Introduction
The integration of algorithmic systems into public administration has contributed to the emergence of what may be described as an “automated state”. In this context, interactions between individuals and public authorities are increasingly mediated by automated systems contributing to the attribution, recognition, or denial of rights.
Within this evolving landscape, the role of lawyers becomes particularly significant. The second half of the Twentieth century, often described as “the Age of Rights”, witnessed the growing centrality of lawyers as intermediaries between legal guarantees and their practical enforcement. The question today is whether this role remains central in the age of the automated state.
This contribution argues that the automation of public authority does not diminish the importance of lawyers but intensifies it. More specifically, it contends that lawyers providing legal representation play a crucial role in safeguarding effective judicial protection through two interconnected forms of intervention: first, through forms of micro-agency that allow them to contest and shape algorithmic decision-making processes; and second, through the mobilization of semantic capital, namely the interpretive capacity to translate concepts between technical systems, legal norms, and individual experiences.
While many legal actors are involved in this transformation, this contribution focuses specifically on lawyers providing legal representation in administrative and judicial proceedings where automated systems are deployed by public authorities. This perspective is particularly relevant because it highlights the role lawyers play in safeguarding the rule of law where automated systems may erode procedural guarantees.
The argument proceeds in two steps. First, the contribution examines how lawyers exercise micro-agency in engaging with automated systems from a procedural perspective. Second, it analyzes the lawyer–client relationship as a form of epistemic mediation within technologically complex environments and argues that semantic capital has become a crucial resource for ensuring meaningful legal representation in the automated state. Through these dimensions, lawyers contribute to the ongoing construction of what may be understood as an emerging “age of digital rights.”
Lawyers’ Micro-Agency in the Automated State
Algorithmic systems are now deployed across a wide range of domains, including welfare governance, migration control, and risk assessment. Their outputs increasingly affect the distribution of rights, resources, and opportunities and are often treated as forms of evidence within administrative and judicial proceedings.
Automated systems introduce a qualitative shift in the conditions of legal decision-making. Unlike traditional processes, automated systems are often opaque, probabilistic, and embedded in complex socio-technical systems. Concerns relating to bias, discrimination, data quality, and explainability challenge foundational principles underpinning the right to a fair trial and effective judicial protection.
Concrete examples illustrate these risks. In the Netherlands, the SyRI welfare-fraud detection system was challenged before domestic courts because of concerns relating to privacy, opacity, and discriminatory profiling. In the private sector, the SCHUFA litigation before the Court of Justice of the European Union demonstrated how automated credit-scoring systems may produce significant legal effects while remaining largely inaccessible to affected individuals.
The central risk, therefore, is not merely automation as such, but the emergence of forms of decision-making that are effectively incontestable by design. Individuals affected by automated decisions may be structurally unable to access, interpret, or challenge the operation of algorithmic systems. It is precisely within this context that the role of lawyers providing legal representation becomes particularly significant.
Within this transformed epistemic landscape, lawyers exercise what may be described as micro-agency: the capacity of legal actors to operate within procedural structures in ways that shape how rights are invoked, interpreted, and enforced in concrete cases. In the context of algorithmic decision-making, this micro-agency increasingly involves engagement with automated systems themselves.
Lawyers’ micro-agency unfolds across three dimensions:
First, lawyers must identify whether algorithmic systems are involved in decision-making, often relying on access-to-information mechanisms technology literacy. Effective representation may therefore depend not only on legal expertise, but also on the ability to understand the technological infrastructures shaping public decisions.
Second, lawyers activate procedural fairness rights—such as access to documents, the duty to provide reasons and transparency obligations—in order to render automated processes intelligible. Through these mechanisms, they seek to uncover the underlying logic of automated decisions by requesting access to datasets, interrogating model design, or challenging the absence of meaningful human oversight. In litigation concerning welfare automation systems, for instance, lawyers have increasingly argued that public authorities cannot rely on automated outputs without providing sufficient explanations capable of being contested before a court.
Third, lawyers engage in the critical assessment of algorithmic evidence. This involves translating technical features—such as data biases, model inaccuracies, or discriminatory outcomes—into legally relevant arguments framed in the language of procedural guarantees and fundamental rights. This translation is not merely technical but inherently normative, because it determines how technological issues become legally intelligible within judicial and administrative proceedings. For instance, evidence that a predictive policing system disproportionately targets minority communities may be reframed legally as an issue of indirect discrimination and unequal treatment.
In these respects, the lawyer’s role assumes a broader norm-shaping function. By mobilizing procedural tools and engaging in strategic litigation, lawyers contribute to shaping emerging legal standards governing algorithmic decision-making. Their micro-agency, therefore, extends beyond individual cases and participates in broader processes through which courts and legal systems define the boundaries of acceptable automation within decision-making.
Semantic Capital and Effective Judicial Protection
While micro-agency captures the procedural dimension of legal intervention, it does not exhaust the role of legal representation in the automated state. The lawyer’s function also operates through a relational dimension that becomes increasingly important in technologically complex environments.
The growing use of algorithmic systems intensifies informational asymmetries between individuals and public authorities, thereby reshaping the conditions of effective judicial protection and, in particular, equality of arms. Within this context, lawyers increasingly function as epistemic mediators. By interpreting and contextualizing algorithmic processes, they enable clients to understand how decisions affecting them have been produced and how they may be challenged.
This dynamic can be observed, for example, in asylum disputes where claimants receive notices denying protection on the basis of automated evidence: lawyers often become the only actors capable of translating technical or bureaucratic language into understandable terms.
At the same time, this mediating role depends not only on legal expertise or personal attitude, but also on what may be described as semantic capital: the interpretive, linguistic, and conceptual resources enabling lawyers to move across multiple semantic registers, including the technical language of algorithmic systems, the normative language of law, and the experiential language of clients.
The capacity to establish meaningful connections between these domains is central to effective legal representation. Semantic capital therefore becomes a condition for meaningful participation in technologically mediated legal processes. Yet semantic capital should not be understood solely as an individual attribute. The ability to mobilize semantic capital may be unevenly distributed and often contingent upon access to resources, interdisciplinary training, and institutional support.
For this reason, semantic capital should be understood also as a relational and collective resource. Increasingly, effective legal representation depends upon collective and interdisciplinary forms of expertise. Lawyers providing legal representation will often engage with data scientists, technical experts, and specialized professionals capable of contributing to the interpretation and contestation of algorithmic systems.
Accordingly, the exercise of micro-agency becomes embedded within broader forms of collective agency through which different forms of knowledge are mobilised to render automated systems intelligible and legally contestable.
The human element involved in translating, contextualising, and sharing knowledge therefore remains essential. Even where decision-making processes become increasingly automated, meaningful access to justice continues to depend on human mediation capable of bridging the gap between technological complexity and legal protection.
Conclusion
The emergence of the automated state reshapes the relationship between individuals and public authorities by introducing additional layers of technological complexity into decision-making processes. Automated systems increasingly influence the allocation of rights, opportunities, and social benefits, often through procedures that remain opaque to those affected by them. As a consequence, ensuring effective judicial protection in technologically mediated environments becomes not only a question of substantive rights, but also of maintaining meaningful access to procedural guarantees.
Within this context, the role of lawyers acquires renewed importance. Through micro-agency, lawyers contribute to rendering automated systems accountable and contestable by activating procedural safeguards, challenging opaque forms of decision-making, and translating technical issues into legally relevant claims. At the same time, through their relational engagement with clients and the mobilisation of semantic capital, they help individuals understand how automated decisions are produced and how they may be challenged before administrative authorities and courts.
In this perspective, the significance of legal representation in the automated state therefore extends beyond individual disputes. By engaging with algorithmic governance through litigation and interpretation, lawyers contribute to shaping the emerging legal standards governing the use of automated systems in public administration. In this sense, they participate directly in the broader evolution of digital constitutionalism and in the adaptation of the rule of law to technologically mediated forms of governance.
Rather than rendering lawyers obsolete, the emergence of the automated state reinforces the continuing necessity of human legal mediation. As public decision-making becomes increasingly automated, the ability to connect technical complexity, legal reasoning, and human experience will remain essential to ensuring that the “Age of Rights” evolves into an effective age of digital rights.
