International Conference on Legislation Looks to the Future of Drafting Laws
October 28, 2024
On October 24–25, the D.C. Bar hosted at its headquarters nearly 150 lawyers from all over the world for the 2024 International Conference on Legislation and Law. An additional 87 attendees joined the conference virtually.
Presented annually by the Federal Bar Association, this year’s conference examined the work of legislative drafters in multiple nations, with a focus on differing approaches regarding the adoption of AI and other tools to advance their work.
A breakout session on the first day of the conference, titled “The Evolving Use of Technology in Legislatures,” opened with a broad overview of how nations are moving toward use of artificial intelligence and other technologies. Hanibal Goitom, foreign law specialist with the U.S. Library of Congress, introduced a study he and his colleagues conducted comparing where different countries stand in their adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their legislative processes.
The 2024 report, prepared for the conference and published this September, is called Innovative Technology in Legislatures in Selected Countries. It offers an in-depth look into the adoption of innovative technologies by legislative bodies in 10 jurisdictions — Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom — followed by shorter surveys of nearly 80 other countries. The ICTs include online citizen engagement platforms, digital document management systems, video conferencing, artificial intelligence, dashboards for voting, and cloud computing.
“The pandemic appears to have served as an impetus for many legislative bodies’ embrace of ICTs, including AI, in their daily work,” Goitom said. “Adoption of [ICTs] with a varying degree of sophistication by parliaments as part of their plans to improve efficiency, transparency, and accountability, as well as citizen engagement, appears to be commonplace.”
In many jurisdictions, these efforts involved information dashboards on parliamentary processes, access to large data sets such as parliamentary archives, and virtual meeting options and remote voting for parliamentary members.
Matt Lynch, Lawmaker service owner at the U.K. National Archives, characterized his country as a reluctant adopter of new technology. “There is one big thing that has changed,” Lynch said, “and that’s a thing called the internet. It just cannot be overstated what kind of impact it has had on legislation.” He noted that the government’s website is not the primary resource used by the public to access legislation, providing new insight into who is interested in British law and why.
“We are [seeing] millions of people looking at legislation in a month,” Lynch said. Tracking data showed a dramatic spike in use of the legislative database in 2020. “We made legislation daily during COVID, but also there were people who were desperate to know the law. ‘Could I go out the house?’ It wasn’t something you would consult a lawyer on … It’s given us a window into who uses legislation, and it’s given us a chance to start moving the dial a little bit on the traditional conception that it’s … just judges and lawyers [who use legislation].”
In fact, it’s nonlegal professionals who were tracking legislation, Lynch said. “People who are at their jobs, making decisions, and they’re trying to figure out what they’re allowed to do. It’s the public trying to find out what are their rights,” Lynch said. He added that the data showed the public had some difficulty navigating legislation, which would impact the future of its design and drafting.
Another panel, “AI-Powered Legislative Services for Drafting,” introduced attendees to a program used by South Korean legislators to assist in their ongoing project to simplify and modernize their legislative code. “The primary purpose of developing this editor was to standardize the format of less lengthy drafting, which had been previously prepared without consistency or uniformity throughout institutions,” said Kyoungshin Kim, legislative attaché for the Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C. “The editor is fully integrated into 100 percent of Korea’s legal information, including current statutes, amendment history, and case law.”
Luís Kimaid, executive director of Bússola Tech, discussed a number of tools, including those powered by ChatGPT and designed for use in government legislative and administrative processes. While AI tools could improve transparency and efficiency, he cautioned that “parliaments must prepare to actively promote discussions on AI’s impact, both direct and indirect.”
“I’ve heard many times parliaments saying, I don’t want to discuss AI and I don’t want you to use this technology, but then you see that they are using the Microsoft suite for email, WhatsApp, [and] many technologies that already have AI in it,” Kimaid said. “By adopting these approaches, parliaments can leverage AI’s power to serve the public while preserving democratic integrity in the technological age.”
Wade Ballou, legislative counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives, joked that AI helped him produce his presentation in five minutes, but it took him five hours of additional work to clean it up for actual use. Humor aside, he was very clear about the importance of AI use in contending with contemporary challenges in legislative drafting.
“In the House this year, we recently surpassed 10,000 bills,” Ballou said. “We have 69 attorneys in the office right now who work on most of those bills, and I can tell you as the head of the office that not a single one of them, including me, reads everything with a very careful eye, so we are already in the terrible position of having to take some kind of shortcut and figure out what’s important, what can pass, what can get a general regulatory instruction to the secretary to make it work. So, that’s where we are.”
Ballou described the tensions involved in discussions about AI adoption, including personal and institutional disinclinations to change, as well as anxiety about the possibility of job elimination as technology takes over tasks.
He had some words of encouragement. “It’s the people involved who can use AI as a tool, and neither the drafter nor the member can delegate responsibility for the draft itself,” he said. “The public did not elect an AI. The public elected a member, and, to me, that’s the most important thing of all.”
“We live in a world of change, and it’s really important for each of us to adopt and maintain an attitude that change is normal; it’s just part of our lifetime learning,” Ballou added. “[Many leaders have] observed that AI is not going to replace any people, but it will replace people who refuse to learn AI.”
Kim illustrated the kinds of change that might take place, given the longstanding use of the technology at the Republic of Korea’s National Assembly. “Speech-to-text systems and face and voice recognition have replaced roles such as stenographers and cameramen; however, a number of roles such as drafter or librarian have actually increased as AI has enhanced their work, not replaced them,” Kim said. “The key difference lies in human choice, I think, whether to use AI as a replacement or as a tool for support.”
