LONDON, June 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Accord Project is delighted to announce a suite of new partnerships with leading international law firms. Baker McKenzie, CMS, Macfarlanes, and Mishcon de Reya have joined the growing membership of the Accord Project to assist in the development of industry-wide standards for smart legal contracts.

The Accord Project's sector-specific working groups continue to develop standardized open source smart contract templates to fuel the next generation of data-driven and connected contracting.

Tom Hansen, UK Lead at the Accord Project said: "These partnerships represent another exciting milestone for the Accord Project. Ongoing collaboration with leading law firms is an important addition to other recent developments at the Project, such as the release of our legal domain-specific language and flagship technology partnerships with IBM and R3. We look forward to working together as the industry continues to support the adoption of this technology."

Paul Stevens, CMS Partner and a leading figure in the CMS innovation unit, comments: "We are delighted to join the Accord Project and to collaborate with other organisations to develop best practice around smart contracts. As a firm, we are committed to investing in new technology and innovation to improve the services we offer our clients. Smart contracts and blockchain have the potential to really disrupt the industry, so we feel this is a vital project to be putting our weight and expertise behind."

Sue McLean, Partner in Baker McKenzie's IT/Commercial Practice Group said: "We are delighted to join the Accord project as we believe that collaboration is absolutely vital to drive innovation in the legal sector.  We understand the power of multi-disciplinary teams to solve problems – we have seen it in action in our own innovation hubs and partnerships globally. Blockchain and smart contracts offer great potential to transform the way our clients do business, but there remains uncertainty over legal enforceability and adoption. It's terrific that the Accord Project is attacking these challenges head on. We are really looking forward to working with our partners to help define standards and explore how we can make practical use of this technology for the benefit of our clients."

Alex Edmondson, Partner, Corporate and M&A and head of the Technology Practice Group at Macfarlanes said, "We are committed to leveraging emerging technologies for the benefit of our clients and see significant potential for blockchain and smart contracts to impact the markets in which we operate. The Accord Project represents a terrific opportunity to collaborate across the legal profession to develop robust, common standards and to promote consistency. We're delighted to be involved."

CONTACT: Tom Hansen, tom@accordproject.org, +44 743 775 5803

SOURCE Accord Project