Speaker :

Prof. Karim Benyekhlef

Karim Benyekhlef has been a professor in the Faculty of Law at the Université de Montréal since 1989. He has been seconded to the Centre de recherche en droit public since 1990 and served as its Director from 2006 to 2014. He was also the Director of the Regroupement stratégique Droit, changements et gouvernance (Strategic Law, Change and Governance Group), which brings together more than 50 researchers, from 2006 to 2014. At the same time, he was the Scientific Director of the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de l’Université de Montréal (CÉRIUM – the Université de Montréal’s International Research and Study Centre) from 2009 to 2012. He is now the Director of the Cyberjustice Laboratory, which he founded in 2010. The Cyberjustice Laboratory has obtained in 2015 the award «Mérite Innovation» from the Bar of Quebec (Innovation Award). He holds the Chaire de recherche en information juridique Lexum (Lexum Research Chair on Legal Information) and serves as a member of CÉRIUM’s science and advisory committees. He received in 2016 from the Bar of Quebec the distinction Advocatus Emeritus. He holds the 2019-2020 Alexandre Koyré Excellence Research Chair.

Member of the Barreau du Québec (Québec Bar Association) since 1985, he practiced in the federal Department of Justice from 1986 to 1989. His teaching and research areas are constitutional law (human rights and freedoms), international law, information technologies law, legal theory and history of law. In 1995, Professor Benyekhlef founded the electronic law journal Lex Electronica, the very first French-language online law journal.

He also initiated the first online dispute resolution projects (the CyberTribunal Project, 1996-1999; eResolution, 1999-2001; ECODIR, 2000-today).  He now serves as Director of the Cyberjustice Laboratory, the work of which is designed to increase and facilitate access to justice. From 2011 to 2018, he lead a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada in the context of the Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) Program: Rethinking Procedural Law: Towards Cyberjustice, composed of an international team made up of some 30 researchers from over 23 different universities in Canada, the United States, Australia and Europe. He is now leading the project «Autonomy through Cyberjustice Technologies and Artificial Intelligence» (ACT Project) funded by the partnership program of SSHRC (2018-2024). ACT aims to increase access to justice through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Over the next 6 years, ACT will be able to count on a multidisciplinary and international team of 50 researchers, as well as 42 partners including research centers, public institutions, legal professionals, representatives from civil society and private sector actors.

Professor Benyekhlef has also participated in developing good governance programs in Africa and the Caribbean (through the Canadian International Development Agency, the United Nations and the European Commission- 1990 and 2000).

With Professor Fabien Gélinas of McGill University’s Faculty of Law, he is the author of Le règlement en ligne des conflits. Enjeux de la cyberjustice (Paris: Éditions Romillat, 2003, available in English here: Online Dispute Resolution), and in 2008 he published Une possible histoire de la norme. Les normativités émergentes de la mondialisation, (A Possible History of Norms. The Emerging Normativities of Globalization, 2nd ed: 2015). The latter was awarded the Prix de la Fondation du Barreau du Québec in 2009. In 2013, he edited a collective work entitled Gouvernance and Risk: The Challenges of Global Regulation, in 2016, Vers un droit global? (Towards Global Law?) and, the same year, eAccess to Justice, published by the University of Ottawa Press, and co-edited with Jane Bailey, Jacquelyn Burkell and Fabien Gélinas.  He was the editor of a collective book published in 2017: Au-delà de la représentation: les figures de la démocratie (Beyond Representation: The Models of Democracy). With Pierre-Luc Déziel, he published in 2018 a casebook on the right to privacy in Quebec and Canada: Le droit à la vie privée en droit québécois et canadien, Montréal, Thomson-Reuters, 2018. His most recent work, in 2021, is AI and Law. A Critical Overview, a collective book presenting the effects of AI on law and justice.

Prof. Pamela Samuelson - University of California at Berkeley

Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman ’74 Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California at Berkeley and a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.  She teaches courses on intellectual property, cyberlaw, and information privacy.  She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law.  She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Contributing Editor of Communications of the ACM, a past Fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and an Honorary Professor of the University of Amsterdam.  She is a co-founder and chair of the Board of Directors for Authors Alliance, a nonprofit whose mission is to facilitate authorship in the public interest.  She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a Fellow of the Center for Democracy & Technology, and a member of the Advisory Boards for Public Knowledge and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Summary :

In guided interviews, experts debated the evolving role of public and private platforms in generative AI. Discussing the different requirements of public and private platforms when applying generative AI.

Speakers :

Mr. Bradford C. Brown - MITRE

Bradford C. Brown serves as Chief, Administrative Operations & Technology Futures at the MITRE Corporation in McLean, Virginia He has been a lawyer for more than 30 years and was the 2nd U.S. Chief Counsel for Technology under President George H.W. Bush. In that role he helped negotiate the U.S. & Canada Cooperative Science and Technology Agreement. He founded the National Center for Technology and Law and was Associate Dean at George Mason University’s School of Law.  He was a member of the Administrative Conference of United States, Ad Hoc Committee that advised federal agencies on the use of the use of AI.  With a team at MITRE, their paper on Supervised Methods for Explainable Legal Prediction won the Peter M Jackson Award from the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law. An AI tool that he invented along with Karl Branting is patent pending and has been commercially licensed.  He is a past board advisory board member of the Institute for Law and Technology and Information Week.  He has authored or contributed to 55 published articles.

Mr. Mike Kujawski - CEPSM

Mike Kujawski has over 20 years of experience as a management consultant, trainer, and professional speaker for government, non-profit, and association clients in Canada and around the globe. His specialty areas include strategic marketing, social (behaviour change) marketing, strategic communications, social media strategy development, social network analysis, organizational branding, and strategic planning. He primarily works with public sector and non-profit organizations that are trying to achieve positive societal change. Mike is frequently asked to speak at major conferences and events covering various topics ranging from the latest disruptive digital trends and the evolution of digital culture to ethical social (behaviour change) marketing techniques and best practices. Mike's consulting and training work stretches across four continents and involves a variety of industries ranging from health and education to justice and the environment. He has recently worked on initiatives relating to vaccine hesitancy, fire safety, drug-impaired driving, electric vehicles, anti-racism, digital currency adoption, and the impact of artificial intelligence on society. Some of Mike's clients include the Bank of Canada, Elections Canada, the Yukon Government, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the United Nations Development Programme, the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, the Government of Kazakhstan and the Government of Sharjah, UAE. As a trainer, Mike has delivered public and in-house training workshops across Canada and internationally to thousands of public servants and non-profit workers. He has developed and instructed multiple university certificate courses, including the Professional Certificate in Public Sector Marketing Program (Carleton University), the Certificate in Digital and Social Media Strategy for Social Good (Carleton University), and the Social Media Engagement Certificate (Brandon University), all geared specifically at the public and non-profit sectors.

Mrs. Olga V. Mack - MIT Computational Law Report

Olga V. Mack is a pioneering leader in law, technology, and innovation. As a Fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, lecturer at Berkeley Law, and Generative AI Editor at law.MITComputational Law Report, she integrates disruptive technologies into the legal profession. She served as the CEO of Parley Pro (a.k.a., LexisNexis CounselLink CLM), a cutting-edge contract lifecycle platform that revolutionized digital negotiation, leading it to significant growth and its successful integration into LexisNexis.

Chair:

Prof. Nicolas Vermeys - Cyberjustice Laboratory, Université de Montréal

Nicolas Vermeys, LL. D. (Université de Montréal), LL. M. (Université de Montréal), CISSP, is the Director of the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP), the Associate Director of the Cyberjustice Laboratory, and a Professor at the Université de Montréal’s Faculté de droit. He is also a visiting professor of law at both William & Mary (USA) and the University of Fortaleza (Brazil).

Mr. Vermeys is a member of the Quebec Bar, as well as a certified information system security professional (CISSP) as recognized by (ISC)2, and is the author of numerous publications relating to the impact of technology on the law, including Droit codifié et nouvelles technologies : le Code civil (Yvon Blais, 2015), and Responsabilité civile et sécurité informationnelle (Yvon Blais, 2010).

Mr. Vermeys’ research focuses on legal issues pertaining to artificial intelligence, information security, developments in the field of cyberjustice, and other questions relating to the impact of technological innovations on the law. He is often invited to speak on these topics by the media, and regularly lectures for judges, lawyers, professional orders, and government organizations, in Canada and abroad.

Summary:

This session consists of a series of presentations. Representatives from different companies that have used generative AI present their case studies and successes in implementing generative AI in different areas.

Speakers:

Mr. Max Simard - Thomson Reuters

Max is a Client Director specializing in Legal Technology at Thomson Reuters, where he has held various roles over the past 11 years. With extensive experience in assisting clients with legal change management, Max now advises on Generative AI productivity and drafting SaaS solutions. Max has a legal background, having completed his master's thesis at Université de Montréal.

Mrs. Erin Walker - Clio

Director, Strategy and Enablement - Clio

Erin Walker is the Director of Strategy and Enablement at Clio, and has been working in digital communications since Netscape Navigator was a viable web browser. She has extensive experience operationalizing technology to achieve business goals, and she's "practically obsessed" with AI, speaking to thousands of lawyers worldwide about AI in legal. She is passionate about using technology to solve problems and make the world a better place.

Mrs. Elise Tropiano - Relativity

Chair :

Me. Valentin Callipel - Cyberjustice Laboratory

Lawyer and recognized expert in cyberjustice and online dispute resolution, Valentin Callipel is the Head of mission at the Cyberjustice Laboratory of the Université de Montréal. With over a decade of experience in the justice transformation sector, he has supervised several digital projects for public and private organizations and has advised, as a member of the Quebec, national and international organizations on the optimization of justice processes. Mr. Callipel leads a research project on using Artificial intelligence for Pre-Conflict Decision funded by the Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). He has been teaching a course on internet civil liability, cybersecurity, privacy and intellectual property at Polytechnique Montréal since 2014. Valentin has also been admitted to Paris bar.

Summary:

In this panel experts with experience in generative AI development come together to share the problems they have encountered and the solutions they have adopted in their development, in an interactive workshop guided by the chairpersons to discuss the process of designing, developing and deploying generative AI technologies.

Panelists :

Mrs. Karen Hulan - Law Society of Ontario

Karen’s practice focuses on representing those injured while in the care of others such as long-term care homes and schools, as well as people injured in car accidents, slips and falls and other incidents. She is actively involved in her clients’ claims for accident benefits, short-term disability and long-term disability benefits. Karen’s clients can expect to have the lawsuit and insurance process explained to them in a way that eases the stress of working through a claim. Her objective is to manage each client’s file in a manner that allows them to focus on their recovery.

Karen earned a Bachelor of Arts from Acadia University (1993) and then studied French at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (1994). She earned a Bachelor of Education (intermediate/secondary) from Memorial University of Newfoundland (1995) and graduated from Queen’s University Faculty of Law in 2002. She was called to the Ontario bar in 2003.

Karen is an elected Lawyer Bencher with the Law Society of Ontario and an Adjudicator with the Law Society Tribunal. She is Co-Chair of the Law Society’s Futures Committee and Member of its Professional Development and Competence Committee and Lawyers Professional Indemnity Review Task Force. Karen is Past President of the Middlesex Law Association and a member of the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association. Her volunteer work has been focused on the legal community and organizations that support her clients. She has authored and presented legal papers and been a guest speaker at a variety of legal associations’ events.

Mrs. Maria Khalusova - Unstructured.io

Maria Khalusova, a Staff Developer Advocate at Unstructured.io, currently works on addressing the challenges of preprocessing complex unstructured data for GenAI applications, such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Previously, she contributed to the field through her work on open-source projects at Hugging Face, and educational efforts to make building GenAI applications broadly accessible to all.

Mr. Shiva Bhattacharjee - TrueLaw

I have about 2 decades of hands-on experience working across the software stack from optimizing parallel processing infrastructure for Apple devices to orchestrating massive data systems in cloud native environments at Confluent & Databricks. I am now the cofounder and CTO of TrueLaw, where we are building bespoke models for law firms for a wide variety of tasks. Our platform allows law firms to train proprietary models using their lawyers' unique expertise and feedback

Chair :

Mr. Jinzhe Tan - Cyberjustice Laboratory

Jinzhe Tan is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Montréal, where he works as a research assistant at the Cyberjustice Laboratory. His research focuses on artificial intelligence and law, access to justice, and judicial behavior. He explores how artificial intelligence can be responsibly integrated into the justice system to improve its accessibility and reduce bias and inequality. He has published and presented his research at several international conferences, and his contributions have been recognized by the ICAIL 2023 workshops, and International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX) 2023, where his co-authored paper won the Best Paper Award.

How can we avoid an instrumentalist orientation when it comes to the generative AI tools that should be available? Researchers and practitioners will come together to discuss the conversation on how generative AI can be used to solve real-world problems through user-centered design principles.

Speakers:

Prof. A.T Kingsmith - Humber College

A.T. (Adam) Kingsmith is a writer, technologist, and mental health researcher. His work focuses on the political economy of anxiety and the development of emotion-AI systems to improve social and economic outcomes. He completed his PhD at York University and currently teaches in Faculty of Arts and Science at OCADU. He is also co-founder of EiQ Technologies Inc., an emotion-AI startup formerly based at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative Innovation Studio. He has written numerous books and articles on these topics, including the forthcoming Anxiety as a Weapon: From Public Secret to Anxious Solidarity. For more, visit his website.

Mr. Ivan Alfaro - Relativity

Ivan Alfaro is a Senior AI Product Manager at Relativity, where he has worked for seven years. He manages a portfolio of AI products, including sentiment analysis, and has co-authored white papers on Relativity’s approach to developing responsible AI solutions for e-Discovery and Investigation. Ivan holds an MSc and PhD in Management of Information Systems.

Prof. Hoda Heidari - Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science

Hoda Heidari is the K&L Gates Career Development Assistant Professor in Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, with joint appointments in Machine Learning and Societal Computing. She is affiliated with the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. Her research is broadly concerned with the social, ethical, and economic implications of Artificial Intelligence, particularly issues of fairness and accountability through the use of Machine Learning in socially consequential domains. Her work in this area has won a best-paper award at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), an exemplary track award at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), and a best-paper award at the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SAT-ML). Dr. Heidari co-founded and co-leads the university-wide Responsible AI Initiative at CMU. She has organized several scholarly events on Responsible and Trustworthy AI, including tutorials and workshops at top-tier Artificial Intelligence academic venues, such as NeurIPS, ICLR, and the Web conference. She is particularly interested in translating research contributions into positive impact on AI policy and practice. She has organized multiple campus-wide events and policy convenings to address AI governance and accountability. Dr. Heidari completed her doctoral studies in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds an M.Sc. degree in Statistics from the Wharton School of Business. Before joining Carnegie Mellon as a faculty member, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Machine Learning Institute of ETH Zurich, followed by a year at the Artificial Intelligence, Policy, and Practice (AIPP) initiative at Cornell University.

Chair:

Mrs. Emmanuelle Demers - WOODS LLP

Commercial Litigation and International Arbitration Lawyer at WOODS LLP