The University of Luxembourg’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) will collaborate with law firm Linklaters to develop automated Legal Tech. In a first of its kind collaboration, the two organisations are coming together to create a tool that will drastically improve how organisations interpret and implement EU legislation.
Machine analysable legal texts
Computer scientists from SnT will work with legal experts at Linklaters to develop a compliance tool for certain EU regulations. Many of these regulations, such as the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), are developing and have been opened to interpretations. As such, organisations are struggling to understand their vast implications for their activities. This project will address the issue by converting the legal texts into an intuitive and machine-analysable format, opening the way for computer-assisted compliance analysis.
The tool will overlay the regulatory requirements onto a company’s policies and it will use automated processes to identify risks and gaps. For example, for every high-level goal, the tool will create sub-goals, linked to the relevant operational processes and to the repository of evidence that substantiates compliance. It will identify areas where evidence of compliance is lacking, and automated risk-based analysis will quantify the risks that remain and their implications for overall compliance.
L-R: Prof. Lionel Briand, Patrick Geortay, Prof. Björn Ottersten, Yuri Auffinger and Dr. Mike Sabetzadeh
Integrated compliance and risk analysis
Dr. Mike Sabetzadeh, Senior Research Scientist at the SnT says: “Our ultimate objective is to build an integrated environment for defining compliance goals, elaborating them into actionable processes, and collecting and managing evidence to demonstrate compliance.”
SnT Vice-Director Prof. Lionel Briand comments: “Our team will draw on significant experience from working on regulatory compliance in mission- and business-critical applications to provide cost-effective solutions for assessing compliance.”
SnT Director Björn Ottersten explains: “The partnership with Linklaters is a milestone for us. We are delighted to be working with their legal experts to bring more automation and scalable solutions to this important sector and maintain Luxembourg’s position as a leader in secure and compliant data management.”
Patrick Geortay, Linklaters Luxembourg Managing Partner, says: “This is a game-changing innovation, using technology in a way that we haven’t seen before. The challenge for corporations across Europe as they ensure compliance with EU regulations is huge and so this tool could have a significant time and cost-saving impact.”
He adds: “At Linklaters, being innovative means doing things differently, unleashing our imagination to challenge the present and shape the future. As part of that, we have built a market leading legal technology capability to support our clients’ individual and evolving business needs and this project is a great example of that.”