The Workshop on Legal Documents Engineering (WoLDE26) is an international workshop co-located with the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2026), taking place in Fribourg, Switzerland, on August 28, 2026.

WoLDE26 brings together researchers, practitioners, legal tech startups, and industry professionals working at the intersection of document engineering, artificial intelligence, and legal informatics. The workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary discussions around methods, datasets, infrastructures, and real-world applications for processing, understanding, and automating legal documents.

Legal documents are among the most complex and information-rich forms of documentation. Recent advances in natural language processing, document understanding, knowledge extraction, and large language models have created new opportunities for improving access to legal information and building intelligent legal systems. At the same time, legal documents pose unique challenges related to multilingualism, reasoning, explainability, reliability, long-context processing, and structured knowledge representation.

WoLDE26 welcomes contributions spanning document engineering, NLP, information retrieval, machine learning, knowledge representation, and legal AI.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions must be original and must not be simultaneously submitted to another conference or journal.

Regular Paper Submissions

We accept short paper submissions of up to 4 pages, including references. Papers must follow the official ACM formatting guidelines.

Submissions to the regular paper track will undergo formal peer review. Accepted papers will be published in the DocEng 2026 proceedings in the ACM Digital Library.

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: July 5, 2026 (23:59 AoE)
• Notification date: July 18, 2026

Authors should select the “peer-reviewed-papers” track during submission.

Industrial and Work-in-Progress Talks

We also invite abstracts describing industrial presentations and work-in-progress talks of approximately 15–25 minutes.

Abstracts should:

• Be at most 1 page long (excluding references)
• Use a minimum font size of 10pt

Accepted abstracts will be informally shared but will not appear in the proceedings.

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: July 13, 2026 (23:59 AoE)
• Notification date: July 18, 2026

Authors should select the “talks” track during submission

Submissions should follow the official ACM formatting guidelines: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedingstemplate.

Committees

Program Committee

• Anna Scius Bertrand — University of Fribourg, Switzerland
• Mark Cieliebak — ZHAW, Switzerland
• Jean Hennebert — HES-SO, Switzerland
• Apollo Daug — University of Basel, Switzerland
• Elliott Ash — ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Tilmann Altwicker — University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Marcel Gygli — Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
• Jakob Merane — ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Organizing Committee

• Sébastien Rumley — HES-SO Fribourg, Switzerland
• Aixiu An — HES-SO Fribourg, Switzerland
• Andreas Fischer — University of Fribourg, Switzerland
• Mark Drenhaus — University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Venue

The workshop will be held in Fribourg, Switzerland, as part of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2026).

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to sebastien.rumley@hefr.ch