The uOttawa Legal Technology Lab is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Faculties of Law and Engineering, funded by Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), to conduct legal technology research and implement legal technology solutions at the University of Ottawa.

The legal sector is changing. Law firms face growing pressures to provide more cost-effective services. Governments, industries and citizens are struggling with making evidence-based decisions on the basis of more and increasingly complex legal information. Legal expertise remains scarce, expensive and inaccessible resulting in a large unmet demand for legal services and an access-to-justice gap. Technology offers novel solutions to deal with these challenges.

Through the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS) and its world-class researchers, the University of Ottawa is already a leader in the technology law, ethics and policy space. The uOttawa Legal Technology Lab complements the existing activities of the CLTS through applied legal technology research and the implementation of legal technology projects.

The uOttawa Legal Technology Lab engages in a range of activities including 

  • conducting cutting-edge research on legal text mining and the automation of legal processes,
  • promoting legal technology education, including online through www.datascienceforlawyers.org  
  • serving as partner for researchers, law firms and legal technology companies in Ottawa and around the world;
  • acting as incubator to promote legal technology entrepreneurship, in particular among uOttawa students.

Team

  • Lead: Dr. Wolfgang Alschner (Faculty of Law, Common Law Section)
  • Co-Lead: Dr. Diana Inkpen (Faculty of Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

Students from diverse backgrounds contribute to the Lab’s activities, including through research assistant positions, Technoships, UROP, or direct research projects. Interested students should contact Dr. Alschner for more information. 

Location

Simard Hall, Room 326 (SMD 326)
60 University Private, Ottawa, ON, Canada.

Projects

Research Projects 

  • Automatic readability review of legal texts
  • Automatic content analysis of international investment and trade agreements

Projects with Industry and Public Sector Partners

  • Department of Foreign Affairs, Australia: Building a Toolkit for Investment Treaty Negotiators
  • Canada School of Public Service: Semantic Analysis of Canadian Regulation
  • Canada Energy Regulator: Develop Algorithm to Detect Inconsistencies in Legal Documents