Consumer Protection in the Digital Era: The Potential of Customer-Centered LegalTech

Abstract

New technologies and tools, often summarised under the term “LegalTech”, are changing the way in which legal professionals work. The digital transformation has changed many aspects of our daily life and democratised access to knowledge and services. In the legal domain, however, consumers rarely benefit from digitisation. On the contrary, they are often overpowered by big corporations and their well equipped legal departments. In this paper, we outline how LegalTech can be used to empower consumers in the digital era, by building tools to support consumers and those who protect them. In order to show the potential of customer-centered LegalTech, we present two prototypes which semantically analyse, assess, and summarise Terms of Services from German web shops.