Joshua Ashley Klayman

Josh is the firm’s U.S. Head of Fintech and Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets. She is one of the best-known blockchain and cryptocurrency lawyers in the U.S. and globally, highly regarded for her extensive experience in, and deep knowledge of, blockchain, smart contracts, and cryptocurrency matters, including initial coin offerings (ICOs)/digital token offerings.

Josh has represented or consulted to global technology companies, token sellers, cryptocurrency exchanges and relayers; venture, hedge, and private equity funds and their portfolio companies; token marketers and broker-dealers; funds interested in trading digital assets; and major global investment banks, insurance companies, financial institutions and asset managers, among others.

By background, Josh is a finance and corporate lawyer. She spent over 10 years representing lenders and borrowers in leveraged finance and banking transactions and public and private organizations in a broad array of commercial transactions and corporate governance matters. Before joining Linklaters, Josh co-founded a blockchain and smart contracts group at a global law firm and set up her own boutique blockchain consultancy.

Josh has spoken about blockchain in the U.S. and around the world, including before government regulators, at many of the industry’s most popular conferences, and at leading universities.

Josh is a director of the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance and chairs its legal working group, and is a member of the Wharton Reg@Tech think tank. She was appointed by the state of Delaware to serve on its blockchain strategy committee.

Passionate about the advancement of women and other diverse groups, Josh is a co-founder of the non-profit Diversity in Blockchain, Inc. and a founding member of Collective Future. She is also on the advisory board of a number of blockchain companies, both nonprofit and for-profit.

Josh is a Forbes contributor for blockchain and crypto matters and her articles have been featured in numerous other major publications, including Coindesk and Crowdfund Insider. She has appeared on television, including on Bloomberg TV and Today’s Verdict with David Lesch, and has been featured in several podcasts, including Forbes’ Unchained, Law.com’s Unprecedented, and The Third Web. She is regularly quoted in news media, including CNNMoney, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Law360, and Fortune.

Josh is an ongoing contributor to Wolters Kluwer’s “Blockchain and Virtual Currencies Briefing”. Among other publications, she authored a chapter, “Mutually Assured Disruption: The Rise of the Security Token” in the first-ever global treatise on blockchain and cryptocurrency, published by Global Legal Insights. She also co-wrote co-wrote Diversity in Blockchain’s "Initial review of Facebook’s Project Libra" and the Cardozo Blockchain Project’s Report "Not So Fast – Risks Related to the Use of a “SAFT” for Token Sales".

For several years, Josh was an adjunct professor at Temple University School of Law, where she taught JD and LLM students; she is now an adjunct professor for an online class on Blockchain and the Law at the University of New Hampshire.

Josh received her BA summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a Juris Doctorate from Temple University where she was a law faculty scholar and a member of Law Review.