Samuel Dahan is professor of law at Queen’s University and is cross-appointed to Cornell Law School and Paris Dauphine Law School. He is the Chief of Policy and Chair of the Deel Lab for Global Employment, a consortium on global work and compliance analytics. A qualified lawyer and mediator, his areas of interest include employment policy, data science and dispute resolution.

Dahan is the founder and Director of the Conflict Analytics Lab, a research consortium concerned with the application of analytics to dispute resolution. He is responsible for the development of MyOpenCourt, an open-access legal technology; and since 2020, he has served as an advisor to leading Canadian law firm BLG, offering guidance on optimizing dispute resolution practices. Dahan is a member of the stakeholder board of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and is the recipient of both the 2021 Stanley M. Corbett Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the 2020 INFORMS UPS Prize for best program in analytics.

Dahan’s research has been published in leading journals such as the International Journal of Economic Law; McGill Law Journal; European Labour Law Journal; Industrial Law Journal; Journal of Law and AI; AAAI; and ICML. His work has been featured on Global News, CTV, Semafore, and CBC.

Prior to joining Queen’s University, Dahan was an EU official, serving as a cabinet member at the Court of Justice of the European Union and clerking for the Conseil d’Etat in France. During the financial crisis of 2008, he acted as an advisor to the financial assistance program in Latvia. Dahan also served as an affiliate faculty member at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

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

Links

Areas of Expertise and Research

  • Global Work
  • Legal AI
  • Workplace Mediation

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

Publications

  • ‘Investigating the State-of-the-Art Performance and Explainability of Legal Judgment Prediction’, AAAI (2021)
  • ‘The Legal Case for a Central Bank Labour Mandate’, Rethinking the Foundations of Workplace Law (University of Toronto Press 2023)
  • ‘Interpretable Low-Resource Legal Decision Making’ [2022] Canadian AI
  • ‘Conflict Analytics: When Data Science Meets Dispute Resolution’ [2022] Management Business Review
  • ‘Analytics and EU Courts: The Case of Trademark Disputes’ in Tamara Capeta and Iris Goldner Lang (eds), The Changing European Union: A critical view on the role of the Courts (Hart Publishing 2022)
  • ‘The Use of AI in Legal Systems: Determining Independent Contractor vs. Employee Status’, Conference in Empirical Legal Studies (2022) (forthcoming in Journal of Law and AI)
  • ‘The Case for AI-Powered Legal Aid’ [2021] Queen’s Law Journal
  • ‘Detection of Similar Legal Cases on Personal Injury’, 2021 International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW) (IEEE 2021)
  • ‘Predicting Employment Notice Period with Machine Learning: Promises and Limitations’ (2020) 65 McGill Law Journal / Revue de droit de McGill 711
  • ‘AI-Powered Trademark Dispute Resolution’ (European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) 2020) Expert Opinion
  • ‘Mediation in Canada’, Mediation: Regulations, Trends & Practices (LexisNexis 2020)
  • ‘The Gap between Deep Learning and Law: Predicting Reasonable Notice’, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2020)
  • ‘Determining Worker Type from Legal Text Data Using Machine Learning’ [2020] Pervasive Intelligence and Computing (IEEE PICom)
  • ‘(Re-)Designing Institutions for EMU Wage Setting: Strengthened Coordination between Monetary and Economic Institutions’ (2017) 8 European Labour Law Journal 281
  • ‘A Path-Dependent Deadlock: Institutional Causes of the Euro Crisis’ (2016) 49 Cornell International Law Journal 309
  • ‘Whatever It Takes? Regarding the OMT Ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court’ (2015) 18 Journal of International Economic Law 137
  • ‘The EU/IMF Financial Stabilisation Process in Latvia and Its Implications for Labour Law and Social Policy’ (2012) 41 Industrial Law Journal 305
  • ‘Comment Favoriser l’essor de La Médiation Comme Solution Aux Conflits Liés à l’environnement et Aux Ressources Naturelles ?’ Ateliers de la Terres, ESSEC IRENE (Institute for Research and Education on Negotiation) 2011