Linklaters has signed up to a new initiative aiming to bring together a consortium of legal and technology partners to help promote open standards around smart contracts.

Richard Hay, the UK head of fintech at Linklaters, said the firm was eager to join the initiative – dubbed the Accord Project – because it is looking to "instil in our lawyers a sense that this is a time of significant technological advance, and that some aspects of contracts that are currently written in prose may ultimately be written in some form of machine-readable text".

He added: "We are looking to empower our lawyers to make the most of these technologies and the technological advances that they entail."

Linklaters has been involved in smart contract and blockchain-related endeavours prior to joining the Accord Project. The firm recently issued a joint white paper with the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, exploring the use of blockchain-enabled contracts for derivative-based financial transactions.

Linklaters has also run "a number coding workshops for lawyers" that educate its own lawyers about smart contracts and blockchain-enabled automation, Hay said.

The firm will join the Accord Project as a member of its financial services working group, where it will help define standards for smart contracts in the financial industry. Hay noted that the during the past "two or three years, we have seen most interest in blockchain and smart contracts" come from the financial sector, and that interest is now "spilling over into our broader corporate client base".

The Accord Project was founded by Dentons-backed internet of things-enabled contract startup Clause, and already has a host of other law firm partners including Dentons, Holland & Knight, DLA Piper, and BakerHostetler.

The project also counts tech organisations such as Hyperledger, the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management and, more recently, the Open Identity Exchange, as partners as well.

Peter Hunn, CEO of Clause, previously told Legaltech News that the goal of the Accord Project is "to start setting some standards around what the technology will look like, so that law firms and other users can become acquainted with it".

Houman Shadab, co-founder of Clause, previously told Legaltech News that although the term "smart contracts" is often linked to blockchain, the Accord Project will aim to take a much broader view of what such contracts can entail.

"Definitely there is a need to consolidate what we mean by smart contracts and bring it back under the rubric of legally enforceable and automated technology. That may or may not be implemented with a blockchain," he noted.

Indeed, smart contracts may not entail fully automated contracts. Hay noted that though "most financial contracts have clauses that at the moment would be more susceptible to being automated", there is still a fair amount of clauses that do not lend themselves well to automation.

While the "the holy grail is ultimately" a fully automated contract, Hay said it is far more realistic at this time to consider automation in a piecemeal fashion.