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Smart contracts are becoming an indispensable working companion for lawyers

1. Case of fact

Law firms are advocating the use of technology to complement the work of their lawyers. The blockchain, although its definition is unfamiliar to many legal professionals, is substantially helping many lawyers to reduce their work time while retaining, or sometimes increasing, their efficiency. 

Smart contracts have penetrated the legal sector and are here to stay. Blockchain-powered tools such as Supreme have been created to take tedious work out of the hands of lawyers, useful for any type of law firm, regardless of size.

2. Supreme's Implementation

We’ve been developing smart contract capability into a range of different initiatives, all of which will run on our own blockchain, Supreme. Supreme is a blockchain designed for, and run by, the legal industry, with key players forming the nodes which keep the network running. At its most fundamental, it provides stakeholders in the industry with a ledger of record, which radically enhances the way clients and lawyers trust one another in a digital environment and, in turn, improves the accessibility of legal services to people everywhere. While smart contract technology is still young, particularly in the field of commercial use cases, we have been able to launch and run a testnet of Supreme.

In addition to the blockchain itself, we’re developing a range of smart contracts tools that run on top of Supreme. Legaler ID, our own self-sovereign identity application, will allow lawyers to register their qualifications on Supreme and for clients to verify those qualifications so they can deal with lawyers confidently, while remaining remote. In line with our mission to use technology to make legal services more accessible, lawyers using Legaler ID will be able to earn Justice Tokens for free legal services they provide to disadvantaged clients.

When clients confirm the services have been rendered in full, a smart contract is triggered which automatically deposits the Justice Tokens in the lawyer’s wallet. This will be a huge step towards developing more sophisticated systems for rewarding socially crucial legal work without requiring the burden and cost of a human-supervised system. Thanks to smart contracts, the system is fully automated except for a handful of human confirmations.

3. Challenges 

I think, broadly speaking, the biggest theme behind the challenge of implementing blockchain today is the rapidly changing nature of its regulatory context. Any upgrade to a novel technology takes time, and even more so when that technology involves the handling of your most critical assets or information. In the time it takes to research, create policies around and engineer a blockchain solution, much can change. The most talked-about changes are tokens’ legal status in key jurisdictions. The suit by the SEC on Ripple over the alleged security status of its token, XRP, famously continues in US courts, with some commentators anticipating appeals to the Court of Appeals or even the Supreme Court, which will take years. It isn’t just cases about whether tokens are securities, either.

China recently banned most cryptocurrency mining in its borders, precipitating an exodus of miners from what was once the world’s biggest bitcoin mining country. There are also outstanding legal issues about the data that blockchains handle. The EU’s flagship privacy legislation, the GDPR, which protects users’ ownership over their personal data, is seen by some as at odds with the immutable nature of many blockchains. 

Legal issues abound but it would be wrong to suggest the fate of blockchain technology is fully in the hands of the regulators. Of course, there are internal challenges too. The user experience of cryptocurrency has come a long way from its early days, when simply buying a token was difficult. However, the design and usability of many of these applications remains fairly technical, which means it is used by only a small niche of people. The more friendly we can make blockchain tools, the wider adoption they will enjoy. That one is up to us, as creators and developers, to rise to the challenge.

4. Conclusion

Major technological change in the way we transact, deal and agree is inevitable in almost every sector. In our specific industry of the law, that change is computational law and digital agreements. These advancements pose massive benefits for all parties, like reducing costs of interpreting regulations, negotiating contracts and ultimately transactions costs. However, they are currently too expensive to realize. Human lawyering remains cheaper than a system of computation law which, today, would involve establishing human-powered and centralized overseeing authorities.

Blockchain changes that. With the right tools, anybody can create a digital agreement for something as simple as leasing a property for a weekend. This is significant because digital delivery of legal support (whether that be legal information or scenario-specific legal advice) means cheap delivery of legal support, and that delivers a huge benefit to civil society. We perceive the law as the set of rules that applies to everyone, but currently 5 billion people around the world have no access to legal help. Put simply, powering digital legal advice with blockchain will enable us to realize the law as it should be.

This is just the benefit that blockchain offers in our specific use case, but it’s a useful metaphor. Wherever it is implemented in our universe of constant human-to-human transactions, it bridges the ‘trust gap’ previously occupied by personal relationships or institutions. Now, in our increasingly distributed world, we can chat with, sell to or negotiate with strangers on the other side of the world, without privacy-invading and cost-inducing middlemen in the way.

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