Focused on complex technology disputes, including AI, automated commerce, and blockchain, David L. Evans brings deep experience at the intersection of law, business, and emerging technologies. A Fellow of the College of Commercial Arbitrators and a former AAA-ICDR director, his neutral practice centers on technology-related disputes.
David co-leads the AI-Driven Commerce and Automated Transactions subgroup of the AAA-ICDR AI Ambassador Program, where he addresses issues involving agent authorization, smart contracts, and disputes arising from agentic transactions. He is also Counsel to Murphy & King, P.C. in Boston and has served as a commercial arbitrator and mediator in more than 450 domestic and international matters. David L. Evans shares his perspective and experience in managing disputes in the evolving Web3 industry.
Q: Tell us about your professional background and how you became involved in Web3-related disputes, including matters involving blockchain, cryptocurrency, digital assets, or smart contracts.
I came to this field the way many commercial neutrals are coming to it: through the ordinary disputes that crypto businesses generate before anyone reaches the novel questions. I have handled internal governance matters involving companies in the sector, including mining operations, where the disputes raised familiar questions, such as whether one shareholder could buy out another or whether the business should be sold. That experience, together with my experience as a neutral in technology and AI matters, led me to the questions I now work on as a co-lead of the AAA-ICDR AI Ambassador Program’s subgroup on AI-driven commerce and automated transactions.
Q: What types of Web3 disputes do you most often see in your work? How do they differ from more traditional commercial, financial, or technology disputes?
The Web3 disputes I have seen are less exotic than the label suggests. Honestly, they are conventional commercial disputes that happen to involve digital-asset businesses. The blockchain or cryptocurrency element is real, but it sits beneath a dispute that any commercial arbitrator would recognize. The difference is not in the legal questions so much as in the surrounding facts, where valuing a volatile digital asset, making sense of on-chain records, or understanding how a crypto business operates can require more technical fluency than a traditional commercial case demands. My belief is that parties want sound, independent judgment, not simply domain expertise.
Q: What trends are you seeing in Web3 disputes? What developments do you think will most shape the future of dispute resolution in this area?
The most consequential trend is that the technology has raced ahead of the legal infrastructure. Enormous effort has gone into enabling AI agents to transact business. Far less has gone into the questions a dispute resolver has to answer when one of those transactions goes wrong. Who authorized the agent, and how far did that authority run? When an agent commits to terms, has a person formed an agreement in any sense the law recognizes, or has the deliberation that contract doctrine assumes simply been engineered out? When the parties disagree about what happened, whose record governs? Who decides the dispute, and under what rules?
These are the questions I expect to shape dispute resolution in this area. The instinct in some quarters may be to build new systems to govern agent conduct. The better path, in my view, is to adapt the frameworks that already work. Established rules of evidence, familiar principles of agency and authority, and the institutions that have spent decades administering complex commercial disputes still have a place. The hard problems of agentic commerce are problems of identity, accountability, and recourse. They are legal problems, and they are the kind that arbitration has been built to resolve.