Emerging Construction Technologies and their Legal Issues

This session provides an overview of the emerging technologies in the construction industry and their legal issues. Such technologies include machine learning, the use of drones on the construction site, the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to add real time data to Building Information Modeling (BIM), and the use of self-executing contracts (Smart Contracts) with blockchain technology. These various examples will ultimately show that while Smart Contracts and the other technologies can be extremely useful and efficient, a traditional contract is still required in order to adequately protect the parties from new liabilities introduced by the technologies and to cover the terms that cannot be delineated to code.