The following dispatch comes from our Estonia Legal Hackers organizer Risto Hübner:

Estonia Legal Hackers had its first meetup in Tallinn, Estonia on October 7. The meetup was hosted by Nortal, the largest software development company in the Baltics. About 35 people participated. Most of the participants were practising lawyers, but the event also brought together several technologists, university professors and government officials. There were participants not only from Estonia, but also several other countries, including for example China, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Thus the atmosphere was very vibrant and lots of interesting people came together.

Risto Hübner, the general counsel of Nortal and the organizer of the meetup, as well as Anne Veerpalu, the co-organizer of the meetup and a lawyer primarily specializing on advising of early stage startups, gave an introduction to the Legal Hackers movement and overview of some of the current trends in legal technology and the legal industry in general. Thereafter, one of the leading data scientists from Estonia gave an interesting presentation about big data and machine learning, opening up the following discussion about the relevance of big data for lawyers and their clients. In addition, presentation about legal content capture and visualisation was made, demonstrating how visualisation could make it easier for people to understand legal norms. Finally, the meetup was concluded with a demo of a new database containing majority of Estonian case law, and being an alternative to the respective official legal database run by the government.