SUBMISSIONS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

Following the success of the first Justis International Law & Technology Writing Competition, designed to help current students demonstrate their writing ability to an international audience, this year the competition has since seen an increase in interest and entries from students around the world wanting to share their creative writing ability.

Three topics were introduced to inspire students in their writing. These were Social Media, Technology and the Law, Access to Justice and Technology, and The Future of Legal Technology. They were chosen as topics as they all enabled students to explore a number of emerging issues, with enough freedom for engaging authors to write about specific issues that they were interested in.

The 2019 competition received entries from students at 61 universities from 29 countries around the world, including the University of Toronto, the University of California, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Oxford, Western Sydney University, Singapore Management University and the University of Dhaka. This level of engagement demonstrates that students from all around the world are taking the time and effort to create interesting and extremely well-thought-out articles on these important topics.

While the competition received many submissions, only six articles from each category were shortlisted and put to our panel of expert judges for review, including Emily Allbon (Founder of Lawbore; Senior Lecturer and Director of Mooting, The City Law School, University of London), David F. Wills (Editor, Legal Information Management (LIM); Squire Law Librarian, University of Cambridge), Masoud Gerami (Managing Director, Justis Publishing), Ruth Bird (Former Bodleian Law Librarian, University of Oxford, and former Vice President of the International Association of Law Libraries), Nicole Allaband (Editor-in-Chief, Richmond Journal of Law & Technology), James Williams (Annual Survey & Symposium Editor, Richmond Journal of Law & Technology), Ilya Mirov (Senior Articles Editor, Richmond Journal of Law & Technology), and Eli Hill (Annual Survey & Symposium Editor, Richmond Journal of Law & Technology). As all entries were of such high quality, this made the shortlisting, judging and adjudication a challenging process.

OVERALL WINNER AND BEST IN CATEGORY ARTICLES

We are pleased to announce that the overall winner for the 2019 competition is Kim Rust of the University of Sheffield for their article Block-chain reaction: Why development of blockchain is at the heart of the legal technology of tomorrow.

You can read Kim Rust's winning article in this edition of Legal Information Management, alongside articles by Walter Myer of the University of Oxford, Eleanor De of City, University of London and Iphigenia Fisentzou of BPP and who were all awarded Best in Category for each of the three categories of the 2019 competition.