The Upcoming Legal Trends in Technology
Artificial intelligence has made headlines over the past year. However, this will not be the only legal challenge of 2024. Attention will have to be paid to tokenized debt, legaltech and identification systems, among other issues.
Technological advances have been more than abundant in 2023, but perhaps the most prominent change has arrived through artificial intelligence (AI) and the European regulation approved in extremis on this very subject, which places the EU at the forefront of the field, ahead of its competitors.
Undoubtedly, in the next 12 months we will be talking about AI again, but there will be many other legal developments to watch out for. ECIJA’s experts have highlighted ten trends that are likely to become the new challenges they will have to face in 2024.
Artificial Intelligence
Along with the milestone of the approval of the AI regulation, the European Commission has initiated the approval of the so-called AI pact, which seeks a voluntary commitment from industry to anticipate the regulation and start implementing its requirements before the legal deadline. The pact will encourage and support companies in planning ahead for the measures foreseen in the regulation. Companies will have the opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to the new legislation and prepare early. More specifically, the covenant will encourage companies to communicate the processes implemented to prepare for compliance and ensure that the design, development, and use of AI are reliable.
Crypto-assets
The regulation on crypto-asset markets, approved in April 2023, which regulates both the issuance and provision of services related to crypto-assets and stablecoins, will be applicable between mid-2024 and early 2025 and will be the reference standard for the rest of the jurisdictions betting on this type of services.
The approval of the standard has served to inject legal certainty into the market, encourage innovation and ensure a high level of protection for retail holders and integrity of crypto-asset markets.
Metaverse
Although 2023 has been the year in which the metaverse has weakened as a major technological trend, the truth is that the advancement of virtual reality and augmented reality have created a space that connects the physical with the digital, which portends many future developments. This phenomenon transcends entertainment and encompasses sectors such as gaming, education and social interactions. In terms of intellectual property, this union between the real and virtual worlds will pose complex legal challenges, from the ownership of virtual assets to the application of copyright laws on user-generated content.
Digital Services Act
2024 will be the year of the Digital Services Act (DSA). This package of measures is a sweeping European regulation that implements a series of new obligations and alterations to large technology companies, but which also directly impacts users on the basis of information obligations, limitations on advertising, moderation of illegal content or transparency in algorithms.
Legaltech
By 2024, legaltech is expected to continue its rapid evolution, driving a deeper transformation in the legal sector. The use of AI-based technologies will become more prominent in this sector, especially those based on advanced natural language processing models.
This technology (GPT) is set to revolutionize the way legal professionals interact with legal information and documentation. GPT is expected to enable more efficient and sophisticated automation in the creation and review of legal documents, providing real-time contextual suggestions and corrections.
Identification
This year will be a key year in terms of innovation and identification, because while technology is increasingly providing guarantees for identification purposes, control agencies are establishing more limitations in terms of the use of these technologies in favor of user privacy. This has occurred with the publication of the APA’s guidelines on the processing of biometric data for access control and attendance control purposes in the workplace, which limits it and calls into question its legitimacy. This will lead to a more dynamic debate about identification vs. privacy.
“Cookies”
The disappearance of third-party cookies – tracking files that websites place on a user’s computer to track their online activity and display relevant ads – an issue that has been postponed for some time and will involve major changes, both from the perspective of compliance with data protection regulations and the way in which companies approach marketing activities.
Tokenized debt
The end of 2023 saw the adaptation to Spanish law of the regulation on a pilot scheme for market infrastructures based on decentralized registry technology, which has opened up the possibility for companies to issue debt and therefore finance their activity by issuing debt in tokenized format, thus allowing the opening of a new market with very broad liquidity.
Data Protection
Data Protection Officers (DPOs) will become the best qualified agents to take on the functions of supervising regulatory compliance and contributing to the implementation of new technologies within organizations. This will increase the relevance of this figure in the legal team of companies and the critical importance of its successful configuration.
“Cyber”
2024 will see the transposition of the CER directive on the resilience of critical entities into Spanish law; the transposition of the NIS2 directive for the resilience of essential and important entities; the implementation of obligations of the DORA regulation for financial entities, insurers and IT service providers for these entities, as well as the approval of the Cyber Resilience Act on the security of products with electronic components. Finally, the cybersecurity certification frameworks promoted by the European Network and Information Security Agency will be developed.
Published in Expansión Jurídico