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Sports law & AI: Game on?

241418
As artificial intelligence takes the field, sport faces new legal & governance dilemmas: Ian Blackshaw examines the state of play
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming sport—enhancing performance, officiating, talent identification and fan engagement—but its adoption is uneven and increasingly expensive.
  • Serious legal risks accompany AI use, particularly around data protection, ownership of athlete data, liability for automated decisions, bias, and intellectual property rights.
  • Strong governance and human oversight are essential to ensure AI supports sporting integrity, fairness and compliance as regulation struggles to keep pace with innovation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over the world, including the world of sport.

In this article, we will explain how AI is being applied to sport, and the main legal issues and sporting challenges which it gives rise to in practice. That being said, AI is a vast, complex and evolving phenomenon, heralding what has been rightly described as a new industrial revolution, but one with unpredictable consequences, so in

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NEWS
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The dangers of uncritical artificial intelligence (AI) use in legal practice are no longer hypothetical. In this week's NLJ, Dr Charanjit Singh of Holborn Chambers examines cases where lawyers relied on ‘hallucinated’ citations — entirely fictitious authorities generated by AI tools
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming sport, from recruitment and training to officiating and fan engagement. Writing in NLJ this week, Professor Dr Ian Blackshaw of Valloni Attorneys at Law explains how AI now influences everything from injury prevention to tactical decisions, with clubs using tools such as ‘TacticAI’ to gain competitive edges
The Solicitors Act 1974 may still underpin legal regulation, but its age is increasingly showing. Writing in NLJ this week, Victoria Morrison-Hughes of the Association of Costs Lawyers argues that the Act is ‘out of step with modern consumer law’ and actively deters fairness
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