Legal Hacker Project Challenges

We are fortunate to have two separate legal hackathon style open challenges happening during IAP. Participants in this course are welcome and invited to join Legal Hackers MIT teams that will be collaborating on multiple projects for each open challenge (in collaboration with members of LegalHackers.org.

Although the challenge events are situated in San Diego and the Washington DC area, the same system used for online participation in this course can be used for team collaboration and for developing, submitting and presenting the team project.

Participation in these activities is encouraged but completely optional. Collaborating at MIT on a Legal Hackers team project can provide a unique opportunity to gain invaluable experience solving difficult real-world challenges by using the new skills, tools and methods of applied legal analytics.

The two open challenges are:

The ABA Legal Analytics Prototype Jam

• Form or join a team with others in this course to collaborate on a project for the first American Bar Association Legal Analytics challenge! This hackathon style data science challenge focuses on using applied legal analytics with the aim of assisting small businesses seeking to understand make decision about contract terms and conditions of various “Software as a Service” providers. Projects will presented and reviewed at a special prototype jam session in San Diego by the ABA Cyberspace Law Committee on January 26th. The ABA has kindly arranged for a live video channel between the MIT Media Lab and the prototype jam venue at WeWork in San Diego, which will enable participants in this course to hear/see and virtually participate in the event, including project presentations and feedback from invited judges.
• For more information, see: http://prototypejam.org and https://apps.americanbar.org/dch/committee.cfm?com=CL320042 and also https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-legal-analytics-working-group-prototype-jam-san-diego-registration-30191633990
• Please refrain from registering through the EventBrite page unless you plan to participate in person at WeWork in San Diego. All participants in this course who choose to join an MIT Prototype Jam project team will have opportunity to register separately.

MIT Team Project for ABA Legal Analytics Prototype Jam

• MIT and Thomson Reuters Labs got together to hack the Legal Analytics Prototype Jam for the ABA Business Law Section. We prototyped a dashboard to understand jurisdictional issues of cloud contracts. The use case we chose is a tool to help small businesses understand their exposures to the new EU privacy law by automatically analyzing cloud contracts.

• Working demo site, showing geo-coded jurisdictional law for the same 30 contracts provided by the Legal Analytics subcommittee: http://romercreative.com/cloudcontracts
• Our working project directory for this demo: https://github.com/LegalAnalytics/Raindrop
• Video walkthrough of the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flxbX23Aa2Q
• Our team project page, see: http://trlabs.prototypejam.org

30 Second Overview Demo

Video Walk Through of Our Team Prototype Jam Project

For More Information About

• MIT Computational Law research, see: https://law.MIT.edu
• TR Labs, see https://innovation.thomsonreuters.com/en/labs.html
• Thomson Reuters tagging tools and company data, see: http://permid.org

Financial Entity Open Challenge on Roles and Relationships

• The Financial Entity Identification and Information Integration (FEIII) open challenge focuses on understanding the relationships among financial entities and the roles that they play in financial contracts as represented in documents and databases. The dataset consists of 10-K and 10-Q filings with the SEC, and the task is to identify sentences in the filings that provide evidence for a specific relationship between the filing financial entity and another mentioned financial entity. MIT Legal Hackers team intends to computationally determine likelihood that the role of (or relationship with) a company was accurately reported in SEC disclosure by publicly traded companies (in 10-K and 10-Q filings). Opportunities for participants in this course to actively work various parts of this challenge project in collaboration with the MIT Legal Hackers team will be coordinated with the class schedule. This challenge project will be worked on by the MIT Legal Hackers team from the first of the year until submission deadlines in February and March.
• For more information: https://ir.nist.gov/feiii/index.html and https://ir.nist.gov/feiii/about.html