PLC@BPM 2025 : Processes, Law, and Compliance Workshop

WORKSHOP AIM AND SCOPE
The Processes, Laws and Compliance (PLC) workshop intends to provide a forum to facilitate the exchange of research findings and ideas on data-driven and process-oriented techniques and practices in the legal domain, fostering collaboration among interdisciplinary experts, researchers, and practitioners working in IT and law.

Research in legal informatics has grown in recent decades, not least due to the spread of information systems capable of recording the data of legal processes (legal event logs), the texts of tenders, and the temporal dimensions of legal procedures. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques provide a valuable means for analyzing legal processes to gather valuable insights on legal matters that can support the work of public administrations and private companies in the legal field.

Examples of areas that are expected to benefit from the application of AI techniques, such as Process Mining, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing, are the automated discovery of actual legal procedures from historical data; the formalization of legal requirements using process discovery, the verification of regulatory compliance of procedures; the prediction of the unfolding of on-going legal cases, among others. At the same time, the implementation of process mining technologies brings several challenges regarding deployment and effective use of its outcomes: How to apply these techniques in a privacy-sensitive manner and how to deal with potential biases from the predictions are some of those.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
We welcome contributions related to automated process-oriented analysis and digital law, as well as considering legal modeling and conceptualization features.

Potential topics are:

- Discovery of process behavior in legal artifacts (laws, proceedings, guidelines, standards, logs, etc)
- Compliance between formal representations of laws and their implementation
- Variant analysis of different legal process executions?
- Performance analysis in the legal domain
- Predictive analytics on legal cases
- Techniques for modeling and formalization of laws
- NLP and Law
- Visualization and Simplification techniques for legal processes
- Legal reasoning and processes
- Information retrieval and multimedia search for legal documents
- Rules As Code (RaC) approaches for the implementation of compliant-by-design systems
- Emerging applications in legal data & knowledge engineering


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
The workshop accepts two categories of submissions: Regular papers and Show & Tell sessions.
Regular papers. Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished research papers. Submissions are expected to be between 12-15 pages long, and short papers between 6-11 pages long - including references, appendices, and figures.
Springer will publish research papers as a post-workshop proceedings volume in the series Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP). According to Springer's policy, the acceptance rate will be lower than or at most equal to 50%
Show & Tell. In addition, we welcome summaries of work already published or under submission elsewhere, descriptions of work in progress, tutorials, and practical experience reports. These categories will not be published but will have space for presentation. The format of the category is free and should not exceed 2 pages.
For formatting instructions and templates, see the Springer Web page: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
At least one author of each accepted paper must register and participate in the workshop.
Submissions should be made via Easychair through the following submission page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bpm2025 (by selecting the PLC workshop)

All submissions must be in English and converted to PDF before electronic submission.
The organization of a journal special issue dedicated to the workshop topics is under consideration. If confirmed, a selection of the best accepted Regular papers will be considered for an extended version of the special issue.

The workshop's main purpose is to create a community of scholars in the intersection of process mining and laws. The authors of accepted papers, after presenting their work, are invited to to debate in plenum over a central theme in the session, with the facilitation of the session chair and participants. A keynote speech at the beginning of the morning session will bring inspiration for the workshop on relevant topics (e.g. AI and Law).
To finalize the workshop, the last plenary session will discuss the challenges and future directions in the BPM and Law research.

IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline to submit Papers to Workshop: June 13, 2025 [DEADLINE EXTENSION]
Acceptance of Papers for Workshop: July 3, 2025
Workshop camera-ready papers: July 11, 2025

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS (in alphabetical order)
Laura Genga, Technical University of Eindhoven (Netherlands)
Hugo A. López, Technical University of Denmark (Denmark)
Emilio Sulis, University of Turin (Italy)
Roberto Nai, University of Turin (Italy)