Walmart Inc. announced earlier this week that following a pilot program, it will be having its suppliers of lettuce register with a blockchain program so that the company can prevent the spread of E. coli.

The retailer will require its providers to upload data about their produce to the blockchain database, which was developed by IBM, within a year. The suppliers will be able to trace their products within seconds, according to a report in the New York Times.

The adoption of blockchain to regulate supply chains at a massive retailer underscores the growing idea that the innovative tool isn't just useful for cryptocurrency and transactions that are strictly financial. Therefore, experts say, in-house lawyers of any stripe would be smart to beef up on the emerging technology.

“As in-house or general counsel, you need to understand what 'the blockchain' is and that there are hundreds of thousands of 'blockchains' out there that all strive for the same goals, but provide different benefits, depending upon the nature of the business,” internet lawyer and blockchain lecturer Andrew Rosso said in an email.

The blockchain Walmart is using is called permissioned blockchain, according to Amir Azaran, a partner at Loeb & Loeb in Chicago. Permissioned blockchain allows the network to appoint participants who are given permission to validate each individual transaction.

“What Walmart is doing is what's called the permissioned blockchain and that to me is the future of blockchain; discreet problem solving within industry segments using permissioned blockchains,” Azaran said.

So, why use blockchain? Rosso said that two advantages are transparency and reliability through encryption. He said that now, consumers have to go through intermediaries, such as financial institutions or the post office, for example, to accomplish something.

“What this technology does is remove those intermediaries, providing an avenue for direct communication or engagement between the only parties that matter: those directly involved in the transaction,” Rosso said.

Rosso said that blockchain will give companies competitive advantages over nonadopters.

“Those businesses that are clever enough to grab hold of this tech, and utilize it for the public good, will discover its true power,” he said. “It provides the 21st century competitive advantage that has been missing since the birth of the Internet.”

In-house teams should know that even though blockchain has numerous uses—Coca-Cola recently said it will use it to track worker rights issues—it does have some downsides.

Azaran pointed out that it took awhile for Walmart and IBM to prepare their program. “This is after a two-year pilot of the technology,” he said. “It's very difficult to implement. Not technologically, but institutionally,”

He explained that companies have to create a network of participants that have some measure of control or input into the database.

There are also issues of who has access to what within the network. Azaran said there will be questions of who has the right to upload data, who has the right to view the data and who has the right to deploy smart contracts on the blockchain.

“Just doing that on a peer-to-peer network requires a lot of governance,” Azaran said. “It's not the tech, it's the governance that's needed to implement it.”