Twitter and 100-year-old cases are a crypto lawyer’s best friends

LAW school would hardly be sufficient to train a lawyer for the novelties of today’s crypto cases – whether they involve fraud, financial crime or insolvency. The Business Times asked several lawyers how they prepared themselves to tackle this unique intersection of law and technology. 

Blast from the past

Dealing with the novelties of crypto law is “almost like going back to the late 1800s or early 1900s”, said Danny Ong, the managing director of Setia Law. When he represented B2C2 in Singapore’s first Bitcoin case in 2019, he even read up on cases “involving the barter of horses for wheat”, to understand how certain fundamental legal principles evolved over the centuries.

While crypto cases present newfangled challenges, lawyers ultimately go back to the basics – developing arguments on first principles, and offering the courts a novel solution. “You’ve got to be creative and think outside the box,” he said.

Daniel Chan, partner at WongPartnership, said that lawyers have to “constantly learn”. Fundamental questions such as “What is property?” are resurfacing thanks to new technology.

“New forms of property don’t pop up every day. It is only in this Information Age, in the past couple of years, when there is a new form of digital currency and everyone is forced to take a view,” he said.

The courts have also had to keep pace. Said Ong: “Thankfully, our courts have been very progressive on this front, and have time and again shown no hesitation in formulating innovative solutions to novel challenges when justice requires it, particularly in fraud and financial crime cases.”

Trawling Twitter

While age-old case law is a reliable resource for lawyers, Drew & Napier director Chua Tju Liang found that the crypto space also demands new methods.

“I would never have anticipated that upping my social media game, and following the right Twitter accounts to stay up to date on the latest developments in the crypto space, would be a key part of my professional career,” he told BT.

True to his point, the social media platform has been the core stage for many crypto sagas, including the public unfolding of the Three Arrows Capital collapse. In the landmark Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT case, the court even allowed the service of court papers over Twitter.