Yevgeniy Porada, Managing Partner at OSTIN Law Firm, as an expert participated in the discussion on the topic "Legal Tech: Technologizing of Legal Business" by "Ukrainian Lawyer" Magazine.

"At the moment OSTIN Law Firm is servicing two ICO projects and one mining project , which are quite specific, interesting and highly promising. According to recent data, the total investment value of ICO projects all over the world in Q1 2018 is amounted to $ 5.8 Billion. Just to compare: the total investment value of IPO projects all over the world for the same period (Q1 2018) amounted to $ 42.8 Billion. Of course, the total value of ICO projects is lower than IPO projects, but it would be unreasonable to ignore this area, considering its immense popularity all over the world and in Ukraine particularly.

Nowadays, legal regulation of ICO in most countries is rudimentary or absent at all, which greatly reduces the role of lawyers in ICO projects comparing to IPO projects. Nevertheless, I believe such situation is temporary and in the near future governments of the most countries will create a legal framework for this market sphere, as some other countries started to do (the USA, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, Belarus, Gibraltar, and Cayman Islands etc). This would increase the work for lawyers dramatically.

Some people say that artificial intelligence, bots, smart contracts, etc., will make revolution in the legal profession soon or even destroy it at all. I disagree with that. The legal profession is traditionally very conservative , its modern look was formed hundreds of years ago and did not changad substantially. Moreover, development of more complex and multifaceted relationships between people in the family, society, country and the world led to, creation of new legal areas and specializations. I think that development of the IT sphere will have the same effect on our profession ".

Source: "Ukrainian Lawyer" Magazine, http://jurist.ua/?article/1520