VQ Year 2013 in Review

Legal Innovation Blog

As the year 2013 is coming to an end we would like to take this opportunity to share some of the highlights from an inspiring year – our fourth – with VQ, and to thank everyone that made it all possible.

VQ at the podium

During 2013 VQ was invited to speak at a number of events, including the annual Swedish in-house counsel conference Bolagsjuristen, and was nominated as one of the lecturers at the Stockholm University Master of Laws and Information Technology Programme on the Future of Legal Services.

VQ was also speaker and panel moderator at the InfoTorg Seminar on Legal Market Trends. Helena Hallgarn and Ann Björk shared their views on the changing legal marketplace with challenges and possibilities onwards. Thereafter, they moderated a panel discussion regarding changes on the Swedish market and how the Swedish market is affected by the international trends.

Furthermore, VQ’s Helena Hallgarn was one of the speakers at Practical Law’s 2nd Annual Knowledge Management Forum, a conference in London covering different aspects of the three main themes technology, enhancing client value and maximising efficiency. Helena Hallgarn shared her insights on how to develop innovative and efficient service delivery by the use of technology, for example by automating routine legal work and by repackaging knowledge management for clients by the use of a document assembly tool.

Law as an app competition

In March, VQ was part of the panel of judges, together with Johan Kahn, Delphi Law Firm, for the inspiring and innovative new legal competition “Law as an app”, when the Master Programme of Law & IT at Stockholm University for the first concluded the course with a practical assignment.

Three teams of students were tasked to come up with an idea for a legal service or app. The competition was very close and the winning team “ProfileMe” (a more transparent and privacy-aware targeted advertising and profile management tool) only won by one point.

Stockholm Legal Business Summit with VQ Forum – The Future of Legal Service

For the fourth time we arranged VQ Knowledge and Strategy Forum, our annual legal conference focusing on leadership, strategy, innovation and technology trends for the legal market. This year, we arranged VQ Forum as part of the two-day Stockholm Legal Business Summit, together with the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. With this approach we could create a joint legal strategy event focusing on the changing legal landscape from different aspects.

More than 200 in-house practitioners, legal advisers, law firm managers and other legal professionals from around the world attended the Summit to discuss strategy and key developments in the legal market.

VQ publications

During 2013 we have been asked to write columns sharing our views on the future of legal services and the legal markets developments by inter alia Cornell University Law School. In the VoxPopuLII column we discussed the future of legal service, with a specific focus on how the current changes on the legal market demand a more strategic approach to knowledge management and efficient working processes and how technology is becoming more and more important as a way to develop new innovative ways to deliver legal services.

Reports from inspiring seminars

To keep up to date with all new legal market trends internationally, VQ also attended several inspiring conferences and seminars in USA and UK during the year.

One of the major conferences we attended was the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA)’s Annual Education Conference. This four-day mega event in Las Vegas gathered over 3,000 attendees interested in the future of legal service and topics under the theme “catalyst” as in change and actions to change.

VQ Legal – the online legal service and knowledge platform

VQ Legal is our legal service for standard document packages that is widely used by major law firms, in-house legal councel departments, accounting firms and other companies. It is a new legally intelligent and efficient solution for creating all relevant documents for a specific matter with a content that is updated and quality assured by our partners Bolagsrätt Sundsvall and Elmzell Advokatbyrå, with English translations by TransLegal.

During 2013 we also established a new expert group for the development of M&A and commercial contracts law, consisting of highly reputable legal professionals.

Christina Ramberg, Elisabet Wenzlaff, Hanna Larsson, Jan Widlund, Magnus Wittbom and Ulf Sallnäs in VQ Legal’s expert group.

Besides the new area for commercial contracts law we also launchedthe new area IT law, with IT law contracts produced by Senior Legal Advisor Christina Wikström. Christina has more than twenty years of experience from corporate legal work related to different commercial sectors, with a focus on IT, Media and Telecom.

During 2013 we also focused quite a lot on the possibilities offered by the VQ Legal platform in projects providing customized and integrated solutions for several customers.

For example, we used the VQ Legal platform in projects both to create internal knowledge banks for law firms and to create external documents delivery directly to law firm customers via new innovative solutions.

We have also used the platform to create knowledge sharing portals and online service support tools for other legal service providers and organisations.

All these projects are very exciting and involve the use of our platform and advanced document assembly technology, which we aim to provide more detailed case studies about onwards.

Articles about VQ

During 2013 several articles were published about VQ, VQ Forum and VQ Legal. Here are some of these articles (most of them in Swedish):

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