Summary of the breakfast

It is with a lot of enthusiasm that our Legal Interoperability Team joined forces with the LEOS (Legislation Editing Open Software) team for this April virtual breakfast as part of the DigitAll conference! Welcoming also the New Zealand Better Rules initiative, this session discussed multidisciplinary teams as key enabler of digital-ready policies and the key challenges and lessons learnt, building on the LEOS and Better Rules stories. 

The webinar started with a brief introduction, mentioning the rationale behind joining forces between the Better Legislation for Smoother Implementation and LEOS communities. Then, speakers from Better Rules and from LEOS outlined their respective views on multidisciplinary teams and tools, followed by a panel discussion. The question & answers gave our teams food for thought to design our future activities.

The session welcomed the following speakers and panelists:  

• Hamish Fraser, Legislation as Code Researcher, involved in the New Zealand Better Rules
• Veerle Cumps (European Commission) and Alice Vasilescu (external consultant), from the LEOS team
• Dr. Fotis Fitsilis, Head of Department for Scientific Documentation and Supervision in the Hellenic Parliament
• Carlos Torrecilla Salinas, Head of the “Digital Economy” Unit in the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre

We would like to thank all the participants and again the speakers and panelists! 

Key takeaways

• It is key to involve the right profiles at the right time as part of the policymaking process and to reflect from the very beginning on who are these profiles and when to involve them. 
• The current “waterfall-type” law-making process should move more and more towards an agile approach, to achieve digital-ready legislation. 
• The experience from LEOS, which started with the goal to increase the efficiency of the legal drafting process opened the door to a series of opportunities to explore new ways to draft legislations, but also to improve their content.
• Working in multidisciplinary teams was a key success factor for LEOS, both in its design and in using it as part of drafting legislation, and for Better Rules, when designing regulations. 
• The idea to apply the rule-as-code ex-post (once the legislation is drafted) could be further explored, in particular to ensure that it is developed in parallel to the development of the natural language model of the law.
• We need to explore and to understand how regulation can cope with the fast evolving pace of new technologies. 
• Improving regulation will be a major playing field for new technologies and standardisation is at the heart of that. 
• A certain cultural change is needed in the European Commission and in public institutions in general to get everybody on-board, go along in the road of digital transformation and to move towards digital-ready legislation. Moving to LEOS as a new tool for drafting legislation was a good example. 
• Strengthening the different teams and communities involved in law-making could be fostered by not only involving physical persons but also legal entities such as companies, NGOs and universities. 

Presentations and recording

Scroll down to download the speakers' presentations and the webinar key takeaways presentation. 

Watch the recording.

Next steps

We look forward to see you in our next virtual breakfast sessions!

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And if you have any question, do not hesitate to contact us.