The legal domain is undergoing a rapid digital transformation driven by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Process Mining, and Knowledge Engineering. These technologies are reshaping legal systems worldwide, offering new opportunities to automate processes, extract and formalize legal knowledge, ensure regulatory compliance, and implement predictive analytics for legal cases. At the same time, the legal field must address critical questions about the integration of these technologies, including their impact on legal reasoning, judicial decision-making, and compliance with existing legal frameworks. The integration of data-driven and process-oriented approaches holds the potential to significantly enhance transparency, accountability, and efficiency within legal systems.

The "Compliance, Processes, and AI Technologies for Legal Systems" special issue aims to bring together cutting-edge research that explores how AI, Process Mining, and Knowledge Engineering can be applied to address the growing demands of digital justice. Topics of interest include AI-driven decision-making, legal event log analysis through process mining, legal knowledge modelling, natural language processing (NLP) applications in legal text analysis, and techniques to ensure privacy and fairness in AI-based legal systems, ensuring that AI applications adhere to jurisdiction-specific legal norms and uphold fundamental rights. We encourage contributions that push current methodologies’ boundaries, addressing theoretical challenges and practical implementations.

We welcome submissions from interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners looking to explore innovative approaches that drive the future of legal technology, helping to create more efficient, transparent, and fair legal systems globally.

Topics

The Special Issue on "Compliance, Processes, and AI Technologies for Legal Systems" focuses on a wide range of topics related to AI, Process Mining, and Knowledge Engineering within the legal domain, including but not limited to:

- AI techniques for legal decision-making and legal analytics
- Knowledge modelling and conceptualization in Digital Justice
- Legal ontologies, semantic web, and linked data for law
- NLP applications for legal text analysis, including entity extraction, legal text summarization, and classification
- Predictive analytics on legal cases and dispute resolution
- Techniques for ensuring privacy and mitigating bias in legal AI systems
- Visualization and simplification techniques for legal processes
- Digital transformation and automation of legal processes
- Process Mining in legal event logs for process discovery and business process compliance
- Legal reasoning and processes
- Applications in legal data and knowledge engineering
- Ethics and fairness issues in digital justice

Important Dates

Title and Extended Abstract: 5 March 2025 [send an abstract of your research proposal (format free, max 4 pages) to roberto.nai@unito.it]
Response to authors: 20 March 2025

Full papers due: 30 April 2025 [standard review process]
Final notification: 15 October 2025

Submissions

[Please submit your title and extended abstract (format free, maximum 4 pages) by March 5, 2025, to roberto.nai@unito.it. Authors will receive feedback by March 20, 2025. This feedback will help determine if the proposal fits with the scope of the Special Issue, which is interdisciplinary between the fields of computer science and law.]

Submitted papers must be original and not under consideration for publication elsewhere, demonstrating a balanced approach between technical and legal perspectives to ensure their relevance to the journal’s core readership. However, extended versions of previously published conference papers are acceptable, provided the manuscript includes substantial new content and differs from the earlier version. Please refer to Elsevier’s Guide for Authors for submission guidelines.

Manuscript can be submitted through the journal’s editorial submission system (registration required): https://www.editorialmanager.com/CLSR.

Select "VSI: Legal Systems" in Computer Law & Security Review (in the Dropdown menu “Select Article Type”).

Review process

All manuscripts for the Special Issue will be peer-reviewed in a standard double-blind review process following the journal review process. To ensure relevance for the legal community, reviewers with backgrounds in legal scholarship will be included to assess the alignment of submissions with key legal principles and challenges.

The editors will provide their recommendations and feedback to the authors during each round of revision of the submitted papers.

Guest editors

Laura Genga, Technical University of Eindhoven
Hugo A. López, Technical University of Denmark
Stefano Montanelli, University of Milan, Italy
Roberto Nai, University of Turin, Italy
Emilio Sulis, University of Turin, Italy