Lawyered

Lawyered is Jonathan Kleiman, a Toronto business lawyer who has run a solo practice for well over a decade and who collects crypto art under the name lawyered.eth. He told MLow he got online at eleven, spent his teenage years on IRC, and treated technology as a hobby all the way through university and law school. Bitcoin arrived later than he would have liked, and what pulled him in was transactional freedom, the idea that people should be able to hold and move what they have earned without asking permission. Several cycles of trading left him tired of chasing pumps, so he decided to buy things he could still look at in twenty years. He describes his collection as a diary of his early time in the space. Most of his legal work in web3 is unglamorous and practical: incorporating companies, writing partnership agreements, and setting out rules so that everyone shares the same understanding before money arrives. He is blunt that smart contracts and legal contracts answer different questions, since a court asks what the parties intended while code only does what it says. He is also blunt about scam recovery, which he mostly declines because there is rarely anything to recover.

He collects one of ones and small editions, weighted toward artists he has spoken with and expects to still be making work in ten years. His wallet holds a deep run of The Memes by 6529, including five copies of 21ST CENTURY HEIST, alongside photography editions and psychedelic one of ones. He buys what he likes rather than what has a defensible floor, and he says low liquidity suits him because it stops him cycling pieces out for something newer.

• Toronto business lawyer with a web3 practice
• Collects as lawyered.eth
• Deep holder in The Memes by 6529
• Came for transactional freedom and stayed for the art
• Argues code and contract answer different questions

On the show