It feels as though people have been talking smart contracts for a long time. Like most new innovations, it will take a specific use case (i.e. business challenge important enough to justify adoption) to kick it out of the domain of academics & legal conferences, and into commerce & industry. Perhaps this has already happened. If it has, be sure to give me a shout.
Yesterday, I came across an interesting analysis of smart contracts from Charles Kerrigan, a lawyer at big law firm CMS. It was compiled by Richard Troman of the blog Artificial Lawyer’s (must read for the legal techies out there). Mr Kerrigan was giving a speech as part of a panel giving evidence to the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain at the end of last year. Whilst the speech is detailed, it provides an interesting deep dive into some of the pervasive questions out there on smart contracts. As Richard Troman’s points out:
…as the prospect of their use in day to day legal work draws ever closer, what should we be focusing on? How should we approach this subject and what really will be the key issues we need to grapple with before this quintessentially legal technology becomes mainstream?
The full extract is posted on Artificial Lawyer’s blog here. If you have any thoughts, or know of any live smart contract use cases in industry, be sure to let me know.
Andrew Essa 