The First TechLawSF Startup Weekend

August 2014 – The UC Hastings Law School acted as the organizers and coordinators for the first TechLaw Startup Weekend that was held at AirBnB’s headquarters in San Francisco. The five organizers from Hastings for the event were Kristen Killian, BethMcCarthy, Hanna Konitshek, Gabby Grinberg and Ashley Dymond. The 2.5 day event was run by Startup Weekend in Seattle that is a non-profit organization that facilitates innovation and the creation of new businesses on a world wide basis. The program focuses on providing an event that targets experience, education and experimentation for the participants.

The theme was to create software on the web to address issues in the legal community. These include lawyers, courts, consumers and corporations that need to manage the vast amounts of information and get answers on the vast amount of regulations and rules that vary by city, county, state and federal jurisdiction. The program was run by a staff facilitator from the Startup Weekend organization. The facilitator / innovation evangelist lead the close to 100 participants in motivational team games and allowed the group to give their individual 60sec pitches to the group.

Following the group activities, the participants selected the top 8 ideas and split off into teams to develop the products. The projects were to be presented 36hrs later with a web demo, and 5 minute pitch on the product and market opportunities. The eight ideas that came out of the program were:
(1) Automated Terms of Service Creation
(2) Creating common searchable database from PDF court docs
(3) Document generation and signature loop for closing projects
(4) A legal opinion commentary for social viral videos
(5) A crowdsourcing method for bail bonds
(6) A kickstarter like action for goal targeting that need a legal framework
(7) A franchiseable legal platform that supports integration of new techlaw products
(8) A common resource and regulation access query for parties involved with landlord / tenant disputes.

The projects were judged by leaders in the community and events sponsors including the One Legal Labs Incubator, keynote speaker and Stanford Law School Fellow Ron Dolin, Charles Belle of the Startup Policy Lab, Hasting Law School and others. The voting was also given from the attendees of the event. Images of the event are in the gallery.

The overall winner of 1 month support and shared office in the new One Legal Lab Incubator as well as legal web access from Survata , General Assembly and Founder Suite was a project names CloudL. The team was large – over 10 people and focused on the issue of localized common resource and regulation access query for parties involved with landlord / tenant disputes. The couple of points that drew this team ahead were – the direction of the localization of rules in the use GUI so they new where and when the program was applicable. The input from the designer working with the legal team to decide on a quick method to visually display the relative relevance of the output options from the program. The system also had a business model for use for the program for both the landlord and tenant sides.

Unlike a traditional programming hackathon, the Startup Weekend was focused more on the process and the structure of the solution rather than the code base. The teams had access to free domain names, and broadband along with their own computers. This let the teams use a variety of opensource resources and free to use automated builder tools. The end presentations were in powerpoint and that was the main focus – telling the story to judges. The use of video and multimedia was a key to the presentations and most of the teams used live social media poling to validate their trends.

For a first year event there were no major hiccups, a couple of minor adjustments for the following year since they have now done an event in the facility and will have a better handle on the logistics. It was an outstanding first year effort and had high quality results with over 90% of the starting attendees staying through to the end.