Clausana - Terms and Conditions App

Clausana is a terms and conditions aggregator application that I and a couple of friends built during the Global Legal Hackathon 2019 (London, UK). The winning application showcased a way to alleviate a problem most online products and their users face today - Terms and Conditions almost universally tend to be an impenetrable wall of information that users don't read or understand (let alone stay in-sync with changes).

How did it work?

The app would walk a user through a series of questions about their preferences in a certain domain (e.g. car rental agreements or letting contracts) and build a personal profile. Based on this profile it would then suggest a list of companies that fit their profile best and rank them against a pre-selected criteria. It being a hackathon I naturally got wear many hats over the long weekend, though for the most part I worked on the front-end which was written in React. We had a thin API layer written in .NET Core that exposed the business logic dealing with users preferences and weighted criteria (stored in an SQL instance on Azure). We also had a couple of non-technical team members analysing T&Cs of several online products and condensing them into a set of common criteria (e.g. user age for car rental companies).

How did it end?

Clausana competed amongst 8 other teams over the course of three days, during which it went from inception to a working product. On the last day we even had real associates in Freshfields use it and give feedback on. The app and our pitch was presented to a set of high-profile judges (including C. Blacklaws, President of the Law Society and J. Nicholas, Deputy Head of Westminster Law School). In the end, our team came first and won the Global Legal Hackathon 2019 [1], [2], [3], [4].