Five reasons why lawyers should try hackathons

Last weekend, I ventured beyond my lawyer comfort zone to participate at Greenhack, a sustainability hackathon in Prague.

The reason behind it is that it fits in my coding journey. My key objective was to have fun (success!).

At the same time, I am pretty sure that every lawyer can benefit from such experience. Especially those lawyers who’d like to learn to code.

What is a hackathon?

Hackathon is essentially a time-limited problem-solving challenge. You get a problem, and some insane time frame (here it was 24 hours). You then hack the problem, and at the end you pitch your idea. It is a collaborative activity – teams form either before the event, or (as it was my case), the day of.

To illustrate, check out our solution of PastPort, material passports to help recycle and transport them.

Why should lawyers try hackathons?

I think that there are plenty of reasons why lawyers should do hackathons at least once. Below I outline the five key ones.

#1 Hackathon forces you to focus on the value

Hackathon makes you concentrate only on what matters to your core idea. This applies if you are coding a website, creating bottle deposit scheme, or designing its visuals.

Thanks to time, material, and other constraints, you have to look at what brings value to your hack.

In other words – with 24 hours to design material passports, you will not spend 20 hours on introductory memorandum on waste handling.

#2 Hackathon is an exercise in multidisciplinary collaboration

Imagine you have a hack team consisting out of pure lawyers (no lawyer-designers or lawyer-programmers allowed). You’d soon realise that you set yourself up for a struggle.

My team was me, an IT consultant, and a college freshman with robotics major, mentored by a waste marketplace CTO. We needed to make it work (and we did and it was awesome).

It was possible, because our backgrounds and personalities complemented each other.

Learning to collaborate with people of different backgrounds is a valuable skill. If done right, you can really benefit from it.

#3 Hackathons make you try something new

During the weekend, we used design thinking to solve our challenge. But we also made a logo, shot and edited a video with a bunch of calligraphy, and a website.

I don’t have much experience making videos or editing them. But I honed some iMovie skills and we made it happen.

Maybe one day, I will use these skills to process all the GoPro footage from our travels I got and never used!

#4 It is a fantastic sales/marketing/networking technique

So I was mostly messing around and kept my lawyer identity on hold. But there were quite a few teams that were doing the challenges within the core business of their companies.

The sponsors of the hackathon then got to know them thanks to their hacks. Some of them definitely made a foundation for new business ties.

Plus you just meet so many new people, which is always great.

#5 Hackathons are awesome

The most important part is that I had a great time. It was amazing to collaborate with my team, to be so creative, brainstorm, try solutions, toss solutions…

I believe that there is a value in trying something for the sake of trying. I do not give up my Fridays/Saturdays lightheartedly, but I would do it again.

Final words

Lawyers should try hackathons at least once. If you are interested, google hackathons in your area. Or maybe it will give you an excuse to go somewhere you always wanted to visit.

Anyway, give yourself a chance to try it. Even if you may feel awkward at first, the outcome is well worth it.

And while you wait, why don’t you start learning to code?

Have you ever participated at a hackathon?