Engineering/ Company
Hash-chained audit trails for client money and signatures
When a regulator, a client or a court asks “has this record changed?”, the answer should be provable, not a matter of trust.
The problem
A law firm’s most sensitive records (what it holds in client money, who signed what, and how a deed was executed) have to be correct today and provably unchanged tomorrow. An ordinary database row can be edited by anyone with enough access, and the edit leaves no trace in the row itself.
Chaining records
We write these records as an append-only chain. Each entry stores a SHA-256 hash computed over its own content and the hash of the previous entry. Change any earlier entry and its hash changes, which no longer matches what the next entry recorded, so the break is detectable by anyone who walks the chain.
- Client-money ledgers: every deposit, transfer and approval, per client
- E-signature envelopes: each signature image’s fingerprint, the signer and the time
- Wet-ink executions: the sealed scan’s fingerprint, the attestation and witnesses
- AI review decisions: who accepted or declined each change
Verifying without revealing
For wet-ink documents we publish a verification page per execution. It shows only the firm, the instrument type, its status, dates and the fingerprint, never the contents, so anyone holding a copy can check it against the record.
What it doesn’t do
A hash chain makes tampering evident, not impossible. It sits alongside the controls that prevent bad entries in the first place: two-person approval for client money, balances that can never go negative, and role checks on every request.
