Accelerating ESG-related legal research technology

This challenge is part of the AI & Data Science Innovation program. You can find an overview of the program and the other challenges here.

Enabling ESG-driven innovation

ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance and refers to the three key factors when measuring the sustainability and ethical impact of businesses and organizations. It represents a unique opportunity to bring sustainability at the heart of our society, markets and organizations.

Legal institutions are providing the necessary framework to enable the execution of a sound holistic ESG strategy, but the broadness, depth, complexity, and evolving nature of the topic bring new and constant questions to both lawyers and businesses.

Regulations are becoming increasingly complex and volatile - a jungle of regulations that changes continuously and rapidly.

This applies to current applicable rules and even more to the ones on the horizon, which may have a significant impact on business decisions, risk and compliance management.

Today’s executives and legal departments must navigate through an ever-growing number of regulations, directives, taxonomies, policies, hard laws, national and international laws, soft laws, etc. Organizations are overwhelmed and often under resourced to follow the regulations they have to comply with as part of their ESG strategy. They can’t filter through the noise.

As a result, ESG strategies and efforts cannot develop their true power. And we want to change that. 

Challenge

Sustainability-driven stakeholders in the real estate development sector like real estate investors, developers, real estate financing institutions need an adequate, individualized, and dynamic overview of relevant ESG-related regulations to facilitate reasonable business decisions and investments. AI-driven solutions promise to deliver that. The key question of our challenge is therefore:

How can an AI-based application successfully automate and individualize screening of ESG regulations relevant to stakeholders in the real estate development sector?

Solutions to the problem should help the stakeholders to:

• Get certainty and understanding of the regulations in place
• Get quality indicators of upcoming new regulations
• Automatically filter through the noise

For detailed information regarding the specifications and desired outcome as a well as a list of further and supporting literature visit the tab "Important Details".

Let´s push innovations for sustainable real estate forward together!

Who can participate?

This challenge is calling all students, researchers, professionals, startups and SMEs – bright minds, pioneers, innovators & AI-aficionados to innovate the way businesses can monitor, anticipate, summarize and manage ESG regulations.

@ Legal students
Are you interested in ESG? Then you probably already know that ESG requirements are extensive and diverse! When working on ESG related matters lawyers have all the info, but they usually lack the technical background for programming an adequate algorithm.

That’s why we need you! With your passion for law and legal background, you are the right person to do the research and address the problem from the legal point of view. Submit your research and the techies will do the rest.

@ Tech students
Do you understand what programming is all about, but the legal regulations are not your area of expertise?

No problem! Since programming is your thing we need you! The most successful legal tech startups are generally founded by a lawyer and an IT genius - Please submit your suggestions for an ideal search mechanism that is perfectly AI based!

@ Startups & Legal tech students
Do you have insight into both legal and tech or are you already an interdisciplinary team/startup?

That is all we need! We are excited to see what solutions you have - please submit them!

@ Lateral entrants & In/outsiders
Are you neither one nor the other? Maybe you come from another universe, but you still know the game. As a child did you prefer legal texts over fairy tales? Is Programming language your mother tongue and AI your best friend?

We need you more than anything else! Delight us with your wild, but target-oriented ideas and extraordinary (re-)thinking of AI & data science. Submit your ideas and let us marvel.

Team matching!
@ Innovation Pioneers
If you lack one of the disciplines, we highly recommend you to team up with other innovators and form an interdisciplinary team! We will support you – see below.

Questions or looking for team members?

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