The 27th International Legal Informatics Symposium deals with legal language models, i.e. the current core topic of AI & Law. Legal informatics has worked intensively on legal databases since the 1970s, and now the product is changing for the first time: no longer the list of results with links to documents and a high error rate, but a draft that not only cites the most important sources, but also summarises the content of the found documents and tries to prepare a legal brief. Is the automated drafting officer standing in front of the office building? Can tools like ChatGPT really take over the tedious work of drafting legal texts? Sounds like a fairy tale, but it will soon be reality. The digital legal assistant is certainly more diligent than his human counterpart (7 days / 24 hours), but he requires challenging control, also because the texts look so perfect but may contain a serious error. Ultimately, it’s about trust, which – like with people – has to be earned, but it is much more difficult because assessing the reliability of the digital legal assistant requires dynamic monitoring.
This year we already have the 27th symposium. The many stakeholders have remained loyal to us, even though the composition and the respective proponents have changed significantly. The concept as a scientific platform for as many people as possible with low and necessary barriers to access has remained the same. Science is diverse – and IRIS wants to meet the need for reviews and consistency checks of scientific research and application practice as well as give a platform to research ideas and innovative practical solutions. IRIS as a community has become more professional; a lot of experience exists and can be read in the 25 conference proceedings.
COVID-19 is over; but the combination of on-site and online should remain. This time we all want to see each other again in Salzburg, but also include as many people as possible online with streaming and Q/As.
This year, the actual conference in February 2024 was/will again be accompanied by an IRIS trimester in the spring, a series of webinars on the IRIS topics, which will be held together with ReMeP Conference, the WZRI Vienna Center for Legal Informatics, RI@rechtsinformatik.ACADEMY, Weblaw, CYBLY and Legal Hackers Vienna. In the fall we were hosting the Law via the Internet Conference (LVI2023) – the annual conference of the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM).
As usual, the conference proceedings include new scientific findings as well as contributions to the practical problems and applications of legal informatics. The multimedia publication in collaboration with Editions Weblaw will be continued.
The conference proceedings are divided into the following topic groups:
• General topic: Legal language models | • Legal Theory / Legal Visualization / Legal Design / Robolaw |
The organizers of IRI§24 are indebted to numerous people who contribute to making this scientific platform on legal informatics possible. The many stakeholders are listed on the following pages under IRIS organization. Particular mention should be made of the universities of Vienna (ARI Arbeitsgruppe Rechtsinformatik in collaboration with the WZRI Vienna Centre for Legal Informatics) and Salzburg (Knowledge Network Law, Economy and Working World), the program chair Erich Schweighofer and the co-chairs Stefan Eder, Federico Costantini, Felix Schmautzer and Jonas Pfister, publications chairman Philip Hanke; the local coordinator Sebastian Krempelmeier and the local organizational team at the University of Salzburg under the leadership of Dietmar Jahnel as well as the Vienna organizational team, specifically named Philipp Wörle as the person responsible for the technology. The program chair is supported by the program coordinators Raymond Rasser and Sebastian Krempelmeier. Thanks are also due to Johannes Braun for assisting in the editing of the contributions.
The authors deserve our sincere thanks for their contributions, which were edited with the greatest possible care.
Conference proceedings are documentation of snapshots of science, namely the cherished and maintained meetings of the scientific community. The IRIS concept provides for the greatest possible dissemination of results. In addition to the printed conference proceedings, the publisher Editions Weblaw publishes – sometimes with a time delay – an online version in the magazine Jusletter IT (https://www.jusletter-it.eu). Further articles that no longer found space in the printed edition will be made available to interested readers in the online version. The conference proceedings published so far (from 2000) can be accessed in the Jusletter IT archive.
We hope that this conference proceedings in printed and electronic form will be received with similar interest as the conference proceedings of previous years!
Vienna, Brussels and Udine, January 2024
Erich Schweighofer, Stefan Eder, Federico Costantini, Felix Schmautzer, Jonas Pfister
