Clifford Chance

Smart Contracts - Legal Agreements for the Digital Age

10 April 2018

Consider a world in which contracts are performed by computers and drafted in computer code by legal software engineers. What kind of efficiencies in terms of speed of execution, legal certainty and transparency could be gained? Conversely, what are the risks of trusting machines to execute contracts, and perhaps even to enter into contracts with other machines? These are some of the questions raised by smart contracts, an emerging technology that promises self-executing contracts implemented in computer code and performed by networks of computers, with minimal intervention from human agents after they have been “launched” by the parties.

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