By Malik Abbas, Founder & CEO, CoinConnect
Let me say something that might surprise you, coming from someone whose firm competes for the work a law firm might otherwise get: you should absolutely use good lawyers. I mean that. Legal expertise is essential, and I would never tell a serious crypto company to enter a regulated market without access to sound legal counsel. So this article is not a hit piece on law firms. It's something more useful: an honest explanation of what a law firm genuinely gives you, where its role structurally ends, and why "we'll just hire a law firm to get our VASP license" is one of the most common and most expensive misunderstandings I see foreign crypto companies make about entering Pakistan.
The mistake isn't using a law firm. The mistake is believing a law firm alone can get you licensed and operating. Those are two very different things, and the gap between them is where good companies lose months and money. Let me walk you through exactly why.
What a law firm genuinely gives you — credit where it's due
Let's start with what law firms are excellent at, because I want you to take the rest of this seriously and you won't if you think I'm just running down a competitor.
A good law firm gives you legal drafting of a quality you cannot safely improvise — the corporate documents, the contracts, the formal submissions, the things that have to be legally precise. It gives you legal advice: how a particular structure sits under Pakistani law, what a clause means, where your legal exposure lies. It gives you legal opinions you can put in front of a board or an investor. And it gives you the comfort of professional accountability for the legal work itself.
These are real and valuable. If your question is "is this structure legally sound?" or "draft this document correctly," a law firm is exactly who you want. I am not minimizing that. In fact, the best market entries usually include good legal input somewhere in the mix.
The problem is that getting a VASP licensed and operating in Pakistan is only partly a legal question. And the parts that aren't legal are the parts that actually determine whether you succeed.
The structural limits — why a law firm's role ends where your real problem begins
Here's the thing founders miss, and it's not about the quality of any individual lawyer. It's structural — built into what a law firm is and how it works.
A law firm is accountable for the document, not the outcome. This is the single most important sentence in this article, so sit with it. When you engage a law firm, what they are professionally responsible for is the legal work product — that it's competent, correct, and delivered. They are not responsible for whether you end up with a license in your hand, a bank account that works, and a live business. That's not what they were hired for, and any honest law firm will tell you so. So when your application stalls, when the bank says no, when the AML system doesn't satisfy an examiner — that's your problem to solve, not theirs. You can have a flawless set of legal documents and still not have a business, and the law firm will have done its job perfectly while you failed at yours.
A law firm stops at the legal layer. Getting licensed and operating requires far more than legal documents. It requires building a real AML/CFT system, not describing one. It requires opening a bank account against years of institutional caution. It requires an independent security and technology audit. It requires structuring capital across the right license categories and the right entry route. It requires fit-and-proper logistics for your people across multiple countries. And then, once licensed, it requires actually launching — acquiring users, building trust, running the business. A law firm does essentially none of that. It hands you correct documents and, by design, leaves everything else to you.
The hourly incentive works against you. Most law firms bill by the hour. That model has no built-in incentive for efficiency or speed — every revision, every query cycle, every back-and-forth is simply more billable time. I'm not accusing anyone of padding; I'm pointing out that the structure of hourly billing doesn't reward getting you licensed fast. It rewards activity. And in a market where speed is first-mover position, an engagement model that's indifferent to your timeline is a genuine risk.
A law firm is reactive, not the owner of the campaign. A law firm responds to your instructions. It drafts what you ask for, advises on what you bring to it. It does not wake up owning your Pakistan entry, orchestrating banking and compliance and regulator strategy and launch as one coordinated campaign. Someone has to be the quarterback — the party that owns the whole field and makes sure every piece moves in concert. A law firm, by its nature, is a specialist input, not the quarterback. If you hire only a law firm, you are the quarterback by default — running a campaign in a foreign regime you've never run before. That's exactly the position that produces the seven failure modes I've written about elsewhere in this series.
The specific gaps for a VASP
Let me make this concrete with the specific things a VASP needs that a law firm structurally won't deliver.
Banking. I've devoted a whole article to the banking wall, so I'll be brief: a law firm will not open your bank account, will not build the AML credibility a bank's compliance team demands, and will not bring you to banking partners through existing relationships. Yet banking is the difference between a license you can use and a license you can't. A law firm hands you a permit; it does not hand you a working account.
AML architecture as a working system. A law firm can draft an AML policy. But a policy document is not a working AML system. PVARA — and the banks — will test whether your transaction monitoring is real, whether your Travel Rule implementation actually functions, whether your goAML reporting capability exists in practice. Building that operational reality is an engineering and operations job, not a drafting job.
Capital and route strategy. Choosing among the four entry routes and ten license categories, and structuring your capital to lock up as little as possible while using the sandbox's reduced-capital provision — that's a strategic and commercial decision informed by how the framework actually behaves in practice. A law firm can tell you what the rules say; deciding the optimal path through them for your specific business is a different skill.
Fit-and-proper logistics. A law firm can tell you the fit-and-proper standard exists. Someone still has to actually manage the people-clearing — the foreign police certificates, the notarization and apostille timelines, the beneficial-ownership documentation — early enough that it doesn't stall the whole application. That's logistics and project management, not legal advice.
The launch. Even a perfectly licensed, perfectly banked company is worth nothing if it can't acquire users and build trust in the Pakistani market. PR, KOL networks, community, the on-ground commercial engine — this is the entire point of entering, and it's about as far from a law firm's remit as you can get.
Look at that list. Every item is essential to actually succeeding, and not one of them is something a law firm is built to own. If you hire only a law firm, you've solved the legal-drafting fraction of the problem and left the larger, harder, outcome-determining fraction entirely to yourself.
The "I'll just assemble it all myself around the law firm" trap
The natural response is: "Fine, I'll use the law firm for the legal parts and coordinate the rest myself." And that can work — if you happen to have deep, current, in-market expertise across banking, AML systems, regulatory strategy, fit-and-proper logistics, and Pakistani crypto market launch sitting in-house, plus the bandwidth to quarterback it all in a foreign regime under time pressure.
For the overwhelming majority of foreign crypto companies, that "if" is false. What actually happens is that the company underestimates the non-legal work, discovers its scale too late, hits the banking wall, mismanages the fit-and-proper timeline, and ends up with a stack of excellent legal documents and a stalled entry. They didn't hire badly. They hired incompletely — they bought the legal layer and assumed the rest would follow, and it didn't.
The resolution: keep your lawyers — and add an owner
So here's the honest conclusion, and it's not "fire your lawyers." It's this: a law firm is a valuable input to your entry, not a substitute for owning it. The right model is to have an experienced partner who owns the entire outcome — route and capital strategy, the compliance build, banking, fit-and-proper logistics, the regulator relationship, and launch — and who brings legal expertise in as one orchestrated input among many, rather than leaving you to bolt a law firm onto a project no one is quarterbacking.
That's the model I built CoinConnect around. We don't ask you to abandon good legal counsel; we ask whether anyone is actually owning the outcome — because a law firm, by its structure, won't, and if no one does, the entry drifts. We orchestrate the whole campaign so that the legal work, the compliance build, the banking, and the launch all move together toward one thing: a live, licensed, banked, operating business. And I'll always be honest about the one thing no one can promise — the regulator's signature. What we own is everything except that signature, and making you the applicant they have no reason to refuse.
If you're currently planning to "just use a law firm" for your Pakistan entry, I'd genuinely like to show you the parts of the job that sits outside their remit — the parts that actually decide whether you make it. That conversation is free, and even if you keep your lawyers (you probably should), you'll walk away seeing the whole field instead of one corner of it.
Book a free scoping call: calendly.com/abbasmalikmuntazir/30min
WhatsApp: +92-329-9552299 · Telegram: @Abbas1101 · Email: team@coinconnect.site
Keep reading: Law Firm, Big-4, or Specialist Consultant — Who Should Actually Run Your PVARA Application?