Legal Design on a Blockchain
The current trend in the legal world shows an innovative, human-centered approach towards laws and contracting. It is known as “Legal Design”. This trend is primarily focused on the end user’s experience, whether they’re a layman or a legal professional. It aims to make law and contracts more engaging, useful and accessible.
This growing movement’s goal is to prevent legal problems later on by clearly visualizing laws and agreements at an early stage. This ensures a matching of expectations of those involved. It aims to create a fair legal system for everyone, by having the legalese making way for plain language.
While Legal Design is still relatively new, there are already appealing examples of how this concept can be executed and used.
Two visual examples of Legal Design thinking are VisualContracts, which developed a visual representation of Facebook’s privacy statement and Jincom, a South African initiative that visualizes contracts in to make them understandable for those that have difficulty with understanding and engaging with standard contracts. Visual representations aid comprehension of complex phenomena and large volumes of data, overcoming deficiencies in experience and/or cognitive ability. These visual contract examples are based on the legal premise that as long as all parties are aware of the implications of an agreement, the form in which it is presented is irrelevant.
By working backward, starting from the point of view of the end-user, a new way of thinking has emerged and become mandatory. The new GDPR regulations, the biggest change in data protection laws in 20 years, are a good example of this movement and a first widespread approach to Legal Design thinking. The regulations hold no less than 7 references to clear and plain language, making it a core requirement of the regulations. Various tools are already available to judge GDPR agreements based on their clarity.
This apparent paradigm shift in the way the legal profession operates makes way for all kinds of opportunities for innovative lawyers, challenging them to create insightful and efficient processes with better outcomes. Creativity and technological knowledge are key in this digital legal era. Professionals need to keep up with the latest developments and the rising expectations of their (future) clients. This requires research, scoping and insight in lateral- and visual thinking, prototyping and testing. Legal designs need to be functional and 100% correct through pre-audited workflows.
However, despite their constructive intentions, Legal Design and plain language are often lacking two important requirements; automating and transparency.
Transparency can be supplied by blockchain technology. A blockchain ensures a paper trail of transactions and stores all information regarding the contract or process, while making this stored information immutable. This creates an objective chain of events for all parties involved in a legal situation.
With Live Contracts, LegalThings One offers a unique possibility to automate these individual requirements to create legally binding designs on any desired blockchain fabric. A LiveContract is based on a derivative of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). By introducing an new, industry wide notation, LegalThings One delivers an all-boxes-ticked framework supplying the earlier mentioned fruit pickers contract throughout international M&A transactions. Creativity and vision are key in this process, due to the endless possibilities. Various high profile parties such as The Dutch government, CMS Law, and the Waves platform have already committed themselves to the Live Contracts philosophy of bringing Legal Design to the blockchain.
If you are interested in learning more about Live Contracts and the LegalThings One protocol, visit the LegalThings One website, or send an email to support@legalthings.io.
