Firmus Novus
A Decentralized Law Firm
The problem Firmus Novus solves
Hiring a lawyer in another EU country is hard. You can't easily check if they're really bar-admitted, you don't want to send a retainer to a platform that might freeze it, and normal chat tools aren't private enough for legal advice. Today's marketplaces ask you to trust them with all three. Firmus Novus doesn't. Lawyers and clients prove who they are using EUDI credentials from real authorities, sharing only what's needed. Fees sit in an on-chain escrow the platform can't touch: clients can dispute right away, lawyers have to wait 30 days. Messages are encrypted in the browser, so the server only sees ciphertext. You can hire a lawyer abroad with the same confidence as hiring locally, without trusting the marketplace with your identity, your money, or your conversation.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest hurdle was that the EUDI ecosystem is still maturing.The biggest hurdle was that the EUDI ecosystem is still maturing. The smaller annoyance was wallet compatibility: EUDI wallets don't work with every passkey manager (Bitwarden, for instance). The real problem was deeper: no bar association issues credentials yet, so the lawyer half of our trust model had no real counterpart to test against, and the EUDI and EBSI test infrastructure is fragmented, with reference deployments and sandboxes that often don't work end-to-end. We solved it by taking the EBSI project's reference implementation for issuers and running our own: a faithful OID4VCI issuer with our signing keys, issuing both the PID and a bar-admission credential. The platform verifies it exactly as it would a real issuer, so when real issuance comes online, only the JWKS URL changes.
Tracks Applied (1)
Network Economy
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