Celebrating the successes of the Lab
As we approach the end of the Labs WEFO funding period, we thought we’d take some time to look back at our past blog posts and revisit some of our achievements in the Lab.
Back in December 2021, we celebrated Pro Bono Week with our Plugged in wiPro Bono: Innovation, Law Tech & Pro Bono in Wales event where we brought together members of the Lab, Swansea Law Clinic and the Solicitors Regulation Authority to discuss how a collaborative approach can be beneficial in developing legal technology for better access to justice.
We got to work putting these words into action at the Global Legal Hackathon 2022 where we developed our own platform, Fast.Law, to enable more efficient provision of Pro Bono services.
Fast.Law was designed to address issues in the provision of Pro Bono services by implementing communication streams in two unique channels; the first aimed to give charities and organisations the opportunity to easily network with lawyers specialising in a specific subject area and the second focused on the direct communication of individuals in need with experienced lawyers to provide helpful advice and guidance. You can watch our presentation on our YouTube channel.
In late Spring 2022, the Lab was thrilled to win the award for Outstanding Research and Innovation Collaboration in Humanities and Social Sciences at the Swansea University Research & Innovation Awards 2022. We were proud to be able to share this success with our colleagues in recognition of all their hard work.
In July 2022, we hosted the Legal Hackathon Wales in partnership with the Welsh Government. Read about what our teams got up to here and here. Full of ideas and inspiration from this event, we developed our own ChatBot and showcased this at the Swansea Science Festival to answer questions about the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 to practically demonstrate how legal technology can benefit our everyday lives. With the rise of AI and ChatGPT technology, it was a great opportunity to showcase how it could have a real beneficial impact on people’s day-to-day lives.
In the Summer of 2022, we gave trainee solicitors an opportunity to get hands-on with legal technology in our Innovative Lawyers programme. Over seven weeks, our workshop featured sessions on a wide range of technologies relevant to the legal sector. Participants had a chance to try their hands at creating their own smart contracts while discussing the potential applications of blockchain technologies to their own areas of practice. LegalTech is going to change the way traditional law firms work in the future, and it was great to have the opportunity to work with young legal minds and show them how legaltech has the potential to bring about real change as they develop in their careers.
More recently, in February 2023, we got to celebrate the success of our colleagues with the launch of the My Journey app. We got to hear about the serious issue of the digital exclusion of offenders and how legal technology can assist, in this case with the creation of an application that helps prison leavers to rehabilitate into society. It was great to hear about how the power of technology can be utilised for social good.
At the end of May, we launched the Lab’s newest research report, in collaboration with the online legal advice forum, LegalBeagles, investigating the impact of COVID-19 on legal advice forums. To celebrate the launch of this report the Lab hosted an event with expert panellists to further explore the role that online forums play in supporting access to justice, including the safeguards needed to ensure forums provide reliable guidance and advice, the challenges encountered, and the ways in which government, regulators and legal professionals can support the development of a healthy ecosystem of online legal forums in the UK.
Our final Showcase Event in June played host to fantastic panel discussions and workshops, hearing from our individual Lab teams and collaborators. We celebrated our accomplishments to date and looked towards what the future could hold for legal technology.
We’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to and supported the Lab over the years, and to WEFO for the opportunity that the funding brought to the Lab.
We’re excited to see what comes next for LegalTech innovations in Wales!