Welcome to the LegalTech Bridge!

Technology, Artificial Intelligence in particular, is the future. Legal applications are no exception. We cannot stop this process, but we can make sure that it is done according to legal, ethical and computer science standards that we have in place in our society.

Therefore, there is a great need for people that understand both legal & ethical requirements on the one hand, as well as mathematical models used for machine learning, software implementation requirements & best-practices for usage of such technology on the other hand.

Legal professionals should understand technology to be able to ask the right questions. Computer science should understand how to develop software that complies to the law and applicable ethical standards.

Such people need to be educated in LegalTech programs. A number of which I have been involved in the development and teaching both at Universities but also through professional organizations.

I strongly believe LegalTech education should be accessable free of charge for all those interested. That is why I decided to share the content I developed via this website. 

In this blog, I will share my personal experience and viewpoints on how to structure and approach such LegalTech education, both towards law students, but also towards computer science students. But I will also discusas other topics that are relevant for Legal Technologies such as artificial intelligence, text-mining, data science, legal analytics, natural language processing and and eDiscovery.  

Especially when dealing with Artificial Intelligence that supports legal professionals with certain legal applications, legal defensibility is an essential component of the curriculum, as it the need to address the differences and missing aspects in for instance educational background, mental models, and working methods as it applies both to legal students as well as to computer science students.

Only by taking a fully multi-disciplinary approach can the learning goals of LegalTech education be reached. This is essential for the acceptance of the usage of technology for legal applications by our society.

Welcome! 

Jan Scholtes

December 21, 2021