Blockchain as a technology has garnered much interest among legal and financial professionals, mostly in the context of smart contracts and bitcoins. But its capabilities are wide ranging, leaving it potentially applicable to a number of tasks.

At a Tuesday panel at the International Legal Technology Association's 2017 ILTACON conference, technologists and legal professionals broke down some of the ways blockchain technology is currently being implemented in the legal industry. According to John Alber, an ILTA futurist who was formerly strategic innovation partner at Bryan Cave, for blockchain, “It's an important time. That's the big picture. And we should be paying attention to it.”

Alber described blockchain as part coevolution of law and money, a technology that is changing the way agreements are enacted and enforced.