Haub Law team places first in Brooklyn Law School’s 9th Annual Stanley M. Grossman Innovators Invitational

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The Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University team placed first in the 9^th Annual Stanley M. Grossman Innovators Invitational. The event is held annually by The Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE) at Brooklyn Law School. The Haub Law team consisted of students Gabriella Mickel, Daniel Guarracino, and Lili Caparosa and was led by Elyse Diamond, Director, Public Interest Law Center and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University.

Competitors were invited to develop and pitch their legal technology startups to a prestigious panel of judges, including industry professionals, entrepreneurs, and investors, to compete for prize money to help launch their ventures. To enter, student teams were required to submit an application consisting of a 150-word explanation of their legal tech idea. From there, only select teams were invited to participate in this unique opportunity.

For the competition, the Haub Law team created a video demonstrating their legal innovation prototype and developed and submitted a business plan for the tool’s development. The prototype was created with a larger interdisciplinary team of Haub Law and Pace University computer science students, along with Haub Law’s Professor Elyse Diamond and Andreea Cotoranu, Clinical Professor and Director of the NYC Design Factory in Pace University’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems, in this fall’s inaugural Access to Justice Lab course. The Access to Justice Prototype is a low-cost, mobile-friendly web application that will help low-income tenants and their advocates in Westchester navigate habitability issues. The Haub Law team placed first, winning the Manne Prize and $9,000 to help launch the project from an idea into reality.

Professor Elyse Diamond said, “I am so proud of our Haub Law team for taking what was developed in our new Access to Justice (A2J) Lab class and creating a pitch and plan to make it a reality. These students are developing real-world solutions to address gaps in access to justice.” The A2J Lab course is a key component of Haub Law’s new Pace Access to Justice Project, which aims to direct the combined legal knowledge, skill and energy among Pace faculty, staff and students to close gaps in access to justice in our communities.

Additionally, on April 29, the Haub Law student team Gabriella Mickel, Lili Caparosa and Daniel Guarracino, joined by Pace Seidenberg graduate students Aastha Bhadani and Aram Stepanian, also presented the inaugural A2J Lab prototype and a business plan at Georgetown Law’s Iron Tech Lawyer Invitational, a highly competitive international competition, held virtually, that is in its 12^th year. The other finalist competing teams were from Georgetown Law, University of Denver Law and Universities in Singapore, Alberta, Canada, and Sydney, Australia. The program opened with a welcome from William Treanor, Dean of Georgetown Law, who discussed the critical importance of programs like these that are training students to develop legal tech solutions to address access to justice gaps, and shared several new initiatives on this front at Georgetown Law - beyond their established Institute for Law & Technology. The team from Alberta was named the winner. Professor Diamond, who attended the live (virtual) competition day, praised the Haub Law team’s “impeccably and professionally executed presentation.” “It is truly incredible that the work our interdisciplinary team did in this inaugural Lab could complete at this level;” described by one of the judges as, “among the best in the world”.