Samuel Dahan

Samuel Dahan is a National Scholar and Professor at Queen’s Law as well as a qualified lawyer and mediator. Dahan is a member of the Advisory Board of EU Intellectual Property Board of Appeal. He is cross-appointed to Cornell University Law School, and is an affiliate faculty member of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and Queen’s Ingenuity Lab.

Dahan is the founder and Director of the Conflict Analytics Lab, a global consortium (Queen’s-McGill-Columbia-HEC) concerned with the application of data science and Artificial Intelligence to dispute resolution and law. He is also the founder and developer of MyOpenCourt, a platform that improves access to justice through predictive dispute resolution research.

Samuel Dahan was a Cabinet member at the Court of Justice of the European Union and clerked for the Conseil d’Etat (French Administrative Supreme Court). During the financial crisis of 2008-2009, he served as an advisor to the EU’s chief negotiator for the financial assistance program in Latvia. He also worked as an associate for White & Case and Essec-Irene, leading firms specializing in dispute resolution (2010-2014).

Dahan holds a doctorate in law from the University of Cambridge and studied law and dispute resolution at Harvard Law School; the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS-Ulm); the Sorbonne Law School; Leuven University in Belgium; and the University of Nice. He was a bronze medalist at the French and UK championships in kickboxing and Taekwondo.

Areas of Expertise and Research

• Dispute Resolution (Negotiation, Mediation and Arbitration)
• Law and Technology (AI, machine learning applied to law)
• Labour Law and employment law (EU and Canada)
• European Union Law (Competition and and Labour)

Achievements

• Founded the Conflict Analytics Lab, a research consortium for conflict resolution and Artificial Intelligence (2018)
• Appointed to the European Union Intellectual Property Office (2019)
• Commissioned to deliver a feasibility study on trademark dispute technologies for the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) (2020)
• Recipient of more than $300,000 in grant money as Principal Investigator, including SSHRC New Frontiers Grant (2019–2021)
• Conflict Analytics Lab was co-recipient of the INFORMS Prize (as a founding member of the Smith Ecosystem) (2020)
• Developed AI legal aid platform with dispute resolution algorithm, www.MyOpenCourt.org (2020)
• Continuing cross-appointment at Cornell Law, Smith School of Business, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and Ingenuity Lab