Nearly everyone I know has, at some point in their life, encountered a legal task: sign a contract, go to court, complete an administrative obligation, request a permit etc. And everyone I know, expected to complete that task quickly, only to realize it would take much longer than anticipated.
Much much longer…
The Need for Speed
Law is the backbone of doing business and in today’s world, conducting business requires speed. Therefore, the law and the various processes it engenders should reflect this need for efficiency. They should enable it. After all the, the law provides a foundation for our societies, allowing them to function. A society is only as good, successful and dynamic as the law that governs it.
We need speed, because our world is fast-paced. We transformed many facets of our lives with speed and efficiency — enabled by an unprecedented technical progress over the years. Thanks to this progress people across the globe can communicate instantly, send money almost instantly, send goods in 24 hours or perform a service fully remotely in 1 day.
And we need more speed to solve other pressing issues our world is facing: climate change, diseases, poverty and more.
So, it is no surprise that we look at all things legal and expect them to act at the speed our societies need.
Bureaucracy is decline
And yet, this is far from being the case. The legal, regulatory and procedural parts of doing — well, anything really — are more of an impediment and a constant frustration than an enabler.
Bureaucracy is at its peak. Over-regulation is at its peak. Transnational transactions are more complex than ever with UK-EU post-Brexit red tape, or a potential US-EU trade spat on the horizon. All of those make business transactions slower, costlier and sometimes outright prevent them. For instance, UK’s exports to the EU dropped down by 27% between 2021–2023 due to Brexit. More than a mere statistic: that’s 1/5th of someone’s revenue gone or 1/5th companies that stopped exporting altogether.
One could argue that slow is good. In the same way a fine-dining restaurant is better than a fast food. Perhaps, the slow-motion of legal processes could mean their quality? Quality in the form of a better, more equal system, offering equal rights to all participants.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Today, roughly 5 Billion people globally lack access to justice. Approximately 1.5 billion of those, are people unable to access justice for civil, administrative, or criminal matters. This includes people in countries with well established institutions and justice systems that still encountered significant barriers in resolving their everyday legal issues. To take California as an example: in 2018 55% of its citizens faced a legal matter and 70% of them received no legal assistance.So all in all, our legal systems are slow and unequitable. Unable to offer adequate support to the majority of citizens.
And a slow and inefficient bureaucracy is one of the leading factors of national decline. As a recent Rand study revealed, great empires across history — from ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy to 19th-century Great Britain — experienced decline due to their bureaucracy.
So make no mistake, bureaucracy is decline.
Building Autonomous Contracts
AI is the right tool
Technology available today — in particular the latest breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence, offer us the potential to deliver more speed in the handling legal matters.
As AI gets better, many tools could and should be created: AI-powered mass adjudication systems, expert systems for judge support or AI powered arbitration — just to name a few.
Going beyond tools for lawyers
But, technology should also be applied in the right ways and in the right places, so as to maximize its impact. Today, most focus in the legal tech space goes into building solutions that help lawyers work faster. This is great, but does not necessary solve the main problem: that the process of relying on lawyers is flawed in the first place.
Consider the evolution of online payments: when purchasing something online, you’re not asked to manually transfer funds. The real progress in payments over the past 20 years hasn’t been about helping the bank clerk perform your transfer faster. Rather, it has been about removing the need for using a bank in the first place. The focus has been on creating 3rd-party intermediaries (like Stripe) that handle this process for both parties — guaranteeing a smooth and trustworthy exchange.
A similar transformative concept is largely absent in the legal sector. Instead of focusing solely on tools that enhance the efficiency of lawyers or judges, we should be exploring solutions that eliminate the need for their involvement altogether (whenever such need is technologically possible for the given use case).
Delos’ plans in Autonomous Contracts
The path Delos proposes (and wants to build the infrastructure for) is to replace the way we currently do contracts with Autonomous Contracts.
Contracts where a 3rd party intermediary — provides a contract, allows parties to sign it and then on their behalf looks at the facts and verifies if the various terms and conditions have been met. Based on that verification it proceeds to execute the rights stipulated in the contract (make payments; transfer rights etc.) along with the various administrative tasks related to this (invoicing; taxes; shipment tracking; regulatory compliance) and solving potential disputes that may arise (via online arbitration). To ensure the entirety of this process is fast and scalable, these tasks need to be handled by AI Agents.
Such an approach would offer several benefits:
- speed up contract servicing
- reduce company costs and time for contract processing by cutting down on back-office work
- minimize errors, and thus decreases litigation risks
- improve payment speed, reducing unpaid invoices, and building greater trust and efficiency into daily contracting
- handle regulatory compliance requirements
- finally (were it a in a complete system with AI-powered dispute resolution) it could serve as an alternative to today’s overburdened legal and judiciary systems
At Delos, it is our mission to build the infrastructure for such contracts allowing businesses and individuals to move contracts and contract management, from outdate manual processes, onto our platform.
Getting to the ultimate solution will take a long time. But overall our 2 step plan to get there can be described as this:
- Create a platform for companies to autonomously execute their contracts. Companies will be able to upload existing contracts to Delos, connect the needed data and leverage our AI Agents to put their contract execution on autopilot — from verifying contractual terms, to payments, invoicing, regulatory compliance, invoicing, and more.
- As more individual companies leverage our platform, we want to introduce 2-sided contracts, with dispute resolution — evolving into an end-to-end fully autonomous contract platform, that can replace the current legal system.