Entrepreneur-access project advances in Global Legal Hackathon

The team behind an online platform created to help underrepresented entrepreneurs make their ideas into reality will advance from St. Louis to the second round of the 2020 Global Legal Hackathon.

The IdeaFlight team, consisting primarily of local law students, presented its project to judges March 8 at Daugherty Business Solutions in Creve Coeur, near St. Louis. Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner also hosted the St. Louis round of the hackathon, which drew two teams of 10 contestants as well as about 10 other participants who aided throughout the weekend event.

The world’s largest international legal hackathon brings together attorneys, students, developers, technology experts and other innovators to address problems that face the business of law or public access to legal resources. This is the third Global Legal Hackathon and the second consecutive year that St. Louis has hosted a first-round competition. Roughly 5,000 people compete in the global competition in more than 50 cities.

“[The event is about] taking a look at a problem differently and getting a group of people together that traditionally wouldn’t be able to take a look at this,” said event host Christian Zust, director of the client technology group at BCLP.

“You’re able to attack a problem with a little bit different space and multiple disciplinary brain power and hopefully hack the solution,” he said.

St. Louis is an ideal city for the hackathon because it houses a diverse legal, educational and entrepreneurial community, Zust said. The event offers a unique opportunity to form partnerships between these industries that could extend beyond the competition.

“Staying active in a community that has a lot of different skills sets to offer and helping to host an event that embraces the diversity of talents and thoughts coming together to attack problems not only is something that is really fun to participate in but really is the way that we are going to solve the hardest problems facing the legal community in the future,” he said.

Participants gathered March 6 to form teams around the presented problems. They had until the evening of March 8 to define the issue, form a solution and outline potential implementation.

“We don’t expect that, from Friday to Sunday, somebody is going to be able to build perfection,” Zust said. “But what they need to show is the solution that they are coming with is actually one that is workable and with further attention and refinement could scale and become sustainable in the way that they have presented to solve their problem.”

The idea behind the winning project was presented by third-year Saint Louis University School of Law student Brooke Bishop, who brought forward a simple question: What if any entrepreneur could elevate their ideas?

Research shows that white men disproportionately obtain the bulk of venture capital investments, while women and members of minority groups are often left without the resources necessary to advance a business concept, said IdeaFlight coach Kristi Smith, senior manager of expert systems and U.S. automation at BCLP. IdeaFlight will provide entrepreneurs access to a network of investors, mentors, legal representatives and more.

Judges were impressed with the clean, well-designed digital interface developed primarily by Lindenwood University student Isabella Luongo.

“After two days, for her to put together something of that nature that was so user-friendly and capable without training for a user to be able to jump in and start working through was really impressive,” Smith said.

The IdeaFlight team also included Washington University law students Mackenzie Allen, Najeebah Hussain, Ellen Komlos and Zack Kalinowski, Lindenwood University student Curro Casado Rodriguez and software developer Alex Cottner.

Coaches also included Stephanie Richter, senior website and digital marketing specialist for Thompson Coburn; and attorney Tiffany Clayton and Innovation Project Manager Emily McCallister, both of BCLP.

The second-place team’s project, initially presented by BCLP, considered how to simplify the process of serving as guardians ad litem for children in the court system. Attorneys with the firm serves as the legal representatives for some children in St. Louis probate courts, but the multi-faceted process can be difficult for attorneys with fewer resources and less experience than those at BCLP.

The team gathered the forms and other resources in a digital platform to equip attorneys with less expertise in the area to serve as guardians ad litem in the city and other jurisdictions.

“[The team] found a way to extend technology to centralize a lot of the knowledge, and different ways to think about how these cases are staffed and run to allow more people access to play a part, and . . . lower the barriers for them to step up and act as the attorney guardian ad litem in these matters,” Zust said.

Zust said team members plan to present the program to a firm attorney who leads the guardian ad litem program with a commissioner of the St. Louis Probate Court to determine if they can apply it in the community.

The second-place team was at a disadvantage, as its problem was more localized than IdeaFlight, Zust said.

Team IdeaFlight has until March 22 to improve its interface and business plan before submitting the project via video presentation to the second-round judging panel March 29. The final round will be held live May 16 in London.

The team coordinated throughout the past week to refine aspects such as sustainability, scalability and the interface to create a complete proof of concept, Smith said.

IdeaFlight will fare well against global competitors because it combines improving the business of law with increasing access to justice, she said.

“If they are able to connect what’s clearly a problem and clearly a need with the design and how well-thought-out their solution is in the same way that they connected with the judges [in the first round], I think that this has a really strong change of moving on into the global finals,” Zust said.