🎉Thrilled to announce that our team came first runner-up position in the #HKLawSociety's Young Solicitors' Group Think Tank Competition! The competition, held over the last few months and which culminated in an in-person presentation on 24 June 2023, focused on “Regulating the use of AI in the Legal Profession”.

🙌 A huge shout-out to our team of trainees, Michelle Ng, Joan Wang, and Sabrina Chow, and our supervising buddies, Richard Poon and yours truly.

🔎Our presentation dealt with the following key issues and proposed solutions in regulating the use of AI by the HK legal profession:

🔹Issue 1: Need for a degree of transparency in the use of AI

🛠️Proposed solutions:

- Agree to appropriate Terms and Conditions with AI service providers

- Draft client engagement letters that explicitly address the use of AI tools, including issues of data storage, data usage, and the origin of the AI’s data

🔹Issue 2: Privacy and Data Protection

🛠️Proposed solutions:

- Include AI-related clauses in client-engagement letters

- Adopt a holistic risk management approach throughout the entire client engagement process, execution of work and post-matter review and feedback

🔹Issue 3: Legal Professional Conduct and Standards involving AI

🛠️Proposed solutions:

- Review existing duties under HK Solicitor Rules (e.g., duties of competence and confidentiality) and whether they adequately address AI-related risks

- Introduce AI-related training programmes for lawyers and trainees

- Given the speed of AI development, regularly review applicable rules and guidelines

🙏We are grateful to the HK Law Society and the Young Solicitors Group for their invaluable feedback. Special thanks to C.M. Chan, Amirali Nasir MH JP, Ronald Sum, JP, and Marcus Ng for their insights.

👏With six fantastic teams in competition, it was an honour to be part of this experience and tp contribute to a meaningful dialogue surrounding AI and its implications within the Hong Kong legal profession.

Another epic MetaverseLegal trip to a new metaverse platform: VRChat Inc. We were led by Weronika Marciniak, who designed VHealing World from scratch for a private client.

This world has different places to gather in groups or reflect and meditate individually.

You can even teleport from one place to another.

Being showered by golden stars was a surreal experience.

And check out this video to see Manuel Gomez's talking doughnut avatar! 

A short 20-second video of our latest MetaverseLegal trip to our favourite metaverse world yet: Glue.

Gorgeous, relaxing spaces with magnificent views. You could make a virtual cup of coffee too.

MetaverseLegal retreat 2023, anyone?

Thank you, Emily Hay, for organising, and to travelmates, Ekaterina Oger Grivnova, Juliette Asso-Richard, idiluzay and livia.

We visit different metaverse apps once a month.  

Our latest MetaverseLegal trip to the metaverse was a trip to Disneyland via AltspaceVR , as created by a user to bring back their cherished memories of Disney.

First, our crew started off in a world designed by Ekaterina Oger Grivnova, with her “pet” crocodile, giraffe, bear and wolf …

Then, we then all travelled together to Disneyland.

I rode on a flying unicorn (watch the video with the sound on!) and teleported to different Disney rides.

My favourite was the Mickey and Minnie railway ride, where Goofy welcomed us onboard.

Being in this virtual world was a lot of fun. The immersive experience looking at digital art with goggles on felt a lot like visiting the recent Hong Kong Digital Art Fair IRL.

I can see why Matthew Ball (author of “The Metaverse and How it will Revolutionize Everything”) says the “challenge of building and creating real-time rendered virtual worlds is the need for enormous internet connectivity, in particular bandwidth and latency”.

The virtual environment was fantastic but as one person said, each world did take a couple of minutes to load (like waiting for a Disney ride!). At one point I lost internet connectivity altogether and almost missed the group trip to Disneyland.

Thank you very much to Ekaterina Oger Grivnova for organising our trip, and everyone who joined. Well done Emily Hay for finding Aladdin’s lamp (albeit not being able to collect the “treasure”!). 

Watch the video here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lizzie-chan_our-latest-metaverselegal-trip-to-the-metaverse-activity-6998667214132322304-wiUi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Tonight in the metaverse, we enjoyed drinks on the rooftop of the Dubai Chambers Penthouse; enjoyed listening to the sound of rippling waters in Spatial Park; felt zen in Buddhaverse; and checked out not one but two Vogue fashion museum spaces.

As part of a monthly metaverse get-together of lawyers with Virtual Reality (VR) goggles, we visited Spatial tonight using Oculus VR goggles.

This is part of our goal to gain experience of the metaverse first-hand and to learn about the technology as it develops.

Spatial had some impressive features, including:

💠 Avatars that look like you! (Check out the photo below and see who you can recognise.)

💠 Full bodies.

💠 Ease of travelling to different spaces within the app.

💠 Ease of movement within spaces, including up and down stairs.

💠 Breathtaking visuals.

It is fun to be on this journey. Tonight our participants included our organiser, Ekaterina Oger Grivnova (thank you!), as well as Emily Hay, Juliette Asso-Richard, Rebeca E. Mosquera, Daniele Pellegrini, Anastasia Choromidou.  

Remember Young ICCA's Meet the Mentors in the Metaverse event on 12 June 2022? The Global Arbitration Review write-up is hot off the press:

🥽 Toby Landau QC (Young ICCA Mentor): "This was a remarkable experience, and certainly a taste of things to come. This is a new technology with extraordinary potential – a total immersion into a new world in which anyone, however remote, can be present and interact. It was particularly fitting to be using this platform for a Young ICCA event, run by a team of young professionals who are looking to the future with a singular enthusiasm and inspiration."

🥽 Dana MacGrath (Young ICCA Mentor): "This Metaverse virtual event was a shining example of how the highly talented and committed new generation of international arbitration lawyers are taking the field to the next level and why arbitration really is the future of international dispute resolution."

🥽 Krystle Baptista Serna (Young ICCA Mentoring Programme Co-ordinator): "Mentees had the opportunity to hear from stellar practitioners and arbitrators and to interact with each other and mentors in a cutting-edge virtual environment. It’s eye-opening and inspiring to see these virtual live connections bring the programme to life."

🥽 Emily Hay (Young ICCA Mentoring Programme Coordinator): "We hope that participants walked away with some advice that may guide them in their career decisions and increased curiosity about this new futuristic technology, which is a lot of fun. Anyone who would like to know more about legal issues and developments associated with the Metaverse should follow MetaverseLegal and ArbTech on LinkedIn to learn more.”

🥽 Yours truly: "The Young ICCA Mentoring Programme is an incredible opportunity for young lawyers. I enjoy being 'a bridge' between mentors and mentees in my role as a group advisor."

🥽 Umika Sharma: "The 'one-of-a-kind' event was beneficial to participants not just because of the career development advice that was shared but because of the introduction to new technology that may play a role in the future of the field."

Check out the full article at https://lnkd.in/gZU6ZJwj 

On 27 January 2022, I hosted the first ever gathering for international arbitration practitioners in VR, with support from ArbTech.

Read the full write-up at Kluwer Arbitration Blog here: https://arbitrationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2022/02/06/arbitration-tech-toolbox-lessons-from-the-first-ever-international-arbitration-gathering-in-virtual-reality/