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.
