We opened this morning with Jameson leading an impromptu session on the shared goals of all Legal Hackers, with the group brainstorming a list of descriptors to guide our remaining discussions. John E. Grant then built on that activity with an interactive presentation on project management and efficient collaboration skills for lawyers, introducing discussion processes that our group would use for the remainder of the day.

Ngoc Nguyen was up next with a discussion of legal process automation as applied to bankruptcy law, where consumers often cannot or will not access an attorney to handle their filings. The automation ideas behind Ngoc’s presentation, represented by existing products like Trademarkia, have broad applicability to other areas of law and go to the core of our mission.

Thomas Brooke‘s presentation combined past and present, beginning with lessons from his father’s work on the first truly programmable computer, which inspired Tom to learn how to code, and leading into an update on the growing North Carolina chapter.

Martin Zerbib gave our final presentation of the Congress, demonstrating the creative potential of HP IDOL On Demand, a sustaining partner of Legal Hackers. IDOL is an API for more efficiently organizing large sets of data and may very well form the basis of many future Legal Hackers projects.

Wrapping up, we recapped our weekend’s discussions using John Grant’s organizational techniques. We came away with some great suggestions for a future Congress and expect to be planning one before we know it.

Thanks to all who participated, to SPACE for hosting us, and especially to our sponsors: HP IDOL On Demand, Avvo, Seyfarth Shaw, and Davis Wright Tremaine.