Online disputes between prominent people, unresolved data privacy issues and forthcoming digital services legislation will “inevitably result in litigation” in Irish courts and yield “busy times ahead” for legal professionals, Attorney General Rossa Fanning has said.
The “overwhelming prevalence” of online tools, platforms and means of communication for work and leisure will see more legal disputes springing from our daily lives on the internet, he said.
Dublin’s status as a European tech hub has helped make this segment of the legal market “increasingly prominent”, Mr Fanning added, creating work for “adaptable members of the legal profession” and leading to litigation in this jurisdiction that would until fairly recently have been considered “extremely improbable”.
Much of Rebekah Vardy’s failed libel action in London against Coleen Rooney, known as the Wagatha Christie trial, had been “difficult to disentangle from the rise of social media”, Mr Fanning said, with the case revolving around both the publication of an allegedly defamatory tweet and the manipulation of Instagram account settings.
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As more such rows are aired online, the courts will be required to “unpick” the legal problems that arise from the use of social media platforms, he told the launch of the Media, Internet and Data Protection Bar Association (Midba).
Barristers, solicitors and in-house counsel specialising in media, internet and data protection law were last week invited to join Midba. The association will hold its first conference in June to address topics such as the fifth anniversary of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the regulation of online harms.
Claire Hogan, a barrister and the newly elected chair of the association, said it would act as a forum for the exchange of knowledge and ideas in a fast-evolving sphere that also includes recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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“Media used to be controlled by a small group of moguls, data used to be stored on giant mainframes and accessed only by men in white coats with clipboards. But nowadays everyone with an internet connection can be a publisher and it is all too easy to assume the obligations of a data controller or a data processor,” said Ms Hogan.
There have been “relatively little decided case laws” in European courts on many data protection issues, Mr Fanning noted in his remarks at the launch.
“There are lots of pivotal and novel questions about the GDPR that remain to be determined and simply haven’t been settled by the CJEU [Court of Justice of the European Union], and it is going to be fertile ground for more litigation into the future.”
The Attorney General said the Government was prioritising the drafting of the Digital Services Bill – legislation that is set to bring into force EU regulations concerning child protection, disinformation, targeted advertising and the transparency of algorithms.
“That legislation is being treated as a priority for drafting in the legislative session that is coming to a conclusion and it may be on the priority for publication list for the summer session,” he said.
Sara Phelan, chair of the council of the Bar of Ireland, said it was important to assess how the rule of law was measuring up against the fast pace of complex technological change.
Citing the emergence of OpenAI’s Chat GPT and other large language models, as well as the EU’s proposal for an Artificial Intelligence liability directive, Ms Phelan said practitioners were aware that legal questions would soon be triggered by “many, many other possible areas”.
