Legal Research Tool is Winning Idea at Annual CUBE Innovators Competition

At the fourth annual Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE) Innovators Competition, James Allen ’18 and Omar Mustafa ’17 earned the $2,000 grand prize for their proposal FileFix, a legal research tool that provides seamless bookmarking and document storage. Functioning as a widget, FileFix provides synchronized webpage bookmarking and cloud pdf storage for swift cataloging of research sources.

"This idea came about as a solution to the problems associated with legal research. As law students, who are constantly faced with these problems, we were in the perfect position to try and come up with the fix--and this competition helped us to actually do that,” Mustafa said.

Antwon Kennedy ’19 won the second-place prize of $1,500 for Project Cité Soleil (PCS), a benefit corporation that would host an online store selling local Haitian-made fashion items to New York City and global markets. PCS also would send law students at least once a year to Cité Soleil, Haiti, to teach English, business, and legal skills to women with the goal to help empower them through fashion, international trade, and ownership.

"Empowering the women of Haiti, Project Cité Soleil, an online fashion store, provides an avenue for Haitian artists to sale locally made fashion items and empowers the women of Haiti through ownership in the corporation," Kennedy said.

The prize money was made possible through the Nancy and Stanley M. Grossman ’67 CUBE Fellowship Fund.

Judges for the competition included Professor Paul Gangsei, Special Counsel, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP; Caleb D. Koeppel ’81, CEO, Bantam Restaurant Group LLC; Robert J. Manne ’77, General Counsel and Senior Vice President, Ultimate Software Group; and Ben Rader, General Counsel, The Goldman Sachs Foundation.