Bloomberg: On What Law Firms Can Do With the Blockchain

October 11, 2015

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Joe Dewey and Shawn Amuial from Holland & Knight are writing a series of articles on blockchain technology and its potential application to the legal industry at Bloomberg. Below, the article sets out practical uses of the blockchain and its potential applications in the future.

But for even the most entrepreneurial firm, a successful approach to the blockchain is not necessarily intuitive. Consider another paradigm shifting technology — the internet. There are not many “internet” practice groups still in existence.

There are, however, lawyers across many disciplines who have a deep understanding of the technology and the regulatory regime imposed upon various stakeholders involved with the internet, such as internet service providers, content providers and social media companies. The spectrum of laws that now impact these industry players is too broad to list, covering everything from anti-trust laws to FCC regulations.

As a result, there are regulatory lawyers who specialize in net neutrality regulations, corporate lawyers who handle corporate affairs for companies like Facebook and litigators who litigate intellectual property disputes involving internet based applications and technologies. Will the same thing happen with the blockchain? To some extent, most likely. There is, however, something unique about the blockchain and its relationship to the legal profession inasmuch as the blockchain has direct implications on how contractual relationships are formed and enforced. As transformative as the internet was to society, it did not fundamentally change the manner in which people contracted for goods and services.

It provided tools to make contracting easier and more efficient, but it did not require any fundamental policy changes or significantly change how lawyers practice law. Even the nature of the internet is different than the blockchain. While the internet created a revolution in terms of information sharing and global communication, the blockchain embodies a system that can facilitate multi-person interactions without the need for any third party intermediary—including the government.

In reality, the blockchain will have a far greater impact on the social contract and the organization of society in general than the internet alone has had. So where does that leave those law firms that recognize the significance of this technology and desire to best position their firms. We don’t know all the answers (or frankly any definitive ones), but we will offer a few suggestions that merit consideration by law firm management.

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About the Author
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About Richard Kastelein

Founder and publisher of industry publication Blockchain News (EST 2015), a partner at ICO services collective Token.Agency ($750m+ and 90+ ICOs and STOs), director of education company Blockchain Partners (Oracle Partner) – Vancouver native Richard Kastelein is an award-winning publisher, innovation executive and entrepreneur. He sits on the advisory boards of some two dozen Blockchain startups and has written over 1500 articles on Blockchain technology and startups at Blockchain News and has also published pioneering articles on ICOs in Harvard Business Review and Venturebeat. Irish Tech News put him in the top 10 Token Architects in Europe.

Kastelein has an Ad Honorem - Honorary Ph.D. and is Chair Professor of Blockchain at China's first Blockchain University in Nanchang at the Jiangxi Ahead Institute of Software and Technology. In 2018 he was invited to and attended University of Oxford's Saïd Business School for Business Automation 4.0 programme. Over a half a decade experience judging and rewarding some 1000+ innovation projects as an EU expert for the European Commission's SME Instrument programme as a startup assessor and as a startup judge for the UK government's Innovate UK division.

Kastelein has spoken (keynotes & panels) on Blockchain technology in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Beijing, Brussels, Bucharest, Dubai, Eindhoven, Gdansk, Groningen, the Hague, Helsinki, London (5x), Manchester, Minsk, Nairobi, Nanchang, Prague, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara (2x), Shanghai, Singapore (3x), Tel Aviv, Utrecht, Venice, Visakhapatnam, Zwolle and Zurich.

He is a Canadian (Dutch/Irish/English/Métis) whose writing career has ranged from the Canadian Native Press (Arctic) to the Caribbean & Europe. He's written occasionally for Harvard Business Review, Wired, Venturebeat, The Guardian and Virgin.com, and his work and ideas have been translated into Dutch, Greek, Polish, German and French. A journalist by trade, an entrepreneur and adventurer at heart, Kastelein's professional career has ranged from political publishing to TV technology, boatbuilding to judging startups, skippering yachts to marketing and more as he's travelled for nearly 30 years as a Canadian expatriate living around the world. In his 20s, he sailed around the world on small yachts and wrote a series of travel articles called, 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Seas' travelling by hitching rides on yachts (1989) in major travel and yachting publications. He currently lives in Groningen, Netherlands where he's raising three teenage daughters with his wife and sailing partner, Wieke Beenen.

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