Sponsored by decoded.legal and Colt Technology Services
A competition to hear ideas from students and prospective trainees on how the law can embrace sustainability principles.
The challenge we set: Which legal, environmental, social, or governance issue can be resolved with improved technology and how?
The Dragons
Our Dragons are experts in the field of technology, ESG, and the law.
Neil Brown, Managing Director, decoded:legal
Lisa McClory, Digital Technologies Lead, D2 Legal Technology
Alessandro Galtieri, Deputy General Counsel, Colt Technology Service Group Ltd
We had three fantastic finalists for the competition who each submitted a video pitch with their suggested solution to the challenge. You can see their pitches here.
The judges were incredibly impressed with all submissions to the Green Dragon’s Den competition and greatly enjoyed hearing from all applicants. It has been fantastic to see such a broad range of ideas across different fields of ESG, and this has not made the judges’ task easy!
We would like to extend our thanks to all the entrants for putting together such interesting and thought-provoking presentations.
The chosen winner and detailed feedback to all finalists is below….
The Dragons are pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Green Dragon’s Den competition is Vathmie Vanditha Widyalankara (Vandy) of Queen Mary University of London, who provided an engaging presentation on the opportunities to use AI-powered pro bono services to catalyse positive change in legal advice services.
Vandy provided a well-considered introduction to the current challenges in law centres and legal advice clinics, also setting out how AI might provide a solution, including by streamlining client triaging, providing AI-powered formfilling, using AI chatbots and AI legal assistants. Vandy dealt with some of the challenges and risks of leveraging AI technology, including privacy concerns around use of sensitive data, algorithmic bias and the crucial need for oversight and effective governance to combat potential fabrication by AI tools and protect consumers from risks.
Vandy demonstrated a good grasp of complex technologies, including differential privacy, and the judges were impressed with the way in which she was able to explain them.
Our two joint second-place finalists (in alphabetical order) are:
Diana Al Mejamai of the University of Newcastle
The Dragons were impressed with Diana’s explanation of the opportunity for AI and algorithmic technology to provide a tracking and early-detection solution to detect methane leaks across the national gas network. We found Diana’s explanation of the problem to be well presented and informative, with good coverage of the links to wider legal frameworks and economic factors associated with net zero. It was interesting to hear about the potential to use predictive technology to anticipate potential leaks.
Jared Higgins of the University of Sussex
The Dragons found Jared’s talk to be an interesting and informative review of end-to-end encryption technology, covering the difficult human rights and policy challenges in this area. Jared presented a solution focused on the use of encryption technology by Politically Exposed Persons. Jared dealt well with the balance of positive and potentially negative effects of introducing this use case for E2E technology, including the potential impacts on law enforcement and anti-corruption efforts. We were impressed with the clarity of Jared’s thinking in terms of differentiating between general purpose chat applications, which we understood to be outside the scope of his talk, and specific applications to be used for official business by politically exposed persons.
The winning entrant has won a work experience placement at Colt and each finalist has won a free place at the SCL Annual AI Conference on 8 October in London.
