The Accord Project, the legal industry body for the development of global rules and standards for the deployment of smart legal contracts, and which was co-founded by Clause, has announced a partnership with tech company R3 to develop support for Corda, its blockchain platform.
The news follows last week’s move by the Accord Project consortium of legal tech companies, law firms and standards-setting organisations to release its first working prototype for Ergo, a new domain specific language for smart legal contracts. The software has also been made available to anyone who wants to use it and can be downloaded from Github (see story here).
The move is significant as Corda is an enterprise blockchain platform designed to record, manage and synchronise contracts and other shared data between trading partners and to meet the complex requirements of the world’s largest financial institutions.
As Corda was designed to meet the highest standards of the financial services industry, one of the most complex and highly regulated industries in the world, it can also be applied seamlessly to all other areas of commerce, said the group. And, no doubt they also hope that this focus on high standards will reassure lawyers working with the technology.
However, Corda is the latest blockchain technology to be supported by the Accord Project open source ‘middleware layer’, which also supports two other blockchain platforms, Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.
R3 will also partner with Clause to build ‘a bridge layer that will allow users to manage contracts on Clause whilst seamlessly recording contract states on Corda’, the group said.
Clause has also deployed a version of the Accord Project technology for contract lifecycle management that allows users to execute contracts and view contract analytics.
Peter Hunn of the Accord Project commented: ‘We are delighted that we are expanding support for the leading distributed ledger and blockchain technologies with Corda. This partnership further reinforces our middleware layer as the standard for smart legal contracts and for usage in the legal industry.’
David E. Rutter, CEO of R3, said: ‘Smart contracts are a critical underpinning of blockchain technology and it is important that we have standardization and interoperability across the board. We look forward to working with the Accord Project to ensure Corda is fully integrated with its open source legal layer.’