The Procedural Gap Project

These tools don't
review contracts.

They diagnose the structural design of legal procedure itself — identifying the specific rules that make bad outcomes systematically inevitable for one class of party, regardless of the underlying facts.

Three tools. One pattern.

Legal disputes that look like they are about a specific wall, a specific expert, or a specific contract are sometimes about something else entirely: a structural gap in the design of the rules governing that dispute — a place where the legal architecture runs out, where the incentive structure goes uncorrected, and where the party who knows how to exploit the gap wins not because they are right, but because the rules make their winning structurally inevitable.

The three instruments on this platform each measure a different expression of this same underlying pattern. They produce a number — not a qualitative opinion — so the structural problem can be named, scored, and argued before litigation entrenches it.

I

The Competence Gap. Courts and institutions ask whether a professional is qualified to do a job. They almost never ask how close that professional's demonstrated experience is to the specific matter at hand. The gap between holding a credential and being genuinely competent for a specific technical problem is real, measurable, and currently unexamined by any formal procedure.

II

The Proximity Gap. Expert witnesses are required to be independent. The current test — self-declaration and adversarial challenge — has no quantitative threshold for network proximity. A direct academic or professional connection between an expert and the parties can go unchallenged simply because no formal standard for measuring it exists.

III

The Disclosure Gap. Most legal systems separate the rules governing disclosure before harm from the rules assigning liability after it. In the gap between those two silos, silence is free and disclosure is costly. The result is a Nash equilibrium in which the party holding private knowledge of a pre-existing problem has no incentive to share it — and the rules reward them for staying quiet.

Free to use. No account required.

Each tool takes raw inputs — case materials, practitioner profiles, expert and party records — and returns a scored diagnostic in seconds. All three tools are free, require no account, and work on any jurisdiction.

Competence Gap · Tool I
Expertise Check
SDD Score 0–100
Measures the semantic distance between a practitioner's demonstrated subject-matter career history and the specific technical content of a matter assigned to them. Based on the paper Qualification and Expertise: The Detectable Signals of Professional Competence Distance.
Run Expertise Check →
Proximity Gap · Tool II
Network Proximity Check
NPS Score 0–100
Measures the academic and professional network distance between an expert witness and the parties to a dispute. Applies Erdős-number methodology from the published paper Network Proximity and Expert Impartiality (SSRN #6905898, received by the Centro de Estudos Judiciários, Portugal).
Run Proximity Check →
Disclosure Gap · Tool III
Bad Faith Check
BFM Score 0–100
Analyses raw case materials and measures the Bad Faith Manufacturing Score — the degree to which the structural incentive distortion described in The Manufacturing of Bad Faith (SSRN June 2026) is present. Identifies the parties, the interdependence, the documented irregularity, and the specific laws creating the asymmetry.
Run Bad Faith Check →

The prior five years. And what comes next.

The last five years of AI in legal technology have addressed one class of problem: making existing legal processes faster. Contract review. Case research. Document summarisation. These are optimization tools — they assume the rules are correct and reduce the cost of working within them.

"A contract review engine makes a good process cheaper. A structural diagnostic engine asks whether the rules governing the contract are themselves distorted. You need the second before you can fully trust the first."

— The Procedural Gap Project · moral.money

These tools do not accelerate existing processes. They ask a prior question: is the structural design of this procedure producing systematically unfair outcomes? If so, for whom, under what conditions, and how severe?

Typical AI legal tech KYC.co diagnostic tools
Reads what is written in documents Reads the structural design of the rules themselves
Makes the existing process faster Asks whether the existing process is working correctly
Produces summaries, redlines, citations Produces a score, a class, a threshold
Treats the rules as fixed and correct Identifies where the rules systematically break
Value: cost reduction and throughput Value: detecting structural failure before it becomes entrenched

What AI enables here — that was not practically available before — is cross-domain pattern recognition. The same structural gap that appears in a Portuguese civil engineering dispute also appears in a hospital surgeon appointment, in a financial regulator's expert appointment, in an international arbitration expert panel. The pattern is the same. The gap is the same. These tools make it measurable in any of those contexts with the same instrument.

Fixes that cannot be weaponised in reverse.

Every proposed fix to a procedural gap carries a risk: the repair can itself become a tool for bad actors. A rule requiring proximity disclosure can be gamed to delay proceedings. A rule penalising silence can be used for harassment. This is why the design of every instrument in this project obeys one constraint:

"Closing procedural loopholes that benefit bad-faith actors while ensuring the fixes are so tightly engineered that they cannot be exploited in reverse."

Each tool produces a score, not a verdict. The output is diagnostic — an evidentiary input for legal argument, not a substitute for it. A high BFM score does not mean the Passive Party is guilty. It means the incentive structure was comprehensively misaligned, and the Active Party has identifiable grounds to argue that the procedural rules were working against them. The score opens an argument. It does not close one.

The full research programme — four academic papers, the theoretical foundations of each gap, and the broader argument about procedural design — lives at moral.money.
moral.money → Procedural Gap Project ↗