Casey Kuhlman is the CEO of Monax, a leader in digital legal infrastructure. A respected blockchain-native Software-as-a-Service company, Monax builds decentralized systems and growing ecosystem applications.

They describe themselves as dog-lovers and do gooders, ex-marines and mindfullness-advocates, photographers and music-lovers, artists and craftsmen, gamers and cooks, athletes and tinkerers.

"We are some of the brightest minds in the open-source community, mavericks in blockchain technology, certified lawyers, software engineers, legal technologists and designers."

Prior to co-founding Monax, Kuhlman was the head of legal information systems at the U.S. Open Data Institute. He is also an ex Marine, having worked in West and East Africa.

We bumped into one another on Twitter a month or so ago when he said:

Dear #legaltech . Dear #blockchain . Can we please. For the love of all that is holy. Just stop. And completely erase the parts of our brain that contemplates #smartcontracts ... Except for those that are deep futurists.

I thought this is a guy I need to speak to!

In this podcast Casey makes the point that there is a long way to go in advance of assuming systems can make contracting smarter. Not least the digtisation of contracts in the first place.

He also foresees a time in the relatively near future that the Balkanisation of the tech scene is storing up problems for customers as they seek to do business with others who operate alternative systems. 

This is a theme I'm hearing more of - not least in the forums of World Commerce & Contracting (formerly IACCM). The free flow of data is going to become the next major talking point in #legaltech.