Lawyer.com , an online lawyer directory, is now accepting bitcoin as a payment method for its lawyer members. Lawyers also get a 10 percent monthly membership discount for paying with bitcoin. The 6-year-old website matches people looking for lawyers with its thousands of lawyer members. Lawyers pay between $99 and $299 per month for the service. By paying with bitcoin, they will get a 10 percent discount on these fees.
Allowing members to pay with bitcoin will permit faster and cheaper transactions, company CEO Gerry Gorman told CCN.com.
Bitcoin Cuts Transaction Costs, Adds Efficiencies
“Bitcoin transactions reduce our costs, improve transaction speed and provide full billing transparency. In return, we can offer our services at significant savings,” Gorman said, noting the low processing fees associated with the decentralized currency. “We’re not paying transaction fees, there are no bad credits, and we can manage our own bad debts.”
Lawyer.com tested accepting bitcoin for about a month prior to making its official announcement, Gorman said. The website uses Stripe, a San Francisco, Calif.-based mobile payment service, to process bitcoin payments.
“We have an emerging group of very tech-savvy lawyers,” Gorman said. “We think bitcoin could appeal to them in building their practices. Bitcoin is going to be mainstream five years from now. We’d like to be the leader today.”
Lawyer.com’s parent company, World Media Group, with offices in New York City and New Jersey, began investigating bitcoin in 2013, Gorman said. The company accumulated a “significant” bitcoin account and purchased bitcoin mining engines.
“We’ve known about and understood bitcoin,” Gorman explained. “We wanted to achieve some sort of critical mass in the marketplace.”
The company advises its members to use Coinbase or Bitpay to sign up for a free bitcoin wallet.
Also read: American Bar Association Teaching Bitcoin to Lawyers
Lawyers.com Seeks To Be An Industry Leader
“Bitcoins will account for $20 billion in payments in 2015 and the number of user wallets has doubled to 10 million worldwide in the last year. We are always looking for ways to deliver more value to our members, and bitcoins are an exciting and fun way to do so,” Gorman added.
Gorman noted that last week, Blythe Masters, the Digital Asset Holdings CEO and a former JPMorgan executive, made the case for bitcoin technology being used in markets. She spoke at a conference recently, saying “the potential addressable markets for these types of technologies are gigantic.”
