On 28 August, as part of ACM DocEng 2026 in Fribourg, iCoSys hosted the first edition of the Workshop on Legal Document Engineering (WoLDE 26) – one of the first workshops dedicated specifically to document analysis in the legal domain.

Organized by Aixiu An, Andreas Fischer, Mark Drenhaus and Sébastien Rumley, the workshop brought together researchers, startups and industry professionals to discuss current challenges and opportunities in LegalTech, legal NLP and lightweight language models. It also provided an opportunity to share ongoing iCoSys research with the community.

Research spotlight: Swiss legal translation

During the workshop, Aixiu An presented “The Price of Reasoning: Cost-Quality Tradeoffs in Reinforcement Learning for Neural Machine Translation,” co-authored with Michael Jungo from the University of Fribourg.

The work addresses an important question for Swiss legal translation: can smaller, specialized models achieve strong translation quality without relying on very large frontier models?

Alongside the paper, the team released two open-weight models for Swiss legal translation, making the results available to the wider research and developer community.

A successful first edition

WoLDE 26 offered a dedicated space to connect document engineering with the specific requirements of the legal domain and to exchange perspectives between academia and industry.

Congratulations to Aixiu, Andreas, Mark and Sébastien for organizing this first edition, and thank you to everyone who presented, participated and contributed to the discussions!