Artificial Intelligence and the Legal Sector

Join us for an AI and the Law talk with Hannes Westermann, who will examine the application of Artificial Intelligence to the legal sector.

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being hailed as one of the biggest inventions of the 21st century. It is likely to have a profound impact on many areas of society. Already, AI is being used in many different fields, from playing complex board or computer games at superhuman levels, to customer specific marketing automation, to performing tasks previously reserved for humans, such as driving cars. AI allows computer programs to find and analyze patterns and correlations in huge amounts of data and use the results for the prediction of certain future events. This talk will focus on how these capabilities of Artificial Intelligence can be used within the complex area of legal practice.

This talk will also describe and demonstrate which elements and capabilities of AI can be used, and are already being used, in the field of law. This leads to considerations like: Will lawyers be replaced by computers? This talk will also be about some findings of our JusticeBot project, which aims to improve access to justice in landlord-tenant disputes using AI and discuss some of the challenges that we are facing.

About the speaker:

Hannes Westermann is a PhD student in Artificial Intelligence and Law at the Université de Montréal. He works at the Cyberjustice Laboratory and is in charge of the JusticeBot project, which aims to enable greater access to justice through the use of Artificial Intelligence. Hannes has published a paper about his research at the “International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) 2019” in Montréal, and his latest paper has been accepted to the upcoming “32nd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2019)” in Madrid.

Hannes graduated in 2018 from Lund University in Sweden with a Master of Laws, focusing on Privacy and Big Data. He spent an exchange year at the Faculty of law at McGill University. Besides his law studies, Hannes has been interested and active in technology and programming, e.g. by participating in hackathons and developing several smartphone apps.

AI and the Law Series

The AI and the Law Series is brought to you by the Montreal Cyberjustice Laboratory; the McGill Student Collective on Technology and Law; the Private Justice and the Rule of Law Research Group; and the McGill Centre for Intellectual Property Policy; and the Autonomy Through Cyberjustice Technologies Project.

This event is eligible for inclusion as 1.5 hours of continuing legal education as reported by members of the Barreau du Québec.