Karim Benyekhlef

Karim Benyekhlef has been a professor in the Faculty of Law at the Université de Montréal since 1989. He has been seconded to the Centre de recherche en droit public (Public Law Research Center) since 1990 and served as its Director from 2006 to 2014. He is now the Director of the Cyberjustice Laboratory, which he founded in 2010, the work of which is designed to increase and facilitate access to justice. The Cyberjustice Laboratory has obtained in 2015 the award «Mérite Innovation» from the Bar of Quebec (Innovation Award). He holds the Chaire de recherche en information juridique Lexum (Lexum Research Chair on Legal Information). He received in 2016 from the Bar of Quebec the distinction Advocatus Emeritus. He holds the 2019-2020 Alexandre Koyré Excellence Research Chair at the Université Côte d’Azur in France.

He also initiated the first online dispute resolution projects (the CyberTribunal Project, 1996-1999; eResolution, 1999-2001; ECODIR, 2001). From 2011 to 2018, he lead a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada in the context of the Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) Program: Rethinking Procedural Law: Towards Cyberjustice, composed of an international team made up of some 30 researchers from over 23 different universities in Canada, the United States, Australia and Europe. He is now leading the project «Autonomy through Cyberjustice Technologies and Artificial Intelligence» (ACT Project) funded by the partnership program of SSHR. ACT aims to increase access to justice through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Over the next 6 years, ACT will be able to count on a multidisciplinary and international team of more than 50 researchers, as well as 42 partners including research centers, public institutions, legal professionals, representatives from civil society and private sector actors.