Enterprise software firm R3 has organized a group of legal firms to set up a Legal Center of Excellence (LCoE), Finextra reported
R3 leads a blockchain consortium of over 200 banks, financial services firms, technology companies, central banks, regulators, and trade associations. It also works with a number of central banks and regulators around the world.
The new initiative is aimed at educating lawyers on the contractual intricacies associated with the live deployment of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). It will make the way for member firms to move to the next phase – from testing to live production – of implementation of blockchain technologies.
The firms joining the initiative include Ashurst, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, Crowell & Moring, Fasken, Holland & Knight, Perkins Coie, Shearman & Sterling, and Stroock. They will have access to R3’s blockchain research, monthly project demos, and Corda training workshops.
“A key feature of Corda is its ability to record an explicit link between human-language legal prose documents and smart contract code," Richard Gendal Brown, CTO at R3, said. "This enables agreements between businesses to be executed automatically with minimal need for human intervention. The LCoE will allow R3 to directly engage with the lawyers that will be advising on and helping draft the smart contracts used by the network of Corda users across the globe.”
In April 2017, an Ethereum blockchain-focused consortium – Enterprise Ethereum Alliance – also announced similar initiative with the launch of Legal Industry Working Group.
