Flight delays, unjustified rent increases or fraudulent diesel engines: although the number of lawsuits before German civil courts has slightly decreased, the courts and the judges suffer under an overload of monotonous legal disputes. In an international and interdisciplinary workshop at the Institute for Legal Informatics on 9 August 2023, current issues surrounding the use of AI systems in the legal field will be examined by experts from the judiciary, the legal tech industry and academia. The workshop is part of the “Explainable Intelligent Systems” project funded by the Volkswagen Foundations.

While law firms and collection service providers have been using smart tools for quite some time, the processing of mass proceedings by German judges is still truly manual work – no wonder, then, that they complain about a “lack of equality of arms”. However, there is some light on the horizon: German courts are gradually arming themselves, and automated systems are now being used in initial pilot projects to make judicial work easier and more efficient.

Martin Rollinger, CEO of SINC, will give an overview of the integration of legal tech tools into the judicial process. Jan Spoenle, Judge at Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart, will give an insight into the handling of mass proceedings by means of AI assistance at his court; the talk will be held jointly with one of the developers of the system, Christian Metz, Data Scientist at IBM. From an academic perspective, Prof. Dr. Georg Borges and Dr. Andreas Sesing-Wagenpfeil from the Institute for Legal Information will pay special attention to the question of how AI systems can be made sufficiently transparent and trustworthy for the judiciary: Is explainability of the systems a promising approach?

Participation in the workshop, which will take place on site at Saarland University as well as online via Microsoft Teams, is free of charge and without prior registration. Participants who would like to attend on site are kindly requested to send an informal registration by e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Access to the Meeting in Microsoft Teams

You can directly join the meeting by following this hyperlink to the Microsoft Teams Meeting or by using 355 866 829 310 as Meeting-ID and GbPTnj as Passcode in the Microsoft Teams App.