A block chain solution to resolve child custody and care disputes built for the Global Legal Hackathon 2018

1. J Ledger
A block chain solution to resolve child
custody and care disputes

2. Team
William Scott
Warren E. Agin
Michael Simon
Kevin Baker
Jasmine Elatab

3. The Problem
• 813,862 divorces in the US in 2014; about 45%
involve children
– https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm
– http://www.dshs.texas.gov/chs/vstat/vs12/nnuptil.shtm
• Between 8 to 12% of divorcing parents
continue to engage in conflict in the years
following divorce, with little if any diminution
of anger and hateful feelings.
– Kelly, Joan B., Parents with Enduring Child Disputes: Multiple Pathways
to Enduring Disputes, Journal of Family Studies, 9, 37-50 (2003)

4. The Problem
• Conflicts regarding child care manifest in
disputes over custody transfers, child care &
support payments
• Estimated 40,000 new problem situations
each year in the US
• While divorce rates are lower outside US,
estimated 200,000 new cases annually
worldwide

5. The Problem
• Resolving disputes is difficult and resource
intensive
• Problems manifest in disputes over factual
issues
• Only evidence is often unreliable oral
testimony of events

6. The Solution
• Jasmine Elatab – executive director of Act Just,
which provides affordable family law
representation
• Survey conducted to evaluate need for a tool
to help address child custody and care
disputes.

7. The Solution

8. J Ledger
• Creates a reliable history of child custody
related events
• Use of Etherium blockchain creates immutable
record suitable for evidentiary purposes
• Prototype built on Etherium using the Truffle
framework and a javascript based application
layer

9. J Ledger
• Tracks information about child custody and
care related events
– Drop off and pick up
– Health care
– Support payments
• Notifies other ex-spouse when an event is
logged
• Where appropriate, ex-spouse can confirm
event

10. J Ledger
• Information logged includes:
– Event type
– Time of event
– Time event logged
– Whether notification received by ex-spouse
– Location (where appropriate)
– Comments of parties

11. J Ledger
• Etherium ID based authentication layer allows
role based limited access (merkle tree)
• Neural network based AI pattern recognition
to identify dispute precursors and allow early
intervention

12. AI Functionality
• Features
– Party
– Event type
– Delay in reporting
– Confirmation receipt
– Event position (in stack of event histories)
– Comments – sentiment analysis
– Library of significant terms from comments

13. AI Functionality
Sentiment analysis using AWS Comprehend
{
"Text": "Damn idiot had whisky breath. Probably took the kid to
hangout with that deadbeat girlfriend of his."
}
{
"SentimentScore":
{ "Negative": 0.9423052668571472,
"Neutral": 0.043935492634773254,
"Positive": 0.0032111972104758024
} }

15. Jargon
Used
Etherium
Blockchain
Authentication layer
Merkle tree
Neural network
Artificial intelligence
JSON hash

16. See our wireframe and demo at:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/jledger
/index.html