We are pleased to present you a new edition of the Compliance Elliance Journal (CEJ). This edition will focus on questions regarding Legal Tech and Compliance.

We are pleased to present you a new edition of the Compliance Elliance Journal (CEJ). This edition will focus on questions regarding Legal Tech and Compliance.

If you have not been hiding under a rock you have heard the whispers about Bitcoin and Blockchain, and they are going to revolutionize everything we do (or scam everyone into debt at the very least). One very interesting part of this technology is the idea of Smart Contracts – programs that automate the process of an agreement between two entities essentially to circumvent aspects traditional problems with executing and enforcing said contract. While in the legal community Smart Contracts have been talked about at length about whether they can truly succeed in replacing certain functions of the legal system, one question that has yet to be asked is if they are a viable substitute are many people immediately placed in a detrimental or even harmful situation. The pervasiveness of Blockchain and Smart Contracts will not affect everyone in our society equally and that must be taken into consideration.

Smart contracts allow for automated compliance with contractual rules. They derive their “smartness” from an execution software that catches the most typical defaults and responds by mechanically triggering a compensation payment or another prearranged consequence. Through this self-enforcement mode, smart contracts are able to save time and effort that is associated with more customary rights enforcement mechanisms. Now, whereas compliance with in-house rules or corporate governance standards is common today, compliance with contract law only occurs on a voluntary basis. This might, however, change if businesses should be obliged to automatically meet customer claims through smart contracts. On the basis of a sample case, this article examines the pros and cons of smart consumer contracts and carves out the most suitable applications of smart contracts as a means to ensure private law compliance.

This article introduces the idea of legal chatbots and how legal chatbots might affect the legal market in the near future. We define chatbots as computer programs that automatically chat with users and assess their potential for legal consultation. We identify four potential strengths of legal chatbots: providing access to justice, serving as contact points for customers, reducing the knowledge gap between lawyer and client and automatically generating documents and taking further actions. In the concluding section we briefly discuss ethical aspects of legal chatbots and possible future developments.

While all industries that handle valuable data have been subject to increasing levels of cyber attack, there is a set of inter-related factors in the law firm cyber security ecosystem that makes such firms more susceptible to attack and also serves to prevent them from taking action to counteract attack vulnerability. As a result of the inter-related external and internal factors affecting law firm cyber security, the human element of firm security infrastructure has been neglected, thereby making humans, at once law firms’ greatest asset, their main cyber security weakness. 1There has been some movement of late, and regulators and clients alike are right to demand law firms do more to improve their cyber security posture.2 However, much of the scrutiny to which their conduct has been subjected has tended to overlook the complexities of the law firm cyber security quagmire, and unless these issues are addressed in the context of a potential solution, meaningful change is not While all industries that handle valuable data have been subject to increasing levels of cyber attack, there is a set of inter-related factors in the law firm cyber security ecosystem that makes such firms more susceptible to attack and also serves to prevent them from taking action to counteract attack vulnerability. As a result of the inter-related external and internal factors affecting law firm cyber security, the human element of firm security infrastructure has been neglected, thereby making humans, at once law firms’ greatest asset, their main cyber security weakness. 1There has been some movement of late, and regulators and clients alike are right to demand law firms do more to improve their cyber security posture.2 However, much of the scrutiny to which their conduct has been subjected has tended to overlook the complexities of the law firm cyber security quagmire, and unless these issues are addressed in the context of a potential solution, meaningful change is not While all industries that handle valuable data have been subject to increasing levels of cyber attack, there is a set of inter-related factors in the law firm cyber security ecosystem that makes such firms more susceptible to attack and also serves to prevent them from taking action to counteract attack vulnerability. As a result of the inter-related external and internal factors affecting law firm cyber security, the human element of firm security infrastructure has been neglected, thereby making humans, at once law firms’ greatest asset, their main cyber security weakness. 1There has been some movement of late, and regulators and clients alike are right to demand law firms do more to improve their cyber security posture.2 However, much of the scrutiny to which their conduct has been subjected has tended to overlook the complexities of the law firm cyber security quagmire, and unless these issues are addressed in the context of a potential solution, meaningful change is not likely. Part 1 of this paper outlines the current threat landscape and details the integral role of human error in successful cyber breaches before turning to discuss recent cyber security incidents involving law firms. In Part 2, we analyse elements of law firm short-termism and the underregulation of law firm cyber security conduct and how these, when combined, play a key role in shaping law firm cyber security posture. Finally, in Part 3 we outline a realistic solution, incorporating principles from behavioural science and modern technological developments.

In contrast to as in other jurisdictions, such as the United States or the UK, out-of-court legal services in Germany are strictly regulated by a statute, the Legal Services Act, which came into force nearly a decade ago and superseded the former Legal Counsel Act (Rechtsberatungsgesetz). According to this act, out-of-court legal services must be expressly permitted and are, in principle, reserved to lawyers. Consequently, there are certain legal restrictions for tech providers offering legal services in Germany that must be observed. The following article deals with the scope and limits for offering legal services by legal tech providers in Germany according to the German Legal Services Act. The author explains why some legal tech business solutions offering legal services may be in conflict with this act, which is a significant issue of compliance for both legal tech start-ups and their investors. Entrepreneurs, stakeholders of legal tech start-ups and capital investors should weigh the economic opportunities and legal risks carefully before placing a legal tech start-up on the German market.

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Skuldebrevslagen har bestått i nästintill oförändrat skick sedan dess införande 1936, samtidigt har de sektorer vilka i störst grad träffas av regleringen för skuldebrev kommit att ändra sin hantering av dessa. Att ta fram skuldebrev från valven där de förvaras har uppgetts vara en kostsam procedur, varför detta är något som instituten undviker med följden att skuldebrevslagens skyddsregler inte längre efterlevs. När skuldebrev ställs ut i digital form har det av HD, i Mål nr Ö 5072–16, bedömts inte vara möjligt att säkerställa gäldenärens och borgenärens positioner enligt 15 och 21 §§ SkbrL, eftersom ett digitalt skuldebrev i nuläget inte anses kunna besittas. Dessa skuldebrev har därför ansetts vara enkla och inte löpande, trots att adressaten talar för en tolkning i riktning av den senare. HD:s beslut lämnar en del problematik och resonemang obehandlad, vilken i denna framställning analyseras och tolkas. Slutsatsen av analysen är att det har skett en juridisk öppning för en digital besittning av ickefysiska företeelser, samt att beslutet pekar på en definiering av det löpande skuldebrevet som inte tidigare har framkommit av lag, doktrin eller praxis. Resonemanget bör anses ha brutit ny mark och utgör, trots att dess prejudikatverkan kan ifrågasättas, i dagsläget ett indicium för rättsverkan av digitala skuldebrev. I framställningen prövas, mot bakgrund av HD:s resonemang, om digitala skuldebrev kan anses löpande i lagens mening om de ställs ut genom den så kallade blockkedjetekniken. Av denna tekniska lösning fordras att rättsverkan av en traditionellt sett fysisk företeelse, besittningen, kan uppnås utan att innehavaren har en fysisk närhet till det digitala skuldebrevet. Eftersom frågan inte har behandlats förut kommer resonemang från skilda rättsområden att undersökas. Praxis, tillägg och lagförarbeten har varit vägledande, samt har doktrin tillämpats särskilt vid studiet av skuldebrevslagen och besittningsbegreppet. Problematiken med besittning av ett digitalt skuldebrev är kopplad till att det löpande skuldebrevet har ett värde i sig, som fysiskt dokument, varför den tekniska lösningen måste överföra de med ett dokument följande egenskaperna till den icke-fysiska representationen för dessa. Blocket i blockkedjan, som utgörs av ett smart kontrakt, måste med andra ord ha ett värde i sig. Det måste vidare kunna omsättas, med följden att ett med besittningsövergång jämförbart förhållande uppnås i anslutning till förfoganderättsövergången. Genom att koda den digitala rättshandlingen på ett sådant sätt att innehavet medför rådighet och kontroll över fordringsförhållandet torde rättsverkan av besittning anses uppnås. Av en sådan modell följer, utöver besittningsproblematiken, viss avtalsrättslig problematik och en förändrad riskbild, vilken i korthet uppmärksammas i framställningens avslutande analys.

In the legal domain, documents of various types are created in connection with a particular case, such as testimony of people, transcripts, depositions, memos, and emails. Deposition transcripts are one such type of legal document, which consists of conversations between the different parties in the legal proceedings that are recorded by a court reporter. Court reporting has been traced back to 63 B.C. It has transformed from the initial scripts of ``Cuneiform", ``Running Script", and ``Grass Script" to Certified Access Real-time Translation (CART). Since the boom of digitization, there has been a shift to storing these in the PDF/A format. Deposition transcripts are in the form of question-answer (QA) pairs and can be quite lengthy for common people to read. This gives us a need to develop some automatic text-summarization method for the same. The present-day summarization systems do not support this form of text, entailing a need to process them. This creates a need to parse such documents and extract QA pairs as well as any relevant supporting information. These QA pairs can then be converted into complete canonical sentences, i.e., in a declarative form, from which we could extract some insights and use for further downstream tasks. This work investigates the same, as well as using deep-learning techniques for such transformations. / Master of Science / In the legal domain, documents of various types are created in connection with a particular case, such as the testimony of people, transcripts, memos, and emails. Deposition transcripts are one such type of legal document, which consists of conversations between a lawyer and one of the parties in the legal proceedings, captured by a court reporter. Since the boom of digitization, there has been a shift to storing these in the PDF/A format. Deposition transcripts are in the form of question-answer (QA) pairs and can be quite lengthy. Though automatic summarization could help, present-day systems do not work well with such texts. This creates a need to parse these documents and extract QA pairs as well as any relevant supporting information. The QA pairs can then be converted into canonical sentences, i.e., in a declarative form, from which we could extract some insights and support downstream tasks. This work describes these conversions, as well as using deep-learning techniques for such transformations.