
A Smart Contract is a computer protocol intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. To be clear, Smart Contracts are not legal contracts… yet.
At the moment, a smart contract is not a legal contract because, as some may claim, a smart contract does not have the capability to capture the “trust” required to perform a contract. Check out Blockgeeks if your’e interested in more. Contracts take time, effort, negotiating, compromise. People love to rant about how “AI” or “blockchain” will never take away their jobs.
To an extent, that is true. Humans are social, and, yes, Blockchain is not capable of imitating human emotion.
There is nothing stopping a Smart Contract from advancing the way Legal Contracts Operate.
Negotiating will Never Go Away
As a law-clerk who works in a heavily transactional office, I am generally impressed by the skill a transactional attorney has when forming and negotiating contracts. An attorney learns about opposing side’s background; their weaknesses; their strengths; in order to get that upper hand against their opponent. In a sense, negotiating will never go away because it truly is an unpredictable art. Of the many things that Smart Contracts will eradicate, negotiating is unlikely one of them.
Drafting Terms for Basic Agreements Will No Longer Matter
Plain and simple. Attorneys usually find previously drafted contracts and recycle them for future deals because certain deals remain the same. It does not matter what industry you are in, these agreements will never change. However, these agreements still take time to write, edit, review. Theoretically, the only thing that is stopping a Smart Contract from automating generic terms and conditions is the nuanced percentages and numbers that both parties are fighting over. Yet, we fail to forget that this all occurs before the contract is finalized. Smart Contracts could save attorneys and non-attorneys hours because the “quid pro quo” aspect of the contract could never be fulfilled.
Attorneys Struggle to Retrieve Payments for their Contracts/ Contingency/ Hourly Rates- No More
It is commonly understood that attorneys make a lot of money. Big surprise. But many do not realize the difficulty or retrieving funds from their clients, and there are at times waiting periods for attorneys to get the money needed for their clients which was included in a negotiated agreement.
This is where Smart Contracts are revolutionary. Smart Contracts have the ability to exchange money, property, shares, investments, in a transparent manner and immediately.

Why Smart Contracts Will Thrive
Smart Contracts are like Escape Rooms. Escape Rooms are games where teams of people cooperatively solve puzzles and discover clues to accomplish a specific goal. Generally, teams have one hour to accomplish this goal to “escape,” otherwise they lose. Escape rooms are difficult, and generally, the escape room is never completed because one clue was never discovered or solved. By not discovering and solving the rest of the game’s clues, the team fails.
Now that you have an idea of what an Escape Room is, you should think of Smart Contract in the same way. Like an Escape Room, a smart contract is trying to accomplish a goal under a short period of time. There are thousands of moving pieces, but it is the Smart Contract performs all the sequential steps to accomplish a goal under a short time frame.
Let’s Say You Wanted to Rent a Property
You can earn more money through smart contracts. You no longer need to pay for Airbnb or a 3rd party service to handle your transactions, only advertising.
Smart Contracts contain Ledgers, which are basically the IDs for your particular transaction. You have a ledger which includes all the material terms and steps that you want to be fulfilled, and it is attached with all the different terms and actions that the renter is required to fulfill. Such a smart contract includes likely a bank account router number, withdraws money from one account and deposits that into your account, while also abiding to the terms included in your agreement. If any point there is an issue, the smart contract will not be completed. We can at least identify where something went wrong.
All you do is use a cryptocurrency (hopefully a stablecoin based on fiat currency) and encode your contract on the ledger. Everyone sees, and you accomplish automatic fulfillment. Brokers, real estate agents, hard money lenders, and anyone associated with the property game can profit. Smart Contracts basically take “quid pro quo” to an entirely new level, and although attorneys may be upset because this eradicates aspects of their expertise, it also improves the economic aspects of every contract.
Smart Contracts Will Help, And We Need to Learn to Work with This Technology

There is something that many fail to understand. Technology exists to improve our lives. It is not intended to ruin society. Technology exists to make our lives easier, as we can see through the Blockchain Food Supply-Chains such as Envisible, which is joining Mastercard to send preserved foods around the world. By including smart contracts and blockchain in food-supply chains, we can send food to third world countries without fearing that the food was contaminated in some way. By viewing every step of a transaction with transparency, Blockchain inherently improves our lives.
Please. Don’t look at Cryptocurrency as the asset that is going to change the world. The mechanisms which distribute and exchange cryptocurrency are the true engine to this constantly changing technology.
Smart Contracts might frighten attorney and non-technologists, but technology is supposed to help. Hopefully in some way, you feel a little more confident about this technology and it’s incredible potential. Visit Lawkchain for more
