Smart contracts can redesign legal agreements, but businesses beware
Smart contracts provide plenty of benefits, but find out why those benefits can be just one side of a double-edged sword. When was the last time you got a late payment? Chased an invoice? Waited for your monthly paycheck only to realize it’s late yet again? You might relate to these headaches as an investor, employee or client. But the tension that affects each of these unique parties is often caused by one unwavering contributor: an underlying traditional contract.Contracts affect every organization’s workforce, and 26% of employees are involved in managing these agreements at some point,....
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The Federal Bank of Atlanta and executive director of its Centre for Financial Innovation and Stability Larry Wall released a paper on smart contracts and their potential to change traditional legal proceedings. Wall writes: “In many circumstances, smart contracts may eventually be a more efficient way of contracting than traditional paper contracts.” Amid the birth of cryptocurrencies in 2009, a significant number of experts emphasized the important role smart contracts could play in establishing various sets of unalterable agreements on an irrefutable ledger. Some argued that the....
Smart contracts are an essential building block within the cryptocurrency ecosystem and are the core of many decentralized applications (dApps). These programs run when predetermined conditions are met to help automate workflows, execute agreements, and carry out other essential tasks that can be governed with “if/when…then…” statements. Programmed by developers, smart contracts are trustless, autonomous, decentralized, operate transparently, and are unable to be reversed or modified. These attributes make smart contracts a useful tool in reducing or even eliminating the need for....
A London law firm has announced plans to digitise its legal agreements using blockchain technology. In partnership with Stash, a Texan startup formed earlier this year, Selachii will swap its paper documents for self-executing 'smart contracts' run on a layer above bitcoin's blockchain. Selachii partner Richard Howlett told CoinDesk his firm, which has been researching various blockchain solutions since 2013, will start out with contracts such as wills, title registries and shareholder agreements. He said: "We envisage smart contracts being revolutionary in ... litigation across the world.....
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....
Over the last year, the concept of a "smart contract" has received renewed attention in legal and business circles. Advancements in blockchain technology have led some to believe that smart contracts could soon offer alternatives to traditional commercial and financial agreements, with dire results for the legal and financial sectors. While this enthusiasm may be premature, the legal profession nonetheless remains mostly unaware of this important emerging technology and the long-term implications for their profession. In this context, "smart contract"....