Professor Jonathan Askin Featured in Law360 Story about "Legal Hacking"

06/12/2019

A recent Law360 story, “How Hackathons Are Helping To Decode The Justice Gap,” prominently featured Professor Jonathan Askin, whom the story credits as a tech law and legal tech pioneer and creator of the first legal hackathon in 2012 at Brooklyn Law School.

Legal hackathons, in which lawyers and law students meet with coders for days-long sessions to build technological solutions to legal problems, are emerging as unique ways to solve many access-to-justice problems, such as building apps and websites to help people released from prison and other institutions, refugees, and other marginalized and vulnerable individuals find legal and other services.

“We’ve got to start thinking about lawyers as the creators of a new society in the wake of revolutionary new developments,” said Askin.

Several of Askin’s students in the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy (BLIP) Clinic formed the original New York Legal Hackers to continue this innovative way of addressing challenges related to access to justice and the business of law. There are now more than 140 local chapters around the world.

Askin is the founder and director of BLIP, which functions as a modern, technology-oriented law firm. A sought-after expert in the field of technology law, Askin has also been a Visiting Professor at the MIT Media Lab; a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London; a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Amsterdam; a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information; an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School; and Founder and Advisor to the Legal Technology Laboratory and to iLINC, a network of legal support clinics for the European startup community.

Read the story here.