"The 'robojudge' is technologically impossible."

With this clear statement, the Executive Director of the Center for Legal Technology and Data Science at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Dirk Hartung, tried to direct the discussions about the digitalization of law into more realistic channels.  "We tend to be concerned with the social impact of technologies, the use of which is far beyond any meaningful period of consideration," Hartung said.

The occasion for his lecture was the 30th EDV-Gerichtstag (EDP Court Day), which for well-known reasons was again held virtually rather than in Saarbücken.  Prior to this, Florian Matthes, professor of computer science at the Technical University of Munich, had given a highly interesting talk in which he screened the main technologies that are currently shaping the development of legal informatics. Matthes did not hesitate to address controversial topics. When he describes Natural Language Processing (NLP) for legal texts as an essential field of research, hardly anyone will disagree with him; his appeal to rely (again) more on rule-based expert systems, on the other hand, is likely to meet with headwind.

The topic of NLP also reveals a topic that ran through the entire event. One might agree that "computer scientists and lawyers must become friends" (Maximilian Herberger) if one is concerned about the digitalization of law. However, the very mention of "understanding" legal texts as a link between the processing of existing texts and the generation of new ones triggers fundamentally different associations in lawyers and technicians: the linguistic-logical understanding of a legal issue literally collides with the mathematical approximation analysis that is meant by "understanding" from a technical point of view.

Also of direct interest to Austria is the issue of anonymizing court decisions as a prerequisite for their publication. Work on automating this labor-intensive process has been going on for some time in both Germany and Austria. It is interesting to note a thesis of the judge Isabelle Biallaß: Anonymization not only has to be humanly controlled, it also has to be scaled, depending on whether the anonymized text is to be made available to science or industry.

That could still take some time.

Legal publishing house may offer contract generator - no violation of legal services law

WoltersKluwer offers a so-called contract generator in Germany under the "smartlaw" brand. The Hanseatic Bar Association in Hamburg filed a lawsuit against this with reference to the Legal Services Act and won at first level. However, the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) has now confirmed the amending judgment of the Cologne Higher Regional Court (I ZR 113/20 - Contract Document Generator).

In detail, the BGH stated that the creation of a draft contract with the help of the digital legal document generator is not an unfair act according to § 3a UWG because it does not represent an unauthorized legal service within the meaning of § 2 para. 1, § 3 of the Legal Services Act (dRDG). The defendant's activity consists of creating contractual documents on the basis of the user's specifications with the help of the software programmed and made available on the Internet. In doing so, it does not act in a specific matter of the user. It had programmed the software on the basis of thinkable typical factual constellations, for which it had developed standardized contract clauses in anticipation of the given answers. The user's individual circumstances, which go beyond the usual case, would not be taken into account in the creation of the contract document - similar to a form book. Therefore, the user does not expect a legal examination of his specific case.

The German bar association is conducting a whole series of lawsuits against providers of LegalTech applications; so far, they have mostly ended in favor of the providers. However, it should be noted in each case that the German legal situation has no direct equivalent in Austria.