Between law and research: Matthias Vandamme on the impact of AI on the law

In October 2025, Matthias Vandamme started at Ghent University as an academic assistant, where he is working on a doctoral proposal. Since 2020, he has also been working as a lawyer specializing in privacy and data protection law. In this article, he discusses this career change and explains his areas of research in more detail.

From practice to research

My decision to pursue a PhD can be traced back to the experiences I had at the beginning of my career in law.

In 2020, I started working as a lawyer with the idea of putting the knowledge I had acquired at university into practice. Just before I started, I read Tomorrow’s Lawyers by Richard Susskind. That book convinced me that I wanted to become a lawyer, but one who actively contributes to the future of legal services.

This translated into a strong interest in legal tech. My underlying drive in developing new legal tech projects was to replace myself. For example, we developed a project at the firm in which we automated the legal analysis of websites. What used to take several hours could suddenly be done in half an hour. This freed up more time for personal advice to offer real legal added value.

The rise of AI in the legal profession

When the first major LLMs emerged, I, like many others, was skeptical about their usefulness for lawyers. My initial tests yielded mostly amusing results. The AI models quickly improved, resulting in surprisingly good outcomes.

Then, the AI hype exploded in the Belgian legal tech world. Every legal tech provider suddenly had an AI button, and new “AI-native” tools sprang up like mushrooms.

I saw lawyers uploading confidential documents to AI tools without much thought, unaware of who had access to the data. This raised fundamental questions for me about professional secrecy, data protection, and the role of lawyers in a technology-driven context.

Research into the future of legal services

I sincerely believe that AI will play an important role in the future of law. In my opinion, AI will support lawyers and make the law more accessible. It goes without saying that this must be done in a responsible manner.

When I saw a vacancy at Ghent University for a position as a researcher and academic assistant, I knew that I wanted to further investigate the impact of AI on legal services. I am currently preparing my doctoral proposal. I want to conduct research into how the use of AI can influence legal defense, as well as fundamental legal and ethical mechanisms such as professional secrecy and the right to data protection.

From the outside, this may seem like a major career change, but to me it feels like the logical next step in the same story: “actively helping to build the future of legal services.”