“Law Without Walls” (“LWOW”) is an educational program founded by Michele DeStefano, Professor of Law at the University of Miami Law School. It is a co-operative venture composed of more than 30 international law and business schools and includes a diverse body of lawyers, business professionals, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. In a partly virtual journey, students are presented with current challenges facing the legal profession and asked to find innovative and practicable solutions to solve them.
This year’s LWOW kick-off took place from 19th - 20th January and was proudly hosted by IE University, which is situated at the foot of the old city walls surrounding Segovia’s historic quarter. Bucerius students Varsha Kashyap, Thanigai Adhavan Muthusamy (India), Jean Carlo Arévalo Gutiérrez (Colombia) and Christoph Schober (Austria) were placed in four different teams comprising 8 people and sponsored by renowned global law firms and corporations, such as Eversheds Sutherland LLP, HSBC, White & Case LLP and iManage, who assigned each team a particular challenge.
The inspiring two-day journey filled with idea generation, teambuilding, personality assessments, and other exercises managed to break down barriers between coaches, students, sponsors and advisors. To give an impression of what the upcoming LWOW journey will entail, each team had to come up with a challenge to be solved in a mini-hackathon. In a fast and fun ‘ignite’ style presentation, the teams pitched their creative ideas at the end of the kick-off in front of a cheering audience.
Over the next three months students will work virtually, participating in meetings with their team members and external coaches in order to develop solutions to the challenges assigned to them. During this time, they will have the opportunity to refine their skillset of consumer storytelling, prototyping, branding and business planning. At the ConPosium, which will take place in April 2019 at the University of Miami, the teams will deliver their project and pitch in front of an audience of more than 200 people and a panel of judges.
We are looking forward to this challenging, intense and innovative journey!
Christoph Schober, Thanigai Muthusamy, Jean Carlo Arévalo Gutiérrez, Varsha Kashyap
