This is general information, not legal advice, and reflects Ontario law and Stripe's own published terms as of September 2026. Confirm current LSO By-Law 9 requirements directly with the Law Society of Ontario before choosing a payment processor for trust money.
The four grounds, in order
We ruled Stripe out for trust deposits during our own payments-module design work, then re-verified the reasoning against Stripe's current documentation. Four grounds stood up:
- Prohibited Businesses. Stripe's terms bar law firms from collecting funds for anything other than legal-service fee payment — running trust deposits through it risks account termination with client funds mid-transfer.
- Fee netting. Stripe deducts its processing fee from the transaction before settlement, so the deposit that lands is never the full, gross amount — a direct conflict with a trust ledger that has to record the full sum received.
- One settlement account. A single Stripe account has one payout destination, so there's no built-in way to route some payments to trust and others to general.
- Automatic clawback. Refunds, disputes, and negative balances let Stripe debit the payout account on its own, and no setting turns that off. If trust were the payout account, Stripe could pull money back out of it.
What's still fine: your operating account
This isn't a blanket Stripe ban. A firm already using Stripe to collect operating income — retainer top-ups already earned, flat-fee work already billed — can keep doing that. The line is trust money specifically: money held for a client that hasn't been earned yet. DROZlegal's own product ships a real, collect-only Stripe integration for exactly this operating-account case, off by default, wired for operating collections only and never connected to a trust ledger.
What we built instead, and its real status
Our own client-payments module is built and has been through four rounds of adversarial review, but it isn't switched on in production yet — we're finalizing a payment-processor agreement first. Behind it: a Helcim connector materially further along than a bare socket, including a separate trust-account token that refuses a trust-destined checkout outright rather than quietly routing it to the operating token; a LawPay connector that's currently just the placeholder for a partner agreement; a mandatory seven-day expiry on every payment link, since a link that never expires is a bearer instrument that never dies; and a database constraint that makes it structurally impossible for a processor fee to be debited from trust. See our fuller look at how DROZlegal designs around the trust-money hard ceiling, and our By-Law 9 trust-accounting guide for the gross-deposit rule this whole design answers to.