Written by Ashik Kay

I remember the first time I saw a computer. I was five, and my dad had taken me to his office at work. There, he showed me something that blew my mind. It was an “appliance” that looked like a TV, but that you could interact with it. He asked me if there was anything that I wanted to know about the world because, on this machine, you could ask questions to an abstract entity called “the internet” and get answers within a span of seconds. Thrilling for five-year-old me. That was also the first time I saw the iconic colours of Google, and the moment sparked my interest, first to learn how computers work and, slowly, as I have grown older, to figure out how we can use them to build new things and solve old problems.

Now, more than a couple of decades later, I work as a Customer Engineer at Google, doing exactly the thing that sparked my interest as a kid. Using cloud technology (read that as AI in 2025) to build solutions that solve problems for businesses across the UK Travel and Retail sector.

I recently had the privilege to mentor and judge contestants over a weekend at the “Hack the Law” event powered byKing's E-Lab at University of Cambridge. Having been passionate about entrepreneurship during my university days, this was an exciting opportunity to get an insider view at what innovation and technology fuels the startup culture today. I was very keen to see how technology is impacting the Legal sector because this is not something that I get to do very often in my day-to-day work.

Sitting on the judging panel provided a unique vantage point. This was not just about the future of legal tech, but also about the evolution of innovation itself. Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to see ideas mature and materialise into practical solutions by the vibrant and diverse teams in front of me and a few particular things stood out to me.

The first thing was the democratisation of innovation. In the past, materialising an idea into something tangible and presentable required being able to build technical assets. Today, as this event made clear, the days are gone when you need to have immense technical skill to achieve your vision. With the power of AI, you can now explain an idea and let the computer build it out for you! I saw this process come to fruition when some of the finalists from the hackathon consisted solely of participants from business or legal backgrounds, who spent their time thinking about an idea and “vibe-coded” it into existence using tools like Firebase studio. To be clear, this does not yet mean that you can have a fully-fledged company with no technical people (at least not yet), and this argument is a hill I am willing to die on as of July 2025. At the same time, these tools provide the powerful capability to bring initial interest and investment. These are two crucial factors for the success of a startup with no technical founders.

Which leads to my second point, this is all about human-led intelligence. Getting the chance to judge some of the teams as someone who works regularly in this space, the ideas that really stood out were the ones in which the teams put time and effort to think through how their idea would ultimately help the end user. At Google, we have a saying: “Focus on the user and all else will follow”. This approach contrasted with some of the other methods of development employed, where teams fully depended on AI to create a solution and to build it. For example, something that my co-judge pointed out was, how could we actually let a basic LLM decide on the probability of success on an argument? This approach is not reliable because it fails to account for the complex, often unpredictable, human elements that truly determine an outcome in the four walls of a court. The most effective use of AI at the moment is in being an excellent tool to research on your behalf and surface things of relevance. The human element, however, taking the lead on what to do with this information, remains the best way to develop convincing solutions (for me, this is the whole point of the term “Innovate”).

It is worth pointing out that, at this point in the evolution of this technology, there is always an argument about “Innovation in AI” vs. “Innovation with AI”. Some of the finalist teams were quite impressive as they looked at the challenge from a different perspective. Rather than thinking about how we could use AI to innovate, they thought about how we could innovate to improve the effectiveness of AI in the legal sector. Just like some of the enterprises that I work with, Legal requires AI that is trustworthy and reliable and, in this respect, I was incredibly glad to see that there were many projects in the space of search and database technologies which aimed to help AI (and users) understand legal documents better, ensuring that AI parses and surfaces the information accurately. Research into AI in these specific circumstances is equally important, if not even more important, than the application of AI.

As a Londoner who frequents the tube daily, I did get the slight ring of “Mind The Gap Please” a few times over the course of the four days. This observation really stood out to me and is likely a consequence of the fact that I have access to, and am working with, the cutting edge in AI (thanks to my employer and the businesses I work with). Although most people, including the judges and the contestants I engaged with, are in the Legal sector and have a good understanding of AI and the key terms associated with it, there seemed to be a gap in awareness of several updates and changes happening in the space. For example, some of the recent models are excellent at tackling hallucination, and many AI-ready database solutions can privately and securely provide results that are grounded in facts. Many people I interacted with, however, were not aware of these tools and developments. We must remain mindful that the AI space is growing at an extraordinary rate which requires significant efforts to keep abreast of. Given this, I strongly believe that it is crucial that we have more of such events, and that we continue to educate people about, and find ways to communicate, the advancements in this technology.

A final component of this event that stood out for me was the demonstration of love that is in the AI(r). From the organisers to the mentors, from the contestants to the other judges, and right to each and every volunteer helping out on the project, everyone (and I mean everyone!) was passionate about the cause. I felt that the group really saw the value of this technology and how exactly we may be able to use it effectively to bring improvements to the things we do daily. We definitely need to share our knowledge and to see these solutions as the next step in human capability, like the internet was a couple of generations ago. To properly achieve this, we need more open-source development and a collective mindset of growth and innovation. This will be crucial to effectively leveraging this technology across sectors beyond tech.

That said, we also had some amazing winners at the event and I would encourage people reading this to go check them out at the Hack the Law page to get to know more about them and their innovative ideas.

I had the company and the support of my amazing colleagues Fabian Desnoes , Alexandra Vieru , Yen Chau , Andrea Vasco , Emma Osman for this event and massive respect to each of them for putting in the time during the busy work weeks and the weekends!

None of this would have been possible without the exceptional organisers and the volunteers at the Cambridge Judge Business School and King's E-Lab . The impact of the work you do may or may not be visible today, but it will be obvious tomorrow!

Thank you and I'm looking forward to the next one!

None of the above content had AI influence, so I take full responsibility for the awful humor.

“TARS, let’s bring that humor down to 75 please” (iykyk)

This content above constitutes the author’s personal thoughts and opinions and does not constitute Google's view on the subject matter.

A Weekend with the Law(AI)ers

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