.”
Catalysing the community
“Hackathons like the one we ran with BRYTER are very effective to inspire a community into action,” they explain. And this hackathon is just the start.
“At the KTech Lab of the Observatory, we are working on how to standardize and digitize contracts, using BRYTER as one of the key tools for the projects. We’re currently focused on the standardization and digitization of the preliminary contract to the sale and purchase of houses. It’s a contract specific to Spanish Law which involves escrow arrangements (in Spanish, “pacto de arras”).”