Yiolanti Maou, Adjunct Faculty at the School of Law, Presents at the IDEA Final Conference in Brussels

On 22 October, Ms Yiolanti Maou, Adjunct Faculty at the School of Law and Associate of the Procedural Law Unit, presented her research at the Final Conference of the IDEA Project, “Artificial Intelligence, Labour Law and Access to Justice”, held at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

IDEA (I-tools to Design and Enhance Access to Justice) is a two-year project co-funded by the European Union and coordinated by the DIKE research group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with partners in six Member States. The project examined the digitalisation of court systems across the consortium and developed an AI-supported platform to guide parties in labour disputes, with redundancy dismissals as its principal case study. The conference marked the project’s conclusion. Alongside a demonstration of the IDEA platform and the launch of two edited volumes on artificial intelligence in labour law and in civil dispute resolution, it included a panel of comparative perspectives, with speakers from Morocco, Germany, Turkey, Belgium and Cyprus.

Ms Maou’s presentation, “Blind Spot by Design: Legal Triage Chatbots and the Conflicts Dimension of EU Employment Disputes”, examined whether legal triage chatbots are sufficiently calibrated to the protections that EU private international law affords workers in cross-border employment disputes. In particular, it questioned how effective triage can be where a chatbot answers under one national law and leaves out the private international law analysis that a cross-border dispute calls for, such as concurrent jurisdiction, the protection of the law of the habitual place of work, and overriding mandatory provisions. Ms Maou concluded that effective triage requires complete legal analysis, and that for cross-border workers this means the questions of jurisdiction and applicable law must be built into the tool’s design.

Sincere thanks to Prof Marco Giacalone, Dr Gioia Arnone and the DIKE research group for organising the conference and for the invitation to present.