AI techniques for modelling legal negotiation

Abstract

of participants, context and user preferences.Negotiation is a process of cooperative decision-making between parties concerning the resolution of a common dispute. The goal of negotiation is to develop a settlement that is acceptable to both parties. One way to achieve this is to ensure disputants take responsibility for their outcomes and control the disputation process.Most current systems have chosen to model the negotiation process by representing progress made within a negotiation. In this paper we focus on modelling the trade-offs and compromises to made by parties to a legal dispute. A system we have built to model disputes in Australian Family Law uses fuzzy networks, numerical allocation procedures and decomposition hierarchies.The most powerful intelligent negotiation support systems are domain dependent, and it is unclear how their techniques might be made applicable in other domains. The reason for this is that negotiation itself is very context dependent. Negotiation is also a process dependent on the requirements of its working domain. The domain we discuss in this paper is Australian Family Law. In most legal conflicts, once a settlement is reached the parties to the settlement are not required to have an on-going relationship. This is not the case in Australian Family Law. Family law varies from other legal domains in that in general:

A formal approach to protocols and strategies for (legal) negotiation

“…Bellucci and Zeleznikow [6] propose a legal negotiation support system tailored for Australian family law. Such a system is based on bi-directional fuzzy cognitive map, and it relies essentially on numerical (fuzzy) values given to the negotiation issues by the parties involved.…”

“…A negotiation is a discussion between parties for the purpose of reaching an agreement (cf., for example, [6]). This suggests representing a negotiation as a dialogue between parties, this dialogue is articulated in progressive stages, where the parties make offers, reject or accept offers, or propose counter-offers.…”

Conception of cognitive interfaces for legal knowledge

“…1998, Paris). In legal domain, the theme has been developed in the field of negotiation (Belluci & Zeleznikow, 1999), argumentation (Verheij, 1999) and more recently in advanced user-friendly legal databases (Matthijssen, 1999).…”

Representations of Decision-making Support in Negotiation

“…Decision-making Support in Negotiation 451 (Bellucci and Zeleznikow, 1999a) claim that by its very nature, negotiation is a vague and indeterminate process. In fact, as do the personalities of people differ, so too does the manner in which parties negotiate.…”