The webinar saw outstanding participation by HBKU’s students and we were pleased to engage in an interesting Q&A session with the University’s Dean, Susan L. Karamanian.

On the 23rd of September, we were invited by the prestigious Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Qatar to talk about how blockchain technology can impact dispute resolution. Professor Georgios Dimitropoulos, Associate Professor of Law at HBKU Law and Research Associate at the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies, chaired the event.

HBKU’s webinar page

The webinar saw outstanding participation by HBKU’s students and we were pleased to engage in an interesting Q&A session with the university’s Dean, Susan L. Karamanian.

In her words:

Technology already has and will continue to have a major role in improving the efficiency of courts.  The webinar we co-organized with Jur was eye-opening, as our HBKU Law students learned about dispute resolution in the virtual world.  For them, it is very likely that the trip to the courthouse will no longer involve a lengthy commute followed by a wait to appear in front of a judge.  It may very well involve some clicks on a keyboard. This change will be profound.

HBKU Law looks forward to having more interactions with Jur to help lead this conversation in the Middle East.

Dean Susan L. Karamanian, Hamad Bin Khalifa University College of Law

The participants reached the conclusion that blockchain can disrupt the justice system and contribute to increasing its transparency and impartiality. We have seen this as a recurring theme during our webinars across the world where we got in touch with communities from Mexico to South Africa to China. The response to the previous webinars was overwhelming, with an average participation of 133 registrants (90% legal tech lawyers) per webinar, in which we got the chance to connect, talk, and engage with around 300 law firms in 65 countries and 254 cities. 

Our answer to the major problem of access to justice is our upcoming product 1, the Open Justice Platform, which we plan to release in Q1 ‘21. If you want to know more about it, please check out justice.jur.io.

As in the past series of webinars, our speakers mostly focused on the relationship between smart contracts and traditional contracts (our CLO, Raffaele Battaglini), dispute resolution and blockchain with a specific focus on alternative dispute resolution (our legal engineer, Luigi Cantisani), how decentralization and blockchain solutions should be built in stages progressing from simple to complex features, and how complex is to create a blockchain-based platform compared to a traditional centralized platform (our CEO, Alessandro Palombo).

It has been an extremely valuable session and experience. I think our students got important insights into how blockchain can impact certain aspects of the dispute resolution process. It is extremely important for them to hear from individuals that are shaping the field and have an impact on the “future of justice”.

Professor Georgios Dimitropoulos, Associate Professor of Law at Hamad Bin Khalifa University Law College of Law

I believe that blockchain technology will have a major role to play in the upcoming years, also because of the COVID pandemic, and I look forward to seeing the launch of the Open Justice Platform and letting our students test it – added professor Georgios.

A final Q&A session was moderated by Prof. Dimitropoulos together with our CTO, Luca Y. Daniel. This section saw the participation of a lot of students and showed how interesting these topics are to a young legal audience eager to know more about blockchain technology and how it might affect their future careers.

Check the replay of the webinar

We stopped by after the webinar to ask our hosts to share their thoughts on the webinar and the impact of technology when it comes to dispute resolution.

A final thought from our CEO Alessandro Palombo:

I was impressed with the community’s reaction to this event. It was in the pipeline for a long time and I am pleased that despite COVID, we were able to get in touch with HBKU’s students and share our knowledge of blockchain technology with them and discuss how it can impact their future careers as lawyers and dispute resolution professionals.

Alessandro Palombo, CEO of Jur

I am looking forward to collaborating more with HBKU and other universities in the Middle East to spread awareness of blockchain technology and involve them in testing our upcoming Open Justice Platform – he added.

Get started with the Open Justice Platform