Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, we have seen an explosion of interest in applying artificial intelligence to help solve the biggest challenges in law. More recently, we have started to see new innovations aimed at helping ordinary people with their most critical needs.

We invite legal technologists, researchers, and practitioners to join us in Turin, Italy on December 9th for a full-day, hybrid workshop on innovations in AI for helping close the access to justice gap: the majority of legal problems that go unsolved around the world because potential litigants lack the time, money, or ability to participate in court processes to solve their problems.

The workshop will focus on three topics:

  • AI for access to justice generally
  • AI for dispute resolution
  • Data issues related to access to justice (building reusable, sharable datasets for research)
Submit via EasyChair (by November 17th, 2025)

What is the access to justice gap?

Around the world, up to 5 billion people have unmet legal needs. This number represents the access to justice gap. The needs range from survivors of domestic violence, people navigating custody or the right to make basic decisions about their own wellbeing, to people facing eviction from their home, to others dealing with unfair treatment in accessing basic government services.

Approaches to close the access to justice gap range from offering direct legal representation to self-help and DIY solutions that can help individuals at scale.

Who

The Suffolk LIT Lab will be collaborating with Stanford’s Legal Design Lab and the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab to lead the workshop, along with Tabled.io, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Swansea University Universita da Torino. The workshop is part of the larger Jurix 2025 conference, hosted at the University of Turin, Italy.

The workshop committee is:

  • Livio Robaldo, Livio.Robaldo@swansea.ac.uk
  • Marco Giacalone, Marco.Giacalone@vub.be
  • Joelle Long, joelle.long@unito.it
  • Massimo Durante, massimo.durante@unito.it
  • Margaret Hagan, Stanford Law School, mdhagan@stanford.edu
  • Quinten Steenhuis, Suffolk University Law School, qsteenhuis@suffolk.edu
  • Hannes Westermann, Maastricht University Faculty of Law, hannes.westermann@maastrichtuniversity.nl
  • Jaromír Savelka, Carnegie Mellon University, jsavelka@andrew.cmu.edu

The program committee will include the organizers above, and a pool of additional researchers to be named.

Shared workshop day

The day will be divided between a traditional academic workshop with paper presentations and an interactive exercise related to building datasets for access to justice-related research.

Legal Data For AI and Access to Justice – Data Availability and Technical Standards (LDA2J)

A portion of the day builds upon the Innovate UK project Odyssey, which involves the first two proponents as well as The National Archives, the UK’s official publication office.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities in LegalTech, given their impressive performance across a range of natural language processing tasks. However, to develop the full benefits of AI for Access to Justice, legal data is required under appropriate copyright licences and those datasets require optimisation for LLM application. Integrating bottom-up neural inference with top-down expert-curated XML data appears particularly promising. Such hybrid approaches can strengthen retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models for legal use cases.

In the United Kingdom, legislation and jurisprudence is available through The National Archives under OpenJustice Licences and in Akoma Ntoso (a.k.a. LegalDocML), the XML standard format for the legal domain. This open infrastructure has significantly boosted opportunities for LegalTech innovation and Access to Justice. A notable example is Libra.law, developed in the context of the Innovate UK project Odyssey, an application designed to leverage structured legal data and LLM capabilities for enhanced legal reasoning and legal information access by the public and for qualified client referral to University legal clinics and law firms for legal advice.

But what is the situation in other countries? How do academics and industry players access, process, and structure legislation and jurisprudence for AI applications and Access to Justice?

This portion of the workshop will compare and contrast methods that rely on Akoma Ntoso or similar specialized formats with those that operate directly on unstructured legal texts, highlighting their respective strengths, limitations, and potential for advancing LegalTech.

Submission format for traditional paper presentations

We invite contributors to submit:

  • short papers (5-10 pages excluding citations and relevant appendices), or
  • proposals for demos in the form of an extended abstract (1-2 pages excluding citations).

We welcome works in progress, although depending on submission volume, we will give a preference to complete ideas that can be evaluated, shared and discussed.

Case studies are welcome, especially when accompanied by enough detail for qualitative results and replication. Case studies should be well-researched with a relevant prior work section.

The focus of submissions should be on AI tools, datasets, and approaches, whether large language models, traditional machine learning, or rules based systems, that solve the real world problems of unrepresented litigants or legal aid programs. Papers discussing the ethical implications, limits, and policy implications of AI in law are also welcome.

Other topics may include:

  • findings of research about how AI is affecting access to justice,
  • evaluation of AI models and tools intended to benefit access to justice,
  • outcomes of new interventions intended to deploy AI for access to justice,
  • proposals of future work to use AI or hold AI initiatives accountable,
  • principles & frameworks to guide work in this area, or
  • other topics related to AI & access to justice

Papers should follow the formatting instructions of CEUR-WS. (ceurart)

Submissions will be subject to peer review. Submissions will be evaluated on overall quality, technical depth, relevance, and the diversity of topics to ensure an engaging and high quality workshop.

You can download templates for the ceurart style in LaTeX or Microsoft Office formats.

Writing a successful submission

We welcome papers submitted by practitioners and non-traditional authors. To help you succeed, you may want to read through our guide on writing an academic paper in AI and access to justice.

All authors should:

  1. Explain the connection to access to justice clearly.
  2. For fairness, we ask that you follow the page limits and the formatting instructions strictly. Use the templates provided.

Expected number of submissions

This is the 5th edition of the AI for Access to Justice workshop, and recent editions have attracted 20-30 submissions each. We expect to accommodate approximately 10-20 paper presentations and demos.

Multiple submissions by one author

Authors are permitted to make multiple submissions. Each will be considered individually on its merits. Authors will not be permitted to give a live presentation of more than one paper.

Publication possibility

We hope to publish the proceedings from this workshop with CEUR, although we ask for patience as we have limited administrative support for this task.

AI disclosure and AI co-authorship

Please read the CEUR AI usage guidelines carefully. Papers that use AI in certain restricted ways will not be eligible for publication with CEUR, although they may still be eligible to be presented at the workshop. Please be clear with us about how you used AI when writing your paper. Do not use it to substitute for your human judgment and authorship. You are responsible for the accuracy of all content in your paper in all cases.

All papers should include a disclosure of their use or lack of use of generative AI.

We do not have a policy on AI “co-authorship” but we note that it is not compatible with CEUR publication.

Self-publication and publication with other journals

You are welcome to publish a preprint at any time with a venue such as arXiv.org or SSRN. Publishing a preprint will not prevent you from participating in the CEUR publication.

We understand that you may not want to wait for us to publish your work. You will have the right to use the feedback from our workshop to revise your paper for publication in another venue. Communicate with us if you choose a different publication venue so we do not duplicate the publication. Publication other than a preprint is typically exclusive.

Important dates

Submissions are open. Use EasyChair to submit your abstract early, and update again by November 17th.

Submit via EasyChair

Submission deadline: November 17th.

Notifications expected: November 24th.

The workshop will be held on December 9, 2025.

Workshop format

The workshop will be a hybrid event. Workshop participants will be able to participate in-person or remotely via Zoom, although we hope for broad in-person participation. In past editions, about half of the participation was remote and half in-person. We use Zoom to facilitate multi-channel discussion throughout the workshop.

This will be a full day workshop from 9 AM Turin time until 18:00 (6 PM).

Presentation format

Each accepted paper is expected to have:

  • 10 minutes (+ 5 for questions) to present long papers
  • 5 minutes + 5 to present for short papers
  • 5 minutes + 5 to present demos

Slides and visuals are welcome. Authors are encouraged to practice their presentation in advance to ensure they can fit their presentation in the strict time limits given.

Papers will be organized by theme into shorter blocks (typically 4-6 papers in each block). We will reserve about 15 minutes at the end of each block for a short panel discussion or additional questions from the audience on each theme.

More about the JURIX conference

The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (JURIX) is an organization of researchers in the field of Law and Computer Science in the Netherlands and Flanders. Since 1988, JURIX has held annual international conferences on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

This year, JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems will be hosted in Turin, Italy. It will take place on December 9-11, 2025.

Registration required for in-person participation

Attendees who wish to participate in-person will need to register for the Jurix workshop-only conference. Registration includes food throughout the day. Optionally, participants can also participate in the rest of the Jurix conference which will include a number of academic papers on a wide range of developments in AI and law.

We hope to have an option for remote participants to register via Zoom for free.

Workshop schedule

The workshop will be on Central European Time (GMT+1), 6 hours ahead of the LIT Lab’s home time zone on the U.S. East Coast.

This is a full day workshop that start at 9:00 AM and runs until 18:00 (6 PM). Registration and in-person check-in starts at 8:30 AM.

For the complete schedule of the day, see https://jurix2025.di.unito.it/program-overview

Past workshops