Technology

alt.legal: Amy Wan Is Making The Blockchain A Safer Place For Contracts

She's started a legal tech company whose mission is “creating legal solutions for society that enable greater access to legal services.”

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Amy Wan

The blockchain will change our lives forever. Not just for the lucky people who were (now famously) paid 10,000 bitcoins to fetch two pizzas (at the time of this post, that would have value in excess of $110 million USD). Blockchain technology has massive and cascading implications to the fundamentals of contract, public records of transaction, securities regulation and digital identity.

As we dive into 2018, I am starting the year with a series committed to cryptocurrency and blockchain, and the lawyers helping to advance the blockchain revolution. If you need an intro to blockchain or cryptocurrency in general, I will not be doing that here, mainly because I lack the expertise. For a primer, I suggest the Thomson Reuters intro to blockchain, Blockchain 101 resources at Coindesk (worth reading almost all of it), Nick Szabo’s conversation with Tim Ferriss on his podcast (this is honestly the first time I had it explained to me that stuck), and this most recent post from Perla and Kamlani (found on this fine site).

In this first installment, I interviewed Amy Wan, a “legal hacker” and co-founder of Bootstrap Legal. In the six years since graduating from her dual degree program at USC and the London School of Economics, Amy’s worked on international regulatory affairs (specifically, as a Presidential Management Fellow) and has been a general counsel, and law firm partner. She is now a founder and CEO of Bootstrap Legal, a legal tech company whose mission is “creating legal solutions for society that enable greater access to legal services.” Through her company’s project Sagewise, she is building a dispute resolution infrastructure for smart contracts.

Amy’s expertise is at a level of incomprehension for most of us blockchain neophytes. I can best put it like this: Amy is not an enthusiast, or an evangelist. She’s an actual real-life expert, someone that is working on the real and not the theoretical. Here’s our conversation:

Ed Sohn: Amy, tell me your story.

Amy Wan: I studied biology at USC, but quickly figured out that I wasn’t interested in it or a career in healthcare. Instead, I got involved in a lot of community work while an undergrad at USC, and I went to USC Law to continue some of the work I had started in social justice. After my 1L internship, however, I got a little disillusioned with human rights work because I felt that humans rights law does not effectively cross borders.

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ES: Where did you turn next?

AW: I started to look around, what DOES cross borders — what is universally respected. The answer: money. So I changed my focus, started looking at the intersection of money and morality.

After I finished school, I took a job with the federal government doing international trade and regulatory work. Working with the Departments of Transportation, State and Commerce, I did some work with the WTO and the UN on international trade and business and human rights. I thought I’d spent the next 20 years in DC, but then I met my husband, a med student at Georgetown at the time. He matched in LA, which is where I’m originally from.

So, I left government to be with him, and I had to start a completely new career path. It was 2013 by this point, which made it tough, but what had always bothered me was that there’s so much inefficiency in how law is practiced. I’m a practical person that’s focused on efficiency. I wanted to do something about it.

ES: At this point, did you turn to a career in innovation?

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AW: When I moved back to LA, I started the Legal Hackers LA Meetup — I believe we were probably the third such group.

ES: My first interview for Above The Law was with the first legal hackers guy in NY!

AW: We joke that it’s the island of misfit attorneys. Attorneys who are unhappy with how things have been done. It’s kind of a safe space for attorneys who think differently.

ES: From there, you went on to be a general counsel at a real estate crowdfunding company called Patch of Land, then partner at a law firm that specializes in the same. Why in the world would you want to later get into tech solutions?

AW: I wanted to do something more scalable with my time—not the billable hour. And I wanted to enable more access. For instance, I had a client that wanted to raise $300k, but when I told him my discounted friends-and-family rate, it sent him running. It made me realize that there is no real access for these smaller transactions for legal counsel.

So, I left that job and cobbled together software that would automate drafts of real estate securities offerings. We launched Bootstrap Legal in July, with real estate fundraising as our first project, and we’re doing well.

ES: That’s really cool. I noticed from your site: your chief document officer is a bot? What does that mean?

AW: Right, so the real estate product is document automation software. That’s basically what the bot is. We’ve taken complex real estate securities documents and made it into an expert system.

ES: What is your next project at Bootstrap?

AW: The next project is about smart contracts, which are just contracts written in code, on the blockchain. Over the last year, we have seen some coding vulnerabilities in blockchain smart contracts. The blockchain is made to be self-executing and immutable, but in certain situations, people will need to modify or terminate their smart contracts. For example, the DAO hack — a $50 million hack at the time — was a hack against the intent of a smart contract.

So, to prevent that in future smart contracts, we are building an SDK — analogous in function to an arbitration clause in a traditional contract. If anything goes wrong, like funds transferring without your knowledge, the parties can go in and trigger a dispute resolution process. It brings the off-chain dispute resolution process on-chain, to be more efficient and accessible, but less costly.

ES: Why is this so important to have? Why can’t people just take their breach claims to court?

AW: The traditional legal system is, in many ways, incapable of handling smart contract disputes. Many smart contracts are executed pseudonymously, so contracting parties would have a hard time knowing who to bring to court. Even if court can render a judgment, it would be technically incapable of enforcement and collections without certain code after the smart contract is set into motion. And since smart contracts are written in code, most cases would require an expert witness to testify as to what the smart contract even says, since most people can’t read code.

What we’re doing is important because users of smart contracts today don’t have transactional confidence. Entering into a smart contract today is like playing roulette — you don’t know what you’re going to get. If businesses and people can have more confidence in a transaction, they will naturally transact more. And that’s critical for the success of the blockchain industry.

ES: Tell me how the dispute resolution piece works.

AW: The dispute resolution vendor, whoever you choose, can go in there and administer the judgment of whatever the dispute resolution is.

And we don’t want to fill the role of the arbitrators, because we’re not here to overhaul the entire legal industry. We plan on inviting regular, well-known arbitrators (like JAMS or AAA) onto the platform because I do think businesses — especially traditional businesses that are coming onto the blockchain — will want that. But we also need dispute resolution vendors for those smaller disputes under $1,000.

ES: That’s really exciting. What does the world look like in a few years, after smart contracts and other blockchain ventures are commonplace and accessible?

AW: We have incredible blockchain technology that’s been around for more than a couple of years now. The big thing is just figuring out how to bring it down to the level of the real world. Most of what’s happening is still highly theoretical. No one has really brought it down to real world use cases.

Critical infrastructure still needs to be built. For instance, this current dispute resolution project is an infrastructure project. As more infrastructure is built, you’re going to see things that look like the early Internet age. Start with the infrastructure, and then we can build apps and programs and companies. That’s where we are headed with the blockchain.

ES: You started by saying that when you started your career, you wanted to help people and make the world better. Do you think you’re making a difference?

AW: Yes. On the real estate side, I’m bringing transactional costs down. It’s increasing access to legal for smaller businesses. On the smart contracts side, essentially, it’s any attorney’s dream to create a new paradigm for the legal industry. So I do think my work makes a difference.

ES: Thank you so much for your time. It’s been really enlightening.

Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at [email protected] or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)

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