ILTA Awards

Cem Uçan LinkedIn / cem-ucan/ 2026 WINNER 2026 / Y O U N G P R O F E S S I O N A L S T O W A T C H C em Uçan is the Co-Founder of Athena, an AI-native law firm in New York formed to make legal services faster, more consistent, and better aligned with how modern clients work. His work sits at the intersection of legal judgment, legal engineering, and technology-enabled service delivery: turning emerging tools into trusted systems for real legal work. Before founding Athena, Cem was a Legal Engineer at Legora, where he partnered with general counsel, legal operations leaders, senior lawyers, and implementation teams to design, implement, and scale AI- enabled workflows inside core legal processes . He worked on large-scale deployments across top law firms , supporting firmwide onboarding, global rollouts, and hands-on adoption with attorneys and stakeholders. That experience now shapes Athena. Cem believes AI has opened the door to a new legal services model where efficiency gains can be passed through to clients rather than absorbed into legacy delivery models. For him, the opportunity is not only to deliver legal advice with greater speed, consistently high quality, and reliability clients can trust. It is also to make the practice more sustainable and meaningful for practitioners. Cem defines professionalism as the ability to earn trust in high- stakes environments through preparation, precision, and follow- through. Whether working with senior lawyers, legal operations teams , clients , or peers , he is deliberate about expectations , transparent about limitations , and focused on work that can withstand scrutiny. His approach has made him a trusted partner to legal teams adopting new technology. A strong advocate for advancing the legal technology industry, Cem has helped treat adoption as a structured discipline rather than a one -time training exercise . Drawing on his ac ademic background in innovation and his experience with enterprise legal teams, he has contributed to frameworks for how technology spreads inside legal organizations. Knowledge sharing, mentorship, and community engagement a re c e n t r a l to C e m 's p rofe s s i o n a l a p p ro a c h . H e s u p p o r t s attorneys and peers exploring new technologies, advises others on legal engineering career paths, and contributes to the legal technology ecosystem through teaching, collaboration with legal education institutions, speaking, volunteer service, and industry participation. Cem's selection for ILTA's 2026 Peer Awards recognizes both his contributions to legal technology to date and the promise of what he is now building through Athena. His work reflects a steadfast belief that legal services can be more effective for clients and more sustainable for the professionals delivering them, without lowering the standards of judgment, care, and responsibility the profession requires. ILTA AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE 2026 3 3

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