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

Professor Francisco de Elizalde ( Principal Investigator) will be speaking of the implications of legaltech in legal practice in a conference held at Allen & Overy in Amsterdam on October 17th and 18th. Practitioners, academics and legaltech companies will join him to discuss this topic.

The conference, 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.