Financial blockchain coalition R3 has assembled a group of ten legal firms in an effort to educate lawyers on the contractual intricacies surrounding the live deployment of distributed ledger technologies.
In creating the Legal Center of Excellence (LCoE), R3 is paving the way for member firms to move from testing to live production of blockchain technologies in the business-to-business arena.
The ten firms joining the initiative are Ashurst, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, Crowell & Moring, Fasken, Holland & Knight, Perkins Coie, Shearman & Sterling, and Stroock.
Members of the LCoE will have access to R3’s research on blockchain that provides a view into the concerns of their clients, monthly project demos that give members a practical understanding of real world blockchain applications, as well as Corda training workshops that have specifically been developed for attorneys.
This will ensure that law practioners have a strong understanding of the technology, says Richard Gendal Brown, CTO at R3, and are equipped to advise their clients on new and emerging legal and regulatory issues associated with blockchain and R3's Corda platform.
“A key feature of Corda is its ability to record an explicit link between human-language legal prose documents and smart contract code," says Brown. "This enables agreements between businesses to be executed automatically with minimal need for human intervention. The LCoE will allow R3 to directly engage with the lawyers that will be advising on and helping draft the smart contracts used by the network of Corda users across the globe.”
The R3 initiative apes a similar legal engagement programme launched by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance last year.