Legal firms can streamline, re-engineer, automate, disintermediate, and secure many of legal processes without losing any of the judicial authority.
Blockchain enables legal firms to securely and transparently manage legal agreements and transform paper contracts into programmable, self-executing actions.
Instead of emailing sensitive data back and forth Law firms can use Dijets to store legal information on a decentralised, distributed ledger for append-only feeds, which increases data integrity. If evidence is tampered with or changed, the associated hash value will not match, making it clear that a change has occurred.
Blockchain can enable any legal organisation to digitally manage the entire lifecycle of a contract, not just from negotiation to signing, but also continuing over the whole term of the agreement, with transparency and permissioned-based access among parties in the network. Legal firms of all sizes can use smart contract logic to trigger business processes and events.
Consider for example a construction site with sensors which record the time and date of a delivery of a load and record it as arbitrary data on the blockchain. This event can be programmed to then trigger a smart contract to automatically notify the third party such as the bank for the receipt of the delivery thus confirming the terms have been met and for the payment to be released on that load delivery. Such Smart contracts provide huge opportunity for agile and forward-thinking firms.
A smart contract is essentially programmable code that facilitates the transfer of digital assets between parties under the agreed-upon stipulations or terms. It is similar to a traditional lega contract in most ways including definition of rules and penalties around the agreement except for the fact that it can also enforce the agreed-upon obligations automatically. Smart contracts help you exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the services of a middleman.
The following are some of the many immediate benefits that scalable Blockchain technology can bring to supply chain partners across the globe:
- Operational Simplification: Legal firms can leverage blockchain technology to streamline and simplify their transactional work, digitally sign and immutably store legal agreements.
- Document Storage & Maintenance: Smart contracts, and automated contract management reduces excessive time spent preparing, personalising and maintaining standard legal documents.
- Increase Transparency: Smart contracts have baked-in compliance, no surprises, and no room for misinterpretation. Even non-tech savvy can better understand the transactions they enter into and what the smart contract represents.
- Cost Reduction: Many of the manual tasks can be carried out automatically, which significantly decreases the hours allocated to drafting and amending legal documents. This cost is generally passed down to clients, which pushes hourly lawyer fees to astronomical rates. The introduction of smart contracts will accelerate and lower the cost of transactions between parties. A cost-efficient algorithm can automatically and transparently manage escrow accounts at a fraction of the cost of manual labor. Lower costs will increase the overall demand and accessibility for legal services.
- Automation Flows: Legal firms spend up to 48% of their time on administrative tasks, including transferring information between software and updating client trust ledgers. Utilising a legal agreement repository and pre-fabricated smart contracts, lawyers can automate non-billable administrative tasks and transactional work. Cutting down on excessive manual labor will also accelerate legal proceedings, which decreases costs to customers.
- Process Optimisation Blockchain technology can streamline, re-engineer, automate, disintermediate, and secure many processes in the legal industry without losing any of the judicial authority.