On-demand legal services and document assembly provider Rocket Lawyer has announced a partnership with blockchain developer ConsenSys to create a blockchain-powered smart contract service for its customers. The service, deemed Rocket Wallet, will leverage ConsenSys Openlaw, a blockchain-based protocol for legal agreements.

Rocket Wallet will essentially be one of the first uses of smart contracts, which automatically execute their terms on the blockchain without need of intermediaries, developed for the legal service market. Such contracts have almost exclusively been used in the cryptocurrency space in initial coin offerings (ICOs).

Charley Moore, founder and CEO of Rocket Lawyer, said the company is currently accepting signups for the October beta release of the service. He expects Rocket Wallet to be released publicly in the “early beginning of next year.”

The service looks to allow users to deposit funds into a Rocket Wallet account, which they can use for digital payments. From there, users can go through Rocket Lawyer's document automation process to draft a legal work contract of their choosing and, together with another party, input the payment terms. With the new service, however, parties also input what actions trigger the transfer of funds when the contract terms are met. Such triggers can include receiving a property deed or a document confirming that contracted legal work is complete, for example.

Once the trigger is met, the funds are taken out of the Rocket Wallet and automatically transferred to the respective party. While this may seem like a fairly easy process for the end user, behind the scenes, the service is a lot more complicated.

“Our Rocket Wallet service will leverage blockchain tokenized payment technology in order to make it simple and fast and reliable for everyday contracts to provide for electronic payments,” Moore said.

Essentially, each contract will be coded as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, and when the contract terms are met, “tokens” will be transferred from one party to another. Such tokens correspond to traditional currency amounts that are added or taken out of a user's Rocket Wallet account.

For the end users, Rocket Wallet “doesn't require any knowledge or utilization” of digital currency, Moore said. In fact, because most of the service happens behind the scenes, users won't recognize any blockchain processes happening during the transaction.

Aaron Wright, an associate clinical professor of law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and co-founder of OpenLaw, believes that the new service will help streamline how consumers pay for legal work. “The idea of having automated payment between lawyer and clients further reduces the friction and adds a lot of value for people in the ecosystem.”

In addition, Moore added that because transactions happening on blockchain are recorded on an immutable ledger, smart contracts can “provide a level of security authentication and importantly recording that I don't think the world has really had before.”

To be sure, smart contracts can also suffer from security vulnerabilities. Some smart contracts used by ICOs, for example, have been compromised by cybercriminals. Wright noted that security “is always a concern in software; just like anything else there could be bugs.” But he added that the smart contract protocol developed by OpenLaw allows “folks to stop smart contracts” from executing if they are comprised.

Being able to halt smart contracts can also help with another potential problem: party disputes over contract terms. Moore noted that such disputes will be further addressed by a “considerable amount of dispute resolutions services” that will launch alongside Rocket Wallet when the service deploys publicly.