NEW YORK, N.Y., USA – August 14, 2017 – Today the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) announced that 14 leading law firms and academic institutions have joined the EEA’s Legal Industry Working Group, bringing together top, global law firms and leading legal minds to explore building enterprise-grade applications on Ethereum. The rapid growth of the EEA Legal Industry Working Group is emblematic of the increased interest by legal professionals in blockchain technology, and the EEA believes that the Legal Working Group will prove foundational to the success of various efforts taking place within the organization.

New members joining the EEA and Legal Industry Working Group include Cooley, Debevoise & Plimpton,Goodwin, Hogan Lovells, Holland & Knight, Jones Day, Latham & Watkins, Morrison & Foerster, Perkins Coie, Shearman & Sterling, Cardozo Law School, Duke Center on Law & Technology, and the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Existing EEA members joining the EEA Legal Industry Working Group include BNY Mellon, ConsenSys, ING, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

“We are thrilled to see robust interest in blockchain technology by forward-looking law firms and institutions,” said Aaron Wright, Chair of the EEA Legal Industry Working Group, Associate Clinical Professor and Co-Director of the Cardozo Law School’s Blockchain Project, and co-founder of the smart contract project OpenLaw, “Lawyers are poised to serve as the catalysts for blockchain technology, and the Legal Working Group will serve as a neutral space to explore blockchain-based legal technology, develop standards for “smart” legal agreements, support emerging enterprise use cases, and tackle important policy issues raised by this new impactful technology.”

The EEA is an industry-supported, not-for-profit established to build, promote, and broadly support Ethereum-based technology best practices, open standards, and open source reference architectures. Formed earlier this year, the EEA is helping to evolve Ethereum into an enterprise-grade technology, providing research and development in a range of areas, including privacy, confidentiality, scalability, and security. The EEA is also investigating hybrid architectures that span both permissioned and public Ethereum networks as well as industry-specific application layer working groups.

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EEA will collectively develop open industry standards and facilitate collaboration with its member base and is open to any members of the Ethereum community who wish to participate. This open source framework will enable the mass adoption at a depth and breadth otherwise unachievable in individual corporate silos and provide insight to the future of scalability, privacy, and confidentiality of the public Ethereum permissionless network.

For additional information about joining EEA, please reach out to [email protected].