What is StreetSnap? StreetSnap is an innovative technological solution allowing councils and their partners to better record, utilise and remove hateful graffiti and visual representations of hate throughout their broughs. The app allows users (from council officials to PCSOs and integrated partners) to track potential areas of higher hate crime and incidences of extremism effectively and efficiently within their communities. StreetSnap enables councils to communicate with ease across departments, teams and partners as well as better allocate resources and funds into areas where issues are ide ..read more

The latest report from the Legal Innovation Lab Wales; ‘The LegalTech Ecosystem in Wales, Between Start-Ups, Law Firms and Law Schools: A Road Map for the Future’, offers a comprehensive analysis of the sector, with a view to a bright future, with Wales as a global leader in LegalTech. LegalTech is one of the key strands of the £4.95m Legal Innovation Lab Wales, which was set up by Swansea University and part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). As part of this strand, the Lab has looked at supporting the development of legal innovations in Wales, underpinned by research in ..read more

The Legal Innovation Lab was a £4.95M initiative held within the School of Law that encouraged innovation in LegalTech, access to justice, and counterterrorism, with a Final Evaluation Report now available. The Lab was part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and the operation commenced in August 2019, running until June 2023. During this period, the Lab combined purpose-built facilities with expert research in three areas: LegalTech: supporting the development of legal innovations, underpinned by research into AI and machine learning. Cyber Threats: supporting the und ..read more

As we approach the end of the Labs WEFO funding period, we thought we’d take some time to look back at our past blog posts and revisit some of our achievements in the Lab. Back in December 2021, we celebrated Pro Bono Week with our Plugged in wiPro Bono: Innovation, Law Tech & Pro Bono in Wales event where we brought together members of the Lab, Swansea Law Clinic and the Solicitors Regulation Authority to discuss how a collaborative approach can be beneficial in developing legal technology for better access to justice. We got to work putting these words into action at the Global Legal Hac ..read more

“Collaborating with the local communities does not mean not having a global impact.” This was one of the quotes that stuck with me after attending the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Networking Day on 3rd March 2022, organised by Swansea University.   This simple message conveyed a significant idea that, in order to change the world, we must first start at home, and who better to address the importance of this message than the wonderful Owain Wyn Evans. A person of many talents, he has made a great impact in the music industry, the world of radio and LGBTQ+ community. He spoke a ..read more

The My Journey App launch event, held on the 28th of Feb 2023, was jointly organised by the Legal Innovation Lab Wales and the non-profit organisation Include. This event discussed a very important but often overlooked topic of the digital exclusion of offenders and celebrated the creation of an application that helps prison leavers to rehabilitate into society. Digital exclusion is a real concern for offenders as they do not have any access to technology when in prison. Some have lived their entire lives not knowing how to use a phone or the meaning of the internet. But when they finally ste ..read more

 Introduction When developers think of Accessibility and Security two things often spring to mind: Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics, and the OWASP Top 10. These are standards we use to guide our projects towards being secure and easily used by the end user while maintaining flexibility and expandability of the project. They are excellent standards to follow, but they don’t give a complete picture. It stands to reason that these are both things that we as developers wish to maximise - we want our clients to find our applications as easy and intuitive to use as possible, and we want users to ..read more

Allen & Overy recently announced that they are integrating innovative AI programme, Harvey, into everyday practice at the firm after testing it in beta since November 2022. Harvey’s founders include former lawyers and was partly funded by OpenAI’s Startup Fund. The programme comes in the form of a chat bot which incorporates OpenAI’s GPT technology and is designed to assist lawyers with document drafting and legal research by analysing data and using natural language processing and machine learning to produce results. The use of Harvey within the firm comes with a caveat that all informat ..read more

Billable attention units, neurorights, and cognitively enhanced lawyers are just some of the potential futures discussed by the University of Sydney’s Dr Allan McCay in the Law Society’s Horizon Report, Neurotechnology, law and the legal profession. With more and more investment in neurotech by the likes Elon Musk and Meta, the capabilities and applications of neurotech are set to expand. But with this new technology comes potential ethical and legal issues. Neurotechnology, or neurotech, is any technology which interacts directly with the nervous system by reading from and/or writing to the ..read more

A fundamental principle of our legal system in England and Wales is that of open justice – that justice must be seen to be done, as well as done. Transparency in the legal system is achieved by allowing reporters to publish articles on cases, allowing the public into courts to view proceedings, and allowing public access to court judgements and documents. Recently, a significant step has been taken with regard to the availability of court judgements with the launch of The National Archives’ (TNA) new Find Case Law service in April 2022, publishing all new court and tribunal decisions from the ..read more