Accepting Cryptocurrency as Payment for Legal Fees
Ethical and Practical Considerations
BY HERRICK K. LIDSTONE, JR. AND ERIK K. SCHUESSLER
In the early 1970s, the legal community
grappled with whether to allow payment
of legal fees by then-innovative means:
the credit card.1 Now, attorneys are faced
with another cutting-edge method of paying
legal fees: virtual currency, also known as cryptocurrency.
While most of us have at least heard of
Bitcoin and Ethereum—the two most popular
forms of cryptocurrency 2—few attorneys are
comfortable enough with the cryptocurrency
concept to start accepting it as payment for legal
services. Cryptocurrency is not money, and it
is not issued or backed by any government.
Cryptocurrency is a virtual asset only existing
in electronic form. Coins are merely an entry
on a virtual ledger that contains a chronological
record of all ownership changes in the coins
making up the virtual currency. This ledger,
known as the “blockchain,” is replicated on
servers all over the world.3 The blockchain
consists of a series of “blocks” with basic details
regarding each transaction (including source,
destination, and date/time), and is ever-expanding
with each successive transaction. All
transactions in the blockchain are verified and
publicly viewable at https://blockchain.info.
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