Samuel Dahan is law professor at Queen’s University and is cross-appointed to Cornell Law School and the Smith School of Business. A qualified lawyer and mediator, Dahan's areas of interest include dispute resolution; AI and legal analytics; employment law; consumer protections; and EU law. Dahan is a member of the Dispute Resolution board of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). 

Dahan is the founder and Director of the Conflict Analytics Lab, a global consortium (Queen’s/McGill/Columbia/HEC) concerned with analytics and dispute resolution. He is also the founder and developer of MyOpenCourt, a legal help system for self-represented litigants. Dahan received the 2020-2021 Stanley M. Corbett Award for Excellence in Teaching and was the co-winner of the 2020 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences UPS George D. Smith Prize for excellence in analytics research. Since 2020, Dahan has served as an advisor to BLG, a leading Canadian law firm, offering guidance on optimizing dispute resolution practices.

Dahan served as a référendaire (legal advisor) at the Court of Justice of the European Union and clerked for the Conseil d’Etat, the French Administrative Supreme Court. During the financial crisis of 2008-2009, he acted as an advisor to the EU’s chief negotiator for the financial assistance program in Latvia. He also worked for White & Case and for Essec-Irene, specializing in dispute resolution (2009-2014). 

Dahan holds a doctorate in law from the University of Cambridge. He has studied law and dispute resolution at Harvard Law School; the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS-Ulm); the Sorbonne Law School; Leuven University in Belgium; and the University of Nice. He was a bronze medalist at the French and UK championships in kickboxing and Taekwondo.
 

Areas of Expertise and Research

  • Dispute Resolution (Negotiation, Mediation and Arbitration)
  • Analytics, AI (text analytics and computer vision)
  • Employment law, Customer Disputes, Personal Injury 

Achievements

  • Founded the Conflict Analytics Lab, a research consortium for conflict resolution and Artificial Intelligence (2018)
  • Appointed to the European Union Intellectual Property Office (2019)
  • Commissioned to deliver a feasibility study on trademark dispute technologies for the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) (2020)
  • Recipient of more than $300,000 in grant money as Principal Investigator, including SSHRC New Frontiers Grant (2019–2021)
  • Conflict Analytics Lab was co-recipient of the INFORMS Prize (as a founding member of the Smith Ecosystem) (2020)
  • Developed AI legal aid platform with dispute resolution algorithm, www.MyOpenCourt.org (2020)
  • Continuing cross-appointment at Cornell Law, Smith School of Business, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and Ingenuity Lab

Selected Publications

  • The Use of AI in Legal Systems: Determining Independent Contractor vs. Employee Status, MC Cohen, S Dahan, W Khern-am-nuai, H Shimao, J Touboul, 2022
  • Evaluating Explanation Correctness in Legal Decision Making, XZ Chu Fei Luo, Rohan Bhambhoria, Samuel Dahan, Proceedings of the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2022
  • Interpretable Low-Resource Legal Decision Making, R Bhambhoria, H Liu, S Dahan, X Zhu, AAAI arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.01164, 2022
  • Analytics and EU Courts: The Case of Trademark Disputes, S Dahan, X Zhu, R Bhambhoria, S Townsend, The Changing European Union: A critical view on the role of the Courts (Hart), 2022
  • Detection of Similar Legal Cases on Personal Injury, J Lam, Y Chen, F Zulkernine, S Dahan 2021 International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), 639-646, 2021
  • Investigating the State-of-the-Art Performance and Explainability of Legal Judgment Prediction, R Bhambhoria, S Dahan, X Zhu, Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021
  • The Case for AI-Powered Legal Aid, S Dahan, D Liang, Queen's LJ 46, 415, 2021
  • Conflict Analytics: When Data Science Meets Dispute Resolution, S Dahan, M Cohen, C Rule, Management Business Revie, 2021, 
  • Determining Worker Type from Legal Text Data using Machine Learning, Y Yin, F Zulkernine, S Dahan
  • 2020 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, 2020
  • AI-powered Trademark Disputes Resolution Systems, S Dahan, Expert Opinion commission by the European Union Intellectual Property Office, 39, 2020
  • Determining Worker Type from Legal Text Data Using Machine Learning, Dahan S.Pervasive Intelligence and Computing (IEEE PICom 2020) 2020
  • Canada Mediation: Regulations, Trends & Practices, S Dahan, Lexis Nexis, 2020
  • Predicting Employment Notice Period with Machine Learning: Promises and Limitations, S Dahan, J Touboul, J Lam, D Sfedj, McGill Law Journal, 2020
  • The Gap between Deep Learning and Law: Predicting Employment Notice, S Dahan, J Lam, R Bhambhoria, X Zhu, ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning) 7, 10, 2020
  • (Re-) Designing institutions for EMU wage setting: Strengthened coordination between Monetary and Economic Institutions, S Dahan, European Labour Law Journal 8 (4), 281-305, 2017
  • The Economic and Financial Crisis and Collective Labour Law in Europe, S Dahan, EUROPEAN LAW REVIEW 41 (6), 943-946, 2016
  • A Path-Dependent Deadlock: Institutional Causes of the Euro Crisis, S Dahan, Cornell Int'l LJ 49, 309, 2016
  • Whatever it takes? Regarding the OMT ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court, S Dahan, O Fuchs, ML Layus, Journal of International Economic Law 18 (1), 137-151, 2015
  • L’influence grandissante du droit comparé au Conseil d’État: vers une procédure juridictionnelle innovante?, A Bretonneau, S Dahan, D Fairgrieve, 2015
  • L’Influence Grandissante du Droit comparé au Conseil d’Etat: vers une Procédure Juridictionnelle Innovante? Dahan S., REVUE FRANÇAISE DE DROIT ADMINISTRATIVE (Dalloz), 2015
  • Comparative Legal Methodology of the Conseil d’Etat: Towards an Innovative Judicial Process? D Samuel, D Fairgrieve, A Bretonneau, Courts and comparative law, 2015
  • The Legal Framework for New Economic Governance and Its Implications for Wage Policy, S Dahan, The Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, 2014
  • L’Encadrement Juridique de la Situation des Couples de Personnes de Même Sexe Face au Principe d’Egalité en Common Law, Dahan S., Chauviré C., RECUEIL DALLOZ, ACTUALITE DU DROIT COMPARE (Dalloz), 2014
  • Whatever It Takes? A Propos de la Décision OMT de la Cour Constitutionnelle Fédérale Allemande, Dahan S., ACTUALITE JURIDIQUE. DROIT ADMINISTRATIF, 2014
  • The EU/IMF financial stabilisation process in Latvia and its implications for labour law and social policy, S Dahan, Industrial Law Journal 41 (3), 305-327, 2012