Finboot, a digital platform for the signature of smart contracts has been named the winner of the first Legal Tech Startup Competition organised by Garrigues in conjunction with Spain Startup at South Summit, the summit for entrepreneurs in Southern Europe. The competition seeks to encourage research projects that focus on developing new technologies in the field of law and offers the winner a free package of legal advice provided by experts from Garrigues. In total, more than one hundred projects took part. The four finalists got their chance to present their start-ups at South Summit today. 

Smart contracts

Finboot, an initiative with participants from Spain, the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the US, is based on Blockchain technology. It is an aggregation platform that houses smart contracts for corporate use and offers them to the end user via a single interface. The judges considered that this new solution makes an important technological contribution to the legal environment, by developing a technology that facilitates transactions and makes them more competitive through the use of self-executing smart contracts. It expands the current horizon of how parties can make secure deals in decentralised environments. 

Entrepreneurial

In launching this initiative, Garrigues seeks to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem and foster entrepreneurship in projects arising from the legal tech world. According to the judges, made up of experts from Garrigues, Spain StartUp and Samaipata Ventures, all of the pre-selected candidates are aligned with the major legal tech trends prevailing in Silicon Valley. They include initiatives that may have a disruptive effect on the market, that propose more efficient models for aggregation and online matching of supply and demand, that entail the disappearance of intermediaries or seek to automate processes or analyze big data, among others. 

Other finalists

The other three start-up finalists also presented their projects today. Lawers is a platform for obtaining financing for litigation through crowdfunding. The tool puts investors in contact with potential plaintiffs in commercial lawsuits. Franco-Swiss project EJust is an online dispute resolution platform that maintains it is the first platform on which the parties can resolve their differences from start to finish, with binding legal agreements that are applicable worldwide. Lastly, Spanish and Portuguese company MESbook comprises a group of specialists in industrial management and artificial intelligence that has applied online business concepts to industry, such as user interaction, instant measurement or quality and action analysis, predictions using big data or machine learning tools.