 One of the major purposes of the law is to develop a general purpose platform for studying how people behave online, how they interact, and how different kinds of interventions, legal, institutional, organizational, and technical, affect how they behave and how they can structure their relations well. The law is changing so rapidly and so much is being transacted over the net. At the same time, our legal institutions are having a great deal of difficulty keeping up with the changes around them, they're being under budgeted, they're being stressed. What can we do in the digital world that we can use to support law, to supplant law, to be law? With the law lab, we've really undertaken the commitment to investigate the underpinnings of laws and institutions, particularly as an institution that supports innovation. What we're trying to do is provide better evidence for how we should design law and how we should design systems more generally to fit the kind of people we really are. Banking is one area that is ripe for the digital revolution. The world of finance is ripe for this kind of innovation. If a group of people wanting to collaborate on a software project are scattered around the world, in the old days, this made it very difficult for them to come together as equity owners. The virtual corporation will allow them to have all of the traditional protections of a business organization brought into the digital format so they can do it entirely by the web. People are coming together to collaborate in decentralized networks. One of the amazing things about life on the net is that the life and the behavior are also the transcript. Everything is occurring in a way that is susceptible to analysis. We're now in the middle of looking at hundreds down to the low thousands of collaborative sites and trying to extract from that an understanding of what makes them work and what makes them fail. And typically when you have complex problems, say like the financial services collapse, you have to get information across many kinds of disciplines, not just the form of classic finance, but also as a computer science problem, also a problem of complexity of science. There are different kinds of insights that come in and form the solution. Changes are made possible because of the technology, but they're not made inevitably good because of the technology. In other words, you can architect networks so that they don't easily fail. You can architect them that can be self-healing. You can architect them so that they can be wholly transparent. Part of what our undertaking to be is to create a platform, a cloud platform that allows people to get together in a focused way, to have conversations towards solving problems. And part of our role in being involved in this design is to make sure that we do it intelligently and well and that we work with good partners as we do. The law lab idea is how to structure it is not just all be a single institute. It's really to be a network of partners who have different kind of competencies. When you open up information flows, you increase the rate of learning and innovation dramatically. What we're doing is trying to build on the experience of open collaborative innovation online to build a non-siloed open network research platform for any social scientist interested in the network. Beginning to collect large-scale data on these phenomena and then to convert these into insights about how we can get up tomorrow morning and design a new system is to my mind the most exciting thing that we can do.