Smart Lawyers Will Make Smart Contracts
Interests in smart contracts have grown lately especially with the formation of The DAO – Decentralized Autonomous Organization which is based on Ethereum. What Are Smart Contracts? They are computer applications in which contracts are written into computer code and perform or execute automatically. These applications are expected to run as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. These trusted and permanent records shared across parties through a tamper-proof network have the potential to reduce costs, increase automation, and remove....
Related News
No, smart contracts will not rid the world of lawyers, despite the greatest efforts of blockchain innovators. At least, that's according to Nick Szabo, the man widely credited with inventing the smart contract concept itself. During the keynote address at the Smart Contracts Symposium at Microsoft's New York headquarters this week, Szabo gave an update on the industry he helped create – a talk that was followed by a string of commenters from smart contract startups. Addressing a group of about 250 people (comprised largely of members of the blockchain trade association, the Chamber of....
Hackers are soon going to be the new lawyers as the adoption of smart contracts increase in the near future. The advent of Blockchain 2.0 and Blockchain 3.0 has given rise to new ways of automation using Bitcoin’s underlying technology. There are special cryptocurrency platforms like Ethereum, Rootstock, Counterparty, Lisk and more that allows people to create smart contracts on the blockchain. These smart contracts enable automation by allowing developers to set trigger conditions. These trigger conditions are certain prerequisites, when met, will execute the function programmed on the....
With the recent attack on the Ethereum DAO, it raises the question of how much technical knowledge do individuals and organizations need to know before applying smart contracts to their businesses? Smart Contracts Have a Ways to go and Need Developers. Recently, an article from the Australian Financial Review explained that distributed ledger tech may be....
A law firm in New York is reviewing how the use of the blockchain technology can remove many of the manual steps that are required when it comes to executing smart contracts. The law firm, Hogan Lovells, is considering how smart contracts and the blockchain can automatically execute agreements without the need for human interaction, thus helping to free up lawyers time. In a blog from the Wall Street Journal, the use of smart contracts will ensure that terms of a contract are enforced in a faster time; however, this also means that there needs to be a closer relationship between the....
In a new world of smart contracts, many expect that formal written contracts, and the lawyers that draft them, will be obsolete. It is presumed that the agreed-upon term sheet will be simply given to a software developer to convert into smart contract computer code.That code will be the final agreement. But what does a software developer know about drafting code to implement a traditional term sheet? The negotiating parties know their deal, and the lawyers know the applicable law and the customary terms, but the software developer does not. A traditional term sheet is not enough. A “smart....