Already the evening before, around 35 guest speakers and partners from the hub got to know each other in our law firm — during the warm-up for the conference, initial contacts were made, asked questions and sympathies developed.
The digitization of the legal sector cannot be slowed down — that much is clear. But what does this change mean for lawyers, clients and our judicial system? Many changes promise greater speed and accuracy — for example when it comes to processing the same processes, contracts that are always structured in the same way, or other standardized processes. It is not for nothing that Justitia is blind: She should do her job as unemotionally as possible, blind to sensitivities, personal sympathy or attempts at manipulation.
In the keynote speech at the German Legal Tech Summit, lawyer, author and New Work pioneer Dr. Jo Aschenbrenner, LL.M., showed how lawyers benefit from change without abolishing their own profession: Because it is precisely emotional intelligence that helps us deal with the personal fates and feelings of our clients.
It continued with a variety of panels and keynote speeches: For example, how could damage reporting processes, such as those that are part of everyday life in traffic law or insurance companies, change through the use of artificial intelligence? According to estimates by German insurers, the sum generated each year as a result of insurance fraud is around 5 billion euros. A person, such as a clerk, is only around 50 percent likely to assess whether an insured person is lying in his accounts. In contrast, a classic lie detector already achieves a hit rate of around 70 percent. In contrast, modern AI solutions recognize lies with an accuracy of 80 to 90 percent (depending on the method).
And our firm? We were represented at the summit by several lawyers — both in front of and on stage. Marion Albrecht, specialist lawyer for IT law, discussed the GDPR compliance of GPT models and the resulting questions for automation and data protection. Her interlocutors were Patrick Kaul, head of the Liabilities and Payments Department of the Lower Saxony Savings Banks Association, lawyer and legal tech expert Nils Model from the University of Tübingen and lawyer Dr. Julius Remmers from Taylor Wessing. In the afternoon, our partner Jörg Offenhausen sat with Thomas Frankfurth (Head of the VGH Legal Department), Dr. Alexander Georgiadis (Head of Department for Digitalization at the Ministry of Economic Affairs of Lower Saxony), Gesine Irskens (Judge, Head of Unit at the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice and Expert in Artificial Intelligence) and Nathalia Schomerus (Legal Tech Manager at CMS) and debated the overriding question: Do we create ourselves through digitization?
The summit culminated with the award ceremony for the startup competition. At the pitch event, young companies were able to solicit the votes of the guests and compete against each other in live voting. The clear winner of the day was the startup iur.crowd — an AI-based platform for sharing and analyzing court decisions. iur.crowd enables lawyers to work more effectively and therefore more successfully in a data-driven manner.
We are looking forward to the next German Legal Tech Summit — and especially to all pioneering companies and projects that were devised on November 2, 2023!
