Final Call for Papers: 2nd International Workshop on AI and Intelligent Assistance for Legal Professional in the Digital Workplace (LegalAIIA)

to be held on Monday, June 21st, 2021, Sao Paulo, Brazil in conjunction with the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2021)
https://sites.google.com/view/legalaiia-2021

We are delighted to announce our two keynote speakers for the 2nd International Workshop on AI and Intelligent Assistance for Legal Professionals in the Digital Workplace (Legal AIIA).

Dr. Kristian J. Hammond, from the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, will be our first Keynote speaker. His talk will concentrate on the AI theme of our workshop. Dr. Hammond is the Bill and Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University and the co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence company Narrative Science. His primary research is in the field of data analytics and human/machine communication. Dr. Hammond also conducts research at the intersection of law and technology, including developing platforms for analyzing legal data.
Webpage Link: https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/research-faculty/directory/profil...

Dr. Michelle Zhou is a co-founder and CEO of Juji, Inc., a California-based company that develops Cognitive Artificial Intelligent Assistants in the form of chatbots. Prior to founding Juji, she spent 15 years at IBM Research and the Watson Group, where she managed the research and development of Human-Centered AI technologies. Dr. Zhou will be our second Keynote speaker and will focus on advances in the realm of Cognitive AI and Intelligent Assistance (IA), as well as the roles people in different fields could play on the road to democratizing AI.
Webpage Link: https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2021/michelle-zhou

Over the past decade, increased use of machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies has significantly increased legal professionals’ abilities to efficiently access, process, and analyze digital information. AI breakthroughs continue to improve everything from advanced search to information extraction and visualization to data summarization, classification, and review. At the same time, concerns over transparency and the potential limitations of fully automated approaches to problems in the legal space have led to an upsurge of interest in methods that incorporate human intelligence –- the so-called "human-in- the-loop" approach to AI. The debate over using AI as a replacement for humans, as opposed to an augmentation of human abilities, otherwise known as IA or Intelligent Assistance, is over half a century old, but currently the pendulum is swinging back toward the augmentation or IA perspective. However, not all human-AI collaborative effort is guaranteed to be fruitful. Research into the nature, degree, and efficiency of the human contribution to various applications is needed to ensure that the efforts and resources are deployed effectively.

This workshop will provide a platform for examining questions surrounding “AI as human augmentation” for legal tasks (a.k.a. Intelligent Assistance or IA), particularly those related to legal practitioners’ interaction with digital information, including e-discovery. The focus of the workshop will be on better understanding the interaction between human and AI capabilities. The primary audience for the workshop will include working attorneys, legal researchers, computer science researchers, and AI providers in the legal industry.

Open questions remain about the conditions in which human interaction is necessary to produce more effective results, whether the human or AI should be the primary driver in the collaboration, and whether or how increased interpretability and explainability of AI models is necessary for acceptable and successful human-AI collaboration in the legal domain. The ability of systems to analyze and identify exploitable patterns of human interaction and assessment in tasks like EDD (Electronic Data Discovery, or technology-aided discovery) is a significant area of inquiry as well. Empirical comparisons between pure AI versus IA or human-augmented AI – favorable or unfavorable – in the form of user studies or simulations, are encouraged. Proposals on how best to evaluate various methods of human augmentation are also welcome, as are analyses of the ethical implications of adopting AI as replacement versus AI as augmentation in legal applications.

Participation is invited on all topics relevant to these research themes, including but not limited to:

Comparative Evaluations between AI & IA Systems and Approaches

• Practical AI metrics vs. IA metrics and human-centered metrics vs. system-centric metrics (including KPIs such as time, cost, labor, utility, etc.)
• Comparative studies examining the effectiveness of AI-enabled systems, tools and approaches versus non-AI-supported versions of the same
• Evaluation studies of actual legal systems and practitioner tools which are enabled by AI Functionality, including effectiveness, quality, value rendered for users, and other measures.
• Comparative studies examining the relative merits of incorporating human input into AI-driven systems via intentional direction vs. passive feedback
• Evaluations of various modes of human-generated relevance feedback – e.g., simple labeling vs more granular feedback
• Topics involving bias, discrimination, fairness, or justice

Human-Computer Interaction Studies in the Context of AI or IA Systems

• Novel interaction techniques for legal technology systems
• User studies relevant to legal professionals and tasks (ethnography studies)*
• Human-AI Collaboration (machine-directed and human-directed)
• An examination of the role of transparency, explainability or interpretability in AI-supported Systems
• Utility-related explorations and contributions in AI or IA systems beyond standard metrics

AI & Ethics Topics

• An examination of the role of transparency, explainability or interpretability in AI-supported systems
• Topics involving bias, discrimination, fairness, or justice in AI systems (either human-induced or machine-induced)
• Accountability in AI-supported systems
• From organizational, design & development and deploy perspectives
• Designing Ethics or Compliance with Law into AI
• Human-centered Design for AI Systems
• User Proprioception (interactive awareness of the effects of human action on the AI)**
• AI Contributions to Process Automation (both ethical & bias dimensions)
• Accessibility (for those who use it vs. who can use it)

DESI / E-Discovery-related

• Human influence on the Technology Assisted Discovery & Review process
• Role & resources expended by designers & annotators
• Expectations of users, customers and courts for human explanations of TAR processes
• Comparative studies on the influence of TAR in a Proactive vs Reactive e-Discovery Process
• Examinations of key dimensions of IA through lenses of entities, topics, timelines.
• How users interact with such dimensions in dynamic rather than static ways

This workshop is an outgrowth of the popular and successful decade-long DESI (Discovery for Electronically Stored Information) series of workshops (http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/desi7/#History). While we welcome contributions on AI and IA across the entire spectrum of legal informatics, we also welcome more traditional DESI-related submissions as well.

Important Dates:

• Submission Deadline: Sunday, 2 May 2021
• Notification of Acceptance: Monday, 24 May 2021
• Camera-Ready Versions Due: Monday, 14 June 2021
• Workshop date: Monday, 21 June 2021

Workshop Organizers:
Jack G. Conrad, Thomson Reuters (Co-chair)
Jeremy Pickens, Open Text (Co-chair)
Jyothi Vinjumur, Walmart
Hans Henseler, University of Applied Sciences Leiden and the Netherlands Forensic Institute
Jason R. Baron, University of Maryland, College Park
Dan Linna, Northwestern University

Program Committee:
Amanda Jones, H5
Apoorv Agarwal, Text IQ
Evangelos Kanoulas, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam
David Lewis, Reveal
Alan Lockett, CS DISCO
Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland, College Park
Antigone Peyton, Ridgeline International
Dan Rubins, Legal Robot
Fabrizio Sebastiani, Italian National Research Council (IST-CNR)
Amy Sellars, Cardinal Health
Gineke Wiggers, Leiden University

Paper types:
In view of the novelty of this workshop focus, three primary types of papers are sought: Research, Application and Ideation. Research papers should include some form of empirical evaluation, appropriate to the nature of the paper. Application papers should actively demonstrate one or more of the themes above involving comparative studies, evaluation or other type of examination. Ideation papers are similar to a position paper in that experimental results are not required. However, while Ideation papers permit discussion of ideas that are not tested, they should be testable. An Ideation paper should contain concrete proposals on how the ideas would be evaluated and implemented, and the significance or impact of doing so.

Submission guidelines:
Papers should be no longer than 8 pages. Authors should submit their papers using the same two-column ACM paper format used for ICAIL. While papers can be prepared using LaTeX or Word, all papers should be converted to PDF prior to submission. Review will not be blind, so papers should contain author information.

Papers should be submitted to the following email address: organizers@legalAIIA.org, with the subject line “RESEARCH” or “APPLICATION” or “IDEATION”, based on the submitted paper type.

Questions may be directed to the co-organizers via the email addresses included below. At least one author of an accepted paper is expected to attend the workshop.

Proceedings:
All accepted workshop papers will be included in the main LegalAIIA 2021 Proceedings and published by CEUR in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings .

Publication opportunities:
Papers accepted for presentation will be available online prior to the workshop. Papers will also be published on the CEUR workshop website and indexed by the DBLP Computer Science database.

Examples from LegalAIIA 2019:
CEUR-WS Workshop website: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2484/
Indexed DBLP database: https://dblp.org/db/conf/icail/legalaiia2019.html#RietveldRK19

Selected papers may be proposed for publication in a special issue of the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal or as chapters in a book on AI and Intelligent Assistance for Legal Professionals in the Digital Workplace.

Workshop Website:
http://LegalAIIA.org

Contacts:
Jack G. Conrad, Thomson Reuters: jack.g.conrad [at] tr [dot] com
Jeremy Pickens, Open Text: jpickens [at] opentext [dot] com

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* In the context of the workshop, an ethnographic study refers to a qualitative method where researchers immerse themselves in the environment or operational conditions they are studying.
** Proprioception refers to the perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body, in this case, in the context of a user’s interaction with a computer system.