Riikka Koulu

I am an assistant professor of Law and Digitalization and a postdoctoral researcher of procedural and insolvency law at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Law. I am also the director of University of Helsinki Legal Tech Lab.

I defended my doctoral dissertation "Dispute Resolution and Technology - Revisiting the Justification of Conflict Management" in September 2016. In my PhD I examine the impact that technology-enabled forms of conflict management have on the justification of use of coercion. I consider conflict management technology as disruptive, in the sense that implementation of technology affects both doctrinal boundaries between different fields of law as well as dispute resolution mechanisms. My research focuses on on distributed technologies and their potential for conflict management, e.g. what would be the implications of building dispute resolution as smart contracts on the blockchain. This project examines the shifting meaning on trust as the focal concept of conflict management.

The work of the Legal Tech Lab examines the implications of digitization of legal services. The Lab hosts a variety of activities, including annual events such as Law and Digitalization conference in Helsinki in June and an interdisciplinary Hack the Law! in October.

My earlier publications concern e.g., privatisation of enforcement (2017), online arbitration (2017), justification models and dispute resolution technology (2016), applications of the blockchain in dispute resolution (2016), enforcement mechanisms (2015), the justification of ODR (2014), the doctrinal importance of examining all dispute resolution jointly (2013), access to Internet as a fundamental right to a fair trial (2012), interpretation of procedural principles and procedural justice while using videoconference technique in obtaining evidence (2010, 2011), and the public image of arbitration (2009).

Since Autumn semester 2012, I teach a yearly advanced course on dispute resolution and technology for undergraduate students at the Faculty of Law. In addition, I teach different courses on procedural law, legal digitalization, legal tech hackathons etc. 

In 2015, I was a visiting researcher at the Cyberjustice Laboratory, Université de Montréal, Canada and in spring 2016, I had a research period of 3 months at the University of Barcelona, Spain.