The international project COHUBICOL (Counting as a Human Being in the Era of Computational Law), led by VUB professor Mireille Hildebrandt, focused for five years on legal tech and its integration into modern jurisprudence. It is a collaboration between lawyers at VUB and computer scientists at Radboud University, where Hildebrandt holds a chair in computer science. Legal tech (legal technologies) integrates advanced computing techniques, such as programming languages and machine learning, to contribute to legal services. Meanwhile, there are a lot of similar software packages and even companies (mainly in the US) offering such services.
llowing on from the current AI hype, legion of benefits are claimed: legal tech could automate a lot of tedious work (e.g. drafting legislations, business contracts, social security services, taxes, etc.). At the macro level, legal research requires ploughing through thousands to millions of documents. "This is not just digitisation, like converting documents into pdfs. You cannot study all those pdfs in detail, you need something much more powerful, a system that synthesises those documents in a meaningful way," says Hildebrandt, project leader, professor of 'Interfacing Law and Technology' at the VUB and recommended at 50 women in robotics 2023. "However, automation comes with a lot of problems and risks. As a computer scientist, you can attempt to put all laws and case law into an algorithm, but that can lead to screwing past insights, with disastrous consequences for legal development."
Moreover, law varies from country to country, so most legal tech cannot be applied just anywhere. The team around COHUBICOL, composed of lawyers and computer scientists, therefore took a close look at a selection of 30 typical legal technologies. One of its main results is the Typology of Legal Technologies (an evaluation method based on a large number of types of legal tech). To this end, the team examined different applications, datasets and scientific publications from both a legal and a computer science perspective. Key questions they asked were: What functionality is offered and can the technology in question deliver it? If you apply this type of technology as intended, what can go right or wrong? How does the use of technology in legal practice relate to the rule of law now, but also in the future? "These are important things to ask yourself," says Mireille Hildebrandt. "In any case, technology will play an increasingly important role in all kinds of aspects related to law and justice."
It is therefore important that lawyers and computer scientists meet and learn whether, and if so how, this kind of technology can be built responsibly,. "We want to make sure that the guarantees of the rule of law are not eroded," Hildebrandt adds. To put his money where his mouth is, Hildebrandt is organising an international conference in Brussels for the second time, together with the new academic journal 'Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational Law' (CRCL). The conference will take place on 20 and 21 November 2023 at the Free University of Brussels and will also be accessible online. This event will address key themes of AI in law and the development of legal methods, with speakers at the forefront of this rapidly evolving field. The event is for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, law and society. Participation is free, and interested parties can register via the link.
