Lawyers know firsthand how long it can take to confirm proof of delivery for an international shipment or how much time is needed for lawyers to cross-check the accuracy of data coming from faraway places before fulfilling an agreement. You can visit the official website of the most recommended trading platform online.
Lawyers are constantly handling transactions with people and entities in other parts of the world. Almost every product and service in the legal industry relies on components, materials, or labour from other countries. Traditional law companies have been slow to develop new products and services using blockchain – but they’re changing their tune.
In the past year or so, more than a dozen legal technology startups and several prominent law firms in the US have announced plans to incorporate blockchain technology into their businesses.
Accessibility of legal sector
While some parts of the legal industry might be resistant to change, there’s no denying that blockchain technology is making its way into the sector. Introducing this new approach can make the legal sector more accessible. It will offer more ways to prove identity, a digital history of transactions, and the legitimacy of data.
For example, blockchain technology can make verifying the legitimacy of electronic signatures easier. Many lawyers already use electronic signatures for their contracts. But relying solely on an electronic signature can be risky.
Using blockchain technology, lawyers will be able to confirm the actual identity of their clients. It will also come in handy for preventing fráud and corruptíon in elections by making sure votes are counted correctly and counted only once. The financial sector has been driving development efforts. Still, there are many ways that this could affect non-financial companies as well— especially those that rely on suppliers or customers based abroad.
How will Bitcoin reduce costs in the legal industry?
Law companies integrating bitcoin and blockchain technology have reported significant cost reductions in their business processes. For example, the amount of time spent on auditing contracts and ensuring data is accurate has been reduced by up to 80%.
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Blockchain can slow down significantly when there’s a high volume of transactions or users. That’s why some legal firms are integrating bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to speed up the processing of transactions on their blockchains. By paying for their usage in bitcoin instead of fiat currency, law firms can experiment with different ways to solve this problem.
How will Bitcoin improve security in the legal industry?
While it’s still being determined how users in the legal sector will use bitcoin and blockchain, we can guess because of the similarities between law firms and financial institutions. For example, in both types of companies, user data is contained in the blockchain. And protecting this data requires sophisticated security measures along with robust encryption algorithms.
At this point, firms will likely keep a private blockchain with a public access layer on top of it. It could look similar to how exchanges are set up now, with a public web interface that lets customers trade cryptocurrencies while asking them to provide their identity information through an encrypted system.
Use case
- Intellectual Property
Protecting intellectual property such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks is a complex process. It’s expensive for law firms to manage their clients’ IP portfolios, especially when multiple parties are involved. Blockchain records of transactions could streamline and simplify transactions by making the process more transparent and traceable.
- Billing
Most law firms use time-tracking software that allows them to bill clients hourly. But this requires lawyers and their staff to enter data into several systems, which can be time-consuming and subject to errors. Blockchain technology can eliminate some of these inefficiencies and reduce costs by creating a single source of truth for legal billing information while speeding up the delivery of invoices to clients.
- Litigation
Blockchain technology could improve the efficiency of legal discovery and the process lawyers use to collect information from each other during a trial. Today, discovering evidence from counterparties and service providers can take months. Blockchain-based discovery systems can reduce the time to just a few days and make it easier for lawyers to share data across multiple jurisdictions cost-effectively.
- Compliance
Law firms must retain audit trails for every transaction they conduct on their client’s behalf. Investigations often demand access to this information, which is why law firms are already trying out different blockchain-based record-keeping solutions.
- Contracts
Contracts are notoriously difficult to enforce, and there’s no one-size-fits-all contract format. But blockchain may help simplify or automate the contract creation process, which users can then store in the blockchain for future reference.
- Recovery
Law firms often have to recover money from customers after legal disputes arise, and recoveries are often time-consuming and expensive. Blockchain technology can help streamline this process, allowing banks to provide rapid and efficient services to law firms while they keep their costs down in the long run.
