From 13 – 15 March 2026, Bucerius MLB student Hediyeh Motalebzadeh took part in the three-day LWOW Sprint event held at the NOVA School of Business and Economics in beautiful Carcavelos, Portugal. During 3 intense and challenging days, participants were assigned to talented and multidisciplinary teams composed of a mix of intergenerational legal and business professionals, academics, and law/business school students from around the world.
The teams were sponsored by corporate legal departments, law firms or law/legal tech companies and worked together to solve real business-of-law problems or social responsibility challenges.
The Law Without Walls Sprint 2026 was taught with the innovative and now established 3-4-5 method (3 Phases-48 Hacking Hours-5 Stages) and included collaboration exercises, intensive hacking as well as a mini-composium. Hediyeh spoke to us about her experience.
What attracted you to participate in Law Without Walls?
I have always been drawn to the intersection of disciplines - where law, business, and strategy converge and where the most complex problems emerge precisely because they do not fit neatly into one domain.
That belief has shaped my academic and professional trajectory: from studies in International Business and Entrepreneurship, to Strategy and M&A Consulting at PwC, and now to my Master of Law and Business at Bucerius and WHU, deliberately building the breadth and analytical depth required to operate in high-complexity environments.
Law Without Walls stood out as a program that does not merely celebrate interdisciplinary thinking but demands it, under pressure, with real stakes. More importantly, the Sprint offers a compelling vision of the future, one in which the most complex challenges at the intersection of law, business, and technology are solved not in isolation, but through collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and strategic thinking.
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when thinking about your LWOW experience?
The first thing that comes to my mind is the intensity of working in such a high-level collaborative environment where everyone is working to the limits of their expertise whilst at the same time pushing themselves to go beyond those limits.
At its centre, LWOW showed me what drives exceptional outcomes – strong interdisciplinary collaboration, intellectual openness, and a willingness to think beyond traditional frameworks.
How intensive was the preparation for the pitches?
The preparation for the pitches was very intense yet highly rewarding. The three days leading up to the pitch condensed the whole process of problem definition, problem solving, solution shaping and executive communication within a very limited timeframe.
Coming from a strategy consulting background, I particularly valued the balance of creativity and analytical rigor in tackling these complex challenges. LWOW ultimately highlighted what I see as essential capabilities today: connecting across disciplines, synthesizing diverse perspectives into a coherent strategic direction, and translating that into innovative, high-impact solutions.
Tell us more about your LWOW Sprint challenge?
Our challenge and problem faced by SAP Legal addressed a fundamental challenge in modern organisations: the positioning of legal function within the broader business ecosystem. Specifically, how SAP Legal could shift from gatekeeper to a board-level trusted advisor - a question that presented itself as legal and revealed itself, within hours, as a classic strategic repositioning problem. Identifying that distinction early on shaped everything.
We built our solution around three levels: repositioning SAP Legal's value proposition in the language of business outcomes; redesigning its relationship with senior leadership to shift from reactive validation to proactive co-creation; and creating the internal conditions that make early legal engagement the natural instinct of business leadership rather than a reluctant obligation.
What made the challenge genuinely compelling was its broader relevance. The transformation of expert functions from gatekeepers to strategic advisors is one of the defining organisational questions of this era - one I expect to encounter repeatedly across M&A mandates, transformation engagements, and board-level advisory work.
What inspired you most during this experience?
The creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that emerged from the diversity of the room was extraordinary - people from law, business, technology, and beyond, converging around real problems in ways that consistently challenged inherited boundaries and produced genuinely original thinking.
What made the experience so unique is its deeply compelling vision: that the most complex challenges of the next decade will not be solved through siloed expertise but through the kind of trust-based, interdisciplinary collaboration that LWOW practices as a lived principle. That vision aligns precisely with everything I have been building toward and encountering an entire community organised around it was as energising as it was affirming.
Will you stay in touch with your team members?
Without question. We have stayed closely connected since the sprint ended. It is particularly rewarding to see how we worked through this complex challenge and developed a high-impact solution that is now being further pursued at SAP - I am excited to see how it continues to evolve and look forward to staying connected with the LWOW community.
