Legaltech: A solution to corruption?

Today we can see that our countries have high rates of corruption^[1] and it is increasingly difficult to fight it.

Corruption is like that neighbor who's been living in front of your house for years, but who we try to avoid to protect our families from possible damage or assault, and we don't know how to make him go away. The legaltech, in turn, is like the new neighbor, we judge him immediately for his innovative and even disruptive ideas, until we know him and we want him to be our best friend.

In this neighborhood, the new "legaltech" neighbor awakens in the unpleasant "corruption" neighbor a deep discomfort, whose reaction is to create collective panic so as not to lose control of the community that has long been violating, thus generating more insecurity, uncertainty and hopelessness, but that could end with a happy ending if we all put our side and get involved.

What we see personified in a neighborhood in the previous paragraphs is what happens to corruption. We have taken the attitude of the lesser evil, believing that "better known devil than devil to know," since we ignore the different mechanisms that some people use within public and private institutions to benefit from, as at least we know they reach a "limit" and any other could be worse. This could change, at least from my point of view.

We have a great opportunity to eliminate corruption, without violence and through legal innovation. The last time, innovative mechanisms have emerged to ensure transparency and legal certainty in human relations, such as smart contracts (Smart contract)[2]in which the system implements and implements the obligations promised in the contract, without the need to resort to mediators or courts.

Ideas such as the one mentioned, it uses a technology called "Blockchain," whose importance is the elimination of intermediaries, consensus and storage of information in "a chain of blocks," becoming immutable and permanent. With this background and back to the neighborhood example, it means that each of the neighbors handles the same information and all have access to it, which makes it difficult for the unwanted neighbor to manipulate them all.

Today, our governments and institutions have become that untrusted neighbour that takes us away from calm, as the lack of transparency in their processes leads to the favour of a few and the harm of many. Legaltech would be an opportunity for better use of both human and economic resources.

If we can mix technology and legal innovation, we can make the common good a reality and not a fiction. Legaltech would allow us, as in the above-mentioned examples, to give certainty to the agreed dates, the stated content and the agreements reached, by reducing in part those forms of corruption such as the use of insider information, tax evasion, extortion, fraud and embezzlement, among many others that we can find in human relations due to the failure to do so.

As lawyers and lawyers, we have a responsibility to be a real contribution to society, giving them the tools to understand the importance of their rights and duties and thus to facilitate access to justice, preventing the misused privileges from continuing to contaminate us.

—

[1] https://www.cesla.com/pdfs/Informe-de-corrupcion-en-Latinoamerica.pdf

[2] Review https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/ to know more.