Athens Legal Hackers is a movement of lawyers, policy makers, technologists, that organizes meetups, workshops and hackathons. Our members are welcomed to participate in our events about Data, Privacy, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain and all aspects of Law, Innovation and Technology.

How we started

The Legal Hackers movement began in 2012 in Brooklyn, NY. It was there, in the wake of the SOPA/PIPA copyright debate, that several students in the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy (BLIP) Clinic and their professor, Jonathan Askin, sought to answer a nagging question: how can lawyers leverage the tools and collaborative, open ethos of the technology community to anticipate and solve law and policy problems? To answer this question, the students hosted the first ever “legal hackathon,” held at Brooklyn Law School in April 2012. Based on the success of the hackathon, the students and their friends formed a meetup called “NY Legal Hackers” to build a community in NYC focused on hacking the law.

Since then, the movement has grown quickly, from a second chapter in Washington, D.C. started by original New York Legal Hackers members, to new chapters spreading across the United States and then the world, to international summits that bring global chapter organizers together to discuss law, technology, and community building.

In June 2019, Athens Legal Hackers became part of Legal Hackers Community.

What we do

Legal Hackers promote “legal hacking”—i.e., the process of developing creative solutions to issues at the intersection of law and technology—and are inspired by the ethos of the original MIT hackers of the 1950s and 1960s. The output of legal hacking could be a tech-based solution (e.g., legal tech, reg tech, or civic tech), an improvement in legal services delivery, or a new way of addressing a public policy issue such as data protection, intellectual property, or the sharing economy. As Professor Askin put it back in 2012:

“The goal [of legal hacking] is to morph and evolve the law on one hand to better serve technologists, enterprises and society, but also harness technology so that lawyers can better service their clients.”

Athens Legal Hackers host regular events that bring together individuals to learn, share, and collaborate. Athens Legal Hackers events include informal gatherings, panel/keynote discussions, workshops and hackathons.

Organizers

Compliance Officer and IT Lawyer, CIPP/E, LLM

Head of Data Protection and Privacy, CIPP/E, PhD Candidate

Resilience & Data Governance Manager, CISA, CDPSE, CIPP/E, DPO Executive