Towards Robot Judges
Legal Analytics Conference
In May 2016 the competition to generate ideas on how to automate answering legal questions together with making answers highly accurate was announced. Throughout the end of year 2016 and beginning of 2017 the teams worked on prototypes that were evaluated by the jury (see below for a list of jury members).
Now the decision has been made and the cooperation partners are ready to announce the winnes during the conference held on May 31. The conference aims to bring together those offering (possible) solutions to those needing them in their everyday life - practitioners, lawmakers, judiciary, scholars and students. Hence, the name of the conference "Finding the right needle in the right haystack."
Read the summary of the conference and find the presentations here.
Legal Analytics Competition
Average lawyer spends tens of hours every year to dig through piles of legal texts seeking answers to complex legal questions. Interpreting law requires meticulous search for relevant judgements and administrative decisions, preparatory materials, EU sources, guidelines, scholarly writings, and number of other sources. The volume of such materials grows fast. Search is only the beginning. In order to answer legal question, lawyer need to detect legal rules that are relevant, check their validity, solve conflicts between rules, and overcome gaps in law.
Estonian Bar Association and the IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu, supported by several governmental institutions, law firms and IT companies, announce a competition to generate ideas on how to automate answering legal questions together with making answers highly accurate.
Aim
Participating teams should create working prototypes of or ready applications that:
- Enable legal professionals (and why not laymen) to automate the process of quickly finding correct answers to legal questions under Estonian law (it could be considered an advantage if EU law or law of other jurisdictions would be covered at least to some extent as well);
- Are made available under open source license so that the software can be developed further by the governmental institutions or anyone else;
- Have the source code available for download from a suitable distribution point such as Github or SourceForge.
Participants
The competition is open to everyone. Teams combining technical, design and legal expertise might have the strongest chances.
Deadline for Submissions
The deadline for submissions is 31 January 2017.
Award Fund
The award fund of the competition is EUR 10,000. The jury may issue several awards and divide the award fund as it deems appropriate. The jury reserves the right to reduce the award fund or cancel the competition in case of insufficient interest or insufficient quality of submissions.
Announcement of Winners
Winners will be announced during the Estonian ICT week in May 2017. The winners will be expected to present their submissions during the event where the winners are announced.
Jury
The submissions are judged by the following panel:
- Andres Kütt (Estonian Information System Authority; IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu)
- Anna Ronkainen (TrademarkNow)
- Anette Aav-Büth (IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu)
- Evar Sõmer (Estonian Ministry of Justice, Centre of Registers and Information Systems)
- Hannes Vallikivi (Estonian Bar Association)
- Peeter P. Mõtsküla (IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu)
- Rauno Kiris (Estonian Supreme Court)
- Risto Hübner (Nortal; IT Law Programme of the University of Tartu)
- Evert Nõlv (ExtendLaw)
Please send submissions and questions to:
Anette Aav-Büth, University of Tartu Law School, IT Law Programme, anette.aav [ät] ut.ee, tel +372 737 6048
Additional Information:
- Facebook event
- Information in Estonian
- Hannes Vallikivi, Chairman of the Board, Estonian Bar Association, hannes.vallikivi [ät] derling.ee, 5116811
- Anette Aav-Büth, Director of the IT Law Programme, University of Tartu, anette.aav [ät] ut.ee
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