Good afternoon I am a trial lawyer in one of the developing countries and I believe that blockchain technology can be used to solve the problem of trust in forensic examinations. This essay is divided into three blocks, in the first of which I will give a brief description of the existing problem, in the second I will propose ways to solve it, after which in the third block I will detail the advantages of blockchain technology (or, as it is called in our legislation - distributed ledger technology) for solving existing problem.
Trust issue As I wrote above, I am a trial lawyer in one of the developing countries. My specialization is construction disputes, including those related to the quality of work (buildings, project documentation, etc.). Neither I, nor my judicial opponent, nor even the judge can determine the quality of construction work, since we do not have the appropriate construction and technical education. The current legislation provides that in such a case, the judge must appoint a forensic examination so that the expert, warned of criminal liability for falsification, unambiguously assesses the quality of the building or project documentation. Since the choice of such experts is in the hands of the judge, he usually offers the conduct of a forensic examination to specialized state or quasi-state organizations (for example, universities). However, often such organizations are overloaded and refuse to conduct examinations. Accordingly, the court is forced to choose experts from candidates proposed by me or my opponent. The problem is that our company (like many other companies in the construction industry) offers the court mainly those experts who, even before their appointment, promised their loyalty and agreed to issue a court opinion in our favor. And we are talking not only about private expert companies, but also about some state institutions (yes, the complete rule of law is not one of the features of our country).
Digitization of the Institute of Reputation Thus, the court finds itself in a situation where it is forced to choose whom to entrust the conduct of a forensic examination in a situation where the experts are potentially affiliated with one of the parties to the litigation. Weeding out unnecessary experts is carried out “manually”: the court analyzes the diplomas of experts, looks in which court disputes they have already conducted examinations, whether their conclusions have been refuted, and also analyzes the links between experts and participants in the dispute. In general, we can say that the court examines the reputation of experts. Meanwhile, this process could be greatly simplified (modern affiliation schemes can drive anyone crazy) and accelerated (determining candidates for examination usually takes two to six months) by integrating blockchain technology. Currently, all experts hypothetically entitled to conduct forensic examinations are members of a special SRO (Self-Regulatory Organization). This SRO should be modernized into a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), which maintains a distributed registry containing all possible information about experts, their connections and professional knowledge. In this case, specific experts can be identified using special soulbound tokens. I see three hypothetical scenarios for integrating such a DAO into the existing society of our country: (a) private, (b) public, and (c) partner. a) In a private scenario, the forensic experts themselves and the expert organizations that are members of the DAO maintain the nodes themselves. The advantages of such a scenario are greater decentralization and, accordingly, good protection against malicious attacks on the blockchain. The first disadvantage of such an organization is the difficulty of mass adoption of technology by the courts. Most of the judges are people over 50 who have dedicated their lives to public service. They will be skeptical of new obscure technology coming from the private sector. Problems with mass adoption can also arise from participants in litigation, who are accustomed to offering the court only those experts whose decisions they can influence. The second disadvantage is the difficulties faced by experts. Now they must, in addition to their main expert specialization, receive additional blockchain education to manage their node. For a lone expert, such a financial burden can be unbearable. b) In the state scenario, the node validators are the courts themselves. At first glance, only the disadvantages of such a solution are visible compared to private validators: even if such a scenario works in disputes between two private companies, the very idea of decentralization will be compromised in a dispute between a private contractor and a public customer. In this case, a situation is possible when the state, as the “biggest player”, will instruct the courts (whose judges are appointed by the state) by power methods to supplement a couple of blocks with unreliable data on the bad faith or good faith of a particular organization. Partially, such a scenario is blocked by the transparency of the blockchain - perhaps the state, knowing that its dishonest actions will be detected, will abandon the idea of attacking the “expert blockchain”. However, there are also pluses: the issue of financing the transformation of the SRO into a DAO and the mass adoption of changes by judges is being addressed. c) The third option for integrating blockchain technology seems to be the most successful. Within the framework of a partnership between the state and private expert organizations, our hypothetical DAO of experts will work best. In this scenario, the owners of blockchain nodes should be expert organizations and individual experts, and the state should subsidize the transition from the old “paper” SRO model to the new digital DAO, compensating experts for the initial costs of additional training and equipment purchase. The upkeep of the nodes must be paid for by gas at the request of the Judicial Department. The state can also legally oblige the courts to entrust forensic examinations only to experts who are members of the new DAO. Such a public-private partnership will benefit all participants, since the state and society will receive faster and more objective court decisions in cases requiring forensic examinations.
Benefits of using blockchain technology in the expert selection process. The first such advantage is the transparency (transparency) of all information about experts. Transparency of data about experts, their qualifications and connections will allow the courts to quickly approve or reject the candidates proposed by the participants in the litigation. The second advantage of the blockchain - the immutability of information will also speed up the process of appointing an expert. That is, for the parties to the dispute, these two advantages will significantly reduce the time for consideration of court cases and, accordingly, the costs of court lawyers. For the state, these two advantages will also be beneficial, as the likelihood of error by a particular judge will be reduced and the level of confidence in judicial decisions will be increased. Thank you for your attention.