Introducing Decombine Smart Legal Contracts

We click accept. We're not entirely sure what we've just agreed to. What happens now? It's anyone's guess. There are promising hopes that this is just the thing that will solve our problems, but we're not really sure. We're willing to take a risk or two to get over this hump and get back to work. Haven't been in this exact situation? Well, I don't believe you. Most of us interact with hundreds or thousands of individual agreements every single day.

Most agreements are small, but they're still impactful to our lives. It's the warranty on the coffee machine, the insurance on our motorcycle, the video game we purchased through a service, or the assurance that the driver picking us up is not wanted in 34 states.

A better way? Meet the Decombine Smart Legal Contract (SLC)

1. What is a Smart Legal Contract?

A Smart Legal Contract (SLC) is the concept of a legal agreement that includes some kind of machine-readable format. It is difficult to pin down an exact definition, since it doesn't exist as a widely accepted or even attempted standard. Not necessarily for lack of trying. A lot of very smart people have been working in this problem domain for a very long time. Much has been explored. Custom programming languages, domain specific languages, tooling for lawyers, blockchains, and more. Almost all of it has struggled with the same problem: there's no reason to upset the apple cart. We have a system that works.

Legal boilerplate isn't going anywhere, and that's just fine. Our lawyers need comfortable vacation homes. For agreements that don't require getting our legal teams on the horn, we think the Decombine SLC has something to offer. Our approach is fairly simple: we focus on what is supposed to happen during the lifecycle of our contract. We create a template to describe it, and then plug in software to act, or react, to what happens. Natural language legal text hasn't gone away, and it won't, but now there's a lot less guesswork about what happens next. In summary, that's the idea behind the Decombine Smart Legal Contract.

2. What is Decombine?

We're a small startup, part American, part Finnish. We've been working for a few years on research and development around the future of agreement. Much of those lessons are going right into the Decombine SLC. The Decombine SLC is open source so we're making a calculated bet that it's the right thing to do, and that there exists a viable future in acting as a trusted partner to help you operate your SLC.

The competitive advantage of Decombine SLC

Interoperability

Decombine SLC have been designed with the leading cloud native interoperability standards in mind. There are no proprietary standards or software required to use or create SLC. SLC leverage Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects and tools like Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Cloud Events, and Flux. Furthermore, this means that SLC are going to be a safe bet for the future, ensuring that each Contract has long term viability for integrating to solve the most demanding and complex business problems.

Simplicity

Although it may sound complex, the Decombine SLC is deceptively simple. Each SLC is defined using one of multiple template formats that are considered de facto standards for communicating configuration (JSON, YAML, TOML). Provided you understand the process you're templating, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to create a template. Once the template is created, you can then include any number of software workloads that are used in the SLC. Decombine SLC currently supports software that can be run on Kubernetes - so anything that uses Docker.

Transparency

Trust is getting much harder to come by, and for pretty good reasons. It used to be that everyone on the Internet was the FBI. Simpler times. Unfortunately, those days are gone. The Internet matured from simple corporate naivete to surveillance capitalism and is heading full steam for something more complex. The bar to overcome skepticism is only going to get higher as the proliferation of agents and models leads to opaque results. Transparency is about to make another comeback.

Encapsulating your service as a SLC means you are standing behind your work. You have done the work of outlining key events, expected outcomes, and are ready to back them up. Your service doesn't have to be open source, but it can be. Most importantly, people know what to expect. This is about to be a huge competitive advantage, for both humans and machines alike.

Every SLC has a series of states. Just like in the real world, a contract can only ever be in a single state. For example, it can't be both valid and invalid. In order for it to be valid, there are probably very specific conditions that need to be met. The same could be said for a service. If you want to access a service, you need to meet certain conditions.

stateDiagram-v2
  direction LR
  state Unsigned
  state Incomplete
  state Signed
  state Expired
  [*] --> Unsigned
  Unsigned --> Incomplete: First signature
  Incomplete --> Signed: All signatures complete
  Incomplete --> Expired: Expiration date reached
  Signed --> Expired: Expiration date reached
  Expired --> [*]

Flexibility

Just because you're a technology leader doesn't mean you're ready to jump into the deep end of innovation for your contracts. Decombine SLC don't care what kind of contract you have, whether it is a Word document, PDF, image file, or something else. Decombine SLC are designed to be agnostic of the related natural language legal text. On the other hand, if you're ready for something more capable, you can use the Decombine SLC to create a contract that is fully machine readable.

Accord Project is an open source community under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation working on the bleeding edge of complex data and document modeling. Decombine SLC plan to natively integrate with models created from Accord Project's tooling and libraries so that you can integrate structured data models into your natural language legal contracts to support the most advanced use cases and customization possible.

Decombine Network

Decombine Network is our managed service to provide a secure, privacy-oriented, and reliable platform to operate your SLC. We're building the infrastructure to enable anyone to create, share, and manage their SLC - whether for themselves, their community, or their organizations. We are offering users to be able to sign up now for early access, and as soon as we're ready, we'll personally let you know. For peace of mind, you can review our transparent privacy policy here: Privacy Policy

Register Early Access