Lexon improves Access to Justice.
Blockchain smart contracts, employing automation fortified by distributed computer systems, promise to significantly speed up and lower the cost of legal processing and arbitration in mundane contracts. This in turn lowers the cost of access to the legal process and its related functions, which will increase the health of our social fabric and boost the innovative and value creating elements in our economies. For this to happen, smart contracts need to be legally correct, which requires that they be comprehensible by members of the legal trade.
The Cost of the Legal System
Today, the high overhead cost of policing, and access to justice, make many otherwise viable niche markets impossible, both in the real and the virtual world, and skew playing fields to the benefit of big players. The unsustainable reality is that the threshold from which court action begins to make sense lies at six figures, below which the economics of attorney and court fees work in favor of frivolous abusers and outright frauds. The resulting loss in commercial activity, human suffering from experienced injustice and stifling of entrepreneurial capacity damages the economy and erodes an essential pillar of peace and trust in our societies to a staggering degree. This is recognized by the Access to Justice movement and this paper can be a contribution to the effort by providing an approach that is concrete, scales and works for small-time situations as well as taking on the customary ways of entrenched stakeholders in a big way, supported by the force of a technological quantum leap.
A natural limit exists in the processing capacity of the human brain. Cases beyond a threshold of complexity take a long time to communicate from client to lawyer, can be too deep to penetrate for a lawyer within a short time and in their details repeatedly be forgotten or remembered wrongly over the course of a trial. These hard human limits of brainpower of lawyers justify high price tags, explain egregious consequences of misunderstandings between lawyer and clients that deepen the divorce between justice and law. It is obvious how machines excel at helping with this type of complexity challenges and are doing so in many other industries.
An urgency to act exists within large corporations: while the factual side of relationships between businesses are primarily expressed through contracts, legal departments routinely have a lack of understanding of the fundamentals and the spirit of a collaboration and a detrimental effect on the development of, and the results from interactions between corporations. A preference for the predatory perspective of a zero-sum game15 rather than a mutual beneficial symbiosis, often divorces the take of the lawyers at a company from those of the business people and workers who actually produce value and are interested in win-win situations – to create a sustainable business and as expression of the meaning inherent to their work. For decades, efforts have come up short to reign in the sprawl of copy-pasted legal texts and negativity of the contributions of legal experts, and to manage the chaos caused by millions of pages of contracts being produced.
Time for Change
The mirror image of this travesty is the indignation with which not a few number of lawyers react to the mention of the notion of justice. They are trained to acquire this mindset and while their scorn is rational and helping with the necessity to acquire work across the spectrum of cases, it is at best cynical and at worst the expression of unfettered corruption that in its severe consequences for other people has a corrosive effect on the social fabric as well as the productivity of industries.
There is, despite what lawyers are taught and like to believe, perhaps a much better way.
Law as understood, practiced and taught within a given nation is an on-going social process that involves people across generations. The various legal substrates that have accumulated will require time to further evolve based on new social thinking and new technological innovations. Key to this is the education of the coming generation of legal practitioners. And core to this education is the broad understanding of the role of smart contracts and human-friendly expressions of smart contracts.
Improving Access to Justice
Blockchain technology can reduce the cost of access to justice and the legal system and even make policing unnecessary by its capacity to enforce rules at very low cost. For certain kinds of legal agreements, automation combined with immutability allows mundane tasks relating to the creation, execution and verification of legal contracts to be done at the costs of mere cents. In some circumstance, individuals may even engage in legally binding transactions without the mediation of human legal professionals.
Blockchain smart contracts that transfer crypto tokens are the ultimate enablers for fair subcontracting, bedrock trade finance, a new class of safe derivatives, yet unheard of niche markets, machine-to-machine commerce and much cheaper access to justice. Their power lies in their ability to digitally transfer possession according to predefined rules, with almost perfect reliability and at minimal cost. Crypto tokens combine bearer16 qualities and safety with complete auditability. Where employed they immediately enable a secondary market.
For more complex legal situations in which a legal precedent or previous cases are rare or do not exist, smart contracts technology together with artificial intelligence may provide support for human legal experts to arrive more efficiently at a solution.