Founded in Queensland by Milan Gandhi in 2015, The Legal Forecast is all about encouraging collaborative thinking to imagine and create new ways of doing law.

Now the group is taking its bold vision to New South Wales with hopes that the network can foster the same spirit of entrepreneurship among the local legal fraternity, as it has done in the Sunshine State.

Mr Gandhi, who is a law student at the University of Queensland, said his idea for The Legal Forecast was to leverage innovation in ways that could advance access to justice, as well as legal practice more generally.

“Facilitating a melting point of interdisciplinary perspectives and using it to spark bright new ideas about law and legal practice is exactly what we hope to achieve,” Mr Ghandi said.

“It’s not so much about only bringing together people from the technology and law space, although technology is a big part of what we do. The more exciting reality is that lawyers can learn new ways of thinking from all kinds of professionals, be they in STEM or the creative industries,” he said.

This week the group is rallying legal professionals in NSW in a bid to prompt law students and lawyers to think about how the future of the profession and the business of law can be transformed.

University of New South Wales law student and The Legal Forecast president, Adrian Agius, said the network served to teach practitioners and also connect them with those in the tech community.

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“We hope to raise awareness of our exclusively NSW initiatives and our NSW team in the hope that law students, lawyers and others in the NSW legal community will be inspired to collaborate with us on many of our endeavours.

“[Be it by] assisting to educate the legal community about disruptive new trends and technological advances and how they interact with law and legal practice; or advocating for enhanced wellness in the legal community and enhanced access to justice for everyday Australians,” Mr Agius said.

‘Disruption’ may well be one of the most overused business terms, Mr Gandhi said, but the focus of The Legal Forecast is all about reconsidering how the profession may be disrupted. He suggested that what is important is the opportunity for active brainstorming with the right people.

“When we use the term ‘disruptive thinking’, we mean that it’s a hobby of our expanding community of Legal Forecasters to challenge assumptions held by those in the legal world, brainstorm what society might actually need from lawyers in the future and to dream up the solutions today,” Mr Gandhi said.

The Legal Forecast Sydney will be officially launched at a special event hosted at the College of Law in St James Centre on Wednesday, 24 May, from 6.30pm.

Legal academic Lyria Bennett Moses from the University of New South Wales will deliver a keynote address for the launch on the subject of legal innovation. The associate professor’s main research area is the intersection of technology and the law and how to effectively regulate new technologies.  

The function is free, however registration is essential.