Welcome, Sabine Wehnert - turning legal AI into something you can actually trust

With Sabine Wehnert, the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security (RC Trust) at UA Ruhr welcomes a postdoctoral researcher dedicated to practical NLP solutions for the legal domain. In Ivan Habernal’s TrustHLT group, she works on search and recommender systems that support legal professionals in their daily research - improving the findability of relevant sources and ensuring that model outputs are reliable and justifiable in real workflows.

Sabine Wehnert is completing her PhD at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. In her dissertation, “From Explainable to Justifiable Legal Artificial Intelligence: Structuring Search and Knowledge Derived from Legal Textbooks,” she explores how to extract knowledge from legal textbooks and link it to statutes and case law to support robust search and exploration. She builds textbook-derived knowledge bases and prototypes, and evaluates retrieval approaches with regard to performance, robustness to bias, and explainability - connecting Legal NLP, Legal Information Retrieval, Knowledge Graphs, and human-centered methods.

Beyond research, Sabine enjoys time with friends, family, and her cats, stays active through various sports, engages with Japanese language and culture, and loves mushroom foraging in the fall.

We are excited about the collaboration and the impulses Sabine brings to trustworthy AI in legal contexts.