Smart Contracts – Will it Replace a Lawyer?

What is a Smart Contract?

Smart contracts are automated contracts with the terms and conditions of the agreement between purchaser and vendor being legitimately written down into lines of code. The agreements and the code contained in that exist over a distributed, decentralized blockchain system. Smart contracts allow the trusted agreements and transactions performed among unique and anonymous parties without the requirement of a legal expert, central authority, or external implementation system. Smart contracts deliver transactions to be irreversible, transparent, and traceable.

Background

Smart contracts were first depicted by Nick Szabo, a cryptographer and a computer scientist in the year 1996. In due course of years, Szabo amended the idea and discharged a few publications, where he depicted the concept of building up contract law related to business practices through the structure of electronic commerce protocols between unknown persons on the internet.

Advantages of Smart contracts 

• Full control: Smart contracts remove the requirement of a mediator, basically giving the user the complete control of the agreement.
• Assurance: Smart contracts make sure that no one can lose or steal the documents, as they are encoded and securely stored on a verified, shared ledger. Besides, the purchaser does not need to believe individuals they are managing and vice versa, as the fair-minded system of smart contracts substitute trust.
• Savings: The expensive fees associated with notaries, counselors, estate agents, and numerous different delegates are not required for smart contracts.
• Security: Smart contracts if implemented accurately, are tough to hack. Besides, ideal situations for smart contracts are secured with complex cryptography, where the safety of the documents is assured.
• Effectiveness: Smart contracts save a great deal of time, typically wasted on manual processing of loads of paper reports, sending or moving them to different places.

Working of a smart contract

• In contrast to a standard contract, which is drafted by a legal advisor, signed by both the parties, and upheld by law, a smart contract sets an association with cryptographic code.

• Succinctly put smarts contracts are self-executing, written in code, and fulfilled only if the conditions are met.
• Finally, smart contracts evacuate the requirement of an intermediary, which means parties going into the agreement can legitimately transact directly with one another.

Does smart contract replace lawyers?

Smart contracts have been regarded conceivably revolutionary over few industries with experts saying that to a certain extent that it will substitute traditional contracts and legal counselors. The individuals, who state smart contracts will make legal advisors worthless, accept the whole legal agreement is communicated in its code. It implies that code is law and legal counselors will not be required, except they are also developers of these smart contracts. Moreover, smart contracts are to be seen as a code, not a law, which is used to automate the implementation of a fundamental legal agreement. Hence, they are not legitimately binding.

Benefits of Smart Contract

As a replacement to traditional contracts with a central plan of action, given below are the benefits of the smart contracts offered by organizations:

• Directly dealing with clients
• Protection from failure
• Trustworthy
• Reduce fraud
• Cost-effective
• Maintaining Records

Disadvantages of Smart Contracts

• Absence of universal guidelines concentrating on blockchain technology and related technologies like use cases, smart contracts, and mining such as cryptocurrency make these technologies hard to manage.
• Smart contracts are difficult to implement, as it is still a generally new idea, and research is always carried out to comprehend the smart contract and to understand their implications completely.
• Smart contracts are permanent. When there is a change which has to be included in the agreement, another agreement must be made and implemented in the blockchain.

Wrap up The stand of governments, banks, and financial controllers on cryptocurrencies have been extending from cautious to deliberately accepting. The technology behind blockchain and smart contracts has been generally acknowledged as revolutionary, and it is being executed at different levels. Though the smart contracts were created in association with cryptocurrencies, they are typically implemented in the finance and banking industries.