The Fifth Annual Workshop on Applications of Artificial Intelligence in the Legal Industry

WHEN December 15, 2021 - December 18, 2021
WHERE Virtual

Collocated with 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE Big Data 2021) http://bigdataieee.org/BigData2021/

ABOUT THE EVENT

Over the past decade, exponential growth of data in the legal industry has created a significant business challenge. Legal professionals often are overwhelmed by big data in cases: for example, every year docket data of over 350,000 cases are brought to courts in the United States and typical antitrust investigation cases generally involve reviewing and producing terabytes of data. This voluminous data must be processed and analyzed to derive new insights, better judgments, and effective strategies in legal cases. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, in particular natural language processing and machine learning, have been increasingly embraced by the legal industry to efficiently process and analyze large volume complex legal data, to deliver legal services at reasonable costs, and satisfactory speed.

AI technologies and breakthroughs in machine learning and other AI areas and their applications to natural language processing, speech and image processing, and making sense of large volume of data are reshaping all aspects of the legal industry. From automatic contracts drafting to intelligent legal robots, from judicial analytics to predictive coding, from case management to litigation outcome prediction, AI and big data analytics begin to be leveraged in reinventing the legal industry. Meanwhile, transparency and ethical concerns over applications of AI in the legal industry bring up regulatory issues on mitigating unintended social consequences while reaping competitive advantages and economic gains of the emerging technologies.

With both the challenges and opportunities brought by the applications of AI on legal big data, we identify there is a gap between the legal industry and academics working with AI applications in big data. Continuing the success of our workshop in previous years, we organize this workshop to bridge that gap, to further AI and big data analytics research applied to legal data, and to provide an open and thoughtful dialogue about how these analytics could be leveraged to assist legal practitioners. Additionally, this workshop is intended to promote the applications of AI in big data analytics in the legal industry and we are looking for interesting and novel cases. This workshop will accept broad applications of AI to legal industry challenges or legal industry data. The workshop is a part of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data.

Research topics included in the workshop:
Applications of AI to electronic discovery
Applications of AI to contract automation and management
Applications of AI to litigation support and outcome prediction
Natural language processing and understanding in the legal industry
Intelligent legal information retrieval
Legal text summarization, extraction, and classification
Knowledge graphs and automatic reasoning in legal domain
Speech and image recognition applications in the legal industry
Machine translation of legal text
Intelligent advisory and automatic question answering in the legal industry
Explainable AI for the legal and compliance industries
Deep learning applications in the legal industry
Responsible AI: fairness, interpretability, privacy and security of legal AI applications

Important dates
Oct 31, 2021: Due date for workshop papers submission
Nov 10, 2021: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
Nov 21, 2021: Camera-ready of accepted papers
Dec 15-18, 2021: Workshops
Paper submission instructions
Full papers — up to 10 pages IEEE 2-column format — should be submitted via the conference workshop online submission system (https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2021/bigdata21/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S11). We also encourage submission of short papers (up to 6 pages) reporting works in progress. Papers should be formatted to IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines (more instructions and templates can be downloaded from the conference website). The submission deadline is October 31, 2021. All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings and published by the IEEE Xplore Digital Library (covered by the Engineering Index).

Organization Committee:
Rishi Chhatwal – AT&T Services
Peter Gronvall – Ankura
Nathaniel Huber-Fliflet (Co-chair) – Ankura
Robert Keeling – Sidley Austin LLP
Christian Mahoney – Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP
Jianping Zhang (Co-chair) – Ankura
Program Committee:
Arthur Carvalho – Assistant Professor, Miami University
Ali Hadjarian – Principal, PwC
Jiepu Jiang – Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech
Vikram Kapoor – Senior Managing Director, Ankura
David Lewis – Chief Data Scientist, Brainspace
Hongfei Lin – Professor, Dalian University of Technology
Huan Liu – Professor, Arizona State University
Vahan Minassian – Director, Pfizer Inc
Yue Pan – Senior Partner, Dezhi LLP
Jeremy Pickens – Principal Data Scientist, OpenText
Haozhen Zhao (Chair) – Senior Director, Ankura