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Blockchain tools are very useful for law firms. But few know how to implement them.

1. Case of fact

Many law firms are considering using technology to help them draw up contracts and keep track of their contract activities in detail. 

The blockchain's support for law firms ensures the use of smart contracts, with all the benefits they bring, but also guarantees the security of the data contained in these contracts, which is an important factor in today's world.

To find out more about how a law firm can make use of a blockchain tool, The Impact Lawyers asked Mark Waser, Chief Technology Officer of the Government Blockchain Association. 

2. Blockchain implementation

Smart contracts are required for almost anything except for simple data storage. Indeed, contrary to what most people believe, even Bitcoin uses smart contracts. The distinction is that they are built into the blockchain and users cannot add more smart contracts. Smart contract notifications also make it much easier to track what is occurring on the blockchain without having to monitor every single block. As a result, we use smart contracts in virtually everything that we do.

The crown jewels of our technology is the Government Business Blockchain Platform which is a blockchain interconnection fabric that allows blockchain-based services to be provided by best-of-breed blockchains and dapps across blockchains. The first requirements for such a system are distributed gateways between the blockchains and a utility token that can cross the blockchains and flow throughout the system so that services can be paid for. Whenever smart contracts are available on a given blockchain, we use smart contracts for our cross-blockchain tokens, to convert between our tokens and the native blockchain currencies, to manage locks so that gateway machines don’t conflict with each other and to allow multiple gateway machines to verify information that another gateway machine has conveyed. 

Our core blockchain is Hyperledger Besu which is a Private Proof-of-Authority (rather than expensive Proof-of-Work) version of Ethereum. For both this blockchain and the public Ethereum main net we use enhanced ERC-20 smart contracts to provide the extended addressing and cross-blockchain security necessary. We have also created new Solidity contracts to convert between our tokens and Ethereum on the main net and for the other purposes listed above. On other smart contract blockchains, we need to write similar contracts in their smart contract language. For non-smart contract blockchains (e.g. Hive), we use very convoluted data structures and much more extensive monitoring services to provide the same functionality.

We also use smart contracts for a very wide variety of other purposes and applications.

Source: Freepik

3. Challenges

At this point, the challenges are mainly political, not technical. The projects that fail – and there have been many huge ones attempted by large consortiums (e.g. international shipping) – fail because of lack of willingness to share data and other issues in forging operating agreements. Further, blockchain tools do NOT require any more expertise than most database tools – unless you get *really* deep into very complex smart contracts – particularly on the public blockchains. Note that this is primarily due to the immaturity and generally poor quality of programming tools and debuggers – and, on public networks, due to the need to protect yourself against malicious actors.

4. Conclusion

Implementation of blockchain in a company provides security, interoperability and other advantages. They also can use built in cryptocurrency as “reward points” to incentivize people. Where blockchains really shine, however, is in allowing multiple entities to cooperate effectively in a trustless environment. If there is *any* reason why you are considering a distributed database, you would be making a HUGE mistake if you don’t consider blockchain instead.

Government Blockchain Association website.