Holland & Knight Joins Blockchain Legal Industry Working Group
MIAMI (August 15, 2017) – Holland & Knight announced today that it has joined Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s (EEA) newly launched Legal Industry Working Group. The group brings together top global law firms and leading legal minds to collaborate and explore blockchain technology and smart contracts built on enterprise-grade applications of Ethereum-based protocols.
“Blockchain technology is largely known as being the underpinning of Bitcoin, but it will play a much larger and transformational role in business and law in the coming years,” said Josias N. Dewey, co-chair of Holland & Knight’s Technology & Telecommunications Industry Group and co-author of Thomson Reuters’ The Blockchain: A Guide for Legal and Business Professionals, the first-ever book on blockchain technology and the law. “Holland & Knight is thrilled to be part of an initiative that will push this technology forward in meaningful ways.”
“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,” said Aaron Wright, chair of the EEA Legal Industry Working Group, associate clinical professor and co-director of the Cardozo Law School’s Blockchain Project, and co-founder of the smart contract project OpenLaw.
Other members of the Legal Industry Working Group are Cooley, Debevoise & Plimpton, Goodwin Procter, Hogan Lovells, 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 legal departments from BNY Mellon, ConsenSys, ING and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
With almost two dozen lawyers from several practice and industry groups, Holland & Knight’s blockchain and distributed ledger practice advises clients in a broad range of matters, including enterprise applications, initial coin offerings and investment in blockchain companies and technology. The team is part of Holland & Knight’s Technology & Telecommunications Industry Group, which is comprised of approximately 120 lawyers with diverse specialties and deep industry knowledge serving the firm’s more than 400 clients in the technology sector.