Thammasat University students interested in business, law, accounting, sustainability, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 17 June Zoom webinar on Future-proofing Businesses with AI, Proactive Law and Clear Communication.
The event, on Monday, 17 June 2024 at 5:15pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Department of Accounting, Aalto University, Finland.
According to the event website,
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into various aspects of business promises to redefine the landscape of business law.
This forward-looking seminar, co-organized by Aalto University School of Business’s Business Law and Tampere University’s JARGONFREE Research Group, will explore how we can use technology to decentralize law and make it more ‘decent’ (just, efficient, accessible and inclusive), and how we can achieve sustainability goals by applying a proactive approach and clear communication.
Speakers & topics:
- Samuel Becher, Imagining the future of AI-enabled legal systems
- Gerlinde Berger-Walliser, Proactive law for corporate social responsibility and human rights
- Anne Ketola, From Jargon to Justice: Clear Communication for Sustainable Business Practices
- Perttu Isohanni, Algorithmic imitation: protecting the new creative economy in the age of generative AI
Samuel Becher is a Professor at the Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. His research focuses on a wide range of topics including the economic and behavioral analysis of law, law and happiness, empirical analysis of law, consumer law, contracts, legal education, health law, and environmental law.
Gerlinde Berger-Walliser is an Associate Professor of Business Law at the University of Connecticut School of Business. In addition to her focus on international business law and CSR, she conducts research in proactive law, contract visualization, and legal design.
Anne Ketola is a linguist who specializes in cognitive accessibility and plain language. She is the Principal Investigator in the contract language: from unsustainable jargon to clear sustainability communication project (2024-2026), conducted by the JARGONFREE research group at Tampere University.
Perttu Isohanni is a doctoral researcher at Aalto University. His research focuses on legal challenges involving the use of generative AI in the field of intellectual property rights, particularly copyright law.
The TU Library collection includes research about different aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) and business law.
For further information or with any questions, students are invited to write to
petra.hietanen-kunwald@aalto.fi
Last year Professor Becher coauthored a paper, LexOptima: The Promise of AI-Enabled Legal Systems.
Its abstract:
Emerging technological developments, such as advancements in machine learning, natural language processing, predictive analytics and new and emerging methods in artificial intelligence, are poised to significantly transform legal systems.
These technologies are already enhancing the predictability of litigation outcomes and beginning to automate aspects of legal research and adjudication processes. Current legal systems, however, are not ready to leverage these developments optimally and to distribute their benefits equitably.
This article critically examines the potential for a new AI-enabled legal model we call LexOptima. LexOptima is characterized by its use of decentralized, community-driven data and algorithms to generate—in real-time—context-aware law and personalized legal services. LexOptima has the potential to radically improve access to justice, reduce bias in legal processes, empower communities to play a greater role in the creation and development of law and policy, and increase efficiency in legal institutions.
However, the transition to such a model also faces significant challenges, including issues of data privacy, resistance by incumbent interests, algorithmic transparency, and the need for robust human oversight. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary analysis of relevant literature and technological trends, we provide a conceptual framework for LexOptima and explore its potential benefits and limitations.
We conclude by proposing key considerations and next steps for a dynamic, human-centered approach to legal system transformation that optimally and inclusively leverages the strengths of humans and AI-enabled technologies.
From the paper’s introduction:
Current legal systems are ill-equipped to optimally leverage the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI). Our legal systems and institutions often struggle to provide affordable access to justice.
Worldwide, estimates suggest that over a billion people have unmet civil or administrative justice needs, and countless others are excluded from opportunities that the law provides. A significant number of people do not seek legal advice to understand or resolvetheir problems, with a large proportion reporting severe difficulties investing the necessary funds to address their legal issues.
The complexity of the law, coupled with the high costs and time-consuming nature of legal processes, can create significant barriers for individuals seeking justice. The inability of many to navigate the legal system effectively leads to a sense of frustration and disillusionment and can result in severe delays and tragic outcomes. More generally, as society becomes increasingly digitized and globalized, traditional legal frameworks and institutions are wrestling with novel challenges, such as regulating emerging technologies, protecting digital rights, and resolving cross-border disputes. Overall, our systems wrestle to keep pace with society’s rapidly evolving needs and account for the increasing complexity of legal issues in the modern world.
In this article, we reimagine our legal systems and institutions and explore how we can better position them to fully harness the potential of new technologies and address these challenges.
To that end, we envisage a new, AI-enabled model of law—we dub it ‘LexOptima’7—capable of leveraging the power of technology to foster greater citizen participation, inclusivity, efficiency, and trust. In doing so, we aim to ride, not resist, the technological wave already challenging our legal systems and offer a fresh perspective on the promise and perils of what we see as an inevitable transformation.
Recently, new AI tools such as multimodal large language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm, making ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
Sophisticated AI applications, capable of generating human-like text and images, composing music, and allowing users to effortlessly process the entire internet, have surprised a world underprepared for their appearance. The innovation and capabilities such tools bring have sparked a newfound fascination around technology and its potential impact in various fields.
In the legal domain, the widespread advancements in artificial intelligence are rapidly beginning to affect legal systems, practices, and institutions. […]
This new reality will result in profound potential transformations and opportunities for our legal systems. Contemporary legal systems worldwide rely heavily on humans for their
development, enforcement, and implementation. These systems have evolved in various legacy environments, where human labour and wisdom—rather than data and processing power—have operationalized and sustained legal processes and institutions. Thus, we must radically reform and adapt our legal systems to the newly emerging technological reality, ideally allowing for ongoing accommodation of indefinitely many future technologies we have yet to clearly anticipate.
LexOptima, as we envisage it, is a decentralized, AI-optimized and future-ready legal model that responds to this need. It is characterized by its community-driven and individualized nature, where the law is not dictated top-down. We imagine a system in which legal norms, practices and principles emerge from enormous datasets of publicly available information, and the collective actions and preferences of individuals and community members.
In its ideal form, LexOptima aims to leverage technology to make legal systems more accessible, equitable, and efficient, thus fostering implicit trust and participation. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)