The 26th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering

August 25, 2026 to August 28, 2026
HES-SO / University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Workshop on Legal Documents Engineering (WoLDE26)

Friday, August 28, 2026 — Pérolles Campus, Fribourg

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Organizers

Description

In the legal field, documents have a unique complexity: intricate structures such as footnotes, tables, and domain-specific formatting, combined with strict requirements for accuracy and interpretability. Extracting and processing their information covers a wide range of tasks, from preparing content for data ingestion and semantic search, to extracting specific elements such as signatures or document types, to processing the full text while preserving the original structure — for instance when translating documents without altering their layout. A variety of approaches address these challenges, including OCR and large language models.

This workshop is among the first to focus specifically on document analysis within the legal domain. It aims to bring together researchers and legal practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss and exchange best practices, with an emphasis on emerging methods such as lightweight LLMs and agentic systems, and on their seamless integration into real-world legal workflows. The goal is to foster discussions about methods, datasets, infrastructures, and real-world applications for processing and understanding legal documents.

We particularly welcome interdisciplinary contributions spanning document engineering, NLP, information retrieval, knowledge representation, machine learning, and legal informatics.

Topics of Interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Format

The workshop is a half-day (3-hour) session organized in three parts:

Call for Papers — Peer-Reviewed Papers

We invite short papers of up to 4 pages including references, prepared in the ACM double-column format (refer to the ACM instructions for the template — Word users should use the interim template). Reviewing is single-round: each submission is accepted or rejected without a camera-ready revision. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the DocEng 2026 proceedings.

Papers must be submitted as a PDF through EasyChair, selecting the peer-reviewed-papers track.

Deadlines for papers
Submission deadline July 5, 2026
Acceptance notification July 18, 2026
Workshop August 28, 2026

All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).

Call for Abstracts — Industrial and Work-in-Progress Talks

We also welcome presentations from practitioners wishing to share real-world industrial experiences, or work-in-progress research, without formally submitting a paper. Presentations should be described in an abstract of at most one page (excluding references, font size min. 10pt). Only accept/reject decisions will be communicated to proposers. 15 to 25 minutes will be allocated to each presentation.

Accepted abstracts will be informally made available but will not be part of the proceedings. Abstracts must be submitted through EasyChair, selecting the talks track.

Deadlines for talks
Submission deadline July 13, 2026
Acceptance notification July 18, 2026
Workshop August 28, 2026

All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).

Attendance

Workshop attendance is included in the full DocEng 2026 conference registration. A Tutorials & Workshop Only registration ($75) is also available — see the Registration page.

Technical Programme Committee

More TPC members might be added by mid-June.

Contact

For questions about the workshop, please contact Sébastien Rumley.

This call for contributions is also available in PDF format.