Artificial Intelligence & Law
The development and deployment of artificial intelligence models and systems is an increasingly regulated business decision. Whether you are building AI, investing in it, or putting it to work inside your organisation, you face the same question: how do you move quickly without “breaking things”, that is, without taking on legal, regulatory or reputational risk you cannot see?
Our AI practice exists to answer that question. We advise across the entire life of an AI system — from what you can own and protect, through how you govern and certify it, to how you contract for, deploy and defend it. We combine hands-on EU regulatory work with a genuine, technical understanding of how these systems actually work.
Our services
Governance and regulatory compliance. Classifying your systems under the EU AI Act and mapping the obligations to your specific use cases; building risk-management, transparency and human oversight frameworks; support in the preparation of conformity assessments for high-risk systems; designing AI literacy and internal policy; aligning AI management systems to ISO/IEC 42001 and the harmonised technical standards under the AI Act; and guidance in using regulatory sandboxes to test compliant innovation with regulators rather than around them.
Protecting AI innovation. Intellectual property strategy for software and AI inventions before national and international patent offices, including advising on technical character and sufficiency of disclosure questions that decide whether an AI invention is patentable at all. Copyright and database right issues across training data, models and AI-generated output. Trade secret protection for models, weights and pipelines. Open source and open core licensing strategy for teams that build on or release open models.
Data and privacy for AI. GDPR compliance for large-scale training and inference, including lawful basis, DPIAs, and automated decision-making and profiling. Advice on the wider European data framework, such as the Data Governance Act and the Data Act, that increasingly governs where AI gets its data. Data sharing, licensing and intermediary arrangements.
Contracts, transactions and due diligence. Drafting and negotiating AI as a service (AIaaS), development, licensing and procurement agreements, with realistic allocation of AI-specific liability, IP and data risk; B2B and B2C terms of use; legal and regulatory due diligence on AI companies for venture capital, private equity and corporate investors.
Liability and enforcement. Advising on AI and product liability exposure under the reformed EU regime, incident response, and constructive engagement with regulators and supervisory authorities.
Who we work with
AI developers and start-ups building their own models or AI-enabled products; investors and funds who need a clear-eyed read on legal and regulatory risk before they commit; businesses and public-sector bodies deploying AI tools who need to do so compliantly; and research institutions and consortia building shared data and AI infrastructure.
Why DSP
Our experts sit on the EU AI Office’s expert group drafting the Code of Practice for general-purpose AI and on the European Commission’s expert group on AI liability. Our advice is grounded in where the law is going, not only where it stands today, and in a level of technical fluency that lets us advise on what an AI system is, not just how it is regulated.
Talk to us
Wondering how the AI Act affects your business model, or how to protect what you are building? Stay a step ahead of the rules.
