Sponsored by Jus Mundi, and organized by King’s College Entrepreneurship Lab, in collaboration with Stanford University’s CodeX, more than 250 students from 33 universities and a range of academic disciplines took part in the hackathon.

The challenge was set under the theme “Building the Lawyer’s Digital Mind” and tasks candidates with developing an LLM-powered assistant for use in a high-stakes arbitration scenario that involved an environmental counterclaim against a multinational mining firm.

The LLM-powered assistant was required to act as a strategic co-counsel evaluating legal strategies, identifying factual and jurisprudential weaknesses, benchmarking against relevant case law accessed through the Jus Mundi APOI, and proposing stronger alternatives.

A prize of £10,000 was awarded to the first placed Julia Volovich, a mathematics undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge who competed solo. A prize of £5,000 was awarded to a runner-up team of five.

Volovich’s hack used an AI tool to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a given case based on identified historic case law patterns. It also indicated at which stage these arguments would have the greatest impact in an arbitration process and outlined counter arguments that other parties would be likely to use.

“In all applications, and particularly in the legal field, AI models and humans have to co-exist. Given the huge volume of data involved, AI can be useful in synthesising and clarifying complexity to find relevant answers. The challenge on the tech side is how we can optimize this co-existence for creative power, without compromising truthfulness,” Volovich says.

“AI is going to play an increasingly central part in legal research and arbitration. It’s fantastic to see such promise from students, from such a broad spectrum of academic disciplines, contributing to technology that will improve how law is practiced, for the greater good,” said Jus Mundi CEO Jean-Rémi de Maistre.

The event followed the LLM x Law CodeX hackathon held at Stanford University earlier this year, also in collaboration with Jus Mundi. The company plans to continue the series with events planned in Singapore and Paris later this year.