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Developing ‘big’ tech will change the law business. Get onboard!

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: April 21, 2017

Good morning. Cavs won last night. Yay.

I’m now going to create two new terms for legal technology: “Big” and “little” legal tech.

“Little” tech, as I’m defining it, consists of applications. “Big” tech consists of the things that underlie and/or power those applications—operating systems, databases, artificial intelligence, the “cloud” and so on.

We’ve (humans) had most of the big tech down for the last few decades. But there are major developments coming in big tech that will affect all of the little tech in the near future. So get ready.

Like this: Pretty soon, you’ll be able to click on a button and an artificially intelligent bot will write a contract (see: Juro) that will be secured in a blockchain.

What does that mean? Basically, that “the cloud,” which is technology of the present (not the future, as someone wrote recently) is never going to be secure enough for the legal industry and will soon be going the way of MSDOS 1.0, at least as far as the law biz goes. The secure future will lie in decentralized, completely secure databases built on “blockchain” technology that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. This technology is making its way out into the rest of the world and everyone is starting to get onboard with it.

In a nutshell, blockchains are a decentralized, distributed, self-authenticating, secure means to carry on transactions—a way of securing financial transactions, signatures, team document creation and so on. They are not accessible outside the network which means that they can’t be hacked, even though they live on the Internet.

Although no data is completely secure a blockchain database is designed in such a way that it is virtually impossible to hack or to access without the password/key.

Blockchains are so secure that many of the world’s major banks, the “Big Four” accounting firms and other entities (legal or not) that require the highest level of security are engaged in studying them.

MyDocSafe (https://mydocsafe.com/us) is the seemingly first “small” application designed for law firms and based on blockchain technology. MyDocSafe claims to create unhackable documents, secure financial and other transactions between attorneys and clients, uses facial recognition software, self-authenticates documents, and more. Check them out.

This is just in its infancy but from what I’m reading, blockchains are the future of secure transactions on the Internet and the potential applications to the law office are boundless.

Next up: How will time crystals affect quantum computing in the legal enterprise?


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