The Legal Agent Workshop (LAW’26) will be held in conjunction with ICAIL 2026, 8–12 June, Singapore
Workshop date: 12 June 2026 (full-day)
Agentic approaches are increasingly used in legal contexts, yet these approaches remain conceptually and methodologically fragmented across AI and Law. Agents appear in many forms: as components of multi-agent systems interacting under norms, as abstractions in agent-based models used to simulate legal phenomena, as autonomous or semi-autonomous tools that act on behalf of users, and as objects of legal, ethical, and philosophical inquiry. With the recent resurgence of interest in agentic AI, particularly in connection with large language models, questions about what an “agent” is, what it can or should do, and how agency should be understood in legal contexts have become both more pressing and more contested.
The Legal Agents Workshop (LAW’26) aims to bring together researchers working on formal, computational, empirical, legal, and philosophical approaches to artificial agents in AI & Law. The goal is to create a dedicated forum for consolidating scattered insights, comparing traditional AI agent approaches and modern agentic AI, and fostering discussion between theoretical and applied perspectives. By doing so, the workshop seeks to establish a starting point for future research and for the development of a more systematic research agenda on agents in legal domains.
The full-day workshop will feature:
- An introductory overview session on agentic approaches in AI & Law
- Invited talks on agents in the legal domain
- Paper presentations and demonstrations of accepted contributions
- Structured discussion sessions aimed at clarifying concepts, identifying common ground, and outlining open research questions
Topics of interest
Agentic approaches are prevalent yet fragmented across the legal domain. This workshop aims to bring together these scattered strands of research and practice, offering a dedicated forum within the AI & Law community to reflect on the concept, use, and implications of agents.
The workshop explicitly welcomes all types of work on agents in the legal domain, including:
- Agent-based modelling (ABM) and simulation in law (e.g. simulation of legal reasoning or court dynamics)
- Multi-agent systems (MAS) in legally relevant settings (e.g. normative MAS, deployment in real-world contexts)
- Agentic AI in law, including generative and tool-using agents
- Legal, ethical, and regulatory approaches to agents
- Philosophical perspectives on agency and its role in law
- Hybrid human–agent collaboration and interaction in law
The primary goals of the workshop are:
- To consolidate dispersed insights on agentic approaches in AI & Law;
- To clarify and critically examine what “agency” means across different traditions and applications;
- To stimulate discussion on interactions among autonomous agents and on the use of agents to simulate legal phenomena;
- To initiate a shared research agenda, including limitations, open questions, and future direction
Submission guidelines
We welcome full papers, short papers, position papers, working papers, demos, blue-sky papers, and extended abstracts.
Paper length:
Long papers: up to 10 pages including references
Short papers: up to 5 pages including references
All submissions must:
- Clearly state their relevance to artificial agents in relation to legal information, reasoning, or processes;
- Articulate their novel scientific contribution and relation to prior work;
- Follow the ACM sigconf (LaTeX) or interim Word template;
- Be submitted in PDF format.
Reviewing will be double-blind. Submissions must be anonymised in accordance with ICAIL reviewing guidelines. Papers that do not meet formatting, page limit, or anonymity requirements may be rejected without review.
Submissions should be uploaded to the conference support system.
Depending on interest, CEUR-WS proceedings may be published.
Important dates
17 April 2026 – Optional abstract submission
24 April 2026 – Paper submission deadline
13 May 2026 – Notification of acceptance
22 May 2026 – Camera-ready version
Organising Committee
Ludi van Leeuwen, Msc, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Cor Steging, PhD, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Tadeusz Zbiegień, M, Jagiellonian University
Programme Committee
Michał Araszkiewicz, Jagiellonian University
Sebastian Benthall, New York University School of Law
Morgan Gray, University of Pittsburgh
Henry Prakken, Utrecht University
Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics
Jaromir Savelka, Carnegie Mellon University
Alex Schwartz, University of Glasgow
Giovanni Sileno, University of Amsterdam
Bart Verheij, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Rineke Verbrugge, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Wijnand van Woerkom, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg
Satchit Chatterji, University of Amsterdam
Hannes Westermann, Maastricht University
Tomasz Zurek, Maria Curie Skłodowska University