The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada granted nearly $500,000
The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada has granted $498,885 in funds to Samuel Dahan, Queen’s University Faculty of Law associate professor and founder of the open-source platform OpenJustice, for a international interdisciplinary research initiative intended to change courts’ use of artificial intelligence.
The funds will be distributed over a five-year period through NSERC’s Discovery Horizons program. Dahan is the principal investigator of “Courtroom Intelligence: Co Designing AI for Courts,” which tackles the delivery of fair, consistent, and timely judgments in the technology age.
The project convenes legal, computer science, linguistics, and social science experts as well as judicial partners. Queen’s Smith School of Business and Queen’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will be part of the initiative, as will Toronto Metropolitan University, McGill University, Harvard Law School, University College London, and Leiden University/Council of Europe. Ex-Supreme Court of Canada Justice Thomas Cromwell will also pitch in along with the French Cour de cassation and the Hong Kong Judiciary.
As principal investigator of the study, Dahan will spearhead the development of an open-source judicial AI framework tailored to courts.
“This project is unique because it’s truly co-designed with courts. We are not building technology in isolation; we are working directly with judges, clerks, and legal practitioners to ensure it meets real-world needs,” Dahan said in a statement.
The project is a response to access to justice issues across the globe. Seventy-eight percent of Canadians dealing with significant legal issues are unable to secure legal assistance, leading to an increase in self-represented litigants tackling complex procedures without legal counsel and burdening courts.
Many have turned to AI for help, but existing tools often hallucinate and generate error-filled filings that delay proceedings and squander judicial resources.
“AI has enormous potential to support access to justice. But today’s systems are not designed for the realities of legal reasoning or judicial work. Our goal is to build AI systems whose reasoning courts can inspect, evaluate, and trust — systems grounded in how legal decisions are made, not just in large volumes of text,” Dahan said.
The project will concentrate on drafting assistance and decision standardization as well as on evidence admissibility and deepfake detection. It will examine methods to help courts identify synthetic and manipulated evidence.
OpenJustice will seek to model judges and lawyers’ reasoning process through the “reasoning flows” no-code framework. The framework will enable legal professionals to construct detailed representations of legal analysis like statutes identification, evidence evaluation, and precedent application via a visual interface. The results of pilot studies have indicated that this process yields fewer errors than traditional AI systems.
“[Judges and lawyers] can encode their reasoning directly into the system, ensuring that outputs are explainable, auditable, and aligned with legal standards,” Dahan said.
Over 20 trainees spanning undergraduate students and postdoctoral fellows will be tapped to help develop and train the platform during the initiative’s five-year run. This period will cover the design and pilot testing stages through to full evaluation and knowledge sharing.
The project is anticipated to generate new benchmarks for judicial AI, policy guidance for courts and regulators in addition to a verified open-source platform.
Dahan added that the Conflict Analytics Lab, of which he is director, is readying a 2027 CFI Innovation Fund proposal for a ~$3.9 million project seeking to construct the first dedicated, sovereign computing and secure data storage system for legal AI in Canada.
In total, NSERC’s 2026 Discovery Research Program has granted over $14 million to Queen’s University researchers.
