Lawyers can leverage blockchain technology to streamline and simplify their transactional work, digitally sign and immutably store legal agreements. Using scripted text, smart contracts, and automated contract management reduces excessive time spent preparing, personalizing and maintaining standard law documents. These cost savings are passed on to the customer. Additionally, blockchain democratizes access to the justice system by cutting down on consumer complexity and lowering hefty legal fees.

Distributed ledger technology creates a shared ledger accessible by all parties to an agreement. Blockchain-based contracts have baked-in compliance, no surprises, and no room for misinterpretation. Additionally, non-technologists can better understand the transactions they enter into and what the smart contract represents.

Many of the manual tasks can be carried out automatically, which significantly decreases the hours allocated to drafting and amending legal documents. This cost is generally passed down to clients, which pushes hourly lawyer fees to astronomical rates. The introduction of smart contracts will accelerate and lower the cost of transactions between parties. A cost-efficient algorithm can automatically and transparently manage escrow accounts at a fraction of the cost of manual labor. Lower costs will increase the overall demand and accessibility for legal services.

Lawyers spend up to 48% of their time on administrative tasks, including transferring information between software and updating client trust ledgers. (Clio’s Legal Trends Report 2018.) Utilizing a legal agreement repository and pre-fabricated smart contracts, lawyers can automate non-billable administrative tasks and transactional work. Cutting down on excessive manual labor will also accelerate legal proceedings, which decreases costs to customers.

Blockchain technology can streamline, re-engineer, automate, disintermediate, and secure many processes in the legal industry without losing any of the judicial authority. Optimizing various industry features will make the legal and financial sectors more efficient and productive while lowering friction and costs.

Legal documents act as a honeypot for ill-intentioned hackers who seek to profit from the valuable confidential information created and maintained by lawyers. Instead of emailing sensitive data back and forth, lawyers can choose to store legal information on a decentralized, distributed ledger for append-only feeds, which increases data integrity. If evidence is tampered with or changed, the associated hash value will not match, making it clear that a change has occurred.