Hi,
I am Roberto Nicolini.

From today on, once a month, I will keep you company during your coffee at 8:00 am updating on the latest law news.

Let me introduce myself, I deal mainly with commercial and company law in relations between Italy and abroad and vice versa, as well as with matters of private and procedural international law. I follow, among other matters, issues related to property law, bankruptcy law, labour law and acquisitions and mergers.

I am a member of the European Association of Lawyers (AEA - Asociación Europea de Abogados) based in Alicante (Spain).

I speak Italian, English and German.

Today I’m talking about justice and blockchain.

One day there will be a pilot case for a judge to rule on the effectiveness of blockchain certification. In an Italian civil proceeding a technical consultant appointed by the judge could only confirm the unchangeability of the document certified by blockchain and therefore its reliability.

Since February 2019 there has been an Italian regulation, which introduced the definitions of “smart contract” and “technologies based on distributed registers”. But the technical standards and guidelines in charge of the Agency for Digital Italy have not yet arrived.

Therefore, we still not know the technical standards that blockchain technologies shall comply with, in order to produce the legal effects of electronic time stamping, in line with European and national legislation; nor do we know the guidelines on the procedures for identifying the parties involved in a smart contract.

In other parts of the world, things are different and China is once again at the forefront. The Chinese “smart courts” are applying several emerging technologies, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, to solve many legal cases.

After the city of Hangzhou hosted the world’s first “smart internet court” in 2017, similar courts started in Beijing and Guangzhou. And again last year, Zhang Wen, president of the Beijing Internet Court, said the court uses technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence to make judgments.

Finally, in September last year, China’s Supreme Court ruled that “evidence authenticated with blockchain technology is binding in legal disputes”. The Supreme Court stated that “internet

courts will be able to recognize digital data that is presented as evidence. Interested parties will then have collected and stored this data through the blockchain with digital signatures, timestamps, hash value verification or through a digital filing platform. In this way it will be possible to prove the authenticity of the evidence through this technology”.

Italy and Europe really need to make a big effort to use these technological tools, especially in the administration of justice.