Burges Salmon joins the Accord Project, a non-profit organisation developing the open source specification and code libraries for a common smart legal contract format.
Lawyers from across the firm and members of Burges Salmon’s Business Solutions team will be participating in working groups to help establish best practices and legal standards for smart legal contracts. This provides those people with opportunities to both learn and contribute in the collaborative development of smart contracts, with a view to helping Burges salmon’s clients utilise the potential of using smart contracts in the future.
The Accord Project is a non-profit, member-driven organisation that builds developing the open source specification and code libraries for a common smart legal contract format for use by transactional lawyers, business and finance professionals, and other contract users. The purpose of the Accord Project is to establish and maintain a common and consistent legal and technical foundation for smart legal contracts. It is organised into working groups focused on transactions: supply chain, financial services, intellectual property, venture and token sales, real estate and construction; and also on dispute resolution. The transactional working groups are assisted by the Technology Working Group, which builds the underlying open source code and specifications to codify the requirements of the transactional working groups into an open source implementation of the specification.
Sarah Kenshall is a director in Burges Salmon’s Technology and Communications team: “As part of our strategy at the firm, we are placing advanced technology at the heart of our legal service delivery model. Smart contracts have a number of potential applications across many sectors and we want to continue to assist our clients in benefiting from such technology developments. We are very pleased to join the Accord Project and it gives us a great opportunity to collaborate on the development of common standards for smart contracts.”
Peter Hunn, founder of the Accord Project, comments: “Having the leading stakeholders involved in the development of a universal specification is crucial to its success. We are therefore delighted to welcome such a forward thinking law firm as Burges Salmon to collaborate on the Accord Project.”