Artificial Intelligence and Renegotiation of Commercial Lease Contracts Affected by Pandemic-Related Contingencies from Covid-19. The Project A.I.A.Co.

This paper aims to investigate the possibility of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address the legal issues that arose from the Covid-19 emergency: contracts with continuous, repeated, or deferred performance and, more generally, having to deal with exceptional events and contingencies. We first examine whether the Italian legal system permits ‘maintenance’ remedies to address contingencies and to avoid the termination of fixed-term contracts whilst continuing to ensure effective protection for both parties’ interests. We then provide a complete and technical description of an AI-based predictive framework, designed to assist both the Magistrate (during the trial) and the parties themselves (in out-of-court proceedings) in the redetermination of the rent of commercial lease contracts. This framework, named A.I.A.Co. for Artificial Intelligence for contract law Against Covid-19, was developed under the Italian public grant known as Fondo Integrativo Speciale per la Ricerca and – even though the predictive system was initially intended to deal with the very specific problem connected to Covid-19 – the acquired knowledge, the produced model and the research outcomes can be readily transferred to other civil issues (such as, for example, determining the amount of maintenance or divorce obligation in family law).