KL Conference delegates to get AI insights from judge

ADVERTORIAL

How company directors comply with their obligations in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be one of the key themes of a presentation to be delivered by Federal Court justice Michael Lee to delegates at BCR Advisory’s accounting and legal conference in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur in September.

“I suspect that a lot of people going into companies start with very good intentions. They get one of these board packs and they realise very quickly that they simply cannot absorb all of the information.” Federal Court Justice Michael Lee.

Justice Lee comes to the conference having in March delivered judgment in the mammoth directors duty case brought by ASIC against the senior management and board of Star Entertainment Group in Australian Securities and Investments Commission v Bekier (Liability Judgment) [2026] FCA 196.

Justice Lee told Insolvency News Online (iNO) that his findings in the judgment bore relevance for directors of small to medium sized enterprises as well as large, publicly listed entities.

“There are some lessons one can draw from Bekier which can be deployed in different contexts such as directorships more generally in SMEs and also the responsibilities of people who aren’t directors but hold positions in companies like the general counsel,” he said.

“There will be some very general themes about the extent of diligence that the law requires and the way in which the law has developed in that regard.

“The other thing that I consider to be of great interest is the tension between the acutely personal roles that one performs in a company which call for judgment calls and subjective analysis with the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence.”

In deliberating over the issues in Bekier the judge confronted the challenge posed to those running companies and their advisors by the sheer volume of information that digitisation had created, and the consequent growth in regulation that’s followed.

Speaking of a recent case he said he had looked at the director board packs and concluded that the amount of information being provided to the board by management was beyond the capacity of even the most conscientious directors.

“What is happening is people are pretending they are not using AI,” he said.

“They’re getting these massive board packs. They’re doing 20 to 30 page summaries. As I noted in the Bekier judgment if a company is going to use AI it has to have a policy about it and it has to be transparent and there has to be some way to preserve the confidentiality of the material, particularly in respect of legal professional privilege and the like and there also has to be a way of working out where in the process do you use it.

“Do you use it at the management level in order to condense information, in order to make it more for all or do you allow management to effectively dump material and then use it in a way of making it digestible?

“We do live in a world of information overload and there are ways of coping with that but one has to be transparent about how that’s done and it can’t at the end of the day be a substitute for human judgment,” he said.

In between discussing the challenge and opportunity posed by AI Justice Lee will regale delegates with tales about the time a legal brief comprising 40 lever arch folders was delivered to his chambers – not by bicycle courier – why regulators are must provide guidance on AI usage; and why common sense could and should be applied to reform court rules around insolvency litigation.

The BCR Advisory Events Conference will be held at the Shangri-La Hotel, Kuala Lumpur on September 23, 24 and 25.

View Conference Program.