Following the final report on Categories of Smart Functionalities, we created an extended summary (see here) with new insights into the potential of AI in legislative drafting. 

The European Commission is certainly not alone in this journey to use innovative IT and AI in legislative drafting and therefore we would like to invite you to share your perspectives on the following items: 

1. Have you integrated AI (whether hybrid models, LLMs or other approaches) into legislative drafting? We would love to hear about your work, findings and experiences.

2. Are you considering scaling up AI deployment in legislative drafting? If so, how does your approach align with, or differ from, the roadmap outlined in the extended summary? Anything missing?

3. Do you see a compelling need for a specialised legal editor built specifically for AI-assisted drafting? If so, let us know which features for such an editor are essential.

The report on Categories of Smart Functionalities investigated the transformative power of AI-based solutions to assist legislative drafting in the public sector. Smart functionalities — powerful services designed to improve the quality of legal acts — enhance the efficiency of the law-making process, and thereby ultimately, serve society and businesses more effectively.

To recap, the final report on Categories of Smart Functionalities includes:

• the definition of what we mean by smart functionalities;
• revisited the categorisation of these functionalities;
• Identified a set of additional smart functionalities;
• documented in detail the business value of these smart categories;
• identified 5 main AI technologies, i.e., semantic similarity, name entity recognition, information extraction, natural language generation, advanced language editing and correction in which to invest; and 
• explored the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in legislative drafting.

The extended summary builds on the work done and in addition: 

• includes a comparison between the use of Large Language Models (LLM) and hybrid AI approaches; 
• argues that whist promising, LLMs are not yet ready for fully-fledged legal drafting; 
• puts forward a roadmap centered on piloting initiatives and agile open-source IT development for implementing smart functionalities;
• makes the case for legal drafting as an excellent use case to apply innovative AI; and 
• draws attention to the significant challenges in deploying AI.

A final comment, in the spirit of “proof in the pudding,” we have also launched a parallel study: a Proof of Concept for Context-Aware Legal Verification. Initial findings are promising, with LEOS the Commission’s  open-source legislative drafting solution emerging as a robust integration platform. More on this study to come soon. 

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