The European Legal Tech Association (ELTA) renewed its board of directors last week. Tobias Heining is ELTA's new president. A founding member of ELTA, he is also Director of Business Development and Communications for CMS in Germany. Heining has extensive experience in the development of technology-based legal advisory products. From his point of view, "digitization will have a dominant footprint in the legal market, as it puts a focus on usability, accelerates commoditization, enables new ways of collaboration and allows scalability of legal services beyond human resources". Therefore, his first objective will be to convince all people affected by this massive transformation to "think positively and become active designers of their own professional future".
In its board of directors, Heining will be surrounded by professionals who are active in the fields of innovation and Legal Tech. One of its main supports will be María Jesús González-Espejo, co-founder of the Instituto de Innovación Legal and managing partner of Emprendelaw, expert in legal design thinking and promoter of innovative events such as the hackathon #HackTheJustice or the Legal Design Challenge. González-Espejo, who was already a member of ELTA's previous board of directors, will assume a more proactive role in the design and development of the association's activities. For her, "jurists are already aware that digital transformation must be among their priorities", to which she added that "they also need to have a global vision, because technology may or may not come from abroad. Collective knowledge and diverse backgrounds are critical, and it is precisely something that ELTA affiliation will bring them.