A Story of Two Holy Grails: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Design and Use of Corporate Insolvency Law

When I started to engage with artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of law, Måns Magnusson, professor of statistics at Uppsala University, asked the lawyers in the room: ‘What is the holy grail of lawyers? What is the best thing we could do using artificial intelligence in law?’ At the time, my answer was: ‘Predicting what a court will decide.’ With this answer, I did not only intend to capture the situation, in which parties face court litigation. I also meant ‘knowing the law’, in other words, knowing the legal consequences of actions and events should a court be invited to apply the law. What other holy grail could there be than anticipating legal outcomes as a result of decisions, independent of whether such decisions were actually judged in court or – as in most of the cases – part of bargaining in the shadow of the law.