 community lawyers, what's called a no-code piece of software or an overlay to an application known as Dock Assemble. So, who here has heard of Dock Assemble before? So about half, literally exactly half, and so Dock Assemble is an open source platform basically that, you know, it's an original claim to fame as it did, you know, more automated document assembly, you kind of, you know, take different parts of a Dockman, kind of stitch them together and export them in different formats, and it was well done and designed in a fairly modular way, and that enabled it to slowly extend its capabilities. So now it's got a variety of different integrations, APIs and cool things it can do. You can just plug something in, so it kind of sends a fax or email or like listen for some event on the web, all kinds of good stuff, and it can do also conditional logic is probably the most important thing. So you can start to start to basically program some simple legal processes and decision trees and things like that, but doing that down in the code base, it just can be somewhat daunting for some people, and so community lawyer provides this very simple, like what you see is what you get, overlay. Can I implore someone to close the door again and then maybe, I think it was Richard who's ah, hey Richard, I know sometimes you come and go, but could you could you close the door when you, when you do? Thank you. All right. So Scott is on. Great Scott. Great Scott. Indeed. Welcome Scott. I was just in my only partially informed way of giving a little bit of background about DACA symbol and community lawyer, but welcome and we're so grateful that you could take time out of your busy day to share some information with us and to help us walk through and understand how to basically use community lawyer to do a rapid prototype of a computational system. So if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself, I'd be very grateful and then the floor is yours. Thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for the introduction and for inviting me to speak to you all. Really excited to get our hands dirty and hopefully make a functioning app. We'll see. But yeah, a little background. My name is Scott Kelly. I'm the president of community lawyer. We're a small team of about four people, three developers. I'm the only non developer. I'm a I used to be an attorney at the ACLU in Pennsylvania, spent some time at the legal aid society before that. But for the last four years, I've been developing technology to empower local lawyers to kind of unlock their legal expertise in combination with technology. And so our primary product is a graphical user interface that is built on top of the open source doc assemble platform that allows for as Daza said, for folks who may not be comfortable working in Markdown and YAML and writing Python code to still take their substantive expertise and code that in a web application and use that web application, hopefully to deliver more streamlined legal services and help ultimately more people access the justice system. So that's community lawyer in a nutshell. Anything more on that you want me to add before I just jump into the demo? Before all of this Chris or Scott is Kansas City as well. My most important attribute is that I am also from Kansas. Kansas side, right, Brian, is that how does Missouri said, so you see, oh, oh, I'm ending this demo now. Bob, has this been raised yet so you can just pass us along, but I was hoping during the presentation that you might be able to talk about this busy space that is kind of expert development of expert systems in the law and how community lawyer distinguishes itself from the other tools in the market, full disclosure, we are a neologic user, but we're very interested in this space as a whole, and I would be very interested in not just the aspects of community lawyer, which I would like to kind of use on the ecosystem in this space. Were you able to hear that, Scott? Yeah, just how we kind of think of ourselves in the larger ecosystem of expert system tools, particularly in the legal industry, and then just like thoughts on the ecosystem as a whole. Confirmed. Yeah, so I would say as an organization we sort of see the two primary differentiators with community lawyer being our focus on usability, which we view as sort of our first-order problem for any expert system, it's not just about do you have a powerful platform, but do you have a sort of magically usable platform, and so taking the learnings from outside the legal tech industry and platforms that are doing things really well, and then applying that to the use case of building web apps that encode legal expertise, but that's kind of one of those things where you can only experience it for yourself. You know, I can tell you that our platform is usable, but it's ultimately just something that you have to try out and see how it is, but I think more than that it's our commitment to being seeing ourselves as part of a larger ecosystem of players. So we're not trying to build something that's just proprietary and you can only use our tool and once you've used it, you're stuck with it. I mean you can literally download the code that you compile with community lawyer and run that in open-source Dock Assemble. So we think that's really powerful is the ability to actually be a part of this larger ecosystem that Dock Assemble, there's a couple other companies that are also building in conjunction with Dock Assemble. So I'd say Dock is one of the main different cheaters. In terms of the space overall, I think it's a great sign that there's a lot of companies that have recently launched in the space. I mean, Neotologic is I kind of thought of as the old dog in this space, but I think Neota has only been around for about six years. Yeah. So it's a young space, but I think the legal industry is finally really investing in this idea of taking legal expertise and transforming it into automations and we hope we can be a part of that story. Great, that was satisfactory. One quick thing in case we don't talk again soon, Brian and I were using community lawyer as part of a rapid prototype we were doing for an automated legal entity through kind of doing like the initial document generation for articles of incorporation and modeling like the annual filings and things like that. And then trying to add on some cool stuff to do it on the web, but we talked about the Scott. And so one little thing we noticed is that when we exported the script from community lawyer and tried to import it into Dock Assemble, when we were basically Kubernetes arising, containerizing with Kubernetes, our whole thing to be more part of the architecture trying to build toward it didn't work. And so we realized that there were certain code blocks that we needed to strip out of the community lawyer export in order to ingest it into Dock Assemble. So you should just be aware of that. It's no big deal, but maybe what's the best way for us to communicate that like to give you the artifacts we had and where the code blocks were so that you can either document it or have a export that's unique to strip the code out or however you want to deal with it. Like do we pull an issue in a GitHub repo or do we send an email? How do you like to get that forward? Probably the best way to reach out to us is community lawyer has a Slack. We're also on the Dock Assemble Slack, but instead of cluttering that up, I'd say just join our Slack and either DM us or just put it in general. We haven't really tried with Kubernetes though very soon. We're working with a platform called Rain in Court to offer a fully kind of containerized version of our system that can run on a private cloud and that will be compatible with Kubernetes. There'll be all sorts of things that we're interfering, but in general, we found that folks who just take the YAML and run it on a sort of classic Dock Assemble installation right on AWS don't have issues, but we'll look into compatibility with Kubernetes for sure. Yeah, we can talk about that another time. There's a lot of things happening in the legal tech industry. Great, so thank you for that contextualizing, Scott. We're rolling up our sleeves. We're ready to get our hands dirty. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and tell me if you see it now. Yep, we see it. It looks like a beautiful spreadsheet. A beautiful spreadsheet. Okay, so we're actually, we're going to ignore this one for now and we're going to focus on these two spreadsheets. So this is a super simple one and this demo is going to be super simple, but you can do a lot of extremely complex things, but I just wanted to demo the basic idea of, hold on a second, I'm going to turn off Slack. There we go. Okay, yeah, so I'm going to take you through what it looks like to build a basic app with Canadian Lawyer that reads from a Google Sheet and then writes to another tab in the same Google Sheet. You could have it be separate sheets. You could have it be a webhook to a totally different database entirely. So let me go out of here. So this is Community Lawyer. You can sign up for a free account. We have a very generous free tier so you can try it out yourself, do everything in test mode. You can even follow along as I'm doing this. I've already built out part of this app. So the way it works is it's a very simple app. It just asks some basic questions, first name, last name, what's your household size, annual household income, and what agency are you applying to for assistance. You can add different questions, edit the variable names really easily with our editor so you can just say, okay, I want to add a yes-no question, add it in here, add a label to it, give it a variable name, my yes-no question, and it's simple enough. I'm not going to go through all the functionality. I'm just going to kind of focus on this use case. But yeah, and then after it gathers this information from the end user of the app, it uses this code right here about the legal agency to index into a table. And it pulls in, in this case, just the multiple that they're applying to the federal poverty guidelines that represents that agency's cut off. So for example, the Legal Aid Society might say that folks who fall at one point, basically 125% of the federal poverty guidelines or below qualify for our services, whereas let's say law school, modest means clinic might say that folks who fall at 250% of the federal poverty guidelines or below qualify for services. And so you want to dynamically pull in those rules based on what agency is being applied to. So we've got our codes right here. And what I've done is I've gone over to the data sources tab, and I've linked my app to this Google Sheet, which is agency criteria. So you can see from this dropdown, you can link it to a table, you can upload a CSP. We also have integrations with Clio, which is one of the major case management providers particularly for private attorneys, and then Google Sheets as well. So when I go in here, you'll see it's a sort of a basic data transformation. So this represents the name of the data as it's going to be pulled into community lawyer. And then this represents the actual column headers in the table that I'm syncing to. So I happen to have these names be the same. So agency code is agency code, eligibility cutoff is eligibility cutoff, but they give a different name. So I can add to this sort of change this name completely, except to me. So referring to the spreadsheet again, you'll see here's our very, very simple spreadsheet. And it's got two column headers corresponding to the two pieces that are right here. So I've got agency code, which is what I'm using to index into the particular row, and then the eligibility cutoff, which is the multiple that I'm applying to the federal poverty guidelines. So that's the basic idea of linking a table. I can provide some resources afterwards for exactly how to create that linkage, but I just wanted to show you what it looked like once it was set up. And then later on in this demo, I'm actually going to show you how to build integration to send the data into another tab in the sheet. I could pause for a second. Any questions so far? Am I losing anyone or like basically following along? I have one little question, which is back in the sort of form maker. Why, if you scroll down, the two data elements that are linked to the sheet purple and the others are yellow, what does that signify exactly? Yeah, so that's just yellow basically in our sort of scheme represents a variable. And then these in purple, that's just a value for a single select. So in this case, this is a dropdown question. So you can only choose one or the other. And so we just, you know, this would output as agency applying to is LA is MMC when you actually see the data output. Thank you. Yep. And so, okay, so what I'm doing here is I'm taking, again, agency applying to this code, and I'm using it to index into the table. So here's the name of the table. Remember, if I go back to data sources, it's agency criteria. So I've selected agency criteria right here. And I said I want to index into that table. And what do I want to use to index into that table? I want to use again, this code up here. So agency applying to. So that's what I've selected right here. This will basically give me all the values from the table and pull it into the app. And then I need to specify what kind of data type is being pulled in. So as far as, you know, the app is concerned, all of this data is just of a type text or string. And so we want to transform that into a number. So I've created this basic expression, which is agency from table, which is this variable right here, eligibility cut off, which is again this right here. And we're transforming that into a number. So this is a type of operator. There's all these different kinds of operators that we let you choose from. And we're dynamically showing you the different operators you can choose from based on the data type. So that's one of the things that we're doing in the background to make sort of encoding your knowledge easier. We won't let you pick an operator that doesn't work with a particular data type. We put those guard rails in place. So in this case, you're transforming this piece of data into a number. And then that allows you to actually use it in this logic that you're applying. Now this is some simple logic. This is just doing a basic federal poverty guidelines computation. So first we have to compute what is the federal poverty line for this particular user. So I've got household size, which is the value that's collected up here, household size. And then this is just the equation that the federal government uses to set the 100% of the federal poverty guideline. So it's multiplied by this number, and then you add this baseline number. That's just their arbitrary equation. Interesting, like one note I make here is if the rule that you're using for your app is something that gets updated a lot, or that you want to be able to update programmatically, you could actually be pulling this from a table as well. I just want to keep the demonstration relatively simple. And then right here, now that we've defined what the federal poverty guideline is, we say federal poverty guideline times the eligibility cutoff number that we're pulling again from the sheet. And then we're comparing that to household income. And we're saying if this is greater than household income, then the person is eligible. So eligible will be as a Boolean, so it'll be either true or false. So if this is true, we want to display this message. Yay, hooray, you are eligible. So this represents a screen that the user sees. And this is the display logic for that screen, which is display if eligible is true. And if it's not, you say darn it, you're not eligible, eligible is false. So this is some simple display logic, you can make this as complex as you wanted. But I've kept it pretty simple for the purposes of this demo. Now I'm going to run through the app. And then once we run through it, I'm going to explain how to now output the data from the app into another sheet. So I think someone asked a question through Zoom though. Do I field those? Is that something that you can pick up? Oh, we can, fielding them is a service we provide unless you want to do it. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'd be happy to answer them. I actually see them right here. Do you want me to just? Yeah, I think if you're happy to, then the best is for you to answer them as you like. Okay. Is there the ability to edit the native code directly within community lawyer? So community lawyer is sort of a one-way path. You can export your code at any time, but it can't then be imported back into community lawyer. The problem there is it's just a huge technical issue to take arbitrary code and graphically represent it. If someone solves that, please let us know. We'd love to be able to do it, but yeah. So you can only export. If you want to export your code just as a note, you just go to settings, code, and you can go here and download the compiled YAML that can then run in Dock Assemble. Sometimes unless you're using Kubernetes. Can you link to something? It still worked fine. We downloaded ours. It worked perfectly fine. We just had to strip a little bit out of it to make it compatible. Okay. Downloading is the fact that we could download the YAML and do stuff with it is actually what pushed us over the edge to be willing to invest time and commitment to using your platform. Yeah. The code is definitely optimized for speed in terms of running the app. It's not necessarily optimized for readability, but you can download it. You can modify it. You can build in your own custom CSS, your own custom API calls. So it's definitely something that you can work with. Someone asked, can you link to some type of Oracle-like library, et cetera? I'm not familiar with what the reference is there. So if you publish some kind of interest rate that changes up and down and your form is reliant upon some type of variable like that, can you API out to some type of Oracle-like library to have a form that's dynamic and that doesn't always constantly have to be updated by. Like so for example, the eligibility formula you had, if you imagine instead it was like, what is the weather? If it's more than 70 degrees, could you input that variable from the National Weather Service, or could you input like the prime rate or something for a given day or quarter? Yeah. So that's what we're linking to like an outside. Like I mentioned before, one of the things you could do is you could pull in data from an outside database like a Google Sheet that is being dynamically updated in real time. So as long as you're updating the external database that the app itself is syncing to, you can basically have variables that are changing in real time whenever updates are being made to the database you're syncing to. So that's definitely possible and that's pretty much why we have the Google Sheet integration, the Clio integration, more coming down the pike too. And then Alexandra asks, what are the most common tools that are developed so far by community lawyer? So yeah, we don't develop them but I take it to mean your user, like the users of community lawyer. The main use cases we see are folks who are building internal document automations for their own law firms. We also see intake or expert system kind of guidance tools for clients or people who are applying to be clients for legal aid organizations or for law firms. And then an emerging category of resource that we see folks offering are fully DIY tools. So think of like TurboTax but for all sorts of areas of law. So for example, we're really proud of this, a nationwide nonprofit just launched that's built pretty much fully on community lawyer. It's called Immigrants Like Us and they're essentially automating every individual immigration form so that anyone in the United States can use their tools and get free, sort of basically use those tools for free and they're building all that out using our set of tools. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, so to continue with the demo, I'm going to go ahead. I'm sure we have one more quick question and then we should run through the demo as much as we can. Brendan. So my assumption is that internally you have a number of documents and then you're mapping this to those documents which are essentially contracts. So you have a library of contracts and the output is this data into the format of the contracts that you have in your database. What's the output? It's a contract. I'm assuming it's a paper contract that it's not some kind of a blockchain code. Oh, the demo will help and you should go to a community lawyer and poke around but you could assemble a PDF document which could be a contract or a lease or whatever a will or a notice. You could also trigger a fax or an email but you could also trigger other types of things too like a REST output to update a variable in a data source which is what we're going to do here. So it's quite flexible in terms of the inputs and the outputs but the original design of Docassemble was to assemble a document in formats like Word or PDF but it's much more flexible now. It's really data in data out. Including modifying the clauses if you wanted to change the clause. So watch this demo. So the reason why we did it from a spreadsheet into a spreadsheet out is because you can extrapolate a spreadsheet into variable into like 10 clauses of a contract. Yeah it'd be like we want to add the you know liability clause for in you know a new state now that we know we were operating there. So you have like an intake form from you know some client who exists in you know let's say uh uh Sylvania and you need to be like okay we see that we have this new uh this new place where we're subject liability. Let's figure out how we want to do that and then you update it and it sends the uh sends that additional protection it's it's listed in a new um new data source. So you can now add like a section like 10.7b for liability limitation disclaimers in the state of Sylvania for example. Sounds easier than shell frames. Yeah so the answer is yeah one of the core use cases is a community lawyer and Docassemble is to compile documents. So we have an in-app PDF editor, an in-app in-app Word document editor. We also have a Word add-in that's going to be launched in about a week or two which will provide even more granular control if you have highly like specific formatting on your documents but just as a basic demonstration of this we can also add this to our app. So here's a little Word document that I'm going to generate it's going to be an eligibility determination it's going to be super simple. I'm going to just create a new variable called eligibility um sentence right and that doc that is going to be it's going to say you are eligible right in the document or it's going to say if you're not so eligible is false we're going to say you are not eligible. So this is a very simple version um with our Word add-in for example if you have like nested lists and clauses that need to be auto renumbered we take care of all that with the you know in your Microsoft Word document um this is uh you know I'll show you how this looks so you are not eligible um and uh there we go so I'll attach this document to the end of the the app as well so we can see it when it runs so let's go ahead and attach we'll assemble this document um so we can we can see that as well I'm going to run the app now and hopefully it works never know with live demos um so you know you and just a note here you can you know this is the standard template but you can you know how many or whatever you want basically match it to like whatever um you know you need to look like but okay my household size is two and I make a dollar and I want to uh say the late society and my contact email is scottacommu.lawyer I hit continue and we do a little bit there and you can see the document was assembled so here's the word document hooray you are eligible and open this up oh did I mix that up um I think I did uh let's go back to my template so I said eligibility sentence you are eligible eligible is false ah there we go so I should have said eligible is true um yeah so that was my mistake uh but yeah so you get the idea now what I want to show which I think is really the point of this is how you can also instead of just generating a you know a static document you can actually generate uh data that's input that's outputted so on our final block what we'll do is if you're eligible we'll actually generate a new row in a sheet um that represents maybe let's say a referral to an agency so I'm going to go ahead and say integration you can do just a general webhook which allows you to send your data really anywhere you want um but here we're going to use our google sheets integration we're going to say add a row to a sheet so we're going to select that action and now we're going to select our google sheet so computational law demo and we are going to select the output um sheet and I'm going to add all the columns right here so these are all the column headers in the um sheets so let me go over to that sheet really quickly um output so there we go client name agency referred to poverty level and contact email and I'm going to go ahead and fill that information now you'll notice right here we've got first name and last name we actually don't have client name so let's go ahead and add an expression that just combines that information in the background so really quickly I'm just going to say first name and join with a space oh join without a space so join yep join with a space to last name and that's your full name right here um and now we can add a full name right here agency referred to let's look that up agency applying to uh poverty level so this is going to be the determination of your oh does someone have a question sorry no sorry I was clearing like my throat sorry uh federal poverty line um that's just where the uh federal poverty line is based on your household size and then your email because we'll want the uh you know agency you're being referred to to be able to reach out to you so we're going to send all this data um into uh the google sheet if you're eligible if you're not we're actually not going to send any data at all so this is just an example to run the app again and hopefully this time the word document properly assembles too so um and I'm going to go ahead and say legal aid society and scott at community lawyers so I hit continue and there we go so let's check our google sheet hooray okay so it actually worked uh so yeah the data was added into google sheet great thing about this is this plus zapier means like the world is open to you even if you don't know how to know how to code because now you can take this data and basically send it into any web application in the universe um that you know that integrates with zapier um and then our word document hopefully this time it actually says the right thing oh yep there we go you are eligible so even our word document is correct now one thing I don't have time for in this demo but I just want to point out is that now that we built this interface you actually have also built an api so you don't people don't actually have to go to your app and fill in this information like I have manually filling this in um they can actually you can actually send a request with the variables in it um and that will act automatically compute and then write the data if the person is eligible to your sheet um we also have a way you can set up apps so it works with url parameters so instead of doing a classic api request you can just pass url parameters so instead of asking someone for their first name right and this is just you could have the whole thing be done by url parameters but I just want to show you really quickly you could go here go to settings add a url variable and we'll say our first name and we'll do a test one so that's going to be like Scott and we'll add another url variable called last name and that'll be Kelly and if we go back to our blocks we can this expression is now broken right because we deleted the original inputs to it but we can go ahead and clear this out and we should be able to now pick first name and last name right there so now we have full name this is still getting sent here I'm just going to make sure this is full name and uh when we run this let's go ahead and go to settings I'm going to copy this uh app to my clipboard and go ahead and hold a second the parameters there at the end of the url yeah yeah so you hear my parameters all you know we can change this so it'll be uh oops uh Smith and uh we'll do uh Sarah right and if we run this it'll pass that information into the app um did I still have the questions there let me see I deleted them oh I need to recompile the app that's a rookie mistake sorry I gotta run the app to recompile it um that's one thing I always forget so okay now the app is recompiled now if I paste this and run it with Bob Smith that will get passed properly there we go okay so um and this time let's say I'm yeah okay we'll do a household size of one your annual income is just to show you that the logic actually works I'm gonna do this so um we'll do a request that doesn't go through darn it you're not eligible we'll go back um we'll change this uh to $10 and hit continue and then it just went through and now this data has gotten passed right here into the google sheet I didn't have to enter this in it was passed by url prem again it could also be passed by api you could have no user interface at all and pass all of this program out and that's it that's like actual computational law right there with not a line of code I'll pull down menus you know all what you see is what you get it's a triumph well I mean it's it's it's definitely a community effort is uh you know we we put a lot of work in this but the doc assembled community jonathan pile who's you know the creator of that project has done an amazing bit of work to just make this all possible so you know big congrats to him as well so and I see your question came in do we have time I might be over my time limit sorry um we're we're flexible as long as you are um is is chris uh baron's with us yet I don't in particular if chris isn't with us yet we definitely have okay I don't see him so yeah so actually the very best thing to do is for you to keep talking so uh michael uh you're on if you could come up mute please that's right thank you scott um look just for a bit of background I actually am a doc assemble user um I have been for the last for about nine months or so um and using it in our in our practice um which is a corporate corporate and commercial practice in Australia and I'm primarily using it for document generation as opposed to the um using the data sources um probably more from a question more to answer one of the questions of people of people in the room about like what's its capabilities um frankly I haven't found a limitation yet is is the answer I chose doc assemble basically because I looked at a lot of the off the shelf uh tools and products that are out there and in each case there was always some uh some limitation or some area where you would um you'd come to a roadblock depending on and I wanted as much flexibility as possible because we're basically designing apps for um the spoke apps for our clients and in fact other law firms and um when you when you actually don't know what the question is you need as much flexibility as possible and basically the the long and short of is I haven't found a limitation there is frankly if as long as you can um you mean sometimes you've got to spend a lot of time actually just mapping out what's the best way of actually achieving something but uh everything is largely possible to be honest and um uh a big limitation I found with a lot of other systems was particularly if you're limited to Microsoft Word was formatting and things like tables of contents and cross referencing and particular font styles and spacing um a lot of our clients will have you know their own style guides which you need you need to match and it handles all of those perfectly even things things like conditional clauses um renumbering dealing with cross references within it that's all all possible so a brilliant system and I can't probably can't give give it enough um enough kudos really right here yeah I couldn't agree more that's why we built our whole company on top of it yeah and I'm actually I'm actually using the um the the document interface uh for for a lot of our stuff and so that I I sort of use that the no code interface there for basically for the prototyping quick builds and the simple stuff but then finesse and modify the code in the background for uh areas where it needs to be a little bit more complex or uh things which are maybe beyond the the no code features um yeah from a from a look at this compared to look at this system I think you've probably got more of a a more of an emphasis on the on API integrations and system integrations with other systems which um actually looks pretty cool thanks indeed and then I think Neha had a question oh Neha you're you're on hi yeah um hi Scott I've also been working with doc symbol for a code for Boston project and one of the issues we were having is making sure it's maintainable after we step away from the project so we're trying to make sure we have automated tests built in and all that and I'm wondering if you can speak about that a little yeah so that is one set of like feature set that we're still you know thinking through is how to make it as easy as possible to to test your apps I mean one of the nice things about building in a no code tool and also one of the limitations of course is that it has those guardrails and so we do try to do a lot at the front end to make sure that your code is runnable we do a ton of runability checks um and just make sure that that things are going to compute but in the future you know ideas we had to improve on the ability to maintain apps one of them is programmatically generating um sort of the uh basically associations one blocks the other because we already do that in the background to check for like infinite loops on such this matter of like graphically representing that so instead of having to create your own decision tree actually just run you know run this tool and it'll essentially programmatically generate that decision tree um there's also some great off the like shelf tools that you can use for testing so um if you haven't tried it out there's a chrome plugin called selenium um that you can use to um just basically create click you know click-throughs of apps it's a little brittle but um click-throughs of apps that uh can test your apps and um you you can have expected outputs and if it deviates you can set in place alerts um another thing that we've really found valuable is there's another plugin let me see if i can remember the name it's called what is it i don't even know what the name of a form filler there you go and you just mash the button and it fills in all of the the fields in a particular screen so it allows you to go through screens really quickly um it's not it's not 100 automated but it definitely speeds up testing that's really cool yeah we've been using something called lettuce so far but i'll check out these two as well great um and we've got two more questions i want to go to michael first just because he said he raised his virtual hand first and then bob thanks does it look also also on the testing front um i find probably the most time-consuming component in the testing front is um look i'm primarily developing i guess with word in mind and so i start with a with a word document usually i can say a quite a long um quite a long contract and testing um testing does become quite time-consuming where you do need to complete the variables and um my process at the moment is usually sort of test as i go and um error find as i go the process that i use um at the moment is to have a um i basically just created an app where i upload a variable list which is just a yaml file which has all of the variables declared as in a static form so you don't need to input them each time you can just have them as basically some dummy some dummy data and use that to um populate your document as you go but um i was just wondering if if you or anyone else in the room has actually come across any other tools where you could actually say visualize uh visualize a word document or uh something similar whilst whilst working and um uh as a back as a taking a step back in before i started using doc assemble um i was looking at um use it looking at markdown and r markdown and which the i'm not sure if anyone's ever come across it but the the um integrated development environment for uh um the art programming language has a a feature where you go on one side you can have code and the other side it shows the output in markdown and a tool like that would be incredibly valuable for something like doc assemble or um where you could you could generate it live i think it's incredibly complex to build but um would be really really useful in the build process uh so if if anyone's come across anything that would be that would be a nice thing to hear about it then yeah i would just say um we've thought about that like a preview screen and uh and very much possible with our pdf editor i think we'll you know probably in the next year offer that and for our in-app word editor um where it gets trickier is when you're talking about like actually visualizing documents that are just in microsoft word and that you might be like marking up using a sidebar or just using ginga um obviously that requires essentially like in your web app hosting a version of microsoft or like very quickly retrieving documents again and again and again so i yeah if someone could develop it it would be amazing i think um that that is uh a little bit further away and not presently on our roadmap um good we've got um two more in the room and i see uh chris barron is on the line so chris will be megan online too if you would um if you would uh do you mind indulging us to allow the q and a to go a few minutes longer oh no please take the time that you need thanks so much chris um so i think it was uh oh richard bob and uh and megan and then we're good and richard i think you have priority of like your physical presence okay so um i feel a little further perfect technical document systems capable of doing complex document assembly applications with a lot of database support rule bases and all that was uh was done in the late 80s it was not new it's just been abandoned in favor of the the steaming pile of things like microsoft word a good example was built at MIT spin up in the MIT spinoff called interleaf oh yeah i've done i've done 10 to $15,000 for 15,000 hours of work developing such applications i built a full document assembly that built all the prospectuses for one of the largest mutual fund companies in the world ran for almost 20 years so the technology exists nobody wants it and uh it's been replaced by javascript and things like that would have to be rebuilt but this is it is not true that it wasn't built it's it got rolled over like a steamroller yeah because uh for a long time people didn't believe they could do this kind of automation and i built dozens of document assembly systems and some of them were for legal documents including regulatory documents that's what i did before i went to law school beautiful yeah i'm so true and i can think of time oh i'll grab it um in the um you know oh god maybe like 10 or 15 years ago uh you know documentum yes it was humongous that's document management management but but there's a big document assembly kind of it does a lot of things and uh but something that uh that i think is worth mentioning is um now that there's been more of a sea change especially in the law toward you know more apps and and services there seems to there's a there's a new it's a new era and there's more readiness to adopt document assembly there's more players out there in the market and then the thing that's interesting about docus doc assemble is um is that it's open source and actually has a reasonable community of diehards uh that have been using it building it out now we've got this ecology um starting to emerge like scott's company with community lawyer doing like no code overlay on it and um so there's something i think if you haven't actually poked around the doc assemble site i strongly encourage you to do it based on your background and take take a look um but yeah it's it's hardly the first and and in some ways it's it's you know more limited than you know something like the huge um enterprise um you know bms said that are that are out there but it is unique in certain ways partly and part of what's so interesting about it being open source is that it very much supports reflects the the felt demonstrated needs of the community that's been building it up so it's been developed hand in glove with use cases that people care enough about to invest in and then to reuse and extend and expand um so we and it also is way easier to kind of do further development precisely because it's open source you can get into the github repo and slack channel and and uh and see other people that have done stuff like what you're just doing so there's something about the open source aspect in the fact and the point in history that it's hitting that i think make it potentially a little different oh i'm sorry thank you one thing you can't do is you can't um overcome the lack of of uh queryable document structuring word his word is a joke so to some degree to the extent that you could do that in uh json i mean in javas in uh with the uh the dom yeah in javascript and do it with more modern technologies you'd be overcoming it and then shadowing out the word when the good document uh composition systems this problem has gone back all the way to canoes and how people lay out lay tech documents and do all that and in the real world the quality of the documents matters a lot and also when you file documents with the court and even though those are very simple they still need to comply so the i think all of the arguments you made about what people want are completely valid the right use cases um that's completely valid but i will say that if the technology for actually rendering the documents uh created a different level of burden the things that became feasible to do and automate would appear different and word was an extremely destructive standard for that because word is non-portable baroque unstable just go down the list we could spend the rest of the class adding yeah so i agree with the i agree with the merits to that word i do agree with what you're saying yeah and then and partly and i agree with what you're saying too for the record and part of the reason why we asked scott to build the demo around the all the document assembly and the legal logic around getting data from an arbitrary source which is google sheets in this case and then sending data from arbitrary source is precisely to demonstrate a world well beyond not just microsoft word but beyond the concept of a document paradigm and going to a data paradigm hallelujah bob you're up it's got um so at liberty mutual one of the things we're thinking about all the time is how we might be able to monetize our uh work and so i was wondering and oh sorry this way oh okay gotcha all right cool am i back to you sorry uh we're thinking about monetizing our work and um so i was just curious you know with a name like community lawyer right is this something where you make like people can make their applications available to the community or do you have a future um kind of vision of starting an app store if you will where you could i could create something in-house with my no code folks that's kind of smart and slick and does something you know kind of creating the law in a very digital way and then license it out to others that might want to use that same application yeah so i first of all i i think you're the one of the very first people who has recognized that i mean at least explicitly recognize the connection between what we do and our name um we're very we were very very interested in this idea and you know borrowing from the software world itself and what you know what you see in github is the folks are the developed software they publish it open and others can leverage it um we think a very similar ecosystem can be set up around legal knowledge and so we've developed uh really robust architecture for uh folks to not only build apps but then share those apps and permission the sharing of those apps um with other people who are users of community lawyer um so just really brief preview you can go here you can set up your own private or public communities where you publish your apps and then you have granular control over you know what you're publishing to you know here's my law firm subscriber community and then you can actually determine you know how folks can run those apps so maybe they can just run the apps maybe they're allowed to copy the apps that you built um you could then decide what kind of copying they can do so maybe they can duplicate it meaning they can see exactly how it's built they can take it modify it do whatever they want or maybe they can just subscribe to it meaning they don't see the underlying architecture but um they can maybe change a few things like the name on it the branding and they can know that a trusted team is behind the app and is modifying it and updating it and so you can you know offer that for free you can open source it you can also make a proprietary offer uh you know charge a subscription um you could charge uh one time payment um yeah we've done a lot of thinking around that happy to uh point you do some resources or send them as a follow-up um that that explain how to do that with our tool could we could we suggest that uh I don't think Brian or I have uh access rights right now to the app but could could you go ahead and ensure the sure the app that you demoed today and then we can send the link around to people you can start to get a sense of of um how they support that natively and community lawyer and that would be great we could post that yeah in her repository great yeah so I'll share the app the one thing I'll do is I'll change it from reading and writing to a google sheet to reading and writing to uh like a table and then just sending it sending a web book is when you have a link to a specific google sheet you don't also have access to the google sheet it's it's not a very helpful um example so yeah that would be awesome uh and I think we've got two two more at this so if we could maybe make them sort of quick uh and then and those will be our last two uh uh and so uh I believe it's uh Neha and then no it's Megan oh it's Megan okay so one more Megan uh but what is your question oh Sam oh Sam had a question about uh potential localization to Portuguese uh but first thing I answer that style in the background oh very good I think Sam saw yeah we basically uh have different uh translations of all the hard coded like buttons and things like that um and that's not something that we we've developed that's just like users of doc assemble they'll create translation files for different languages those will be incorporated into doc assemble and then we just can link to those so one of our users actually created the french uh translation file um and now it's a part of doc assemble and now it's something that everyone can utilize so the beauty of open source right indeed um Megan you're you're up hi um thank you Scott and um I'm sorry about the background noise I'm actually um kind of stealing Wi-Fi at a cafe right now um so um obviously the demo that uh we walked through was intentionally simple um but my question is more about what happens if those types of questions to get the file answer were not Boolean for example so have you ever heard any opinions or those who've built apps on community lawyer um if they've communicated how they work through some potential issues with definitional challenges what happens because obviously in the law there could be dualistic meanings or there could be space for interpretation and I'm just wondering if you've ever had sort of those who did try to develop an app who struggled with you know kind of finding which definition or if they've ever actually had to actively make the decision like we're going to fix this is the definition that we're going for for example got it and could you give an example like an example of uh maybe a legal issue you're thinking of where this issue arises just so I can kind of like be concrete about it um I guess for um I'm thinking maybe in the area of torts where it has to be incredibly faxed specific um and it's not necessarily just like a computation of like the household size and maybe like the poverty level but it's more on what specific I guess small nuances in for example injury and if that makes any sense or if it's just limited to certain fields that people are using um community lawyer right now yeah so we actually have users who do like really complicated triage apps that like are you know meant for it's meant to be like I forget what city um is using it right now but there's one city that basically a bunch of their legal aid providers came together and they developed a triage system where all their different complex guidelines for whether you qualify or not not just household size household income just like things like are you over this age um do you need help in this particular issue are you a military veteran can all be combined um and yeah it can get complex and and that's one thing we always you know tell people is we can we we say it's no code but it's it's not no logic you know um you definitely the the hard part of all of this coding or not is specifying and so the ability to really sit back specify properly what the definitions of particular eligibility buckets are can be really tough um and we definitely are happy to work with users to think about think through the app architecture one thing I can't emphasize enough is just clear naming of variables and having variables represent concepts so for example this is just a really small example I could have combined all of this into one expression um so but I wanted to make this more readable you've just seen household size times this plus this and then is it greater than household income you wouldn't really be able to look at a glance at the expression and understand what's going on and so what I did is instead I assigned a variable called federal poverty line and then that way you can actually read what's going on here so that's one of the things we emphasize with authors is make sure each variable that you're using represents something um that that is you know linked to a concept and that'll make it easier to kind of have the center of your app hold and not sort of completely break down great thanks very much and if I could offer a little perspective just based on the what I imagine you may have been um thinking about like where does this fit in in the law overall um and and what what's computable so in torts like the implied context of the question is if if you have a slip and fall or something can you compute what the legal result would be if it were tried in a court or something like that um and that's obviously fact subject to many many many factors factual legal jurisdiction what lawyers would judge what day on an audit that nuances and fastest of the type of injury and so like this I don't think at this point this is intended to be sort of like this will solve every aspect of law uh including like coming up with predicting the precise result of litigation but there's certain places where this is a great fit now so if you're a torts lawyer and someone comes in with that same slip and fall you have an intake form and you may ask them you know 50 questions about the nature of the industry the injury where is it at a workplace how old were you what did the doctors say on and on how many months and then you know there's some there's some uh tort there's some plaintiffs lawyers who can who know very well like if they ask these 20 questions and get the these type of ranges of answers they can say like ah that's going to be like 130 to 170 thousand dollar recovery very likely in this jurisdiction under these circumstances so like you could start to compute some of that type of stuff it's really good fit what if you know what the variable should be and how to compute that so forth so that you could then get them into into an intake and a representation letter and go the judge at another point in the life cycle of this some hypothetical context could like the clerks could actually potentially put together a lot more parts of the opinion as part of like a way to write the opinion you could the lawyer after the representing could could start to do the complaints and the depositions a lot faster so like the doc assemble right now is really key to those sorts of let's say like slivers of the law but not necessarily like like the you know like there's many aspects of the law like your you know torts and constitutional law and human rights and you know ideas or like principles and values which are much fuzzier and maybe not like the primary use case for doc assemble and community lawyer is that is that fair to say Scott I think that's definitely fair to say yeah I used to be a constitutional lawyer and I would have had no use for community lawyer so I you know I I mean I say that a bit fustitiously but yeah there's definitely areas of law where there's too much ambiguity and and maybe you know a logical sort of opinions across time and space that really wouldn't compute right they would break the computer so that's that's where the humans come in um yeah I just one note I want to end on I see a quick question about this and just in general if you want to learn more about community lawyer you can go create a free account start building um you know have at it um you can also go to the help guide tab and you'll see a number of different resources um you can go to like everything from the tutorial to getting started which has a lot of different resources to a very in-depth user manual and video library um if you want to look for one place to start I'd say try this tutorial right here um it walks you through like a very simple app and kind of has like different um they're almost like lessons right um and uh I saw there's you know someone asking about a class definitely reach out to us we've worked with a lot of different classes to come up with curriculum and we'd be happy to help with that so awesome um so with that thank you so much Scott for taking the time and and really you know again MIT does not endorse private companies or products right I just want to say um you know I think uh you know the the quality of what you've done and and the way that you've done it is is really inspirational and it was uh I think in addition to being so incredibly useful in the field and in practice it actually serves the purpose of explaining what we mean by computational law at least as part of it and um and so just you know kudos and thank you very very much from the bottom of our hearts yes well thanks for having me it was really fun uh you know spending some time with you answering your questions and hopefully we can keep the conversation going um to see you let's please okay thanks Scott so that you know we should do that the first day from now on yeah instead of the last day but uh with that so now that you have a concept of some of the nuts and bolts and mechanics of how this stuff could play out um let's take a look at one of those more complex potential scenarios of like what are the at the top of your game what are the sorts of things you could do with with this sort of way to compute um legal processes and instruments and and that's why we've asked scott baron to join us excuse me chris baron i'm still thinking about scott chris baron to join us again this year um to to show us um some of the um some of how to how it's possible to begin to deliberately engineer and structure transactions in order to have a better chance of achieving certain desired legal results to fall under certain legal uh regulatory frameworks so that's a type of engineering um we just saw some engineering tools let's take a look at the types of systems that we could design and engineer um computationally uh with chris baron so chris welcome and if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself especially your sort of evolved um i guess i would call it um um role and and uh affiliation uh and then um and uh and feel free to dive right in thank you chris thanks daza and um i apologies my apologize folks i've been a little bit under the weather the last two days so i'm not subjecting you to the video feed i have a face for radio anyway so you're not missing much my name is chris baron i am a uh transactional and regulatory attorney i work mainly in the clean energy and sustainability space i build um help clients build a whole lot of renewable energy facilities power plants biofuel facilities co-generation facilities micro grids um also do a lot of transactional work on the energy commodity side and do a ton of work in the environmental markets um uh their design their formation how environmental instruments and the rest of it get originated transacted um and so on um i'm here today to talk about um structuring um the way that you implement a business enterprise uh to achieve the regulatory treatment that um that you desire and it's fairly safe to say that for the most part the regulatory treatment that most folks desire is a light regulatory treatment and one that's not burdensome or restricted um so um we're going to talk about a few things today um i'm going to tell a little bit of a regulatory story um in terms of intangible commodities but um this discussion is going to come around um uh to how fundamentally you look to structure the design and the governance um of an enterprise blockchain um and the characterization of the digital assets the coins the tokens the instruments and so on um that uh that enterprise blockchain is using um so let me start out um did everybody hear the riddle yes some people did i have one hand raised one hand room well i will say the riddle again and uh and uh we'll give folks a chance to to to take a guess and if they've done the reading to take a very uh sharp guess at um at what it means so the riddle is this what things are alike because they have nothing in common what things are alike because they have nothing in common any guesses anybody um you feel free to type online if you have a guess or raise your hand in the in the room we have one hand uh brendan mar contracts contracts in what sense in the sense that every contract is both the same and different okay in the sense that every contract is the same and different um adjudicator of the riddle what do you say that's close it's getting there um any other guesses people um yeah think about this a contract is a way that a thing gets that a thing gets transacted but what is the thing what is the thing things that are alike because they have nothing in common um so alexandra online suggested money money yep that's that's close but i can take a dollar out of my pocket and hold it any other guesses um value value says bob that's getting much closer so um the the answer to this question um and the trick of the riddle is that nothing refers to corpus does something exist in tangible reality does it have body does it have corpus um and in this instance the things that are alike because they lack corpus would be a carbon offset or a renewable energy certificate um environmental instruments um environmental commodities and digital assets a token a coin and so on beyond the electrons that are in a position on a transistor you know in a computer a database system and so on those are all things that exist as a concept as a record and so on but they don't exist in corporeal reality they don't exist in physical reality and the reason why this became important bears on what has we've been able to emerge as a new class of things quote unquote um which are intangible commodities and more specifically environmental commodities so that brings us to the story um back when congress was reacting to the credit crisis um and passed the dod frank legislation the commodities futures trading commission was looking at what should be included in all of these new rules that require for people who are transacting in financial instruments like credit default swaps um uh what they were looking at what new rules were appropriate to require the maintenance of collateral accounts um and other protections so that someone wouldn't get in a position where uh so someone wouldn't get in a position where they found themselves um you know essentially having um uh created a a loss that they can't cover um uh you all might be familiar when you if you've seen ads for options futures other derivatives um it'll say something along the lines of warning you can lose more than you invest um in this investment and that's for a very good reason so what we saw happening with dod frank was this reaction of the credit crisis um the wall street reform and protection act the dod frank act um and what happened was the ctfc came out and took a look across the various markets um and looked at the environmental markets and these are things like renewable energy certificates admissions allowances carbon allowances um and the like um environmental instruments as a general um uh a class of instruments basically represent one of two things they either represent activities that occurred that improve the environment so for instance renewable energy certificates every one megawatt hour of power that i produce from a solar array or a wind farm or other renewable energy generation source creates actually two commodities first it creates the actual underlying electrons the power but then it also creates one renewable energy certificate for each megawatt hour of power that's produced and that may that renewable energy certificate represents all of the green attributes all the green claims to using green power so if that wind farm sells the power to one entity and the renewable energy certificates to another entity it is the entity that is buying the renewable energy certificates matching them up with the power that's called gray power that they're getting off the grid basic power and so on and it's that entity that bought the renewable energy certificates that's able to claim that they're using consuming green power the entity that bought just the electrons off that wind farm has no claim to buying power from a renewable energy facility instead it's what's we called undifferentiated energy or gray power it's just power like any other electron on the grid and renewable energy certificates like carbon offsets carbon allowances emissions allowances and so on have both compliance markets that are governed by regulation as well as voluntary markets that are governed by standards bodies that create various standards protocols and so on for projects to use to originate environmental instruments like wrecks like carbon offsets and so on renewable energy certificates carbon offsets and so on are a very important revenue stream to clean energy projects sustainability projects whether you're talking a wind farm a solar array or if you're talking reforestation of millions of acres there's a whole range of different environmental market projects that can be done but those projects are from the most part you know significantly reliant on the value they can get from selling the environmental instruments that they originate so let's go back to Dodd-Frank Dodd-Frank is basically saying hey all of you guys who are transacting in financial products financially settled instruments i.e. when the final sale takes place money goes one way or money goes the other way they were basically saying that's created a problem Dodd-Frank is going to fix this by requiring things like better collateral counts better disclosure and so on to be able to trade in those so that we don't have a cascading you know crash like what happened with credit default swaps the the what the CTSC asked though when they looked at environmental instruments like renewable energy certificates carbon offsets and so on was hey wait a minute since these instruments don't exist in corporal realities since they lack corpus can we treat them the way we treat other basic commodities that can be settled and again i'll give you an example you can have a contract a forward contract to sell someone a bushel of corn when that contract requires delivery i deliver someone a bushel of corn physically they physically take possession of a bushel of corn and they give me money that's different than say corn futures or corn options um derivatives that use the price of corn as physically delivered in the market on the spot market in the forward market as the underlier but look at that just as a price mark and when those contracts come do instead of something physical going one way and cash coming back the other cash either goes one way or the other nothing physically gets settled that's why we refer to derivatives as financially settled instruments and the commodities futures trading commission basically was established to have jurisdiction over financially settled instruments financially settled commodity related transactions and in in establishing that jurisdiction on an exclusionary basis the commodities futures trading commission does not regulate physical transactions in the same way that it does financial other than just making sure that things like commodity pool operators and others are doing what they need to do from a registration standpoint but if you undertake a physical commodity transaction in the agricultural markets in the energy markets of widgets you name it right um uh any type of oddity um you uh and you physically settle that transaction you are for the most part avoiding commodities futures trading commission regulation and importantly under Dodd Frank you would be avoiding the need to establish collateral accounts um to the park money aside to cover your position and the rest of it so we're getting into the the forward contracts exclusion now right that's right so and this is an example of when you said earlier you might want to start your transaction to be likely likely right then one way you could do that for commodities is to follow up this to number one say make sure everything is related to commodities number two further refinement so that it would fall under the forward contracts exclusion so just that's right just to sort of bring the CTFC has what's called a safe harbor that you can avail yourself in if you are partaking in a commodity transaction where there is physical settlement of the commodity if you fall in that safe harbor you don't have to comply with the same type of rules things like maintaining collateral accounts and so on that you have to do if you are undertaking trading of a derivative that is financially settled and so what happened when Dodd Frank was passed the CTFC began to take a look um and Daza is if you just um uh you know uh word search forward contract you know exemption that should come up or safe harbor i'm trying um oh yeah and you want to know what because it's displaying a PDF it's not treating it like data and therefore it's not displaying it like normal data and so therefore i just wanted to say that out loud because i hate that and now uh we're going to go to my desktop and uh that's fine data proprietary app again because it's not data and and uh just give me one second but i will find that that clause and i don't expect everyone to read the full final CTFC rule but ultimately in the this final rule by the CTFC um uh they defined what a swap was and if you were a swap you were a derivative you were financially settled and therefore you needed to um you needed to basically you know work in accordance with all of the rules um uh for financially settled agreements um i've got it up now by the way just so whenever you're ready there we go sure um uh and you know that again something to peruse you don't certainly have to read this while i talk here folks what the CTFC asked when they started the rule making which drove the environmental market community the renewal especially the renewable energy uh a project development community uh baddie was they said well wait a minute if a renewable energy certificate just exists as a record on a database system and it doesn't act actually have corpus in physical reality how can that instrument be physically settled and what we had to do is go in and describe to them the ways in which environmental instruments are indeed physically settled in other words they get directly transferred upon delivery it's you know in exchange for cash they can be retired and consumed for a purpose that cash cannot fulfill in other words i can use a rec to claim that i am procuring this much green power i can't do that with a dollar bill i can't do that with cash in the bank i can do that if i have a renewable energy certificate that i retire to substantiate that claim same thing if you are trading a emissions allowance as part of a carbon market if i am trading a compliance emissions allowance that gives me that carries with it the right to admit one metric ton of carbon pollution into the atmosphere that if i didn't have it i would otherwise have to pay a penalty if i admitted it that allowance is serving a purpose that cash cannot serve um and so what we basically did is we demonstrated to them how even though environmental instruments are intangible they still have all of the characteristics of commodities they can be physically settled they can be physically transferred they can consume be consumed and serve a purpose that cash cannot serve and they are not derivative instruments they're not based on any underlying activity um they their value changes with the value of that commodity in the commodity market not because there's some different underlier that they're linked to that shifting like derivatives so we were able for the first time beyond rifle shot pieces of legislation like title four of the clean air act or renewable energy portfolio standards passed at the state level um in so on we were able to beyond those rifle shot descriptions of environmental markets to create really what was the first legal characterization of what environmental instruments are as the thing and we are able to do that as a form of what are now called intangible commodities to be more specific for environmental instruments they're called environmental commodities and an environmental commodity is not included in the swap definition and intangible commodity is not included in the swap definition and therefore doesn't have to bear the the burden of maintaining all of the you know collateral accounts protections positions you know policies and so on that if you're trading in derivatives you have to maintain substantial cost um you know impact um and so these intangible non-financial commodities these environmental commodities basically are allowed to transact um be physically settled and not regulated in the same way financial commodities are regulated and in doing so we basically saved folks operating renewable energy facilities folks doing carbon projects folks complying with regulatory flexibility mechanisms in environmental markets um around admissions trading and things like that we gave them the ability to go on without having to undertake a whole lot of additional costs to transact in those environmental instruments that they needed for compliance or that they were selling as part of their business from their projects that were originating them and so on um and so um as Daz is highlighting right now we were able to demonstrate to them but it took some time that the intangible nature of these commodities didn't disqualify them from the forward contract exclusion that is available for commodities that can be physically settled and so even though they have corpus they don't have corpus in physical reality we were able to demonstrate that they can be physically settled um and we did this both you know in filings but also through a number of meetings I helped lead with CTFC staff uh and so on here in DC to help them really understand you know to show them registry records from environmental instrument registries um uh you know contracts examples of it and so on um so that they got comfortable with it yeah so great and it just one quick um bit of I'm just going to put a little salt and pepper on what you're saying right now um so this is really quintessential to one part of computational law which is that when you have um a legal instrument right that's legal um that uh or or an asset for like what its property is fundamentally a legal concept and it's digital you know it doesn't have corpus in the language that Chris is using or or it doesn't have you know it's not not like a tangible um thing you know like a table or a chair um but that doesn't mean it's not real and just to underscore this as the economy and society itself transitions ever more into a digital footing to like an information society a digital economy it's arguably just as real or more real in some ways when I think about um stuff I did in uh in government as a lawyer in the 90s that was where the authoritative version was paper like some of that stuff made it to the archivist um a lot of it's gone for good it was ephemeral it was like it was hardly real in a sense it felt real because we could touch it there are a few things I did that were that were that were caught by archive.org and now propagated across servers still only stuff I can find uh and then when you have you know things that are maybe uh enter on a blockchain or into systems that are verifiable or that exist across places or that could be you know updated for which is a kind of a chain of custody uh it could even be more effective for its essential purpose and more real legally than the stuff that was tangible and brutish and primitive from the past arguably by contrast so this um so this breakthrough stuff that Chris was able to to lead um in the past now you know resulted in our ability to to really use this digital asset class of uh like carbon credits in in a way that that has reality and that exists under a and under existing legal framework you know it's the opposite of far out it's a perfectly well you know it's it's a sound you know long-standing well understood legal framework of commodities regulation and here's exactly um how you construct how this fits in the legal framework and he'll talk a little more later and so keep listening about how you can structure things like the credit he's mentioned like we could show him entries in carbon credit registries is something he just said like a minute ago and a few other things so there's artifacts and things what you can deliberately engineer in order to structure a legitimate system that falls under um a given like regulatory or other legal framework this is very good this is how we practice law in the future and how Chris has been practicing it for decades so back to you Chris and and you know that your next was this was imperative um and you can read this in the uh in the nature of the thing um article i co-authored in environmental finance uh when all this was going on um this was imperative because if environmental instruments fell within the swap definition um a significant percentage of their value um would be lost to transaction costs for those projects um that are using them to do non-recourse project finance um and uh it would have you know made a a significant and material impact on decreasing the amount of renewable energy sustainability projects carbon projects and so on that we're advancing because the value that they could get on the environmental instrument sale on the back end uh was being had to be would have to be discounted because of the need to comply as if they were transacting in a financial commodity which they're not so this ended up with us creating this space um for environmental commodities as part of intangible non-financial commodities um and the the reason why you know this um has value for digital assets is digital assets can look at the same manner and you can kind of go through the same structuring approach um and and this really does bear on enterprise blockchain applications and since liberty mutuals here i'll i'll give you know an example of that if if liberty um you know an insurer or a reinsurer wanted to create a new market layer where they wanted to enable all of their policy holders to be able to trade increments of coverage intro year you could use a technique i'm going to talk to you about now um uh you could use a technique like that um uh you know facts and circumstances depending of course again this is not legal advice this is all just conceptual exploration here um but you could potentially develop a system where the enterprise blockchains coins and tokens that you were using to allow your policy holders within the year to trans to transact amongst themselves increments of policy coverage um all coming out of the same insurer all coming out of the same reinsurer to a group of insurers um that could allow those customer policy holders to better manage their risks on the intro year through trading within that customer group ecosystem um and what they're trading is basically a service currency that can is serving a purpose that cash cannot serve that represents and is exchangeable for a service i.e. better coverage you know more coverage under my policy um uh uh from an insurance standpoint that's an example um for how an intangible digital asset commodity could get utilized um now in looking at creating these service ecosystems around enterprise blockchains um uh what i like to call the chuckie cheese model of tokens because everyone understands chuckie cheese you go in and the person running the service ecosystem when you give them cash they give you a chuckie cheese token and you can plug that token into the arcade into the skeetball to do whatever you want to do you know make the robotic mouse dance you know you name it um actually i think maybe it's a rat i don't know but the um the the bottom line is that you can um under this kind of chuckie cheese um example model for tokens and services and so on you can with enterprise blockchains create these new market layers amongst your customer group um that allows them to either through a bilateral transaction tree where they transact with you and then you provide to another entity or amongst themselves but fundamentally allows them to create um a market for increasing the policy coverage and so on and again there's not really a secondary market for this in the sense that it's not worth it to anybody other than someone who wants to exchange that service point and token for more policy coverage back to chuckie cheese analysis that chuckie cheese tokens um those aren't being used to speculate there's no chuckie cheese executive who's holding 10 000 chuckie cheese tokens that they're safe at home hoping that they're going to appreciate and so on it is a service currency it basically exists um to optimize the provision and allow more flexibility amongst the customer group for the provision of services goods and services so there are this concept of intangible nine financial commodities can apply to enterprise blockchains that are are being put in place for the for business purposes for to optimize business processes this is squarely different from the world of icos bitcoin and so on where you are dealing with um tokens and coins that are really representing a currency that are exist for nothing else other than secondary market speculation um and to have you know that that that trading market for people who are investing in them because they expect the value to grow not because they plan to exchange it for any specifically determined predetermined good and service you know um in the future so i'm sure you're all aware after the icoboom well during the icoboom the securities exchange commission came in and basically said um uh excuse me you guys are transacting in investment contracts here these coins these tokens are investment contracts and so when we're looking at enterprise blockchains one of the first things you want to do is design something that wouldn't trip security status um and the basic test that the supreme court has established for whether or something is a security not is the howie test basic prongs of the howie test is it an investment of money is there an expectation of profits from the person making the investment is the person investing money in a common enterprise and do the profit that come do the profit that comes from that investment does that profit source from the efforts of a promoter or a third party so in many ways think of passive investments you know think of you know stocks bonds all the other traditional securities they all fit that test um but also things like investing in the production of citrus groves the uh the production of a worm farm um you know those kind of things can also meet those tests and so when we're doing the icoboom what we had was the sec um in particularly the digital assets transactions um folks come out and basically say here's how we think the howie test elements conceptually line up with what we're seeing out there with icos in the market and so on and so they asked questions like is the token creation commensurate with meeting the needs of users like we're talking about with the chuckie cheese model or rather is it there for speeding speculation it's there for feeding speculation it looks more like a security are independent actors setting the price or is the promoter supporting the secondary market for the asset or other otherwise influencing trading uh and so on well we clearly see that with bitcoin and all of the other coins out there that are trading speculatively and so on not so much for a service currency you know ecosystem is the clear primary motivation for purchasing the digital assets for personal user consumption well under the chuckie cheese model under the enterprise blockchain model that we're talking about here where you're where the digital assets are going to be argued that they're intangible non-financial commodities yes if we're using them if we're consuming them that makes a difference um but are the tokens being entered into purely for the purpose of investment i.e. that eventually i'm going to exchange them for cash that i have no intention of actually you know receiving a service and so on i'm just speculating under the model that we were talking about the answer would be no so in the in the ask a question sure sorry just a quick one um so um i'm with you so far on each point maybe partly because i've had the benefit of hearing you say it before uh but um on the console part as i understand it part of what is um needed to qualify um you know something under you know commodities law versus a securities law um is that uh is that that unit of value is consumable um and so the moment of consumption for a chuckie cheese token is when it's um like redeemed to play an arcade game at chuckie cheese correct the moment of consumption for a carbon credit or we're more familiar never having been to chuckie cheese yet is is uh when you retire the credit i think um well like when it's been retired is what it's called there's no longer usable so that ton of carbon that's been taken out of the air that's represented by the credit is is like you know done it someone's taken credit for it where they credit what is the moment what what might i understand we're just you're doing a kind of a brain teaser here about um you know you about um atomizing like contract uh insurance coverage and potentially pooling it in a way where people could swap it but would the moment of consumption be when you paid your premium and gained a like legal right to a claim under the under a policy or would it be when you've actually filed but there's been an event you filed a claim or would it be when yet there was actual payout of the claim or that it was you'll finally determine that you were a warrant coverage or when one might just hypothetically at the moment of consumption be under under like commodities law in uh in having like a uh a partial unit of an insurance claim yes so so think about it under the example um for the insurer reinsurer creating a customer group marketplace that's run on an enterprise blockchain um the consumption of the tokens the on that blockchain um which basically not too dissimilar to way we do emissions allowances in a cap and trade system when you add up all those tokens they would represent the full breadth of policy coverage to all of the policy holders in that customer group and so they could trade within that customer group but eventually when one of those customers let's say they're entering into q3 they know that their risk profile is increasing because these various activities they like to get better supplemental coverage they could go out and procure basically you know tokenized coverage from another policy holder that is fungible with their policy and so on that provides added coverage and then when you had that risk event um that their policy coverage would be more because they've added to the tokens that represent that band of coverage and so it would get consumed in the sense that if that policy needed to be called that that person would have more coverage um it it creates better risk mitigation and so on but at the end of the year at the end of the day um or whatever time period was established by that insurance company um those tokens would cease having value if they were in exchange they just represent policy coverage and so on but they would need to be consumed um you know fundamentally um when they when they get turned in that example so um also this won't surprise you one of the elements of what the digital asset transactions team at the SCA said say are are the tokens distributed in ways to meet users needs you know are they being transferred or held in amounts you know that correspond to the purchase your expected use um or are they being really just held for investment well if you're creating a service ecosystem um i mean i have to check i remember when i went to chuckie cheese's they had tokens like physical tokens but i go to chuckie cheese with my kids these days and you get the card right you go to the machine you put in your money they give you a load of card that you then flash and use with all the games and so on and such like that um again there's no there was no buyout or liquid moment for the old chuckie cheese tokens when they transferred over anybody was speculating in old chuckie cheese physical tokens you know there wasn't a moment of a market crash or market spike or any kind of liquidity event for those guys when they transitioned they cease to those tokens cease to be worth anything and so on so well when you see how having tokens distributed for actual use and consumption is an important element here um are these digital assets this is another element are they being marketed to the public i.e. someone's twitter account who's promoting the ico generally versus are they being marketed potential users again in our insurance example it would only be available to people who are already policy holders and it would just be a commoditization you know fungitization of those policies that used to exist as kind of you know customer to customer block to block but now we're allowing for the coverage under those policies the trade on the entry year um and then finally um is the application fully functioning or in early stages of development enterprise blockchains tend to roll out for business purposes um they tend to have that central purpose once the as they get going um and this whole concept that i'm going to create an instrument first token coin first figure out how it really gets used later now we've all seen a lot of that that wouldn't fly under this and that would make it more likely um uh again vaccine circumstances depending for the sec to look at what you're doing and say that's really an investment contract which is a form of security that you're selling with that token or form so the first step in doing structuring enterprise blockchain digital assets so that they can be used in your service ecosystem with your customer group or your peer group if you're talking about something that's being done in a sector things like tracking the provenance of diamonds for instance where you have multiple companies involved in the supply chain and so on um if you're designing instruction that enterprise blockchain these days the first step that you want to avoid is security characterization and so that's something that um you know you can do um it's part of the structuring of how you design the governance for that enterprise blockchain and the transactional and contractual vehicles for how those coins tokens and coins get transacted maybe that's buried in terms and conditions in other places but you have to it has to be laid out um so if i'm doing this with an enterprise blockchain the first you know pitfall to avoid is being you know characterized as a security the next pitfall to avoid um is you will note before the SEC came out with their view of what constitutes digital assets and securities the CTFC came out and basically kind of teased the issue and said well look these we have jurisdiction over digital currencies we have jurisdiction in addition to derivatives over digital currencies foreign currency trading and so on because much of foreign currency trading really occurs at the derivative level you know occurs through derivatives futures options and so on and so you know one of the things that the CTFC hasn't really laid out in too much detail yet they probably will in the future is when maybe it's not a security or maybe it is a security but do they also have either independent or concurrent jurisdiction with the SEC because they deem that thing to also be a digital currency and when you look at bitcoin when you look at stable coins when you look at where certain jurisdictions are looking in taking the database system that their central bank uses and basically put that database system into a distributed database and so on there's an argument that that the CTFC could right you know could call their jurisdiction on the basis of we have jurisdiction over digital currency or in currency trading all the rest of that and so on but it's it's not as likely what's what's more likely is if you can demonstrate that that service currency is consumable if you can demonstrate that is physically settable settable on the blockchain between the parties that are using it that plan to consume it eventually like recs and carbon offsets there's a very good chance that enterprise blockchains tokens and coins if structured correctly under the appropriate facts and circumstances and paper and all the rest of it could be viewed not as a security by the SEC and as an intangible non-financial commodity by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and therefore fall in the sweet spot of basically light to no regulation around the transactions for that those tokens and those coins that instrument and what this means is that there's ways to structure enterprise blockchains such that they face very light-handed if any regulation over the transactions of the thing i.e the tokens and coins maintained on that enterprise blockchain ledger yes i think we're going to go to a couple of questions now because we've got some people in the room who have a few things and first we'd like to bring up john who's in the who's another human dynamics group member and also a lawyer from Italy and doing work in doing his PhD in Dublin and now here for a little while and so well just a quick quick comment back to the intangible goods it might be useful for any common law scholar to consider that in civil law we exactly have this kind of categorization so and actually it informs all our private and contract law so for instance the intangible goods are a precise category in which our reconstruction actually is a bit different because we don't tend up to consider them material at the end of the but actually we just provide rides upon the disposition of this kind of intangible goods so it's actually differentiation really simple anything that is material is a material good that is not material so it's untouchable and untangible it's intangible yes indeed untangible comes from the letting tangere that is to touch so that's and just to connect to what i'm i do it is also mentioned in the paper i wrote recently that a privacy in the gdpr and in europe works according to this to this framework so that is i think important to interesting and then of course the ifrs you know standard for accountancy in in you know very popular in europe it does a pretty good job with intangible property and you know ownership in the u.s in some senses we're further behind conceptually with gap you know it's got so much less coherent treatment so we in some ways we may have some catching up to do well yes i would say that the the basic rules have worked different so you don't have this kind of categorization because you are based on precedent that work differently instead we don't have the binding precedent and well i would say that maybe a common a common thread is about corporations because the the legal nature of corporation i i'm not sure about the us but should be let's say a corporation is untangible but it's it's real because it attacks and so on but we is not we'll say is not a good that you can own you have stocks on it and stocks represent rise that you can enforce upon the the corporation so that is exactly the paradigm that we have with the material goods we have rise that we can dispose and enforce so that might be and and and i think um through much of this we are with intangible non-financial commodities we're certainly talking about rights to make claims to undertake an activity uh to exchange for a good or service uh and so on um so you know it it certainly does line up uh you know with rights and it's a great point the civil law jurisdictions over in europe compared to the common law jurisdiction here in the united states in the uk and so on do i do treat this differently but also too you have to be very careful even the uniform commercial code here in the us talks about general intangibles in a way that it constitutes personal property as opposed to um investment property letter of credit rights instruments you know securities and so on you know uh mineral rights that kind of stuff um so there the definition is important um but the good news i think is that again with the right structuring there's ways that enterprise blockchain applications can get done without receiving securities classification and without being seen as a digital currency um but rather as being seen as an intangible non-financial commodity basically what i refer to as a service token uh and such um and you know the sec and others said you can't just call it a utility token and have it take on those characteristics you have to the way that the way the thing operates will either give or not give it a certain characteristic and and that gets into the structuring of the governance of the system the the contracts that are used to transact the terms and conditions you know and the rest of it for doing so but it's um you know it's an interesting you know it's an interesting approach but you know rights rights and attributes from activities and so on can form into any number of different things securities commodities and others and you know the basically the care and how you structure is important okay and next up we've got bop so uh this is your liberty mutual representative here so i think the use case that you put forth in the area of insurance i i think is certainly intriguing um although i think it would make underwriters to take a lot of tums and stomach pains yes and when just you know what what i've told the underwriters in the past is that they're like an admissions market where you say all of the power plants can only admit this many thousand tons of carbon dioxide you tell the underwriters guys the overall policy coverage is not going to ever exceed this amount we're just breaking up that total amount of policy coverage amongst the holders into more fungible units yeah i totally understand and i think you'd have to have very similarly situated uh ensure that's right yeah you wouldn't want to cross crossing line types for this kind of thing yeah yeah um i could just imagine a situation though where and let's use a very real and very tragic example of what's going on in Australia right now with the wildfires and you have yet to be realized or filed uh fire claims or property loss claims and someone who has more exposure in Australia and ensure there's more exposure in Australia than another insurer could go out under your scenario in the market and buy reinsurance tokens well that would be very unsettling to the reinsurer you know it's almost like adverse selection so hey but again i love it i'm not you know dismissing it i'm just saying that there are some significant hurdles and challenges yeah but i'll honor you with an example of established established groups that you're doing with and it's got to be really clearly defined so the underwriters don't um don't freak out and so that the reinsurers don't think that they've um shifted the risk too dramatically and there's there's ways that it can be done such that the person running the enterprise blockchain you know the insurer the reinsurer or whatnot um is able to you know um you know take transaction fees every time it's transactor there there's manners in which it can be done where you can make sure that the risk doesn't pool in a detrimental way to the issuer yeah i i think that that may be very true um i wanted to maybe just offer up an example of enterprise blockchain example you're referring to for the group here uh liberty mutual has participated in a proof of concept i think we backed away from it at this point but um there's a lot of friction in trading um currency between insurance companies in the form of what's called subrogation claims meaning one insured takes you know a loss and we end up paying our insured but they're really at fault so then we subrogate back against that other individual the tort fees are to recover the loss and we're constantly exchanging these payments all the time and it could be as small as a $500 payment for a bumper or a you know $200,000 you know bottle injury claim um and so there's been a number of insurers that got together to try to tokenize the uh subrogation claims or rights that you might have and so to reduce the monetary friction you would have an enterprise blockchain to then um essentially trade or aggregate the claims that you have and offset them against one another and so that you would have a period of time where you end up settling up yep against each other so if Liberty Mutual is better at you know identifying non-risk insurers than all-state and you know we have a balance a credit balance against all-state then we're able to claim that at whatever the settlement period is and so i still think that that will happen um it absolutely reduces the cost and friction it is incredibly expensive just think about sending a check okay um you know that is a seven to ten dollar event on top of the actual on every single one and so you know i don't need to get into like the economics of blockchain and all that but i'm just trying to give a real world example of um transactions between entities that have been tokenized and then you can kind of settle up and so i don't know enough about you know kind of your theory here about whether or not that qualifies because then they're converting that to an actual hard currency at some point right so you're not i don't know that Liberty would trade its tokens to claim against all-state to someone else you know or anything like that because we're actually caching them in for an actual cash payment so i'm not sure that exactly qualifies on your example but i think it's just a very interesting example of way that organizations are identifying transactions and tokenizer are digitizing them in order to reduce friction or reduce costs beautiful yeah no that thank you bob that's that is interesting and um uh you know i'm sure you guys have i'm sure the the group that's doing that has had counsel look at this um but you know you look at things such as you know is it a limited group that has you know ultimate use to this um uh you know in other words you can't have anybody you know any investor come in and decide to procure those to speculate they serve that specific purpose of um reconciling subjugation claims um so they're you know there there are some dynamics that go in the other direction because what you're essentially doing on those with those tokens is um uh using them as a vehicle a payment vehicle to come in and out of those tokens um as a uh basically a more a cheaper a cheaper way than you know having to deal with julietta counts and all the rest of it um but uh you know depending again how you do it and you know i'm definitely sounding like a lawyer here it all it all depends i'm sorry chris whenever you say it all depends it's over no just kidding i just want to say Todd thank you for coming um we're a little bit after the um the normal hour so appreciate it and uh i want to ask um is or i want to say if there's anybody else that needs to go now because we're we're um 12 minutes past the uh the um witching hour witching hour when we said we would end you're free to go um apologies for uh for this being so darn good that we whether we had to take more time uh but uh but but uh you can come back and we will post this video and we'll also do a wrap up email uh giving people an opportunity to um keep the conversation going in the telegram channel and um if as uh desired uh you know we can facilitate some conference calls and things like that and we do have this sort of tap off time at the end of january which will uh give you the final confirmed date for when we can do some little report outs from people that are um participating in the course and uh and have some discussion around that so uh with that um we're now going to enter um extra innings um and uh and can I ask um chris and and others um would like say four p.m be uh an acceptable like new target for for ending is that possible yeah that works for me i i have a hard stop it for them okay so let's go for like uh 355 uh and um and so we've got um two questions uh in the batter's box uh brendon in the room and um and then something from uh from uh from uh niki was i think alexandra asked someone else online oh no it's chris's view oh sorry um uh so we've got two online actually i think um yeah one from telegram um from christina uh and then one from um alexandra so brendon you're up yes chris uh you uh first of all i have to say it's great to see you again from last year yeah no thanks nice to see you too um you made some uh two two really in point important points um and you know maybe you can expand upon them a little bit more first is that the nature of the transaction and engineering around it it really defines what kind of a financial instrument it is or not and i think that you know really is a point that you know it really has to be driven home that it's it's everything else around um you know the engineering around all of these things but the the the the other thing that i think that you really said which was very important is uh and i want to make sure i have this right is that it's okay if you have a if you have a closed system a closed ecosystem it's okay to have a transfer um from one person to another as long as relative to the individual that thing in question is consumed although it may be transferred to another person but overall all the things in question are consumed or ultimately consumed ecosystem over a period of time so at the end of the day they're all worthless that's right they need to be ultimately consumed um and the the analogy to the renewability certificate market um is both in the voluntary and compliance market when you originate um a renewability certificate um it has a certain shelf life for for the value to either maintain a voluntary certification or to be used for compliance by a compliance entity in the compliance market so um you know a a use it or use it aspect um the fact that it needs to be consumed to serve its final purpose um to make a claim to allow for services or activities to occur and so on that consumption aspect is very important the fact that it can serve a purpose that cash cannot here's a question for you it occurred to me in your statement consumed does that mean really consumed or does it mean that at the end of the day or end of a term that those things in questions are just terminated like the exploration of all these at once so yes um you can have expiration and that that certainly helps to demonstrate that it's not you know a financial instrument it's not speculative expiration certainly helps but fundamentally it's the consumption wherein you use it for its purpose and that environmental commodity that intangible non-financial commodity can there after being used for its purpose can no longer be used for the same purpose it's it gets consumed in the same way that you know you would take an agricultural commodity and you know take that bushel of corn and you know eat it the same thing with with environmental instruments when they get consumed someone is you know retiring them to make the claim that i've consumed this much green power i've reduced my carbon emissions this much and so on or they're being consumed to match up with activities that i wouldn't otherwise have been allowed to do legally without having a corresponding environmental instrument as it is with the admissions markets great great thank you so much no no problem great so we've got a couple more um one uh just in uh oh i already have a in order of um in and out what is that that's your telegram i think through uh okay um christina has asked this maybe something partly for you john uh may i ask about personal data sales so this was posed when we were going into the intricacies intricacies of uh the like um civil law versus common law treatment of intangible property um the questions may i ask you about personal data sale um so personal data is another example it's another asset type you could say of intangible property um and it says what's your view as you know GDPR is interpreted as you shall not basically sell personal data recent EU directive says you can barter data for perhaps trivial services what is your idea on this well um the GDPR doesn't say that we cannot sell our data the GDPR is built upon the civil law and so it doesn't comprehend the idea of selling data why because data are intangible goods and so uh we have rights upon them uh what does it mean um personal data under the GDPR or in general in in europe uh belongs to person who the rights because they descend from article eight and seven uh of the fundamental rights charter so essentially uh we can license this data with our consent that must be informed um and ambiguous uh free and so on to be valid to the data controllers what does it mean that is a kind of contract that is bonded by the regulation itself so it must align to those strict and imperative requirements but we can always opt out for instance so um for instance we draw our consent that is impossible to do in a normal contract for instance about data set well um the essential example to understand the difference how we treat uh uh data not as commodity is that we have rights upon the data but when we sell the data when industries transfer the data uh between them they sell the data set meaning that they sell the uh intellectual rights upon them why because a data set is a set uh of a certain list of data uh and so whoever invented that list with that pattern with that criteria and so on has rights in intellectual rights upon them so this is what is sold and we can we should not uh uh misunderstood it with for instance if we have a pen drive and we sell it we the pen drive if the is the material good so we sell the pen drive but the personal data and the data set that is stored in the pen drive is not the good so we have rights upon them okay so it's not the good it's it's it's the ip yeah and that's um information um uh uh inventions expressions you know that are represented those right you know the rights to control those inventions and expressions that are controlled you know by intellectual property defined by intellectual property laws and frameworks you know are are separate as is information just raw information itself data sets themselves are separate from um intangible environmental commodities um in that intangible environmental commodities basically carry rights to make claims either voluntary compliance um or to undertake activities um uh in the real world and they are consumable um uh you know in furtherance of those purposes um in a way that you don't have with information that can get used again and again and again um or intellectual property that gives you the right to control who uses your you know how an invention or an expression gets used licensed and so on so it is it's different but it goes to show how the various legal frameworks sometimes take very rifle shot definitions of things especially in civil law jurisdictions and other ones it's really the definition of what you're not defines you indeed and so so while we're getting um jurisprudential up in here um that's a perfect segue to Alexandra's question uh and so you could probably see it in the chat but I'll read it I wonder what Chris's perspective is it's chris barron on how to harmonize the governance you know slash structure of uh cryptocurrencies in light of their diverse national treatments uh they are perceived in some jurisdictions as money others as maybe a commodity or security um some places just like a personal property the IRS has said uh ultimately um it is this even possible uh to to harmonize uh you know the the basically like the the legal treatment of you know of these things so great question and um I think the ultimate harmonization is either going to happen in two ways we're going to continue using the us as an example down the track we're on right now where you know both kind of direct the digital assets are getting defined when they fall in a bucket of a security or a digital currency or as I've been arguing an intangible non-financial commodity uh and so on um uh in other jurisdictions it might be more rightful shot but it's going to be one of the one of the two uh doing a rightful shot calling them out specifically um and naming them specifically would be a way that that could could get could get reconciled but um from what I'm seeing these two in the United States it comes into the way that you create design you know use transact and consume if you're going to consume it the thing um that will determine whether it falls in the bucket as basically just a digital representation of money as digital currency whether it falls in the bucket as a security this is something I'm investing in um or if it falls in the bucket of an intangible non-financial commodity where it could be used essentially as you know service currency um uh around um uh you know new markets and so on uh that could be created with enterprise blockchain applications so it's um the the governance structure of cryptocurrencies really has to lend itself to the core purpose of creating something that's being used exclusively and ultimately to be exchanged for you know the provisions of goods and services and so on not something that is being you know used transacted and ultimately um uh you know moving from database to database for speculative purposes okay and and I think we've got one final vantage point before we wrap up from different perspective about harmonization well I would say that it's an issue that invests either privacy AI I mean all the technology because we are moving to a global technological development so we need global solutions um there's no probably a right answer from national or federal laws what we might think about is to bypass the issue considering not the legal nature of the technology but the technology uh as uh uh what it is so to regulate the characteristics how with the standardization so uh standardization laws actually have a neutral approach to the technology they just set the uh minimum characteristics that something should have and these might be a path to do it indeed yeah so a point very well taken especially from an attorney who practices in civil law jurisdictions indeed yeah and there's a certain like kind of logical axiomatic um you know um power to the answer for how would how would one harmonize across different jurisdictions one would look for international transnational legal frameworks yeah so at a high level that just it's a hand from glove fit and eventually you could have a treaty or another um framework um you know convention type document that that establishes you know what this looks like but the from a us perspective um again um investments in cryptocurrencies can often look like uh securities um they often look like you know investing in just basically digital currency um as it were the IRS may treat them as investments may treat them as appreciating personal property there's any number of ways um under different facts and circumstances that it that it could get treated um I'm unfortunately not holding my breath um because this is a new type of um a new type of thing um digital asset script cryptocurrencies and so on and you know it's it's it's come into a world where we've had long established frameworks to protect investors um to protect um uh industries markets and so on um in the derivative space uh and and so on um you know from worst-case scenarios um and uh and that's where you know harmonization would be a nice goal but I do think it's it's a challenge and you know there's there's just such a wide strata in cryptocurrencies and you'll notice that when I was talking about you know service tokens um you know the Chuck E cheese model for enterprise blockchains I wasn't calling it cryptocurrencies you know for a very specific purpose because they're not really intended to function as a digital currency their intention to function as something that allows for uh folks to optimize the way that they um procure and use goods and services and that literally is the final word on the topic uh not not because um it's all that there is to be said but really just because we're now at the the final final witching hour so I want to thank you Chris again this year for for sharing your expertise and your perspectives and for challenging us uh uh on on how to think um legally um in this computational age and want to thank um everybody else uh who's who's participated uh right yeah and what what do people need to know as we hang up yeah so uh we'll we'll be sending out a kind of uh overview of challenges that uh you know we've uh come up with in the last uh few days so that we could so so as to you know kind of color some insight maybe into what we might be looking for you know as we get to this fourth day of the IAP computational law course where there will be an opportunity for everybody to present on some of the things that they've learned so you know I'm sure some of the things that we'll talk about include uh Judge Martinez's uh hypothesization of what might an international court based on computational law look like you know I'm sure there's going to be submissions for apps that are built in community that lawyer or a doc symbol um maybe you know you want to just write up a brief overview of uh how one of these issues applies to something that you're working on and kind of provide your context to you know this uh corpus of information that we've uh kind of been accumulating over the last few days and how might how might you structure a system that could unit that could um encapsulate units of insurance coverage or claim management uh by by uh insurance providers or carriers rather um after the factor how might you architect a system uh that's um encapsulating some unit of value uh in a way where it where it could meet the criteria that Chris just walked us through and that are um spelled out more detail in the regulation um and so that'll give us um you know some good food for thought and the best part about day four which will be the we'll announce it but tentatively January 24th the end of January is um you'll be doing the teaching so you'll be doing the the talking and the presenting and then we'll be um helping to facilitate dialogue and discussion and reaction uh based on what you had to say so we hope that you'll take us up on this offer it is optional um so but if you'd like to keep the dialogue going and then apply the learnings uh in this way we invite you and encourage you to do that so with that um the day three of like the regular class programming for the MIT computational law course fifth annual hereby adjourned here's my gavel thanks so much to everybody for attending we uh you know we've really appreciated all the discussion and we're excited to see what everybody can come up with so stay tuned and please keep participating bonjour now