BIIM 
Boston International Innovation Moot

The Boston International Innovation Moot (“BIIM”) is a world forum for lawyers/law students and experts from other disciplines that will convene annually to debate the regulation of disruptive technologies. Law students will think, argue, and also draft proposed legislation -Model Law type of proposals - while experts from other fields will guide them through the technical intricacies of Crypto currencies, space, big data, biotechnology and other innovation developments.

 

Boston based attorney Dimitrios Ioannidis came up with the Innovation Competition idea because he judges international, and US based moot competitions and is also a judge in several MIT Enterprise Forum Competitions. He often lectures on the need to innovate the legal profession and believes that lawyers tend to be anything but pioneering in technical advances while innovation in every other discipline is proceeding at blazing speeds.

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The innovation moot was held at MIT for the last 3 years as part of the Osmocosm Foundation conference. It included one round of competition given that Osmocosm was a scientific conference focused on olfactory data and emerging technologies. It is now time to open the innovation moot to more law schools around the world and make it what the innovation moot was meant to be.

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BIIM members come from various disciplines, including scientists from MIT and other leading engineering institutions, lawyers and professors around the world who believe that established law school education is not always forward driven because it generally promotes the memorization of existing laws and educates lawyers through analysis of “precedent” – the study of the past. We also believe there is a clear disconnect between innovators, scientists, and lawyers. The legal community (lawyers, law students and those in the academia) often fail to synchronize with the rhythm and pulse of innovation while the legislative process takes place without much input from the innovators. This is the gap that BIIM seeks to bridge.

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BIIM will be a collaboration of law schools and technology advisors from leading schools around the globe, coming together to form a unique educational alliance. BIIM has a core innovation team that will be guiding the areas of innovation in each year’s competition. As part of preparing for the competition and the Global rounds, students will be required to engage experts (from departments of their schools or other schools in their countries) and to approach innovation using experts who will guide them in drafting the proposed legislation. The Global Rounds will involve scientists, lawyers and other experts who will debate the social and public policy questions in the draft legislative proposals. Law School students will compete by arguing for or against their proposals, which will depend on this intensely rich interdisciplinary approach.