> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://report.hacking-legal.org/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://report.hacking-legal.org/impact-report-and-white-paper/chapter-5-the-strategic-link-to-cambridge-hack-the-law.md).

# Chapter 5: The Strategic Link to Cambridge Hack the Law

The academic ecosystem is brought full circle through our structural connection to Hack the Law Cambridge. Now in its third year, Hack the Law has evolved into a multi-track ecosystem. It features a dynamic, full- day conference that runs in parallel with the intensive hackathon sprint. While student teams build LLM-powered solutions to real-world challenges, the conference track brings together legal scholars, industry executives, and global researchers to discuss current and emerging topics, including systemic compliance frameworks, AI governance policy, and automated legal operations.

Sponsoring our hackathon pipeline delivers direct, visible returns to our corporate patrons:

* **Direct Recruitment Pipelines:** Corporate partners secure first-look access to identify and hire top-tier student innovators across STEM, law, business, and the humanities.
* **Low-Risk Workflow Piloting:** Enterprises can safely package complex, real-world data and regulatory challenges into challenge statements to gain new perspectives and observe how agile, interdisciplinary teams build functional solutions in real time.
* **Reciprocal Research Value & Thought Leadership:** Corporate sponsors gain high-level access to LLI’s international community of over 1,000 digital transformation experts. This provides unique opportunities to support practical, peer-reviewed legal tech studies, as well as the foundational research of legal tech Ph.D. students developing new solutions to commercial and societal friction points.
* **2026 Cambridge Hack the Law Case Study:** Project Fidevus - An Open Citator as Public Legal Infrastructure. Team Fidevus demonstrates how the Munich-to-Cambridge pipeline transforms a time-limited hackathon into a platform for sustained interdisciplinary innovation. After winning the overall jury prize in Munich with an AI-supported EU data-breach response assistant, the team used the Cambridge stage to address a different but equally fundamental problem: how can a lawyer determine whether a cited legal proposition remains good law? The team built an open, jurisdiction-neutral citator designed to make the continuing authority of case law understandable and auditable. Rather than assigning a single status to an entire judgment, the Fidevus Verdict Layer extracts individual legal propositions, links each to the relevant quotation, and classifies how later courts have treated it - for example, as overruled, partly overruled, or still good law. Every classification is evidence-gated: the system displays a status only when it can trace that conclusion to a source in the citation graph.⁶ The prototype combined three mutually reinforcing elements:

  * **Proposition-level analysis:** The tool recognizes that a judgment may contain several propositions with distinct legal histories, avoiding the false simplicity of a single case-wide label.
  * **Graph-based auditability:** Cases, propositions, citations, and subsequent judicial treatment are connected in a single network so that lawyers can inspect the evidentiary path behind each status.
  * **Risk Radar:** A physics-informed machine-learning layer evaluates both what a case rests upon and how later courts rely on it, allowing trust (or doubt) to propagate through the citation graph while leaving the final legal judgment with the human user. The public-interest case is especially compelling. Comprehensive commercial citators remain unaffordable for many individuals and smaller organizations, while no comprehensive open citator currently serves the United Kingdom or United States. At the same time, generative AI systems can cite and reproduce outdated authority at scale. Fidevus responds by treating reliable legal status information as public legal infrastructure: open by design, evidence-linked, and intended to support - not replace - professional judgment.

  For the LLF, Project Fidevus is a concrete illustration of mission impact. Cross-border academic mobility exposed an interdisciplinary student team to a new legal system, new data resources, and an international network of technologists, legal experts, and potential employers. The result was not merely a pitch, but a working prototype aimed at widening access to reliable legal research and strengthening confidence in technology-assisted legal decision-making.

⁶ Team Fidevus. Is It Still Good Law? Building an Open Citator - The Expiry Date for Case Law. Project pitch deck and live prototype presented at Hack the Law Cambridge 2026. Demo referenced in the project materials at [Link](https://fidevus-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/georg_delp_fidevus_de/IQBlEWJGs2S2SLAK6ZZpFVAdAQ65dcIgNicRPxCNKTyW6m8)

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