Beyond silos: Bridging the gap between law and software engineering – challenges, successes, and lesson drawing

Abstract

This paper presents lessons learned and best practices developed for an interdisciplinary research project bridging law and software engineering, in the context of regulatory compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). By exploring challenges and successes encountered in such collaborations, it presents practical tools to support legal scholars in fostering meaningful interdisciplinary cooperation with software engineer researchers. Particularly, this paper brings examples on how to address the gap between the legal discipline and legal provisions, which often lack a nuanced understanding of technical realities, and software engineering, which may overlook critical regulatory contexts. The paper specifically discusses early-stage research challenges in, first, establishing common conceptual and operational ground between disciplines, addressing terminological gaps and divergent methodological assumptions. A second early step in interdisciplinary research involves defining a realistic research scope by balancing normative legal goals with technical feasibility, which should incentivise legal scholars to regard other normative sources than legal provisions. Finally, this paper addresses particularly a hybrid process for translating legal provisions into structured, traceable requirements, incorporating legal design techniques to preserve both legal accuracy and technical usability. By documenting these practices and challenges, the paper fills a gap in existing legal literature on interdisciplinarity methods, empowering legal scholars to engage confidently in collaborative research, advancing both academic inquiry and societal impact.