How Blockchain Can Revolutionize The Legal Profession in India

Blockchain technology is used as a public ledger. With miners using computing power to validate transactions on the Blockchain through proof of work, decentralization and transparency are achieved. This post explores how blockchain can revolutionize the legal profession in India by leveraging its assets of irreversibility, security, efficiency and most importantly linking complex contracts between diverse parties so enforcing those contracts becomes feasible for an Indian court.

Blockchain technology is the underlying technology that powers Bitcoin.

Bitcoin can't be counterfeited or reversed because blockchain records are designed to simply verify data and not change it. Blockchain technology provides security for any digital information by storing it in a block of code that is connected to encrypted data in all blocks – hence "blockchain."

Legal cases can take months or sometimes more than a decade in India. High costs mean that lawyers are accessible only to the wealthy, and even so, legal processes remain complex, lengthy, and confusing to citizens.

Blockchain technology has already shown an interest in enabling secure transactions between parties without expensive intermediaries. This innovation has the potential to reduce legal fees and make the legal process easier, faster, cheaper, and foolproof - potentially even resulting in legal disputes being conducted securely on the blockchain platform.

Blockchain technology And the Legal profession

Unlike bitcoin, which is still in its infancy, blockchain technology has a proven track record for good governance, management and immense utility. The major difference between bitcoin and the blockchain network is that, not only does blockchain technology include a dataset but it also stores it in a tamper-proof way, unlike bitcoin. And so therein lies the strength of blockchain - to preserve data integrity by decentralizing data storage. Meaning that whatever you store on the ledger, from family trees to home entitlements to governmental voting records - automatically stored in an uneditable & validated manner.

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has the power to redefine our legal system and the way we use and do business.

The blockchain industry is famous for its uneditable nature. The information on a blockchain cannot be altered, it is incorruptible and can be verified by everyone with access to it.

Blockchain technology and the legal profession is a relatively new field. According to a study by Deloitte, 74% of legal professionals surveyed said they did not know enough about blockchain to decide if it would be useful in their organisation.

Blockchain can provide an uneditable chain of events, which help organisations that rely heavily on documentation or have high regulatory requirements meet those requirements while maintaining efficiency.

The use cases of Blockchain in the legal profession is to provide an uneditable chain of events for public records and registers, create good governance within organisations and reduce fraud.

The future of the legal profession in India with and without blockchain

The legal profession in India today includes paraprofessionals, functional experts, and specialists. Because of these roles, the country has many lawyers and law firms of various sizes. with blockchain, however, the future of the legal profession in India could be different. The adoption of blockchain would allow professional counsel to operate more independently, which would lead to a decrease in the number of law firms in the country.

In the past, the legal profession has had a reputation of being a closed and elite profession. Today, the process of law is being disrupted by technology and it is now more open and accessible to all. The introduction of blockchain technology has shown promising potential in disrupting the traditional legal system as we know it today.

Prominent examples include: JUR (Switzerland), which seeks to provide an online marketplace for legal services; MyLaw (Canada), which is a network that connects lawyers with individuals or small firms who need assistance with their particular cases; and LegalZoom (US) which offers an online service for simple legal needs at a lower cost. There are many other companies providing digital contracts or document-signing services, considered to be part of the digital disruption to law practices.

Should transactions be secured with a blockchain?

A blockchain is an immutable ledger or database made of a decentralized network. Each block of data in the database has its own link to all previous blocks of data, making it difficult to manipulate the information in any one block. The Bitcoin cryptocurrency uses blockchain for transactions and therefore, it ensures that there is no double-counting of Bitcoins or fake Bitcoins being spent. Transactions are not stored in just one central location which makes hacking more difficult.

Parliamentarians in India have been researching on how blockchain technology can limit corruption and improve general administration by facilitating e-governance and paperless transactions. Created a report on factors influencing the adoption of digital currency, recognising that a decentralized ledger could offer greater protection against cyber attacks than banks themselves presently provide for their clients' funds and could also help ensure transparency within private businesses as well as government. It would also address the parliamentary committees concern about risk management where following "hack" attempts to private bitcoin wallets accounting for losses worth 81% o total incurred by such events globally during 2016-2017 period

Conclusion

Blockchain offers many potential benefits for lawyers and the legal profession in India. For example, smart contracts on the Blockchain could offer a promising new way for shares to be traded that would reduce the time and costs of purchase agreements. Lawyers can also use the associated blockchain distributed ledger to store wills and any other legal documents that need to be made public but shouldn't be copied or tampered with. This can help ensure security, transparency, and authenticity without having lawyers handle paper transactions.

~Authored by Adnan Ansari.