The Financial Times Innovative Lawyers programme, along with the Global Legal Hackathon organization, issued their 2020 innovation challenge at the end of April to: “unleash the talent and creativity of the world’s legal industry to collaboratively innovate solutions to the most pressing legal, regulatory and civil society challenges posed by the global crisis that is currently engulfing the world.”

The Global Legal Hackathon (GLH) is an annual event usually held over a weekend where the global legal community, including lawyers, technologists, designers and data scientists gather to rapidly develop solutions that will improve the legal industry on a global scale. This year, that hackathon moved to a virtual platform that enabled even more teams to connect and work collaboratively on the challenges posed by this pandemic.

Bennett Jones decided to join this year’s Hackathon held from April 27 to May 22, 2020. Internally we held a virtual brainstorming session to come up with a specific challenge that our lawyers were facing since businesses and courts were forced to close.

This is the challenge that we prioritized out of that brainstorming session and subsequently posted on the GLH platform:

The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the need for a robust remote video-conferencing solution that meets all of the requirements of the legal community.

Challenge: Design the user journeys, interface (screens) and feature requirements for the ideal video-conferencing solution for legal hearings, arbitrations, mediations, depositions and corporate meetings.

Our Project Team took on this challenge and followed a Design Thinking process to develop feature requirements, mockups and best practices for the ideal video-conferencing solution.