ICAIL 2021 - Final Report on AI and Law Conference in São Paulo, Brazil

Conference Report: 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (https://icail.lawgorithm.com.br)

Sponsoring Organization: International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (www.iaail.org)

The 18th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2021) was held in São Paulo, Brazil, on June 21-25, 2021. The event was hosted by the University of Sao Paulo and took place on-line.
The Programme Chair was Adam Zachary Wyner (Swansea University, United Kingdom), while the Conference Chair was Juliano Maranhão (University of São Paulo, Brazil).

The conference has been held every two years since 1987 to present and discuss research and applications as well as to stimulate interdisciplinary and international collaboration in the filed of AI and Law. This year a big thank you goes to the local organisers for their understanding and availability, in pandemic time, to assess the risk and trying to refocus on the opportunities for a conference online version.
Looking at the results we can say that the challenge was won: conference and workshops, presented 100% online and cost free, led to ca. 1380 registrations in 65 countries, the highest number ever.

This year’s ICAIL program included three days for the main conference (paper presentation, keynote addresses, tributes, system demonstrations) and two days of workshops, tutorials, and related events.

The conference had 89 submissions; 17 were selected for publication as full papers (~19%), 17 as short papers (~19%), 8 as extended research abstracts (~9%), 2 as demonstration papers (~2%), and 3 as COLIEE papers (~3%). In addition, ICAIL held a Doctoral Consortium, helping emerging researchers to engage with the ICAIL community.
All the papers were presented on-line, recorded and disseminated also on the IAAIL Youtube channel, thus opening new opportunities for dissemination of community research.

The conference offered 11 workshops whose topics were diverse and represented state of the art activities in the field. The workshops were:

1) LegalAIIA
AI and Intelligent Assistance for Legal Professionals in the Digital Workplace
http://LegalAIIA.org

2) Jul.IA
Artificial Intelligence in Jurisdictional Logistics
http://dria.unb.br/julia

3) COLIEE
Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2021/

4) BEFAIR2
Bias, Ethics and Fairness in Artificial Intelligence: Representation and Reasoning
https://befair2.org/

5) COPYRIGHT
Copyright Regulation of Inputs and Outputs of AI Systems
https://icail.lawgorithm.com.br/workshop/copyright/

6) XAILA
EXplainable & Responsible AI in Law
http://xaila.geist.re/

7) ASAIL
Automated Detection, Extraction and Analysis of Semantic Information in Legal Texts
https://sites.google.com/view/asail/asail-2021-call-for-papers

8) MWAIL
Multilingual Workshop on AI & Law
http://iris-conferences.eu/mwail21

9) PATENTS
Artificial Intelligence and Patents
https://www.cmu.edu/epp/patents/events/icail21/index.html

10) AILBIZ (Legal Business)
International Workshop on A.I. for Understanding the Legal Business
http://www.ailbiz.com/

11) RELATED
Relations in the Legal Domain
http://related.di.unito.it

Research in AI & Law presented at ICAIL 2021 confirmed its interdisciplinary characters, ranging from theoretical motivations (including research on legal reasoning, argumentation, deontic logic, legal knowledge modeling, responsible AI) to practical motivations and applications (including machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, legal text summarization, evidential reasoning).

ICAIL 2021 also presented three keynote talks which touched key topics for AI & Law.

Prof. Stuart Russell, an internationally recognised researcher and AI educator, spoke on “Provably Beneficial AI”, which was discussed by a panel, deepening our understanding of the relation between AI and Law.
Joe Cohen of Dentons law firm talked about advances in automation, highlighting the real world impact of AI and Law.
Finally, IAAIL president Enrico Francesconi outlined the evolution and the perspectives of AI research in relation to ICAIL.

In this year's ICAIL edition, four awards were assigned. The awards and their winners were:

Carole Hafner ICAIL 2021 Best Paper Award
The best paper award is given in memory of Carole Hafner, an associate professor of computer science at Northeastern University. She was one of the founders of the ICAIL conference and a co-founding editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law.

"When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset of 53,000+ Legal Holdings"
Neel Guha, Lucia Zheng, Brandon Ray Anderson, Peter Henderson and Daniel En-Wenn Ho

The work addresses the question of when researchers should engage in domain-specific pre-training. They find conditions under which pre-training is useful. The work is very well-developed, contributes a dataset, contributes to our understanding on an important topic.

Peter Jackson Award for Best Innovative Application Paper
The best innovative application paper award is dedicated to the memory of Peter Jackson, Thomson Reuters’ Chief Research Scientist, who was a strong supporter of the ICAIL conferences and a significant contributor to the development of advanced technologies in AI & Law.

"From Data to Information: Automating Data Science to Explore the U.S. Court System"
Andrew Paley, Andong L. Li Zhao, Harper Pack, Sergio Servantez, Rachel F. Adler, Marko Sterbentz, Adam Pah, David Schwartz, Cameron Barrie, Alexander Einarsson, Kristian Hammond

The work enhances utility of legal data and removes barriers to information access by applying automated analytical and visualization capabilities on the data. There is a systemic classification of data and a demonstration of interactive filtering to provide alternative and deepening views into the data.

Donald H. Berman Award for Best Student Paper
The best student paper award is in memory of Donald H. Berman, a professor of law at Northeastern University, who was a co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal.

"Incorporating Domain Knowledge for Extractive Summarization of Legal Case Documents"
Paheli Bhattacharya, Soham Poddar, Koustav Rudra, Kripabandhu Ghosh, Saptarshi Ghosh

The work provides an approach for domain-specific extractive summarization for court proceedings of the Indian Supreme Court. The method focuses on representing all important sections of a court document in the summary. There is an argument to make that DELSumm's best performance is notable as it is unsupervised.

The Doctoral Consortium Best Paper Award
The Doctoral Consortium is to provide new researchers in AI and Law with feedback and engagement from experienced experts.

"The Digital Administrative Act"
Alexander Stepanov

This year the sponsoring IAAIL organization held its biennial General Assembly on-line on June 24th. The General Assembly was the opportunity to report about the conference figures and to proceed with the election of the new Executive Committee which will take office at the beginning of 2022.
Also at the membership meeting, the IAAIL Executive Committee announced the Program Chair for ICAIL 2023, Matthias Grabmair of the Technical University of Munich, active and standing member on the Program Committee, who also chaired the very successful editions of the ASAIL workshop.
During the General Assembly a number of bids for hosting the next ICAIL were presented. This year the IAAIL Executive Committee received a relevant number of bids, while the final decision about the next ICAIL venue (ICAIL 2023) will be taken at the end of 2021.

Sponsors of the conference included JusBrasil, Albert Einstein Hospital Israelita, Legalcode, PG Advocados, Urbano Vitalino Advocados, Opice Blum, OASIS Open.
The conference was held in cooperation with AAAI and ACM SIGAI.

Tags: 

Get in touch with us on Linkedin

Join the IAAIL group on Linkedin! Your posts will be shared on the IAAIL website

Contact us

International Association for AI and Law

Send us an email