Smart contracts, the legal profession and COVID‐19: Highlighting the need to embrace technology

Abstract

It has been claimed that technology would replace the legal profession with artificial intelligence and codification of documents replacing the twenty‐first century lawyer. With this premise in mind, this paper discusses smart legal contract formation in the context of Australian contract law, the perceived replacement of lawyers through blockchain technology and how the COVID‐19 pandemic has set the trajectory for smart legal contract convention. We consider whether the legal profession can ever truly be replaced by technological advances and whether COVID‐19 has pivoted the way the legal profession performs business transactions towards modernisation. Although prior literature has considered how the legal profession may benefit from increased technology use, the expected timeframe for occurrence was dependant on a strong reluctance by the profession to change the status quo. Analysis of the impact of COVID‐19 on the legal profession including the execution of legal documents, provides insight into areas for improvement going forward and whether a regulatory overhaul is required. This research shows that, although there are a number of advantages to the implementation of smart legal contracts using blockchain technology, there still remains numerous implementation and regulatory concerns that need resolution if smart legal contracts are to be widely used.