The Processes, Laws, and Compliance (PLC) workshop intends to provide a forum to facilitate the exchange of research findings and ideas on data-driven and process-oriented techniques and practices in the legal domain, fostering collaboration among interdisciplinary experts, researchers, and practitioners working in IT and law.

Research in legal informatics has grown in recent decades, not least due to the spread of information systems capable of recording the data of legal processes (legal event logs), the texts of tenders, and the temporal dimensions of legal procedures. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques provide a valuable means for analyzing legal processes to gather valuable insights on legal matters that can support the work of public administrations and private companies in the legal field. However, AI and Data-driven techniques alone do not provide full transparency of how processes and law intersect. Here, techniques such as process discovery, conformance checking, and process repair can provide new affordances regarding the intersection of the legal and process domains.

Examples of areas that are expected to benefit from the application of AI techniques, such as Process Mining, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing, are the automated discovery of actual legal procedures from historical data; the formalization of legal requirements using process discovery, the verification of regulatory compliance of procedures; the prediction of the unfolding of on-going legal cases, among others. At the same time, the implantation of process mining technologies brings several challenges regarding deployment and effective use of its outcomes: how to apply these techniques in a privacy-sensitive manner, and how to deal with potential biases from the predictions are some of those.