HiiL Justice Accelerator has been fairly active during the month of June. What issues has it managed to address through its activities?
Pitch Event of Legal Innovation
On the 30th of May there was a Pitch Event hosted together with Rocket Lawyer. Rocket Lawyer, already a well-known legal tech organisation in the US, desires to make legal services more affordable, simple and available to more people than ever before. They are now expanding into Europe and they just opened office in The Hague.
With our event we wanted to showcase some of the Dutch legal innovations and discuss how exactly can legal innovations make justice more accessible.
Three legal innovators pitched their idea:
- Appjection (finalist of our Innovating Justice Challenge 2016) – app that helps people who got unfair traffic fines;
- Juribot – through the use of AI it makes case law transparent;
- Visual Contracts – provides people with the tools and skills to create understandable legal documents and services.
Blockchain for Justice: Reuniting Children with their Families
Shortly after, there was another event. This time it was organised alongside the KidsReunited initiative and Blockchain Workspace at the A Lab Amsterdam. Blockchain for Justice event was set up to target the issue of refugee children who wait at the border to be reunited with their families. Currently, an estimated 3.500 unaccompanied minors are waiting in Greece to get reunited with their family in EU member states. According to EU legislation these children have the right to reunification. Unfortunately the process to actually get the children to their parents is not working well and sometimes takes up to 2 years. We want to speed this process up, and found a solution to do so, using blockchain technology.
This event was a kick-off to find people and organisations that want to contribute to building this solution. We found already many people that are interested and hope that this solution will become a reality.
