Blockchain technology has a significant impact on smart contracts. In practice, they reflect the redistribution and organization of the rights and obligations of the contract parties, but the existing legal regulations regarding their functioning are still underdeveloped. With this regard, it is highly important to consider the legal effect of smart contracts in commercial transactions. The current research uses the methods of text-mining such as Chinese word segmentation, keyword extraction, co-occurrence network analysis, and LDA topic clustering to derive the factors that contribute to the legal effect of smart contracts in commercial transactions and then explores the relationships between those factors using association-rule mining in order to reveal the particularities of their legal effect. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that there are four critical areas of concern related to smart contracts: validity determination, transaction security, responsibility definition, and risk prevention and control. There are altogether 11 LDA topics and 33 dispute focus points of the legal effect of smart contracts in business transactions. Of them, the most significant share belongs to the disputes based on professional ethics and responsibility boundaries, which amount to 52.83 percent. The obtained result indicates that the professional ethics and the demarcation of responsibilities are very important aspects of the development of the legal effect of smart contracts.
