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#GLH2020 launches the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

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#GLH2020 launches the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

We just yesterday blogged the details and opened registration for the London edition of this year’s Global Legal Hackathon, which might be the largest hackathon ever!  To add to an already great event, The Global Legal Hackathon have just a short while ago announced a worldwide collaboration with with She Breaks the Law, RSG Consulting, and global law firm BCLP to launch the GLH Inclusivity Challenge and you’ll know inclusivity, diversity and LGBTQ issues are always high on our agenda.  In any case the GLH weekend coincides with International Women’s Day (March 8), so the idea is a natural fit!

GLH2020 adds the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

The 2020 Global Legal Hackathon will be held between March 6-8 simultaneously in more than 50 cities and 25 countries around the world.  This year is the third year Agile Elephant has co-hosted London with our friends at Cambridge Strategy Group, and our the second year that the venue is kindly provided by the University of Westminster, although this year we are moving to a bigger space at their Marylebone Campus.  

As we’ve described, our goal is to get legal brains, marketers, business analysts and coders in to teams over a weekend creating apps and services that improve the practice and business of law, or provide better access to law for the public.  We’ll be fuelling their creativity with beer and pizza, although other food and beverages (including wine) will be available too, thanks to our sponsors – this is a not for profit exercise, and free to enter for all participants (so somebody has to cover our costs please!).  But this year, the Global organisers are setting this extra challenge:

“Participants and teams around the world, in every Global Legal Hackathon city, are challenged to invent new ways to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”

At the conclusion of GLH weekend, a local winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be selected by each city alongside the main winner, and will progress to a global semi-finals too. This will be an extra stream and, like the main stream, finalists will be invited to the GLH Finals & Gala, to be held in London in mid-May. On top of that, the overall winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be invited to present its solution during a diversity and inclusion summit that BCLP is planning to host in September, where leading figures from the industry will be asked to commit to ensuring the idea is brought to life and scaled up to deliver a lasting impact on the legal industry as a whole.

Kearra Markowich, Executive Director of the Global Legal Hackathon, and who is based here in London told us:

“the Global Legal Hackathon is remarkable for the fact that it is a global technology event that is majority women-led around the world.  Women lead the event in Brazil, Israel, Romania, Singapore, the United States, and many other countries. On the occasion of International Women’s Day overlapping with the Global Legal Hackathon, we are thrilled to be joined by women-owned RSG Consulting, She Breaks the Law, and the diversity and inclusion team of BCLP to challenge the world to invent new and novel approaches to increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”


We think this is a fantastic addition to what is always a great fun weekend. Follow these links to find out more about:

We look forward to seeing you in Marylebone!

IBM Think – All for tech and tech for all

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IBM Think – All for tech and tech for all

I’ve been invited to contribute to a couple of panel sessions at this year’s IBM Think Summit in London, one of which is titled “All for tech and tech for all!”.  The Alexander Dumas influence got me looking up his various quotations which led me to something which is very apt for the event: 

“One’s work may be finished someday, but one’s education never.”  

The Think event is always thought provoking and a great place to learn, with top notch speakers, challenging ideas and great content, from keynotes to debates to customers to more detailed sessions.  This year it has moved from the Truman Brewery to Olympia London, so there will be less stairs, doors and dark corners to navigate, but it means the event can spread out with a new campus style.  I started writing this post on the day of the Global climate strike and it’s no surprise that this year’s Summit has a focus on sustainability, with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall delivering the first guest keynote after Bill Kelleher, IBM’s Chief Executive in the UK, opens the show in the morning.  

As well as two streams of content in the Showcase theatres, 3 streams of workshops for developers, a stream of lively debates (more on that later), there is a series of fast paced 15 minute sessions in the Think Tanks.  Those short talks are in varied formats covering cloud, infrastructure, security, resilience, data, AI and shaping the future.   

Topics like Quantum Computing, Advanced AI and Blockchain will get a lot of attention.  As well as the talks, debates and workshops, there will be four Campuses to explore which will host exciting experiences and engaging TED style talks sharing client stories: 

  • Cloud & Infrastructure 
  • Security & Resiliency 
  • Data & AI 
  • Shaping the Future 

I’m particularly interested in the Cloud & Infrastructure campus as this will be the first Think Summit following the finalisation of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat.  As you may know, I’ve written about the significance of this move, with IBM positioning themselves, in my opinion, as the “Enterprise Cloud” company.  IBM’s approach is truly hybrid and multicloud.  Embracing Red Shift’s containerised OpenShift platform means you can build your codebase once and deploy anywhere – on-premise, private cloud, public cloud or at the edge.  With IoT and AI applications, edge computing, or moving servers to where the work happens because of latency issues, becomes a must.  They will also be covering their integration approach, how you modernise existing and legacy applications, as well as their way of managing this multicloud environment cost effectively, safely and securely.  They will cover the IBM Garage methodology with an experience showing how this approach helps you move faster, work smarter, and ideate more rapidly.  They will cover a host of examples of IBM Cloud deployments across 20 different industries.   

In the campus you’ll be able to get hands on with 4 activations: 

  • IBM Garage Accelerator – 3 short films demonstrate how clients have worked with IBM Garage to transform their businesses with the speed of a start-up, at the scale of an enterprise. 
  • IBM Garage Innovation Wall – Follow Mueller’s journey as they quickly define, test, and deploy a solution that changed the way their sales reps interacted with contractors, one of their primary end users. 
  • Customer Success Stories: Explore 15 cross-industry stories of client achievements of accelerated transformation based on IBM Cloud and Infrastructure (apparently this will be sushi bar style – can’t wait!). 
  • Drive Race Winning Innovation with Red Bull Racing Playseats – there’s even a competition to win a factory tour at Red Bull Racing HQ. 

On top of that they’ll be 6 demo pods, 10 business partners to meet, and 13 TED talks going on.  I haven’t got space for the other 3 campuses, but they’ll be just as comprehensive, so there will be lots to learn and a lot of ground to cover.   

Now to the Debates, moderated by Katie Derham.  I’m assuming they will be “in the round” like last year, and under the Chatham House Rule, so for a change I won’t be tweeting every other second.  IBM wants open, thought provoking, maybe even controversial debates so people can really speak their mind.  I’ll be contributing to two: 

All for tech and tech for all 

Over the past twenty years we have seen technology become fully embedded in our daily lives, and increasingly embraced across all age groups.  With an eye firmly on the future, IBM are bringing together a panel of younger and older people, to discuss where technology is heading, what problems it could solve, how it is developed and marketed and how it will be used. How should technology address the needs of the different generations in our society moving forwards, and what will need to change, so that we are truly living in an age of “All for Tech and Tech for All”?  I plan to talk about the difficulty in predicting the future, how tech could be our saviour, definitely something on creativity, and maybe something on how we aren’t educating the current generation properly for what happens next.  What sort of tech might we talk about?  Designer antibiotics, ingestible robots, smart clothing, photonics? 

Essential Education 

The world we work in is changing – and changing rapidly. For those with the right skill-sets, new opportunities abound, and new, challenging careers await; we have the some knotty problems to address – and need a innovative, creative, workforce to address them. But with the pace of change fast and relentless, how do we ensure today’s youth are prepared for the work of tomorrow – and not left behind? How might we promote life-long learning in order to capitalise on a wealth of experience and knowledge? Technology is undoubtedly driving force behind the revolution – but how can education be used to harness that power for good?  I just might mention the most watched TED Talk ever  (62 million views and counting).  That’s Sir Ken Robinson brilliant summary of his “Out of our Minds” book in 18 minutes (highly recommended, both book and talk).  We need to change the structure and priorities of a 19th century designed education system to make it fit for the 21st century.  We need to get creative.  And lifelong learning is a must.  Come along and join in the debates! 

As I finish this post, IBM Think Summit London is only 20 days away.  It’s shaping up to be quite something.  Check out the agenda, and please make time and register to attend right now!  It would be great to meet you at Olympia London, and if you’ve got any questions or suggestions in advance, don’t hesitate to contact me  or find me on Twitter.  See you there! 

Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it

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Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it

I’m at Hannover Messe 2019 for the first time, courtesy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.  It’s not as big as CeBIT was, but it is still a huge conference with over 20 halls of exhibitors, covering everything from Industry 4.0, integrated automation, the digital factory, industrial supply, research & technology to the digital workplace.  HPE are in hall 6, the home of digital manufacturing.  I’ll be telling more stories from here around AI, automation, IoT, edge computing and a whole lot more, but on the first day I met with Chris Wellise HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer.  

Chris Wellise, HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer

When I’m speaking at events I’ll often ask the audience who amongst them was born on or before 1974, because those of us that were have been alive while the population of the planet has doubled, and as humans have been around for 200,000 years, that rate of change is staggering.  We live in exponential times, and Chris is full of eye-watering quotes and statistics on a topic that ins’t particularly sexy, but our lives and the future depends on it.  Chris says that as a large scale manufacturer:

“HPE produces 7 servers, 13 networking devices and 80 TB of storage every 60 seconds!”  

That’s 5 million units a year, all which generate data, and all of which need energy and resources in their creation.  Chris suggests that by 2030 most people will have 15 devices, all generating data because “everything computes at the edge and everywhere”.   He’s seen research that suggests we will run out of gold by 2030.  Yikes!  

You don’t have to have watched The Blue Planet to recognise the effect of what we are creating and then throwing away is doing for all of our futures.  Chris believes that sustainability is key.  We have to power the digital economy in a new way, and recognise the energy and resource constraints we need to work around.  Chris believes we have to move towards the circular economy.  To be able to do more with less.  We have to think in terms of applying our technology to disrupt the status quo.  We need smart manufacturing approaches to remove resource leakages.  

HPE have been rethinking design for environment since late 80s and they are one of only a few tech companies who regularly talk about what they are doing and why, rather than it just being a topic in the corporate social responsibility section of the website.  This thinking is necessary as the numbers are so big.  There will be 8.5 billion of us by 2030.  We’ll have 21 billion devices connected and sharing data by 2020.  By 2060 we will be need to be extracting twice the raw material that we do today, unless we can think differently.  We are running out of our planet at the same time that some people don’t even accept that global warming is real.

The HPE approach is to think through every product and design for its end of use.  They can “upcycle” and reconfigure equipment for a new customer within 48 hours at their renewable technology centres in Erskine, Scotland, and Andover, Massachusetts.  The products are, on average, 89% remanufactured to be sent on to a new customer with the remaining 11% responsibly recycled.  HPE have a vast shared supply chain servicing more than 150,000 customers, helped by over 170 suppliers, and then delivering products to 140 countries.  Chris says that they think about how they can have a sustainable influence on that massive supply chain in terms of greenhouse gas targets connected to the science of what they are doing, all in line with the Paris Accord on climate change.  It’s a call to action for our industry.  The current trajectory we are on is not sustainable.  

The other concept Chris talks about is “data landfill”.  He suggest that only 6% of data we generate is actually being used, and so the other 94% is wasted data that we have used energy, raw materials and production capacity to generate (for no added value).  How do we close that gap?  

Here’s Chris at the show following our sit down, talking with me some more around the sustainability topic:

Chris Wellise talking HPE’s approach sustainability with David Terrar for IT2

I’ll carry on the discussion in a follow on post, taking the sustainability thinking through to HPE’s customers using IoT, AI and data analytics technology to change the dynamic and reduce the waste.  Like I said at the start, sustainability might not be a sexy topic, but our future depends on it! 

Check back here for more content like this, and contact us if you want to find out more.

Disclosure: HPE paid my expenses for the trip to HMI 2019 as part of their influencer programme.

Rock History connections at the Global Legal Hackathon London

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Rock History connections at the Global Legal Hackathon London

This year’s edition of the Global Legal Hackathon London just wrapped last night, with a worthy winner, and 2 runners up, from the 8 teams that coalesced and competed over the weekend.  Actually all 8 solutions pitched were great. I’ll write more about the event and the outcomes in the next few days, but I though I’d start with how the event was connected to some serious 1960s London rock history. 

Like last year Agile Elephant and Cambridge Strategy Group co-hosted, but with Wavelength Law too.  The event grew globally from 40 cities to 47 this year, and London grew too. This year’s venue was kindly provided by University of Westminster Law School at 4-12, Little Titchfield Street in the Fitzrovia area of central London.  They gave us their big auditorium, plus a room called Portland Hall and a dozen classrooms. The hall has rock history significance which I didn’t realise until we started doing the set up with Alan their AV guy:


Pink Floyd 

Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright were all architecture students at The Polytechnic (which subsequently became UoW). They met there in 1963 and formed a band with some others which they called Sigma 6.  The band first rehearsed and played on that very stage in Portland Hall.  Band members and name changes came and went. By 1965 Syd Barrett had joined and they had become the Tea Set.  At some gig that year there was another band with the same name so Syd has to make up a name on the spot and he picked the first names of two blues players he admired Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, becoming the Pink Floyd Sound.  But it all started in Portland Hall.


Jimi Hendrix and Cream

On 1 October 1966 Cream were playing the Polytechnic on stage at Portland Hall. just a week after manager Chas Chandler brought Jimi Hendrix to the UK to launch his career.  Chas talked to Cream apparently saying “I’ve got this friend who would love to jam with you.”  They let him on stage and played Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’.  Eric Clapton is quoted as saying:

“He got up and blew everyone’s mind. I just thought ‘ahh, someone that plays the stuff I love in the flesh, on stage with me. I was actually privileged to be (on stage with him)… it’s something that no one is ever going to beat; that incident, that night, it’s historic in my mind but only a few people are alive that would remember it.”

There should be a plaque somewhere there, but there isn’t.

London was part of the largest Legal Hackathon ever

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London was part of the largest Legal Hackathon ever

It’s been just over a week since the London stream of the Global Legal Hackathon, and those of us who were involved are still feeling the buzz. Here’s a full report of what went on. This was round one of a process which found a London winner to go forward with 39 other city winners from 20 countries, and 1 winner from a remote Hackathon stream too. The aim was to be as open and inclusive as possible, to make this the largest legal hackathon ever!

Globally more than 5000 people participated over the weekend of 23-25 February, generating more than 1000 new legal tech ideas. The 41 winners can improve their entries within agreed guidelines up to the deadline for round two which takes place on March 11th & 12th. Then 10 finalists will be chosen for round three, and funded to attend and the gala final, taking place in New York on April 21st.

Why run a Legal Hackthon?
It’s all about experimentation and innovation. We introduced what #GLH2018 #London was all about in our earlier posts. The goal was to apply innovative ideas and emerging (or any) technologies to progress the business of law or facilitate access to justice for the public. We knew that getting lawyers, coders, designers, marketers, analysts and other business people together over a weekend with beer and pizza was going to make things happen.

So what did happen that weekend?
Something special. On 23rd February, the Friday evening in London we had around 60 people (from 102 registered participants including helpers, mentors and judges) – some were partially formed teams, and many participants were coming along with an idea or some skills, energy and enthusiasm to add in to the pot. Of our participants who stayed the course till Sunday evening, what we didn’t realise until I asked the question in the final presentation session, was that around 2/3 had never participated in a Hackathon before! In Pinsent Masons‘ excellent auditorium, after setting the scene, explaining the timing, the rules, and the Judging Rubric, people started pitching ideas. Actually we started with just 3 good ideas. Then after a worryingly long pause and some discussion the ideas really began to flow. We ended up with 13 really interesting possibilities. We stopped for Dominos Pizza (who weren’t a sponsor, but maybe next year?). Pizza is the life blood of any Hackathon. Straight afterwards we got back in to the auditorium to try to facilitate some version of team speed dating. Actually, following a little encouragement, some of the ideas joined together or were dropped and we coalesced in to 6 teams, each with a strong proposition and a balanced set of skills. Pretty much everybody stayed until 21:00 when we closed the building.

A surprisingly large numbers of team members rejoined us for 8:00 the next morning when we moved to Pinsent Masons luxurious client centre on the 14th floor. More team members arrived during the day – we actually had capacity for 13 teams in 13 separate rooms, thanks to our gracious hosts! 5 teams each grabbed a room for home base, and our 6th team met somewhere else with their developers in the morning, but joined us in the client centre mid afternoon.

Of the 6 lifts you can take to get up and down the Pinsent Masons building, lift D is by far the best choice if you can get it. It’s all glass, running on the outside of the building, and they call it the James Bond lift because it briefly appears in a scene in Skyfall! Fantastic views over London. With that lift, those views and the client centre, this was very definitely “not your average Hackathon”!

Rob Millard and I raided a local Marks & Spencer for sandwiches, nibbles, beer, wine and soft drinks. Actually we totally cleared them out of every variety of bottled beer they had in their fridge – not many regular customers expected in the City of London on a weekend. Sandwiches for lunch. More Dominos Pizza for our evening meal, made even more tasty with the addition of beer and wine (and soft drinks). However, it was notable that our teams were careful with their alcohol intake. We saw people refusing a second beer and heading back to their team rooms – there’s dedication! Yet again they all worked until 21:00 when we had to finally kick them out.

We had the same early start of 8:00 for Sunday with the same early arrivals, a different sandwich selection from Sainsburys and Tescos for lunch, and plenty of drinks and nibbles left for the early evening session. There was a lot of mentor interaction during the day, with teams getting input, asking questions, getting guidance on the approach for their presentations. Soon after lunch you could see some teams rehearsing their story as other teams madly tried to get everything finished by the 16:00 “down tools” deadline.

The Teams
Here are the 6 London teams:

LiP-Sync Toks Hussain
Keith Hardie
Yee Mun Ooi
Ian Broom
James Kingston
Julie Gottlieb
Alex Goff
Mariela Petsova
LightningWarriors George Norfolk
James Turner
Elma Gakenyi
Ben Babbik
Thomas Pauls
Jon Wilks
Team Pinsent Masons Orlando Conetta
Michael Bell
Ben Cooper
Michael Bell
Alisha Kouser
Olivia Irrgang
smartcomms.ai  Rosemary Martin
Philip Fumey
Martin Kath
Lyle Ellis
Steven Jebb
Olaseni Odebiyi
Christopher Rawlings
RegChain Alkesh Acharya
Fraser Matcham
plus 2
Legalytics Murtaza Amirali
Dr. Mehmood Hassan
Ashok Panchabakesan
Mohamed Sajeed Hameed

Our Judges and Mentors
Our judges were Christina Blacklaws, Deputy Vice President of the Law Society, Frank Jennings the “Cloud Lawyer”, Joanna Goodman, writer/editor and columnist for the Law Society Gazette, and Dr Richard Sykes chair of the Cloud Industry Forum.

Our mentors, to advise and keep the teams on track were Sophia Adams-Bhati, Richard Tromans, Andy Unger, Kim Silver, Silvia Cambie, Jelena Madir, Robert Marcus, Dennis Howlett, Maeve Lavelle, Alan Patrick, Janet Parkinson, Rob Millard and me. Amy Braunz of Integra Ledger joined us for Sunday too.

A very big thank you to all of our judges and mentors who gave up valuable time over a weekend to join the fun. This whole exercise was not-for-profit, only made possible by these people volunteering, our host providing the space free, and our sponsors paying to feed us.

Who was supporting this?
Here are those vital London Sponsors and Supporters we need to thank for making all of this possible!  Cambridge Strategy Group, the Agile Elephant Team, and Pinsent Masons were co-hosts (and by the way, the venue was fantastic!).  We mustn’t forget IBM and Microsoft who provided developers some free access to their cloud platforms. LexisNexis, JG Consulting, Sales Filter, Durham Law School and  The Law Society, were our local sponsors. The Society for Computers and Law, and Disruptive.Live were supporting us too.

I must also thank Indi Shinji, Pinsent Masons events coordinator.  She did a fantastic job all weekend keeping us happy, keeping an unruly bunch of hackers compliant with PM health and safety, and keeping her cool as she accommodated our various and unusual demands.  She was brilliant.

The Global sponsors across all three rounds are Integra, IBM Watson Legal, the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium, Cadence, LawDroid and ONE400

The Presentations
As soon as everyone managed to get down from the 14th floor, a little before 16:15 on Sunday we assembled back in the auditorium for our 6 presentations. The sequence had been chosen fairly by drawing lots. Each team had a strict 10 minutes and no more, plus 5 minutes of Q&A from our 4 judges, sitting on stage at the top table. Even with the handovers and usual audio visual problems of hooking up a variety of different laptops for presenting demos, prototypes and slides (that suddenly freeze, or won’t connect) we got through all 6 sessions well inside the allotted 2 hours. I must thank Nathan the Pinsent Masons AV guy who made it happen, recorded and live streamed it all for us (we’ll publish video soon).  diginomica live streamed the sessions on Facebook Live too.   It’s important to note that this wasn’t a “PowerPoint off”, as prototypes and real code were on show, as well as the slides to tell their stories.

Frank Jennings’ post summarises the ideas from our 4 “third” placed teams more succinctly than I could:

“One team proposed the use of machine learning to help users to prioritise and process their emails. There was a GDPR toolkit for small-medium sized organisations. Another was a dashboard collating billing info, time, indexing and work location data. And there was a blockchain application to help with conveyancing.”

Managing to finish the show and tell before 18:00 gave our judges a little extra time to come up with a winner and a runner-up, which head judge Christina Blacklaws duly announced.

It’s notable that none of our 6 teams were reinventing the wheel. Even the team who were tackling the common problem of email and information overload for lawyers had innovative ideas using machine learning to address the problem.

The Winners!
You might have seen the announcements already, but our London winners were:

The runner-up was LiP-Sync:
An app with chat interface using IBM’s natural language processing, sentiment analysis and Watson to help those going through a divorce without legal representation.

The London winner was Team Pinsent Masons:
A blockchain enabled tool to manage workflow in developing ideas for new innovations to fully formed business propositions and for partners to vote on which ideas should receive investment. The tool could also be used for partners to quickly and easily vote on other issues too, making it easier to engage them as business owners and enhance governance.

The Blockchain issue
Agile Elephant’s position on blockchain technology is well known. We worry about the hype and fashion element associated with many of the startups and ideas out there. We worry about a lack of understanding of where blockchain is and isn’t an appropriate solution and the real cost of a transaction using this technology. However, there are a growing number of real use cases and sensible applications, like many that we’ve seen across this Hackathon. We’ll be writing another post specifically on this issue, and I recommend you read CEO of Integra Ledger, David Fisher’s excellent guest post on the Artificial Lawyer making the case for Blockchain and the Law.

Other posts about #GLH2018 #GlobalLegalHack
Here is a selection of posts we could find about the Hackathon.

Here’s a great piece from Dennis Howlett, founder of diginomica, on the event and his experience as a mentor (and I particularly like his takedown of the “armchair quarterback”):

Lawyers and code – who’da thunk? Yet Global Legal Hackathon hailed as success

Frank’s view as a judge:

Hacking legal tech in London

From the Law Society Gazette:

Host team Pinsent triumphs in global legal hackathon

Richard Sykes column on Horizon Business Innovation:

Global Legal Hackathon is Practical and Relevant

Orlando Connetta of the winning team explains their solution:

The Power of Play – Our experience at the Global Legal Hackathon

A great post from Britton Guerrina of PwC on….

Why lawyers should do hackathons

Thomson Reuters on the IP issue with this and other hackathons:

Observations from the Global Legal Hackathon 2018: The Communal Dimension of Intellectual Property

Artificial Lawyer announces the winner, and then broadens it out, listing all of the 40 City winners:

Pinsent Masons Team Wins London Leg of Global Legal Hackathon 2018

And the Worldwide GLH 2018 Winners Are….

I’m expecting a column on #GLH2018 from Joanna Goodman, and other posts too.  As those get published or we find more, I’ll update this post and add them here.

Conclusion
We all had a blast! Some really great ideas have started on a journey that we hope they complete to become products in the wild. Our friends running the Global event tell us they are delighted with all the feedback they got from London, and we know that it was the trending topic in legal tech last weekend. We’ll carry out a survey of our own with all actual participants, as well as registered attendees who downloaded the app but didn’t make it to the venue. We hope to find out what worked, what didn’t and what we should do next year. And yes, there will be a next year! The GLH organisers want to make this an annual event, as well as running other activities for the legal tech community too. We’ll certainly be doing that and in 2019 with our co-hosts for the UK too. Watch this space!

If you attended, were watching on social media, or just want to give us some feedback, please add a comment below or contact us.

Update 

Keith Hardie quite rightly pointed out I’d missed some of the members of the LiP-Sync team.  Apologies, but they’ve been added back.  Also I’ve added more post links (on IP at hackathons, a column by one of our judges, one on why lawyers should do hackathons) – more of those soon as I see them.

Get involved in the Global Legal Hackathon in London

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Get involved in the Global Legal Hackathon in London

You will have heard that Cambridge Strategy Group, Agile Elephant and Pinsent Masons are the joint team hosting the London event for the world’s largest legal hackathon – the Global Legal Hackathon (GLH) on February 23-25.  A winner will be declared for London and that team will go through to a global competition, culminating with a winner announced at a banquet in New York on April 21.

Here is an update of where we are at so far.

First, two of the founders of the GLH, David Fisher, the CEO of Integra Ledger, and Aileen Schultz, their Director of Network Intelligence,  introduce the Hackathon in this video:

Next, we’ve created a new site with all of the London specific details at LegalHackathon.London where you can register for the event, and find out the ways you can enter a team, become a helper, a mentor or one of our sponsors:

 

Lastly, we can report that the word is spreading, and we have a steady flow of registered participants.  We’ve got teams from Pinsent Masons, and LexisNexis (who are also our first local sponsor), as well as sign ups from Vodafone Group, Hook Tangaza, Legal Utopia, Bryan Cave, JG Consultants, City University, Thomson Reuters, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, YADA Events, FromCounsel, Jurit, Mills & Reeve, Fliplet, and Westminster University.  On top of those there are a number of organisations who’ve committed to be involved but haven’t registered yet.  Microsoft are supporting us with free access to the Azure platform for developers, and IBM will be giving us access to their technology too.  More technology partners will be announced soon.

Our friends at diginomica and the Artificial Lawyer will be coming along to report from the event, and we have teamed up with Disruptive.Live to produce video content and live streams.

Watch out for more news and announcements in the coming week.

Register for London

Find out about London

The Global Event

Barclays doing Digital differently

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Barclays doing Digital differently

Back at our first, November 2014 version of the Enterprise Digital Summit London, Dave Shepherd, Director of Eagle Labs & Digital Eagles for Barclays Bank, came to speak about their Digital Eagles programme.  Barclays decided to create a team of front line staff who are on hand in branches across the UK, actively encouraging and educating customers and non-customers to acquire digital skills, so they feel confident to explore technology – a team of over 12,000 has been created so far.  Dave invited me down to Brighton to visit their latest initiative – a network of business incubators and fully equipped maker spaces called Eagle Labs.  Barclays are an excellent example of a well known, established brand with a long history that is approaching Digital in a new way.

_mg_5868They are re-using under utilised branch offices or other spaces to create this network of Eagle Labs.  They piloted the idea in Bournemouth and then Cambridge – Brighton was the third.  They’ve got 6 now, Notting Hill in London opens shortly, with Jersey, Norwich, Salford on the cards.  Barclays are taking a “fail fast” approach, trying things out in each new Lab, and learning as they go.  The initiative itself feels more like a start-up than something run by a big corporate entity, and I’m sure that difference in cultural approach is key to making this a success.
_mg_5849The space I visited is a perfect example of what they are trying to achieve.  The building started life as the Brighton Union Bank back in 1870.  It had been a Barclays branch for decades, but had closed, laying derelict and empty.  The lease runs to 2018.  Barclays have smartened up the outside, reclaimed and refurbished the space, finding ways to convert the old branch infrastructure for its new use as cost effectively as possible.  The old branch manager’s office has become their maker lab with a laser cutter, 3D printer and all of the tools you would need to build a prototype for your business idea.  One of the old bank vaults downstairs, with it’s very impressive steel door has become a photographic studio.  Rather than take the corporate approach of laying expensive new flooring and a typical office refit, they’ve sanded down the old parquet flooring, renovated the old doors and are trying to retain as much of the character of the building’s history as they can, much as you would with a house renovation project.  The old bank “front of house” has become shared office space for the incubator start-ups and small business.  An office upstairs where cheques and local accounts would have been processed has become a presentation and meeting room for hire, with more of the feel of the kind of space you would find at Google, with bean bags and a coffee table made from a big old reel for industrial cable – not what you would expect from one of the oldest retail banks in the country.

_mg_5882Barclays aren’t taking a traditional venture capital style incubator approach.  They don’t take a stake in the businesses, although they do pay rent to the Lab, and of course Barclays would like to bring them on board as business banking customers.  However, a key part of what they are trying to do is connect to the local business community and build relationships in the way that a local branch manager would have done in the past, before retail banks started to centralise everything in the quest for cost savings and efficiency.  They want to build an ecosystem of coaching, support and partners who work from the Lab to help the members and connect with the local area.  While I was there I met two locals who had left corporate jobs to freelance in marketing and training – something that’s happening a lot around the UK.  They’d popped in to use the photographic studio for half an hour to take better quality head shots for their LinkedIn profile.  I saw the laser cutter demonstrated _mg_5871to some people with a product idea.  I met Ryk, a user experience expert who runs TeamPro, a great looking start-up that works from the shared office space that provides free websites for sports teams.  I heard about open days for local businesses that the Lab runs to show what they do.  I saw that they run “Mend it Mondays” – for £5 they have an open session where their on-site technicians will help fix your broken stuff, or use the workshop to build new things.
I was introduced to Dave’s boss Steven Roberts, Strategic Transformation Director at the Bank. He told me:

“Bankers have traditionally been at the heart of their community, helping people with their finances, and supporting local business. The Eagle Labs initiative aims to strengthen that connection with direct help in new ways of working and emerging technology for start-ups and local businesses.  After Digital Eagles it’s the logical, next step for us to be building digital skills in the business community.”

The Brighton Lab provides a home for business advisors, brokers, web site designers, and businesses creating new apps and digital services.  It hosts 2 permanent offices with 4 staff in each, has 2 meeting spaces for hire or use by the members, a maker space, and the main area supports 25 co-workers.  They’ve linked to the local maker community and provide a hub for emerging technology in the local community.  Compared to their peers, Barclays are thinking differently, and doing digital differently.

_mg_5877

All photographs by Rhys Terrar

Extras:

30 photographs from our visit to the Brighton Eagle Lab

Steam Co’s video of the Brighton Eagle Lab Launch (with Steven Roberts and Dave Shepherd):

Find out more about this year’s Enterprise Digital Summit London:

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The Gang of Four and why “there is nothing equitable about equity in a digital age”

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The Gang of Four and why “there is nothing equitable about equity in a digital age”

As a companion piece to my last post about the irresistible rise of mobile changing the face of the technology landscape, this piece looks at the big four companies that are succeeding there, but also the volatility and strange logic of the market, even for big social media brand names that are in the thick of and important in the change.  I’m writing against a backdrop of several weeks of speculation about where Twitter is heading, and then today’s dramatic share price drop for LinkedIn – 43 percent down today wiping out nearly $11 billion of market value so far, and the day’s not over yet.  What’s $11Bn?  Well, that’s 60% of the current value of HP…..

Like my earlier mobile post there is a must watch video at the core.  This one has NYU Professor Scott Galloway speaking at DLD16 in Munich a few weeks back on Monday 18th January talking about the Gang of Four – that’s Apple, Amazon, Facebook & Google.  The video went up on YouTube on the 25th January – at this second, 10 days later it has been viewed 520,618 times.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth 16 minutes of your time to help you better understand today’s landscape and to learn some lessons from the steps the current titans are making.

Scott Galloway preceded his pitch with a brilliantly self deprecating health warning showing that some of his predictions will be wrong, but hoping that more will be right. Here are some of the things he said about the “four horseman of the apocalypse” Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google:

  • In 2015 their combined market capitalisation rose from the GDP of Spain to the GDP of Canada
  • Each of the 4’s 2015 value is so large he compares each with a basket of well known brands in their sector to highlight their position
  • Amazon is the number 1 e-commerce player both sides of the atlantic, dwarfing the next 10 players in each market
  • Apple added $51Bn in revenues last year – that one year growth is more than the total 2014 revenues of luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Coach, Hermes, Michael Kors, Kering, Richmond and Prada combined
    Facebook and Google are growing at 40.3% and 12% compared to traditional media companies where they range from IAC’s 4.5% to Viacom’s -3.7%
  • “The advertising industrial complex is about to come to an end!” – last year 90% of CPG brands lost market share and 68% lost revenue “because advertising sucks!”
  • If you’re wealthy you can opt out of advertising with downloads, Netflix, iTunes, Tivo or Sky+
    He has quotes from fashion brand leaders highlighting how the fastest growing brands aren’t advertising in the traditional way
  • More venture capital going in to the ecosystem but fewer exits
  • The mobile ad market is a duopoly with Google and Facebook controlling 50% of the global market
  • Amazon has redefined the way we think about building businesses – it can be profitable any time it want but has made a conscious decision to run at break even because “profits are heroin to investors”, they get addicted to them and if you take them away, they respond negatively – he highlights Walmart’s recent capital investments to compete as the right thing to do, but the markets didn’t like the drop in profits and so the share price has gone down dramatically, where as Amazon is the master of consistency
  • Over 90% of the profit from the global smartphone market goes to Apple, then Samsun gets a bit, then the rest fight over the losses (the numbers on the slides don’t add up here, but the message is still clear)
    Apple’s revenue from PC’s is going up, everyone else’s is going down
  • If you believe the press, Apple’s Watch is a failure – Apple took away Samsung’s smart watch market share away as soon as they entered the market – ask Richemont and Swatch if they think Apple watch is a failure – he suggests Apple Watch will do $5-10Bn sales this year, but the entire Swiss Watch industry is $25Bn
  • He highlights the amazing rate of growth of Facebook, but then goes on to explain how they’ve only really monetised of its assets, and the potential they have with Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger
  • Facebook are spending more per dollar on R&D than any other tech company in history – as well as being incredibly nimble with the number of products and releases they are doing, they’ve gone from 0% to 76% revenue in mobile in only 3 years – that’s a lesson in how to disrupt yourself and pivot
  • Scott explains how one of these four will become a Trillion Dollar company in the very near future
    He suggests Amazon should be acquiring bricks and mortar retail chains and become the true mini-channel retailer
  • Google needs a bigger business – he postulates they could go after the college education market
    Facebook, Google and Amazon are easy to understand, but what is Apple’s mission? He suggests they “pay an absence of vision tax”
  • Globalisation, free flow of capital, and the frictionless environment mean that i’s never been easier to be a billionaire, but never been harder to be a millionaire – it’s the middle classes that are getting squeezed
    With share options and stock being used as a regular motivator for senior people in companies, but look at the markets and the way companies are being valued – he says “there is nothing equitable about equity in a digital age”

Please watch the video to get all of this in his own words and the full story.  I’ll even forgive him the Adele segment:

He finishes excited by the technology opportunities, pleased by the meaningful things we are doing, but wondering whether we are doing anything profound. What all of this highlights for me is that there are key lessons to be learned from the way Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are innovating, expanding and addressing their markets that should be adopted by your business and my business, but that the equity markets don’t respond well to some of those moves required. I’m sure that’s why the likes of Dell have gone back in to private ownership, and why “going public” as an exit route is less important in the future plans of any of today’s startups.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

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Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

How will Artificial Intelligence affect the future of work? That was the theme of a combined Tuttle Club and Heroes of Mobile event that I attended on Tuesday in one of the towers of Canary Wharf. It was the second in a series hosted and sponsored by Truphone, a mobile phone service provider that produces a SIM card that operates in many countries – a goodbye to roaming charges they say! I met their founder and now CTO James Tagg at the start of the event and we started talking Physics – my own Applied Physics degree is a distant memory, but we shifted on to the Artificial Intelligence topic and James said something really useful and a little profound. He said that Artificial Intelligence is to Human Intelligence like an artificial (actually he said plastic) flower is to a real flower. Viewed in a certain way it can be as beautiful and look very similar, but it’s actually different. It might perform the same core purpose, an acceptable alternative to the real thing, but it’s still different. But that difference might be very useful – it lasts for years not days and doesn’t need water for example. That put the whole Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning topic in to a new light for me… I was there at the event to learn more about an emergent technology which has the potential to be massively disruptive. Will it take away jobs? Will the robots take over the World? Is there a HAL 9000 or a Cyberyne in our real future?

Benjamin Ellis at #FOWAIThe session was introduced by James, and Lloyd Davies of Tuttle was master of ceremonies and moderator. The main speaker was our good friend Benjamin Ellis. He admitted he is an engineer at heart, but soon got on to a key date in history. 25th January 1970 and the name Robert Williams. What is the significance? It was the date and name of the first person killed by a robot at Ford. It meant that from that point on industrial robots were deployed in cages. He talked about how we relate to artificial intelligence and robotics, and how it changes our behaviour. He mentioned how Google has open sourced their AI engine this week. That’s interesting but he believes the smart stuff is how you apply and contextualise the technology (not the AI engine itself, which will just end up as commodity technology). He went on to highlight a basic paradox. More people are being employed with AI solutions rather than less. Going further, we have less leisure time as a generation, even though we are using more technology at work to help get the job done – all surveys around this topic have found productivity hasn’t gone up with newly deployed IT.

Benjamin used a great 1950s picture of an IBM 305 5Mb (first ever) hard drive being loaded on to a plane with a crane, highlighting how far we’ve come. Kryder’s law suggests we might see a 2.5 inch 40 TB drive by the end of the decade – that plus Moore’s Law is driving a hell of an increase in the potential processing power and storage available – will that help make AI more of a reality?

Then Benjamin shifted gears to talk about emulation and simulation and the distinction between the two. We know the brain is made up of neurones. We can emulate what the brain does with things like visual recognition, face recognition and the like. However, there is more to it than that. Benjamin got us to stand and strike a Superman pose. Then he got us to sit timidly, and we discussed how our physiology changes our decision making, and our thinking based on that body language – we are very complex systems. He talked about how 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses actually equates to less than 1% of the brain. He quoted this particular set of figures from this piece of research where Japan’s K Computer — a massive array consisting of over 80,000 nodes and capable of 10 petaflops (about 1016 billion operations per second) was put to work to simulate that portion of the brain’s capacity. It took 40 minutes to complete the simulation of 1 second of brain operation. Neurones are phenomenally complicated and not just switches. Neural networks are more complicated than we think, so emulating those may be just too hard. Let’s do simulation instead. Well that works really well for systems that we can describe precisely, where they are well documented. Businesses are more complex than that, barely repeatable processes as my friend Sig calls them – informal processes that are a little different every time through. So much of business works that way day in day out. Then he quoted Gregory House from the TV program – everybody lies. Lots of our behaviour is built around responding in a socially desirable way, to do with social cohesion, instincts that come from the reptilian part of the brain that controls fight or flight – the part that helps us avoid getting killed. We can put together a model of how we think the other person works, but social interactions are phenomenally complicated and how do we factor those in? Try running a simulation of what’s happening in the other person. What do we think that they think when they are saying that. Actually there is a negotiation of meaning here – how long will it take until we can compute that kind of thing as well as the human brain? Well if you start to cost out computers versus people, you soon get to numbers where the annual cost of ownership of even a single well specified laptop is more than the salary of a third of the planet’s population. Compute power is surprisingly expensive, and we humans can be very cheap. Where does it make economic sense?

Benjamin talked about the Hedonometer for measuring happiness, and how we can track the sentiment of tweets. Maybe computers can do the raw pre processing, be used for predictive analytics, or they can run algorithms to analyse data in the medical space. Yes, there are certain things that the compute power available today can do really well, but is AI really going to take all our jobs?

Well we discussed the productivity paradox – some types of jobs are ripe for automation with AI, but there are others where we’re nowhere near, and humans are still very necessary. But Benjamin was asking how do we work with this AI. How do we get inside the cage with it (bringing it back to the robot, Robert Williams and 1970)? Being alongside robots and AI will change our behaviour in business and he cited the Cobra paradox. In the time of Empire in India, there was a cobra problem. The government’s solution was to put a price on their heads to eradicate the cobra. But the entrepreneurs arrived and started cobra farms to make money out of the bounty! If you set an objective, people will find a way of gaming it. Where do you delineate? Who makes the decisions? At what level do you maintain control? How does the use of AI and robotics change our behaviour?

All great food for thought. We then adopted an Open Space Technology approach – people suggested a collection of issues to be discussed, and we split in to groups for some very thought provoking discussion. The whole evening was summarised by each of the 30 or 40 or so attendees by speaking a sentence or two of the key things they’d learned or a highlight of the evening in to a digital recorder that got passed around.

The hashtag for the event had been #FOWAI but we’d all spent so much time listening and talking, that nobody in the group had tweeted. There was just one tweet in that stream that I shared with the group at the end to their amusement. A “bot” of some kind had generated a tweet that said:

You have to laugh at the irony of it!

Some very interesting thinking that has set me on the road to explore this topic some more in follow on posts.

Essential TED Talks – Sir Ken Robinson – Do schools kill creativity?

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Essential TED Talks – Sir Ken Robinson – Do schools kill creativity?

As I explained in my “setting the scene” post, this is the very first TED Talk that I saw back in November 2006 (although it was filmed in February 2006).  Titled “Do schools kill creativity?”, it has become the most most viewed TED Talk of all time – 35 million views and counting!  Sir Ken Robinson has been an advisor to the UK government on educational matters, and is a thought leader on creativity and innovation in both education and business. This talk covers ground that you will find in his book Out Of Our Minds, and I would also recommend his more recent book The Element which presents the case for finding what you really enjoy doing, and then turning that activity in to your job. This talk, delivered without PowerPoint slides, visual aids or props, demonstrates what a great speaker and story teller Ken is, as well as showing he has the timing of a stand-up comedian.

Ken talks about our education system and the future.  Nobody can predict what is going to happen in 5 years, yet we need to be educating our children for way beyond that horizon.  All kids start with tremendous talent and we squander it.  In our schools creativity should be as important as literacy – it should be treated with the same status, but today it isn’t.  Through as series of great personal stories and anecdotes Ken highlights how children will take a chance because they’re not frightened of being wrong – if you aren’t prepared to be wrong how can you come up with something original?  But actually in our schools, and then in the companies that we go on to work at, we have systems and processes in place that stigmatise mistakes.  He goes on to explain how the education system in the UK and most other countries around the world were designed in the 19th century for an industrial age with a specific set of priorities, a hierarchy that put mathematics and languages at the top, then the humanities, with the arts at the bottom.  Even within the arts music has higher status than dance.  Maths is important, but so is dance.  He asks what is education for, and worries that the whole set up is designed to produce university professors – is that right?

One of the best stories explains how Gillian Lynne, at school in the 1930s, was believed to have a learning disorder because she couldn’t concentrate and was always fidgeting.  Her mother took her to a specialist who recognised immediately what she was, and sent her in a completely different direction.  Watch the talk and you’ll find that you know of her work.

Ken’s talk is a plea to change the way we educate our children in the 21st century and reprioritise our thinking so that ideas, innovation and creativity are brought to the fore.  I’ll use Ken’s own words of conclusion:

“What TED celebrates is the gift of human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we alert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face the future.”

If you want to understand more of our Agile Elpehant thinking, check the rest of our blog material and take a look at the Enterprise Digital Summit London in October. We’d love to hear your comments or suggestions or to see you in London next month.

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