OpenLaw Enables Frictionless Legal Contracts Built on the Blockchain.
Entering demo phase with streamlined contract negotiation, management, and execution tools that transact on Ethereum.
Ask any transactional lawyer about their work and they’ll lament the countless hours they spend drafting and managing legal agreements, collecting relevant information from each side, negotiating routine terms, and sending out and following-up with parties to collect signatures. The process is slow, laborious, and makes the practice of law a painful endeavor.
At OpenLaw, we’ve been hard at work reimagining the transactional legal process from the ground up, building blockchain-enabled solutions that dramatically reduce the time and complication of executing legal agreements. Blockchain enables the creation of n-sided marketplaces, serving as a spine that connects disparate groups of people as they manage and coordinate group activity.
By relying on the Ethereum blockchain and OpenLaw, lawyers and their clients gain the ability to use a blockchain as a common infrastructure to manage and execute legal agreements in a trusted manner. And by relying on OpenLaw’s “draft” tools, we’re now able to further streamline the cumbersome process of contract negotiation and execution.
As we show in our latest demo, using OpenLaw’s new “draft” functionality, anyone can select a precedent agreement from our common repository, make minor tweaks, and send it off to the other side for further input and review.
Once received, the opposing party can quickly fill-in missing information, make minor changes to the agreement (if necessary), and sign the agreement with one click. After signature, the party that drafted the agreement is notified, can swiftly review any changes, and sign the agreement. By relying on a blockchain, we can move beyond the era of sending around drafts and digging through inboxes.
Using OpenLaw, anyone can create a legal agreement, leaving key terms open for the other side to input. Contracts effectively transform from static documents into a menu of acceptable options and clauses. A counterparty can select from acceptable terms and the entire agreement can be regenerated on the fly. The need for back-and-forth negotiation is lessened, and the entire process is mediated by the Ethereum blockchain.
To ease the pain of entering into agreements, OpenLaw has developed a new set of contract management tools that makes it easier for parties to keep track of and seamlessly regenerate agreements if needed. Every agreement generated via OpenLaw can be accessed, tracked, and recreated to ensure that no one ever loses a document ever again.
Unlocking the platform’s ease of access and convenience, OpenLaw is compatible with legacy legal tools, like Microsoft Word. Agreements executed via OpenLaw can be downloaded and saved as a Word document.
Moving Forward
The future of contracting is quickly coming into focus. At OpenLaw, we’ve been growing our team with bright engineers, law experts, and business developers to accelerate the growth of the company and functionality of the platform.
With that in mind we’d like to publicly welcome three new members of our team…
Jacqueline Outka — Senior Engineer
Prior to joining OpenLaw, Jacqueline was co-founder and software developer at Vyvygen, a 3D printing company. Jacqueline is a graduate of Yale University.
Mikolaj Szabo — Senior Engineer
Mikolaj was previously a Scala platform engineer for Gawker Media. He also spent time as a contributor to the publishing platform, Kinja. In addition, Mikolaj has experience as an e-commerce consultant on projects at large retailers like Tesco and Shop Direct Group.
Priyanka Desai — VP Operation and Business Development
Before joining OpenLaw, Priyanka attended the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. While in school, she gained experience at blockchain consortium R3 and with the NYSDFS on their virtual currency enforcement. Prior to law school, Priyanka worked for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and a New York law firm.
Over the next several months, we’ll be rolling out additional demos and are continuing to rapidly expand our team. We’re building the future of law.
