When Algorithms Replace Law

When Algorithms Replace Law: Prediction, Judgement and the Future of Legal Decision Making

What happens when predicting the legal outcome becomes more useful than applying the legal rule?

Twenty five years ago, open source licence compliance could involve lawyers working through spreadsheets. Today, algorithms can assess risk across as many as 120,000 software components in a single project. For Honorary Queen Mary Professor Andrew Katz, this transformation offers a glimpse of something much bigger: a future in which technology does not simply assist lawyers, but increasingly performs functions traditionally entrusted to contracts, regulators and courts.

If an algorithm can deliver a sufficiently reliable outcome faster and more cheaply than conventional legal processes, what happens to legal judgement? What is gained when rules give way to prediction, and what is lost? And perhaps most importantly, who controls the algorithm that increasingly determines the outcome?

Drawing on twenty five years at the forefront of open source software licensing, Andrew Katz will explore how insurers, automated systems and autonomous agents may reshape contracting, legal practice, regulation and accountability. His argument reaches far beyond software. It raises a more fundamental possibility: that the central challenge may no longer simply be how law regulates technology, but how far technology itself begins to perform functions we currently understand as law.

For practising lawyers, this raises immediate questions about how transactions will be structured, how risk will be assessed, and where professional judgement will continue to add value. For academics and policymakers, it raises deeper questions about legal authority, institutional legitimacy, accountability and the rule of law itself.

The event will be chaired by Professor Noam Shemtov, Chair in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, and Director of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute.

The event is kindly hosted and sponsored by Bristows LLP at their London offices. QMIPRI is grateful to Bristows for their generous support.

This public lecture brings together lawyers, academics, policymakers, technologists and students around a question that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: what happens when technology begins not merely to interpret law, but to take its place?