COVID-19 and Responsive Legal Agreements using Oracles
Abstract
Unprecedented events, such as the COVID-19 pandemics provide uncertainty for businesses as they try to adapt to a rapidly evolving legal and legislative environment impacted by restrictions imposed by events such as a global pandemic.
There is no clear universal legal lexicon to describe these types of events, so, without a formal definition and data representation, it is challenging to reason with them from a contract perspective. This article outlines an approach to legal agreements that can adapt to COVID-19 type events by creating a structure for both defining methods of extraction of data from various sources of interest in legal agreements and making them available for on-chain verification and execution in a smart legal agreement. This framework allows contractual clauses to adapt to events that are a result of extraordinary events. The proposed framework outlines issues with getting access to data, including integrating information from different sources, and highlights opportunities and issues involved in operationalising systems using oracles using NLP. Oracle approaches are discussed and procedures that are more suitable for use by contracting parties are identified. Two examples are demonstrated that include data collection and oracle deployment and examples of parameterised contracts that adapt to the data sources.
Presentation
Recording of the presentation is available here.
Conference Paper
Full conference paper is available here.
Keywords
smart legal contract, oracles, distributed ledger technologies, blockchain, smart agreement.
