LexDAO LAOs 
Taking DAOs to the next level.
Proposal Information
Proposal Rationale
There is a DAO of international members and some are pseudonymous. They want to define their legal relationship with each other and from the outside world (limited liability). They also want to be able to enter into contracts, legally hold property, and answer questions such as what happens if a member dies or if members get sued. What should the DAO do?
At the moment there isn’t a clear answer. If you have a lot of resources (time and money) you might be able to navigate the compliance maze or pay a team of experts to help you setup an entity. You might also just YOLO it. There needs to be something in between.
LexDAO imagines a world where communities and cooperatives can use DAOs in a safe and sane way without requiring a full compliance department. We know this is possible because we’ve done it ourselves. We are structured as a Wyoming unincorporated non-profit with a code deference agreement to our Aragon DAO. We want to make this as easy as possible for more aspiring DAOs.
Proposal description
Our target audience is a DAO summoner/coordinator who has a general understanding of blockchain. They’ll be able to read a few guides and review our resources to develop intuition as to how legal wrappers work, why they’re important, and the next steps they can take to get a legal wrapper for their DAO.
Those with more legal experience will be able to use our legal templates to create a DAO of their own. This can serve to empower communities with limited budgets. It can also serve as a resource for legal professionals to easily help communities deploy a legal wrapper without having to charge for a custom operating agreement every time. Every hour of planning on the front end, should help save expensive lawyer hours on the back end.
First we will create a series of high level blog posts explaining why limiting legal liability is important, how code deference agreements work, and how LexDAO structured itself. LexDAO is governed as a Wyoming non-profit unincorporated association with a Code Deference Agreement for the DAO smart contract.
Then we’ll curate a registry of free and open source legal templates you can use as self-help to create a legal wrapper for your DAO. This will include the template as well as supporting information you need to actually register it. The registration is not free, but the information on how to do it will be!
We will also curate a list of communities and teams you can reach out to if you want more help. By first educating yourself about the process of deploying a legal wrapper you’ll then be able to go to the experts with the right questions and requests. This can save you lots of resources vs paying legal professionals their hourly rate to first educate you, then actually deploy an entity for you.
Team Information (For Funding Proposals)
Names, usernames, and/or relevant social links for team members (Twitter, Github, Aragon Forum, etc.):
Skills and previous experience in related or similar work:
LexDAO is a community of legal engineers. We have members with deep domain expertise in legal entity creation, Solidity contract development, media creation for the fintech space, alternative dispute resolution, and more. We’re organized as a DAO and have been some of the first to adopt and experiment with new Aragon features such as Agent, parent/child DAOs, and DAO controlled contracts and services. In short, we understand both DAOs and traditional legal entities and are uniquely positioned to build bridges the two - creating new hybrid entities that are greater than the sum of their parts.
Funding Information (For Funding Proposals)
We expect this project to last 4-8 weeks and we’re asking for 500 ANT to support our efforts.
Please send ANT to the LexDAO Aragon Agent!
0x97103fda00a2b47eac669568063c00e65866a633
Funds will be used to support the LexDAO community continuing to push forward the frontier of legal engineering in the DAO space as described in the proposal description.
Thanks!
