High Level Expert Group Meeting on Automated Contracting and Enforcement in Consumer Cases

09.11.2021

On 9 November 2021, ELI organised a High Level Expert Group (HLEG) meeting on Automated Contracting and Enforcement in Consumer Cases. Leading experts from academia as well as policy-makers and practitioners explored the topic further and worked on the scope of a prospective ELI project in the field.

The experts were welcomed by ELI President Pascal Pichonnaz, who underlined the importance of analysing the legal implications of automated contracting and enforcement. He expressed his hopes that the present meeting would again result in a successful ELI project, as many other previous HLEG meetings had.

Christiane Wendehorst (Chair; ELI Scientific Director), Susanne Augenhofer (Full Professor of Law at the University of Innsbruck; ELI Council Member), Alexandre Biard (Senior Legal Officer - Redress and Enforcement, The European Consumer Organisation), Christoph Busch (Full Professor of Law and the Director of the European Legal Studies Institute at the University of Osnabrück; ELI Council Member; Co-Chair of the ELI Digital Law SIG), Alexander Kunzelmann (Legal Officer, UNCITRAL), Cristina Poncibò (Professor of Comparative Private Law at the Law Department of the University of Turin), Teresa Rodríguez de las Heras Ballell (Associate Professor of Commercial Law at University Carlos III of Madrid; ELI Executive Committee Member), Ulrich Schroeter (Full Professor of Private and Comparative Law at the University of Basel; ELI Council Member), Dirk Staudenmayer (Head of Unit, Contract law (JUST.A.2), European Commission), Christian Twigg-Flesner (Professor of International Commercial Law at the University of Warwick; ELI Council Member), Anna Veneziano (Deputy Secretary-General, UNIDROIT) and Marek Wierzbowski (Partner of the law firm Prof Wierzbowski & Partners Advocates and Legal Counselors; Professor at Warsaw University) discussed then the on-going work by other organisations in the field as well as the scope, methodology and timeline of the prospective ELI project.

Participants were joined by Bernd Bertelmann, Maria Peltoniemi and Martina Zuliani from the European Commission and by Katja Kolman (ELI Senior Project Officer).

ELI would like to express its gratitude to the experts for their valuable contributions, which will be further consolidated and then considered by the ELI Executive Committee and Council.