Ksenya's notes:
We expect law and legal practices to change over time. I don't intend to be technologically deterministic. I do perceive these potential and actual transformation as systematic, affecting all expressions of a relationship between individuals, legal entities and a state in all it's complexity. I'm not talking about the fact that the laws regulating information technology, copyright etc need urgent transformation to be appropriate for the current landscape, this is kind of obvious. I'm not touching on the International Humanitarian Law here either which is another emergency. I'm talking about changes in private and professional lives of individuals and groups of individuals calling for the transformation of law, legal practices and what bothers me personally, access to justice.
To narrow down this complex topic I'd like to cover tools used in legal practice and potential technological developments in this area.
The concept been around for 20 years. Smart contracts have been criticized for it's efficiency - complexity of the program surpassing complexity of the normal legal document as well as the ability to capture meaning as well as the normal contract would. However, for the past 20 years, there was significant amount of experimentation in this field resulting in some interesting hybrids between "smart" and normal contract. We also wee that document automation through Legal Markdown becomes widely accepted.
# Quotes
Our institutions still take for granted that we live in a world of paper. We formalize our relationships with written contracts, written laws, and forms designed for paper.Smart contracts reduce mental and computational transaction costs imposed by either principals, third parties, or their tools. The contractual phases of search, negotiation, commitment, performance, and adjudication constitute the realm of smart contracts.
Nick Szabo (1997) - vwh.net
# See also - Future Law - Next Slide Distributed Contracts - Other Resources on Future Law