Lawyering on the Digital Age: A conference on tech in legal practice

The conference, co-organized by the Jean Monnet Module on Liability of Robots: A European Vision for a New Legal Regime (LEGROB) granted to IE Law School´s Professor Francisco de Elizalde, aims to bring together practitioners, academics, and legaltech companies to suggest an unbiased, but cautious, approach for the engagement of technology in legal practice.

The digitalisation and the development of automated systems , as well as the evolution of artificial intelligence, has radically changed the legal landscape and will continue to impact law at an accelerated pace. These developments already have led to the creation of a completely new “branch” or area within the legal sector, namely the legal tech industry. The wide range of different legal tech applications, including contract drafting software, case-law mining programs, smart dispute resolution systems, and so forth, make operations and tasks possible which were previously inconceivable or would demand an enormous amount of resources. The rise of legal tech has brought about various responses from firm “legal tech believers” to legal traditionalists that consider the supplementation of technology for human resources as “highly disruptive.”

Nonetheless, it would be short-sighted not to see that the advancement of legal tech is going to have a similar impact on the legal sector as industrialisation had on manufacturing.

The aim of the conference is to bring together practitioners, academics and legal tech companies from different legal systems in order to scrutinise what are the real implications posed by legal tech and to suggest an unbiased, but cautious, approach for the engagement of technology in legal practice. It is important for the legal community to have a framework for analysing the benefits and costs of new technology and computer programs before implementing them into legal practice. The costs of new technologies include potential legal and business risks, as well as ethical concerns and technological problems arising from legal tech.

For more information on the Conference co-organized by IE University, King´s College London, Radboud University, Catholic University of Lyon and Univeristy of Florida, click here.

“In LEGROB we are analyzing traditional concepts of law from the angle of artificial intelligence. On top of that, we are having research activities to understand how AI impacts traditional notions of law,” explains Professor Francisco de Elizalde.

 

About the Jean Monnet Module on Liability of Robots

The Jean Monnet Module on Liability of Robots: A European Vision for a New Legal Regime (LEGROB) is devoted to teaching, researching and debating on how the EU is going to take action on the regulation of the Liability of Robots. This Module is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme – Jean Monnet Activities of the European Union.

The subject matter of the Module addresses a particular aspect (the liability) of what is probably ‘the’ most important issue in the forthcoming development of the global economy – AI and robotics. It will define if the EU will continue to be a leading economy in the global scenario or, instead, a follower of more advanced nations.