Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Innovations:Peer Endorsement

💡 In simple words: Lawyers read the contracts and put their name on the ones they trust, taking responsibility for them, like a teacher signing off on good work.

🎯 In 20 seconds (scientific summary): Initial hypothesis for contract validation: endorsement would be the recognition of a template by lawyers who take named responsibility and are prepared to defend it, inspired by Wikipedia's peer review. Anyone could contribute; all templates stay freely accessible with a maturity mention. Only endorsed contracts are intended to deploy in the apps; others remain usable at the user's own risk.

Peer Endorsement

Innovation, WikiDeal R&D

Origin	🔵 Wikimedia Foundation
Status	Prototype 1, In testing

What is it?

Peer Endorsement is intended to let lawyers endorse contracts and take editorial responsibility for their legal soundness: a named accountable responsibility, with additional paid service providing in case of adaptation or dispute. Endorsement means the recognition and adoption of a contract template by one or several lawyers who take responsibility for it and are prepared to defend it if needed. The model is inspired by Wikipedia's peer review and featured-article process: endorsers are named and accountable, so the community can see who stands behind a given contract version.

The expected clientele of these lawyers: mostly federations and coordinations of user groups (their directions), plus people or groups needing tailor-made contracts.

To ensure the quality of these endorsements, a future Validation & Endorsement institution will be tasked with auditing the lawyers' commitments (verifying their legitimacy, their reactivity, and ensuring acceptable rates for any additional services requested by users). See Validation and Endorsement for more details.

How it works on WikiDeal

Qualified lawyers would review contracts and publicly endorse the versions they vouch for, creating accountable, named approval. This is intended to work hand in hand with Collaborative Contract Editing, where endorsed versions become the standard. Endorser eligibility and responsibilities are documented progressively as the platform evolves.

Endorsed contracts and all other templates

Anyone could contribute to the contract templates, and all of them are intended to remain freely accessible, each with a mention of its degree of maturity. Two levels are envisaged, as an initial hypothesis:

• Endorsed contracts: templates recognized, adopted and defended by lawyers who have taken named responsibility for them and are prepared to defend them if needed. Only these endorsed contracts are intended to be deployed in the smartphone applications via WikiDeal and used in contracts signed under the aegis of WikiDeal.
• All other templates would remain available on a goodwill basis. They would generally be much better than contracts invented from scratch by amateurs: a template drafted collectively and refined through feedback tends to be better than one written by a single person, and an imperfect contract is better than no contract at all. They would however be used at the user's own risk, without a guarantee of full legal alignment or of the absence of loopholes. And even when a text itself has no loophole, gaps often appear in the way it is applied.

Related scientific research

Lawyer endorsement of contract models relates to research on information asymmetry, signalling, reputation and the transformation of legal services. These references inform the hypothesis; they do not validate it.

• George A. Akerlof (1970), The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3): doi:10.2307/1879431 · article page on Wikipedia.
• Michael Spence (1973), Job Market Signaling, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3): doi:10.2307/1882010 · signalling on Wikipedia.
• Paul Resnick, Ko Kuwabara, Richard Zeckhauser and Eric Friedman (2000), Reputation systems, Communications of the ACM, 43(12): doi:10.1145/355112.355122 · reputation system on Wikipedia.
• Richard Susskind (2008), The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, Oxford University Press: author page on Wikipedia.
• Gillian K. Hadfield (2017), Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, Oxford University Press: author page on Wikipedia.

See also: Validation and Endorsement · Collaborative Contract Editing · The Subscription Model · All innovations · R&D Portal