Blockchain

Day two of Legalweek 2020 kicked off with a talk from part-time keynote speaker and full-time blockchain and emerging technology researcher Bettina Warburg. Her presentation covered topics ranging from the implications blockchain could have for the digital economy to how it might change the work done by e-discovery professionals.

For the uninitiated, blockchain was defined by Warburg as computers in the cloud that anyone can build applications on top of and no one can control. It's a subject in which Warburg is well versed. She co-founded and acts as managing partner of the early stage venture capital fund Warburg Serres Investments, which according to her bio is focused on "the decentralization of trade and Blockchain Technology."

Wednesday's keynote address focused primarily on the next 10 years, eschewing cryptocurrencies in favor of addressing the systemic change blockchain is poised to bring to the way organizations across industries conduct business. All of that essentially begins with the ability to program and encode transactions that various parties are certain will be executed as written.

"It's not just about being digital, it's about allowing a whole new consumer class," Warburg said.

For the legal industry specifically, this could have a significant impact on the way that law firms or corporate legal departments approach their work while also raising some difficult new questions. While blockchain's ability to maintain what Warburg qualified as a stable and persistent network could be a boon to e-discovery-related preservation efforts, that kind of immortality tends to fly directly in the face of most privacy regimes, including the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.

Those concerns bled into another key blockchain area that Warburg recommended folks in the legal industry keep an eye on: compliance innovation. Here, she argued that blockchain could work to the benefit of both the regulators and the entities they are regulating. For example, blockchain could potentially allow for real-time compliance audits to take place to ensure that various privacy rules are being followed as intended. Meanwhile, businesses can deploy blockchain solutions to ensure that compliance efforts are being encoded and automatically executed the right way.

That in turn could only be a small window into how blockchain could ultimately transform the way that law firms are run. Smart contracts already allow for certain terms or conditions to be triggered or executed automatically upon signature. Warburg broached the possibility of the eventual rise of completely automated firms or other businesses.

"These are opportunities where we do need to imagine what kind of business functions machines are going to start taking over," Warburg said.