On Thursday, July 16, 2026, Ms. Alena Schmickl, Sr. Startup Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was invited by the Professorship for Legal Informatics, esp. Natural Language Processing as online guest speaker for the practical lecture series in the LL.M. Legal Informatics study program. During the lecture, which was held as a half-day workshop, the students gained interesting insights into the development and use of low-code and no-code applications in the cloud. The workshop concluded this semester's lecture series and covered various topics from the course Software Development for Lawyers.
After providing an overview of the history of AWS and the key benefits of cloud computing, our guest speaker discussed the practical advantages and disadvantages of using low-code and no-code approaches with the students. Ms. Schmickl then addressed the latest developments in this field, concluding with a discussion of how natural text and voice inputs can be used for application development in a next-level, no-code-based approach. Limitations such as the black-box behavior of AI models, intellectual property challenges, and hallucinations were also explored.
In the second part of the workshop, students had the opportunity to configure and test their own generative AI applications in small groups using integrity protection measures ("Guardrails") and present and discuss the results in class.
We would like to thank Ms. Schmickl for the workshop and for sharing her valuable insights with our students!