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:

• The Inclusivity Challenge
• The London Edition of GLH2020
• How to register

We look forward to seeing you in Marylebone!

Our guests today are Nour Shaker Fayed – Product Development & Cloud Architect – Public Cloud Services for a large telecoms company, Harvey Durrant – Head of ICT at Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service, and Lia Edwards – Former CIO at Aucerna.  

I know that we are going to discuss how fundamental this problem is to our industry, the importance of diversity of thought is to getting more creative solutions to our problems.  I can also guess that Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, two of the foundational experts of our industry might get a mention too.  Please check it out following the link below.

I’d also recommend that you catch up with our two previous episodes:

Episode 1 – Strategy and Operations – broadcast 22 July 2019, available now on demand 

Episode 2 – Technology and Futures – broadcast 27 July 2019, available now on demand

As a byproduct of the shows we’ll interview each of our guests individually, and get their input for the agenda of CIO Transformation Live and their suggestions on how we can make the event better and more relevant.  All of the video content we produce gets added to the rolling programming on CIO Transformation TV. The next CIO Transformation Live event is at Whittlebury Hall near Silverstone on Wednesday 30th October.  If you are interested in coming along, please check out the website, and follow this link to register for a place.

Can I give a big thank you to all of our friends at Disruptive.Live for doing such a great job for us. Follow #CIOTL for our regular event content and #CIOTOML for conversations around the new panel show.  If you’ve got suggestions of what we should cover, or you’d like to be a guest on the show, then please contact us.