Smart Contracts – What Are They and How Do They Fit in With Traditional Contracts?

/ Contractual Issues, Digital

Blog Authors: Charles Maurice, Partner and Daniel Fournier, Paralegal – Stevens & Bolton LLP   Smart contracts – fruit of the nascent distributed ledger technology – are an emergent disruptor to the legal landscape, but what are they and how do they fit in with traditional contracts? You might be forgiven for thinking that contract law in the UK is neither modern nor smart: after all at times we still rely on legal principles handed down in judgments from the Victorian era and earlier. However,…

JCT Digital – Are You Making the Most of Our Online Services?

/ Digital, JCT Product Updates

Flexible options to buy and work with your JCT contracts online, plus an important notice about our JCT Contracts Digital (CD) Service JCT is committed not only to best practice in creating its suite of contracts but also in their delivery, including embracing the latest digital technologies to support the drafting process and make accessing JCT contracts easier. Two years ago, we launched our current digital services, JCT On Demand and JCT Construct, not knowing the unprecedented set of challenges the construction industry was about…

Debating Digital

/ Contractual Issues, Digital, JCT Povey Lecture

Blog Author: Richard Saxon CBE – Past Chair, JCT Debates are as much a form of entertainment as a way of reaching decisions. But they can still reveal true opinion usefully if the protagonists are so minded. At my school, we were allocated the ‘for’ and ‘against’ roles randomly, to sharpen our wits. As debates progress, positions can become more nuanced. An example of this was the online debate held by Infrastructure Intelligence magazine on the proposition: “That digital transformation is dependent on new forms…

Back to the future: JCT’s 90-year history provides platform for next generation of digital contracts

/ Digital, Latest News, Press Releases

2021 marks the 90th year since the formation of JCT. 1931 was in many respects a ground-breaking year for the construction industry. Whilst mention of the use of standard forms of construction contract goes back to the 19th Century, the creation of JCT formally recognised the need within the building industry for a standard process of entering into a contract that minimised the outlay of costly bespoke provisions, fairly apportioned risk, and included benchmark sets of provisions that reflected precedent. Such was this cultural shift…