One firm. No fee. Founding design partner.

The problem we solve

When a client asks you to erase personal data that the SRA Accounts Rules, the MLR, or a limitation period requires you to keep, someone in your firm makes a judgement call. When the ICO or the SRA later asks about it, most firms can only produce a file note written after the fact. Nexum Ledger seals each retain-or-erase decision at the moment it is made, in a form that holds up when tested, so the firm can show it decided lawfully rather than reconstruct it under pressure. Your documents never leave your systems.

What the founding partner receives

• Deployment carried out personally by the founder, on site from our Liverpool base, alongside whichever case management system you already run
• Weekly in-person check-ins for the duration of the pilot
• A 15-page compliance gap report on your retention and erasure practice
• Direct influence on the product roadmap while it is still being shaped
• No fee

Three things are being built next, and the founding partner gets each of them first and helps decide what they look like.

• A public verification page for your firm. A page anyone can open, showing that your firm seals every retain-or-erase decision, with the current anchor and instructions to check it independently. No client data appears on it, only hashes and timestamps. When a prospective client or a panel asks how you handle their data, you send a link instead of a policy document. Our own home page already works this way, so you can see the shape of it today.
• Retention monitoring. The system knows when each record was sealed and under which retention class. Next it tells you what is now due: what falls for review this month, what is past its period and still held, and what was destroyed early. The point is to stop the calendar living in someone's head.
• An inspection bundle. One export, for a matter or a date range, that an SRA inspector, the ICO, or a client's auditor can verify without taking your word or ours for any of it.

In exchange we ask for two things: candid feedback, and if you are happy at the end, reference rights, one sentence we can quote.

Why this is worth an hour of your COLP's time

We have taken this construction to the SRA's technology policy team twice this year. Their senior policy manager opened the first meeting by calling it very innovative, having read the compliance memo beforehand rather than as a closing courtesy, and responded warmly to the idea of observing a design-partner pilot. The second conversation was the more useful one, because it changed the product.

An earlier version of Nexum encrypted the record itself and treated destroying the key as erasure. Held against a firm's record-keeping duties that does not stand up, for a reason that is plain once it is said out loud: a record you cannot decrypt is not a record. So the design moved, and what you would be piloting is what came out of that. Your mandatory records stay in your own system, complete and readable. Nexum holds a fingerprint of each one and the decisions your firm made about it, and destruction happens only after the retention period has run.

Engagement, not endorsement: these were policy conversations and the SRA has approved nothing. We raise them because a regulator was willing to argue with the design, and because the version that survived the argument is the one being offered to you.

The underlying research is published on the IACR Cryptology ePrint archive and is under peer review. The platform is live, UK-hosted, and benchmarked at more than 10,000 events per second.

Who qualifies

SRA-regulated firms in North West England whose practice areas carry acute retention-versus-erasure tension: criminal and mental health law, family and childcare, immigration and asylum, personal injury and clinical negligence archives. Firm size does not matter; a single office is fine.

How to apply

Email founder@nexumledger.com with the subject line Design partner and one sentence about your practice. We reply within two business days, the demonstration takes ninety seconds, and we will select one firm within a week of the 15 August deadline.

The COLP of the participating firm authorises every step. Compliance decisions remain the responsibility of the firm.