Bringing open innovation to the law

  • Hackathon
  • Legal

From March 27th to 29th we welcomed almost 100 legal tech enthusiasts at the first Open Legal Lab in Magglingen. During the two days, the participants worked together to solve twelve challenges from the legal field. From Twitterbots to new concepts on how to revolutionize the lawmaking process the results of the Lab were as diverse as the participants.

The Summarizing Twitterbot not only tweets when a new leading case has been made by the Swiss Federal Tribunal, but also gives a short summary of the subject of the decision. Follow the bot on Twitter to stay informed about the latest developments at the tribunal: https://twitter.com/BGE_ATF

Solar DAO was working on finding the right legal base for DAOs in Switzerland and how to integrate them best into the legal framework.

Casemates developed a new interface for SPARQL queries in the Casemates. Although the prototype at the moment only works with Luxemburgian law, we are confident that further iterations will also work with Swiss laws.

FragDenBund worked on a website that lets you easily request information based on the freedom of information act (“Öffentlichkeitsgesetz”) guiding you to the right place to ask the right questions.

Soon digital notarial deeds will be implemented in Switzerland. What could they look like? How will they work? How can everyone understand them? These are the questions this team worked on.

Team Apfelbaum worked on a chatbot for legal questions. If you’re thinking about getting a divorce you can now talk to a bot that will answer your burning questions such as: How long will it take? How much will it cost? And how exactly does a divorce work?

Hate speech is unfortunately very common on the internet. But do you know how to file a police report when you’re affected by it? The #HassMelden platform lets you collect all the information you need to make a compelling police report, citing the correct laws that have been breached.

Fachrepositorium Recht aimed to create a law repository collecting all the free information on Swiss law in one handy place.

The team surrounding the collective law-making challenge was developing a new way to make laws: less top-down more bottom-up.

Judges love reusing old judgements to create new ones. With the text block marker, you can scan judgements to see which parts are completely new, which ones have been copied word by word from another judgement and which ones have been slightly altered.

What if you only have to register your data once and for the rest of your life all parts of the administration know who you are? How can this process be done while adhering to the law? The Once-Only team were busy taking on this challenge.

Not only was the first Open Legal Lab a huge success but we are already busy planning the second iteration of the Lab which will take place from April 30th to May 1st 2023 in Magglingen. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date!

We would like to thank our partners from ejustice.ch for their support in organizing the Open Legal Lab, as well as our sponsors.