From 14 – 16 March 2025, Bucerius MLB student Sagar Subramanian took part in the three-day LWOW Sprint event hosted by University of Buckingham School of Law in the UK. Over the course of 3 intense and challenging days, participants were allocated 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 2025 was taught with the innovative 3-4-5 method (3 Phases-48 Hacking Hours-5 Stages) and included collaboration exercises, intensive hacking as well as a mini-composium. Sagar talked to us about his experience.
What attracted you to participate in Law Without Walls?
What initially attracted me to LWOW was the idea of combining law and business, something that aligns well with my interests. But once I got involved, I realized it was so much more than that. LWOW was truly international – just like the MLB – and the level of commitment it required was intense. I wasn’t fully prepared for it at first, but the experience turned out to be incredibly rewarding. I’ve always been interested in building something of my own but never knew where to start. LWOW gave me the tools and ideas to kickstart my entrepreneurial journey. Plus, the chance to travel to a different country and meet people not just from law but from diverse fields was really exciting for me.
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when thinking about LWOW?
Extremely rewarding – and an amazing way to build a strong personal and professional network. Each team was made up of students from different universities around the world, along with mentors from different fields. The team-building exercises over the three months and during the three days at Buckingham helped us understand how to look at problems from different angles – not just through a legal lens. This kind of thinking is so important, especially in law firms or in-house roles, where you need to understand the business context behind legal decisions.
How intensive was the preparation for the pitches?
Pretty intense and definitely stressful – but in a good way! LWOW emphasized Einstein’s quote: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” That was essentially our motto during the three days leading up to the pitch. We spent the majority of our time diving deep into the problem, only shifting to solutions and the pitch on the final day. As lawyers, it’s tempting to jump straight into problem-solving, so holding back and focusing on understanding the problem first was a real challenge – but one that paid off. This approach is very useful and something that I will take with me.
Tell us more about your LWOW Sprint Challenge.
Our team worked on a challenge sponsored by Ballard Spahr, a US-based real estate-focused law firm. The problem revolved around the disorganized land registry system in the US, which makes it really hard for homebuyers to access all the information they need before making a decision. Right now, the available details are limited to basics like ownership, price, and location – but that’s just not enough. Our solution was a product that would consolidate all publicly available information – like title history, insurance, taxes, repairs, nearby hospitals and schools – into one accessible platform for a certain fee. This would allow homebuyers to make better-informed decisions and avoid the high costs of discovering issues during legal due diligence. Currently, there’s no tool that provides this kind of comprehensive, upfront information, and that’s the gap we tried to fill.
What inspired you most during this tournament?
The energy! Just being in that environment with people from so many different backgrounds, all working together to dive deep into a problem and create something real – it was incredible. I’ve taken a lot from LWOW, but what stood out the most was seeing how complete strangers, with different experiences, can come together and build a product from scratch.
Will you stay in touch with your team members?
Absolutely! We’ve been in touch ever since the competition ended. The biggest surprise for me was that we didn’t just come up with a theoretical solution – we actually developed something that could be really useful in the real world. Since then, our team has started taking steps to bring the product to life outside of LWOW. We’re so excited about this and where this could go. It’s great to continue the journey together.
