Queen’s and McGill partner up through the Conflict Analytics Lab

Two of Canada’s most storied universities have joined forces to apply cutting-edge technology to the legal profession.

The Queen’s University Faculty of Law and the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University have partnered to advance the work of the Conflict Analytics Lab, a research lab that will widen access to justice using technology.

“The Conflict Analytics Lab brings together more than 30 lawyers, technology experts, and the business community to provide both citizens and businesses with the tools they need to resolve small cases in a fair way,” explains Samuel Dahan, Queen’s Law professor and director of the Conflict Analytics Lab. “The focus of the lab is on the application of data science to conflict resolution.”

The partnership’s initial projects are showing promise. McGill professor Juan Camilo Serpa and his students, Daniel Indig and Sebastien Correa, collaborated with Maxime Cohen of McGill and Dahan to create an application to help laid off Canadian employees receive fair severance from their employer.

Dahan acquired data from 3,000 employment law cases, and Serpa and his students turned the data into an interactive database where the employees will insert their industry, province, and other key variables to understand if their severance package was in line with the average. Essentially, the application ‘thinks like a judge’ to provide the user with a likely outcome given their circumstances.

“This is an exciting interdisciplinary collaboration, harnessing big data to help these individuals better understand their rights and determine their next steps,” says Serpa.

The Conflict Analytics Lab is working on the model that generates the legal predictions and a platform, such as a website, that will allow members of the public to interact with the data.

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