The Legal Tech Hackathon and its past year’s success story

by Michael Beier

The Legal Tech Hackathon (in short LTH) is a course that is offered each summer semester by the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law and the University of Applied Sciences Vienna. Through this cooperation the LTH not only comprises law students – just like any other “ordinary” course offered at the Juridicum – but also computer science students. These students first meet during the LTH’s kick-off event, form mixed teams and create their own legal tech project ideas. During the kick-off, experts of the legal tech field hold short presentations about their work aimed at inspiring and helping the students to form their project ideas. This is followed by one weekend in early May, when the teams get together on the premises of the ID-Law department and work on implementing their ideas. The resulting prototypes are presented a week later in the finale of the LTH. At the end of the finale the team with the best project is chosen as a winner.

In short, one could say that the LTH creates a symbiosis of computer science and law students. Both groups of students transfer and in turn acquire basic knowledge of the other’s academic discipline while working together as a team on their projects. After the first step is taken during the LTH, the teams can continue their project ideas even after the finale. As such the Legal Tech Hackathon has already been the starting point for some now flourishing legal tech startups.

In the summer term of 2024, the LTH took place for the 7th time. At the finale on May 13th, 2024, we heard the pitches of this year’s 5 teams, all of them talking about their own unique business ideas developed and refined during the Hackathon. For example, the project team behind “Trial Triumph” created a website that calculated the success rate of attorneys on appeal before the Austrian Supreme Court, or “Ref Reviser”, which is a platform that checks bibliographies of legal papers for newer editions of the books referenced. One project that particularly impressed the jury and was therefore declared the winner of the LTH 2024, was “Pat-Check X”. The team behind this project created a tool which is aimed at easing freedom-to-operate analyses and in general patent research. This is done by first creating a list of synonyms for the technical specifications searched for, which the user then links together as required for this search request. Later, the tool searches for these particular sets of synonyms to find all possible patents that are relevant but may use different words and terminology for the same purposes.

The unique teaching concept of the Hackathon and the underlying cooperation between the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law and the University of Applied Sciences Vienna has not gone unnoticed. In September 2023, the LTH was awarded the Ars Docendi State Price for Excellent Teaching in the Category of “Cooperative Forms of Teaching and Working”. Since then, the LTH was also inducted into the Austrian Atlas der guten Lehre (Atlas of good Teaching). Later in November 2023, I had the enormous privilege of talking about and disseminating the LTH’s interdisciplinary teaching concept at the Cyberspace Conference 2023 in Brno. Lastly, during the summer semester of 2024, the University of Vienna’s Center for Teaching and Learning interviewed Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó, for the perspective of the course instructor, and me, for the perspective of a student assistant, to introduce the LTH through the “Infopool besser lehren” (Infopool better teaching) as an example for an unique and (at least in our opinion) great teaching concept to the University of Vienna at large.