A look back at the Open Legal Lab 2023: 19 pitches, 13 exciting projects and 60 creative minds

A hackathon is an event at which a group of people come together to work intensively on developing innovative solutions and projects. It is a collaborative event in which participants contribute their skills and knowledge in order to work together on a specific topic or problem within a limited period of time. 

At the Open Legal Lab, the focus is specifically on the legal system and its challenges. In this context, legal professionals, developers, designers and other interested people come together to develop innovative solutions and technologies for legal questions.  

The Open Legal Lab Hackathon 2023 took place from 30 April to 1 May at the Swiss Olympic House in Magglingen, and we, the organisers from the eJustice.ch association, supported by Opendata.ch, are once again extremely impressed by the results of the various challenges. 

Around 60 participants met in Magglingen on the morning of Sunday, 30 April, first recharging their batteries for the next two days over a cup of coffee and fresh croissants. Then things got under way with the various challenge presentations. The great attention the hackathon attracted was also reflected in the large number of challenges submitted.  

A total of 19 challenges were submitted. The pitches ranged from visualising Swiss data protection labels to improving the quality of legislation through artificial intelligence. In the end, work continued on the following 13 topics: 

Once the teams had formed, they moved into the rooms provided in Magglingen. 13 groups were formed, with some challenge owners also merging into a single group. One example of this is the challenge ”Legal instruct – a dataset to finetune large languages models.” and the challenge ”Start AML“. Both challenge owners saw synergies in their tasks and joined forces in a new group. As part of this challenge, the creation of an openly accessible legal instruct dataset was proposed in order to fine-tune large language models for the legal domain. Another challenge focused on building a “FEDLEXplorer”. The aim of this challenge was to demonstrate how federal law data can be used in third-party products via the SPARQL endpoint of the federal law platform. All the challenges that were worked on can be found and explored further here.

The teams worked late into the night, with one team only finding its way to bed at around 2 a.m. The next day, the teams had until half past three in the afternoon to work on their challenges. The teams’ results were then presented in plenary. The presentation had a special touch, as it took place as part of the Magglingen Legal Informatics Seminar. This allowed all the teams to present their results to an even larger audience. The results were definitely impressive. All the teams worked productively over the two days and made great progress. The presentations were also extremely entertaining, with one challenge owner dancing in in the style of the Windows Launch Party of 1995. Other teams also shone with their visual presentations, such as the Swiss Federal Supreme Court Dataset group in the picture below. This project built a Shiny app with which anyone can analyse data on judgments of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court. 

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the participants, sponsors and guests who made the Open Legal Lab 2023 an outstanding event. Without you, it would not be possible for us to hold such valuable events. We hope you will join us again next time and we will once again warmly welcome you to Magglingen. Together we can continue to make the Open Legal Lab a place of knowledge exchange and innovation, to shape the future of law.