Artificial Intelligence, Licensing & Contracts - A Hands-On Workshop NEW

The development of AI applications presents unique legal challenges, particularly in the areas of intellectual property and contracts. IP lawyers and practitioners must grasp the practical constraints associated with the development of AI products and services, as well as the contractual obligations necessary to protect their clients’ interests effectively.

This workshop bridges the gap between theoretical understanding and real-world application by combining teaching sessions with hands-on exercises. It follows the lifecycle of an AI project through a series of focused sessions — covering data collection, model training, pre-deployment compliance, partnerships, and deployment — and culminates in a set of negotiation exercises. Each session pairs a presentation from the instructors with contractual drafting tasks and a thorough review with feedback from experienced professionals. 

By the close of the two days, participants are equipped to handle, with confidence, the legal and contractual issues inherent in AI development and deployment. 

This is a working workshop, not a lecture series. Each session opens with a focused input from the instructors that frames the legal and commercial stakes of that stage of the AI lifecycle. Participants then move directly into drafting: working alone or in small teams, they translate the principles just discussed into actual contractual language (clauses, definitions, schedules, and allocations of risk) in response to a realistic fact pattern. 

Every drafting task is followed by a review in which experienced practitioners analyse and critique the clauses, and show how the same provision reads very differently depending on whose interests it protects. 

Rather than treating each session as a self-contained problem, participants build a single multi-party AI development agreement across the two days. The data-collection session produces the licensing and provenance provisions; the model-training session adds the ownership, IP-allocation, and performance terms; the pre-deployment session layers in EU AI Act compliance, risk allocation, and liability; and the partnership session resolves how shared IP, contributions, and exploitation rights are governed among several collaborators. By the end of Day 2, each participant holds a complete, internally consistent agreement they have drafted clause by clause and understand from the inside. 

The workshop then culminates in a live negotiation. Participants are assigned competing roles (e.g., an AI developer, a data provider, a deploying customer, a co-development partner) each with confidential instructions and divergent commercial priorities, and negotiate the key terms against one another in real time. This tests the clauses they have drafted under genuine adversarial pressure and reveals where the drafting holds and where it gives way. A closing plenary debriefs the exercise: instructors and participants review the strategies used, compare the outcomes reached by different groups, and draw out transferable lessons for negotiating AI contracts in practice. 

Participants leave with the drafts they produced, an annotated model multi-party agreement, and practical checklists for each stage of the AI lifecycle, namely, a reusable toolkit for their own practice. 

The small cohort and the Chatham House Rule are deliberate: they create a candid, low-stakes environment in which practitioners can test unfamiliar positions, ask the questions they would hesitate to raise in front of a client, and learn as much from one another’s drafting choices as from the instructors. 

On-site workshop combining instructor sessions with practical contract-drafting and negotiation tasks.

Dates: 24-25 September 2026 (9:00 AM to 6:00 PM (Paris time))

Location: Université de Strasbourg - CEIPI

• Bâtiment Le Cardo, 7 rue de l’Ecarlate, F-67000 Strasbourg

Language: English

The workshop will include a limited number of participants to foster exchanges and group work and will follow the Chatham house rules.

A networking event will be organised on the evening of the 24 September 2026.

Fees :

• “early bird” price until 31 July 2026 : 1650,00€
• regular price starting 1 August 2026 : 1950,00€

The deadline to register is 6 September 2026.

A certificate of participation is delivered on completion.

Please note that early enrolment is advisable.

Closing date for receipt of all applications:  6 September 2026.