Globalisation and digitization have put a lot of pressure on legal professionals and have increased the number of cross-border, cross-jurisdictional activities of both individuals and businesses alike, bringing with it the need for innovative LegalTech solutions that can support legal professionals, governments and administrations as well as NGOs and even individual citizens across Europe. From a societal perspective, there is a need to grant citizens more control and transparency with respect to the processing of their personal data. From a business perspective, there is a need for tools and techniques that make daily work more efficient and effective and drive new business models, so that society as a whole can benefit from new capabilities that AI and other technologies can provide despite of a more and more complex legal environment. Towards this end, the LegalTech sub topic aims to explore legal tech mechanisms, processes and methodologies that are now critically needed to support the next generation of semantic applications. We welcome contributions both from academia as well as industry-focused case-studies and applications.

Topics of Interest include but are not limited to:

• Legal ontologies, vocabularies and thesauri
• Legal knowledge graphs
• Legal text processing and mining
• Semantic Web techniques and e-discovery in large legal document collections
• Semantics for multilinguality or multijurisdiction
• Automated regulatory compliance solutions
• Personal data processing consent and transparency
• Machine processing of and reasoning upon data licences and policies
• Data licensing and policy propagation in linked data
• User-friendly applications and interface design for legal semantic information
• Law, Intellectual property and legal issues for data and schemas
• Law and governance in e-democracy and e-participation

Author Guidelines and Submission for paper submissions

• The Research and Innovation Track welcomes long and short papers. Long papers should have a maximum length of 15 pages (including references) and short papers of 6 pages (including references).  
• Submissions should follow the guidelines of the Springer LNCS format. Details are available here.
• Abstract submission for all papers is a strict requirement.
• All papers and abstracts have to be submitted electronically via Easychair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=sem20eu#
• Submissions must be in English.
• Submissions are not anonymous.
• Accepted papers will be published by a well indexed open access publisher.
• To get the paper published in the proceedings at least one author of an accepted paper needs to register for the conference and pay the article processing charge. (We are currently setting up a fund to partially or - at best - completely subsidize the APC of Euro 300.- per paper.)
• The Research and Innovation Track will not accept papers that, at the time of submission, are under review or have already been published in or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference.
• Due to the cancellation of the on-site event, authors of accepted papers are expected to record a video of 5 - 10 minutes in which they present their paper. The video will be published on the conference’s YouTube channel and prominently referenced via the conference website and its social media channels. The video shall be uploaded to Easychair by August 30, 2020 (11:59 pm, Hawaii time).
  

Review and Evaluation Criteria for paper submissions

Each submission will be reviewed by several PC members. The reviewing process is single-blind. Papers submitted to this track will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

• Appropriateness
• Originality, novelty, and innovativeness
• Impact of results
• Soundness of the evaluation
• Proper comparison to related work
• Clarity and quality of writing

We are looking forward to your contribution!

Special Track Chairs:

• Sabrina Kirrane, University of Business and Economics, Vienna
• Harshvardhan Pandit, ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland