On 17 September 2026, Prof. Marco Giacalone, Co-Director of the DIKE Research Group, participated in the international seminar “Justice augmentée : L’intelligence artificielle au service de la prévention et du règlement des différends”, organised in Montréal by the UIA – Union Internationale des Avocats, in collaboration with the Barreau du Québec and the Barreau de Montréal. The two-day seminar examined how artificial intelligence is transforming dispute prevention and resolution, with particular attention to its responsible, transparent and human-centred integration into legal practice.
The event brought together practitioners, academics, mediators, arbitrators and specialists from more than twenty countries to discuss the opportunities and challenges generated by AI in the administration and resolution of disputes. According to the UIA, approximately 90 lawyers took part in the Montréal seminar.
Prof. Giacalone contributed to the panel “L’IA appliquée aux modes de prévention et de règlement des différends : outils, pratiques et cas concrets”, organised as an interactive discussion around concrete applications of AI rather than a sequence of traditional presentations.
Throughout the panel, he contributed to discussions concerning the different categories and uses of AI technologies, the increasingly delicate boundary between decision support and the preservation of human judgment, and concrete applications of these technologies in mediation, arbitration and other forms of dispute resolution. The discussion addressed, among other issues, human oversight, confidentiality, verification of AI-generated outputs and the risks associated with progressively delegating elements of legal reasoning to automated systems.
A particular focus of Prof. Giacalone’s intervention concerned the perspective developed within DIKE’s research on Digitalisation and Access to Justice. While much of the debate surrounding AI and dispute resolution concentrates on technologies used once a dispute has already arisen, DIKE’s work also examines how digital technologies and AI can operate upstream, helping to prevent disputes, facilitate early resolution and create more accessible pathways to justice.
This includes research into online dispute resolution, technology-supported mediation and dispute prevention, as well as the needs of unrepresented and potentially vulnerable users of justice systems. During the Montréal discussion, this perspective was presented as an important complement to the rapidly developing use of AI within arbitration and professional legal practice.
The participation in the UIA Montréal seminar reflects DIKE’s broader research agenda: investigating how AI and digitalisation can contribute not simply to more efficient legal processes, but to more accessible, human-centred and trustworthy systems of justice.