Cardozo Professor Aaron Wright to Head Up Blockchain Technology Coalition of Leading Technology Companies and Global Law Firms Group to Focus on Smart Contracts.
Today the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) announced that 14 leading law firms and academic institutions joined the EEA’s existing major corporate members to form Legal Industry Working Group.
“We are thrilled to see robust interest in blockchain technology by forward-looking law firms and institutions,” said Aaron Wright, Chair of the EEA Legal Industry Working Group, Associate Clinical Professor and Co-Director of Cardozo Law School’s Blockchain Project and co-founder of the smart contract project OpenLaw.
The rapid growth of the EEA Legal Industry Working Group is emblematic of the increased interest by legal professionals in blockchain technology. Legal Industry Working Group brings together a global coalition to build the foundation for the success of the blockchain effort.
New members joining the EEA and Legal Industry Working Group include Cooley, Debevoise & Plimpton, Goodwin, Hogan Lovells, Holland & Knight, Jones Day, Latham & Watkins, Morrison & Foerster, Perkins Coie, Shearman & Sterling, Cardozo Law School, Duke Center on Law & Technology, and the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Existing EEA members joining the EEA Legal Industry Working Group include BNY Mellon, ConsenSYS, ING, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Aaron Wright is a leader in the technology law field, and has been engaged in technology startups for most of his career. Today’s announcement puts him at the heart of the efforts of industry and legal experts to shape the direction of blockchain uses for the future and develop industry standards. “Lawyers are poised to serve as the catalysts for blockchain technology, and the Legal Working Group will serve as a neutral space to explore blockchain-based legal technology, develop standards for “smart” legal agreements, support emerging enterprise use cases and tackle important policy issues raised by this new impactful technology.”
The EEA is an industry-supported, not-for-profit established to build, promote and broadly support Ethereum-based technology best practices, open standards and open source reference architectures. Formed earlier this year, the EEA is helping to evolve Ethereum into an enterprise-grade technology, providing research and development in a range of areas, including privacy, confidentiality, scalability and security. The EEA is also investigating hybrid architectures that span both permissioned and public Ethereum networks as well as industry-specific application layer working groups.
EEA will collectively develop open industry standards and facilitate collaboration with its member base and is open to any members of the Ethereum community who wish to participate. This open source framework will enable the mass adoption at a depth and breadth otherwise unachievable in individual corporate silos and provide insight to the future of scalability, privacy, and confidentiality of the public Ethereum permissionless network.