Fortune Partners at the XIX International Atyrau Legal Conference
On 11 September, the XIX International Atyrau Legal Conference took place in Atyrau. This year's theme was "Artificial Intelligence and Law: the Limits of Automation and Responsibility".
Fortune Partners took part as a gold sponsor alongside Chevron, AEQUITAS and the International Commercial Arbitration Court.
The conference was organised by the Kazakhstan Petroleum Lawyers Association (KPLA) and Tengizchevroil as general sponsors, with BestProfi, PetroCouncil.kz and KazBar as information partners.
The conference was opened by Zhumageldy Yelyubayev, Doctor of Law, Professor, Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, MCIArb and Honorary President of KPLA.
The Fortune Partners paper
Auelbek Zinullin, Manager in the Legal Practice at Fortune Partners, presented a paper on the digital transformation of the court system.
The presentation covered:
- Kazakhstan's standing in the UN E-Government Development Index — 24th out of 193 countries — and the contribution the court system has made to that result.
- The move from "electronic" to genuinely "digital" justice: from the first electronic judgments to fully electronic case files across all types of proceedings.
- The Judicial Cabinet and the rise in electronic filings from 5% in 2015 to 95% today.
- The scale of accumulated data — 100 million electronic documents, more than 15 million machine-readable judgments and 50 million items of metadata — as the foundation for analytical systems.
- The Digital Judicial Analytics system, in operation since December 2023: semantic search, detection of anomalies in judgments, and prediction of case outcomes.
- The robotisation of procedural decisions, from travel bans on debtors to traffic cases in which the evidence is not contested. More than a third of all cases now involve some element of robotisation.
- The limits of automation: technology does not replace the judge, and responsibility for a signed judgment remains with a human being.
- Projects in development — next-generation audio and video recording with Face ID, a prototype AI service for drafting judgments, and specialised internet courts.
Why this subject matters
The theme chosen by the organisers — the limits of automation and responsibility — captures precisely where both the court system and the legal profession now stand. Technology has already changed how a case position is prepared and how deadlines are calculated. Where the line runs between a tool and a decision remains an open question, which is exactly why it belongs in a professional forum.
