TSC Election 2020 — Results

Author: Dan Selman

I am thrilled to introduce the six inaugural members of the Accord Project Technical Steering Committee (TSC); elected for two years. The vote was electronic, and the results have been published online, while the election process is documented on GitHub.

The newly elected members of the TSC represent a cross-section of legal and technical talent; a compiler and database expert, a practicing lawyer, a startup CTO, an enterprise CLM vendor CTO, a full stack engineer and an expert in distributed systems as applied to legal problems. A wonderful mix of skills to help guide the technical evolution of Accord Project for the coming two years. I wish them all the best and can’t wait to see where we are in two years time!

Now let’s meet the newly elected members of the TSC…

Thomas Brooke (nomination)

Tom Brooke has been practicing law for 40 years and has been involved in Legal Tech for almost that long. He has done freelance coding and contributed to various open source projects. He teaches a course on Coding for Lawyers at Campbell University Law School and is helping to create a new legal tech hub at the Law School. He is past president of the North Carolina Bar Association Future of Law Committee, founder of the North Carolina Legal Hackers and has helped with organizing the Legal Hackers International Summit in past years.

Martin Halford (nomination)

Martin is a co-founder and the CTO for beNEXT.io, an Australian-based startup focused on developing smart legal contracting platforms for end-users – initially targeting the real estate industry. Martin is a regular contributor to Accord Project testing, documentation and design discussions, while recently he has been adding image support to the PDF renderer for contracts.

Jolene Langlinais (nomination)

Jolene is a fullstack engineer at Clause, and since February 2019, she has been a regular contributor and maintainer of several Accord Project repositories and the technical documentation. Jolene is an existing Maintainer for the Accord Project.

Dr. Antonis Papatsaras (nomination)

Dr. Antonis Papatsaras is the Chief Technology Officer of the DocuSign CLM Platform. Before he joined Docusign, Antonis was the CTO of SpringCM where he re-built the platform on open source technologies and re-pivoted the company as a CLM (contract lifecycle management) SaaS player.

Antonis received his PhD in Formal Specification and Design of Safety Critical/Distributed Systems from Teesside University, UK. In 2003, he was elected a member of the Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ILTHE) and in 2007 he achieved the status of Fellow of the Higher Education Academy teaching Artificial Intelligence.

Niall Roche (nomination)

Niall is Head of Distributed Systems Engineering at Mishcon de Reya LLP and specialises in Data Science and Distributed Ledger Technologies across sectors including legal, construction, real estate and supply chains. He is as a software engineer and has experience in CTO and advisory roles, developing web, mobile and distributed applications, and most recently, 5G, IoT, Blockchain and Data Science solutions.

Jerome Simeon (nomination)

Jerome is the Chief Scientist at Clause. He is an experienced developer and an expert in databases, programming languages, and compilers. Jerome is a Maintainer for the Accord Project core stack (Ergo, Cicero).