NSERC Discovery Horizons Grant Awarded to Samuel Dahan

Samuel Dahan awarded a $498,885 NSERC Discovery Horizons Grant over five years for a new project called "Courtroom Intelligence: Co Designing AI for Courts."

Back in July, Samuel landed a $498,885 NSERC Discovery Horizons grant over five years for a new project called "Courtroom Intelligence: Co Designing AI for Courts." The goal is an open-source judicial AI framework built on OpenJustice. The project will tackle one of the biggest challenges the justice system: how to deliver fair, consistent, and timely decisions in an era of growing demand and technological disruption.

The part we're most excited about is that it's co-designed with courts. Partners include the French Cour de cassation, the Hong Kong Judiciary, and former SCC Justice Thomas Cromwell, plus Harvard Law, UCL, McGill, TMU, and Leiden / Council of Europe on the research side.

There are two main areas of focus:

Judicial drafting: tools that build reasoning flows into drafting templates so judges get structured, consistent decisions.
Deepfake evidence: multimodal checks on visual, audio, and metadata signals to help courts assess manipulated evidence.

Also on the horizon: CAL is preparing a 2027 CFI proposal (~$3.9M) for sovereign legal AI compute and secure data storage here in Canada, so courts, legal aid orgs, and firms can run open-weight legal models locally.

Full writeup: https://law.queensu.ca/news/Dahan-awarded-NSERC-funding-to-develop-trustworthy-AI-for-courts