About Course:
10.5 Hour CLE Credit Course
The legal industry is undergoing profound changes, as the digital revolution takes its course. New technologies and innovative business models challenge the established position legal professionals have retained for centuries as sophisticated, high-earning advisors to every significant business transaction. With the advent of smart contract technology, business transactions of all kinds will experience a significant evolutionary step towards automation.
Contract forma on based on standardized templates, the software-guided execution of machine-accessible contract clauses and data-driven compliance solutions threaten to marginalize the role of legal counsel in many areas of business. Recently, blockchain – or distributed ledger technology (DLT) – has captured the minds of digital innovators, the broader financial industry and governments alike. The blockchain, a globally-shared, replicated database, tamper-proof through sophisticated consensus algorithms and strong cryptographic guarantees, enables a world of ancient data-silos to connect in completely unprecedented ways.
A future of standards-based, so ware-regulated commercial and public service-related transactions seems in close reach. Law firms that recognize the disruptive potential of blockchain technology early, possess a significant first mover advantage. In a blockchain-based future, legal firms will be service providers on a digital infrastructure. Understanding how law firms will realize their influence on business decisions in such a future, is today’s challenge.
OUR OFFER
We give legal professionals the tools necessary to be part of a digital future. The workshop teaches the basics of blockchain and smart contract technology. Hands-on examples and live coding sessions will demystify the phenomenon “blockchain” and introduce simple but effective strategies to make use of smart contracts today. To combine both legal and smart agreements in one cohesive process will be another focus of the workshop. The techniques taught allow legal professionals to combine their unique domain knowledge with real-world smart contract agreements, offering their clients the best of both worlds.
Prerequisites: No blockchain knowledge required.
COURSE OUTLINE
Module 1: INTRODUCTION TO BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
- Intro to Instructor
- Intro to Blockchain
- How this Course is Organized
- Key Definitions
- Commercial Products
- Computer Science
- Consensus
- Cryptography
- Exchange of value
- Ledgers
- Mining
- Participants
- Programming Language
- Securities
- SmartContracts / RegTech
Module 2: REGULATORY CONSIDERATIONS FOR BLOCKCHAIN
- US Developments
- Executive
- Legislative
- Judicial
- Administrative Law
- State Law
- EU Developments
- International Developments
- International agencies
- Other noteworthy jurisdictions
Module 3: LEGAL DEVELOPMENTS FOR MAJOR BLOCKCHAIN USE CASES
- Bitcoin / Cryptocurrency
- Securities / ICO
- Corporate Governance / DAO
- Rewards / Tokens
- Exchanges
- Shared Ledgers
- Software
- Smart Contracts
- Smart Regs
- Verification Services
Module 4: INTRODUCTION TO SMART CONTRACTS
- What is a Smart Contract?
- Upsides and limitations of smart contracts
- The Case for Smart Contracts – Why we need it
- Legal databases - GROWS requirement
- Generation
- Repository
- Obligation Management
- Workflow and Control
- Security
- The Complexity of Smart Contracts and Smart Legal Agreements – Why we need lawyers
- When Smart Contracts are inappropriate
- Smart Contract Legitimization: UCC Refresher
- Exercise: Try to create your own Smart Contract
- Oracles
Module 5: INTRODUCTION TO REGTECH
- What is RegTech
- What types of RegTech solutions are there?
- Practical example of SmartRegs
Module 6: THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY AND LAW
- Landscape of Use Cases / Industry Impact
- Artificial intelligence / Big Data
- Database Tools / Organization Tools
- Content Tools
- Careers for the Lawyers of the Future
