// Blog
What are Hackathons and How do they Work?
Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to work with Tech for Justice which is an initiative to accelerate the development of legal technology applications that improve access to justice. While the weekend itself was focused on family law, their dreams and aspirations are much bigger.
Towards that goal, they took the challenging step of introducing hackathons to the legal community. One of their big successes from their first Texas hackathon was getting the Chief Justice Nathan L Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court to open the event talking about his Commodore-64 hacking days.
Throughout this, both myself and Claire Dunn (former lead organizer of Austin’s Hack for Change) served as advisors and spent some time sharing our experiences, Vision, and tactics for putting together successful hackathons.