What is your academic and professional background?
I hold a bachelor’s degree in law and two master’s degrees in law; one in Human Rights& Peaceful Settlement of Conflict and another one in International Business Law.
Currently, I am a Head of Legal & Internal Policy department for a private manufacturing company where I have been working as an in-house lawyer for the past 10 years.
Previously, I had the opportunity to work for 5 years in the development sector dealing with project management matters for International NGOs.
Why did you choose to participate in the Legal Tech Summer Program?
I was not very familiar with the legal tech field because I am coming from a place where Legal Tech matters are not yet much of a topic.
However, since I follow the main developments happening in the legal field, especially for in-house lawyers, through several articles, I became aware of the fact that the legal field is being affected by the increasing use of AI. Of course, the speed of adoption varies from one country to another. Therefore, I felt a personal need to learn more about it just for the sake of enhancing my knowledge. Besides, I believed it would contribute to help managing my legal activities in a more efficient way and to keep up with the existing competition in the labor market.
In what way is studying with a diverse group beneficial, in your opinion?
The company I work for is already culturally quite diverse: my colleagues are from different African countries, from Asia and Europe. Like working in a culturally diverse environment, studying within a diverse group offers me the advantage to learn and share ideas with individuals with different mindsets and perspectives but it also gives me an incredible opportunity to learn about different cultures.
It feels like having the chance to catch a glimpse of a country through a small open window. It is amazing to discover, through discussions, to what extend cultures can have similarities even when the countries are not even on the same continents.
How did the Berlin Study Trip contribute to the learning experience in the program?
It was very enriching to meet professionals who built their businesses on legal tech tools to provide legal services. The trip contributed a lot by bringing more practice in the course. therefore, visiting corporates in Berlin made the course more alive. Legal tech tools aim at, among other goals, making the enforcement of the law less complicated for the public. Hence, it was a real excitement to visit and see how companies like Flightright contribute to the enforcement of consumers rights by offering legal services using legal tech infrastructure.
What is the most interesting thing you learned academically and personally during the summer program?
Academically, I was impressed by a combination of several things: first, the data-oriented perspective and analysis of the field of Law. I liked the discussion regarding the possibilities of measuring the legal operations efficiency. I became more aware about the actual necessity do so. I had already taken the initiative to standardize some of our legal department´s tasks that are repetitive (and boring) and created some tools for improving documents management and filing. Hence participating in this program was a confirmation that with my team, we are on the right path.
Secondly, diving into some concepts of Gen AI such as Large Language Model (LLM), learning some basics about some mechanisms behind the set-up of different machine learning models and discussing the complexity and challenges of creating a LLM was also very interesting and very new to me. I hope I will get the opportunity to learn more about that topic soon.
From a personal perspective, I liked to hear about people and classmates cultural background: one-to-one or group discussion with classmates coming from different parts of the world. Plus, having some group activities together off campus and discovering Hamburg together was very refreshing.
