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• Author: Jason Tashea
• Pages: 33-34

AUGUST 2018 ABA JOURNAL || 33

Business of Law

PHOTOS BY CLAUDINE GOSSETT PHOTOGRAPHY; 13IMAGERY/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

The coalition also ha s chimed in about United States v.

Coinbase in the U.S. Dist rict Court for the Northern Dis trict

of California . The IRS sought records in 2016 on Coinbase

users who transfer red bitcoins between 2013 and 2015

because it suspec ted the users were underreporting t heir

virtua l assets. Coinbase fought the reques t.

The coalition arg ued in an August 2017 amicus brief the

IRS was “fi shing wit h dynamite” and its request wa s overly

broad. In February, the cour t narrowed the request of the

IRS somewhat, orderi ng Coinbase to provide records on

at least 13,000 users who ha d at least $20,000 in crypto-

currency tra nsactions between 2013 and 2015.

REAL VALUE, REAL CHANGE

The Wall Street group and the dig ital defense coalition

have been joined by the Enterpr ise Ethereum Alliance’s

Legal Industr y Working Group, which sta rted last summer,

and enterprise sof tware company R3’s Legal Center of

Excellence, which lau nched in February.

Aaron Wright, cha irman of the Legal Industr y Working

Group, says there’s a great benefi t to lawyers involved

because they’re t alking through cutting-e dge legal issues at a

very high level, gather ing perspectives from their peer s, and

taking home the best a dvice they can fi nd for their clients.

“The technology h as the potential to make a dent and

improve people’s lives, and the only way that’s going to

happen is if we have these conversat ions,” says Wright,

a professor at Yeshiva University’s law school.

Wright says his group has 30 law fi rms a s members,

including Am Law fi rms Cooley, Jones Day, and Latham &

Watkins, and that members pay an nual dues, ranging from

$3,000 to $25,000, depending on the organi zation’s size.

The alliance is d ivided into subcommittees of any where

from 10 to 70 lawyers to di scuss topics such as best pract ices

for smart contrac ts, privacy concerns, int ellectual property

issues, blockchain gover nance and tax matters. Wrig ht says

some of the subcommittee s will be issuing reports on t heir

research topics, w hile others are working on product demos.

Just as Wright’s group covers only one blockchai n, R3’s

Legal Center of Exc ellence focuses solely on the Corda.

However, while the other legal blockchain g roups are non-

profi ts focused on open-source platfor ms, R3 is a for-profi t

company , and Corda is proprietary sof tware that runs on a

private blockchain platform.

R3 clients—mainly fi nancia l institutions—already work

with BigLaw fi rms that ma ke up the center’s 13 members,

including Baker McKenzie, Cl i ord Chance a nd Crowell &

Moring. R3 wanted those l awyers to learn about its platfor m

to better adv ise their clients, says Jason Rozovsky, senior

counsel at R3 and hea d of the legal center.

“We’re moving into a phase where there are pi lots launch-

ing and real value being moved a nd real change happening

to how people do business,” Rozovsky says. “ There are real

novel legal issues the tech nology raises across a var iety of

indu str ies.” Q

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The FCC received millions of

comments during the net neutrality

repeal debate from bots exploiting

stolen or misused identities—what is

the agency going to do about it?

By Jason Tashea

Data scientist Je Kao was skept ical

of the nearly 23 million public comment s

the Federal Communication s Commission

received during the net neutr ality repeal

debate last year.

“I would not guess one in 15 people submitte d an FCC

comment,” says Kao, a mach ine learning engineer at

Atrium Legal Technology S ervices in San Franci sco.

“The amount doesn’t pass the smell t est.”

He challenged his suspicion by ana lyzing the publicly

available comments and found at lea st 1.3 million were

submitted under a stolen or misu sed identity. While there

were fake comments submitt ed on behalf of both sides of the

debate, the vast majorit y, Kao says, were anti-net neutrality.

However, the problem was bigger than he initia lly knew.

The New York attorney general’s o ce, w hich is suing

the commission over net neutral ity along with 22 other

attorneys general , said as many as 2 million Amer icans

had their identities stolen. A 2017 report by da ta analytics

consulting fi rm Emprata for industr y group Broadband

for America found that nearly 445,00 0 were from Russian

email addres ses, and that a similar number came f rom

Ger many.

While the FCC has t aken issue with the charac terization

of the New York attorney general’s claims, Jessica

Rosenworcel, an FCC comm issioner and

a Democrat, release d a statement

saying the agency’s net neutra lity

repeal process “ turned a blind eye

to all kinds of c orruption in our

“I would not guess one

in 15 people submitted

an FCC comment.

The amount doesn’t

pass the smell test.”

– J e f K a o

Technology