2216 - Protecting Your Business from Legal Pitfalls with Intellectual Strategies' Jeff Holman

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1:05With us right now, it's Jeff Holman. Jeff, you are the founder and CEO of Intellectual Strategies. You are found on the web at intellectualstrategies.com. Can't wait to talk about this topic. Before we do, Jeff, would you mind maybe just sharing a little bit about what have you been doing outside of work lately? What are your hobbies, interests? What have you been geeking out on lately? Yeah, that's pretty easy. It depends on the day. This morning was futsal. I play soccer with a group of guys three days a week. Wait, what did you call it? Futsal. So F-U-T-S-A-L. It's soccer, but you have a size five soccer ball if you're playing normal soccer.

1:45This is a size four, which is what youth usually play with, and it's got a heavier bladder in it. So it actually doesn't bounce as high. You can still get it up in the air, but you don't want to head it too many times because it's a pretty solid ball. So it's futsal. And we just play on an indoor court and have a blast. Get a workout in, you know, three days, We have a group that plays up to five days a week, but I make time for three days because I have another two or three days of tennis that I'm doing in the mornings. Wow. And it's got to be great. You know, I tell you, as an adult, and I would say particularly maybe as even an adult guy, like it's hard to make friends and do friend stuff unless you're very thoughtful and conscious about that and you're very proactively doing it.

2:33So this is probably, in addition to great workout, like it's just a good bonding activity. It really is. It really is. And, you know, I used to play like formal leagues for soccer and there you're like, you know, it's very competitive. People think that they're because they show up on a Thursday night that they're going to win the World Cup or whatever. And it's not as friendly, frankly. So a while ago when I realized I was getting older and I wasn't recovering from injuries so well, and I also realized I'm kind of provocable sometimes. Sometimes I figured I better play friendly soccer. So, yeah, I joined this group and that's what we do.

3:07It's what we call the friendly futsal club. And we just play in the mornings, pick up ball. And it's a great workout, great bonding. It's fun times. I love it. I love it. So your company, Jeff, is Intellectual Strategies. Your website is intellectualstrategies.com. Give us an overview of your work. Yeah. So this came about from, you know, I've been doing law for 25 years from a patent agent working with inventors to today working with startups and scaling companies. And we have just basically launched a unique model, what I call fractional legal team. You hear a lot about fractional stuff these days.

3:45We're doing a fractional legal team where we basically bring the whole team, you know, our all five attorneys, our staff, and we say, we're your legal team. Treat us like your team. Treat us like we're down the hall. and as similar as it seems to some things that law firms already do it's very very different well why is that a good fit for some clients as opposed to I don't know just paying for an attorney when you need them yeah the well the obvious is when you need an attorney and you have to pay for them and you go through that calculation in your head nine times out of ten you say yeah I'm not going to call the attorney.

4:21And so as lawyers, we have, you know, I guess we're master communicators, people say. And what we've done is we have created the biggest obstacle to people actually hiring and using us and getting access to our expertise. It's a little backwards in my mind. So I wanted to reverse that and I wanted to create what I initially called integrated legal counsel. We want to be integrated with your team. But the word fractional is a lot more popular. People know it now more over the last three or four years. So it's just that fractional model. Bring us onto your team. Let's work collaboratively. Let's make it easy to get access to the expertise that startups, founders, scaling companies really should have.

5:04Just how fractional are we talking about? Well, so I mean, we can do like a project by project, but that's not really the intention here. The intention is to have a monthly fee and that monthly fee scales, right? Some people need us a few hours a month, but once you have recurring problems or recurring issues, recurring opportunities that you really should bring legal in on, that's when you can bring somebody in. And the whole reason to do it with a team approach, there are various reasons, but one of the main benefits that people get is they don't always need my specific expertise. I'm very heavy in IP patents, inventions.

5:42they might need somebody that has more, you know, trademark or more employment law or more startup funding or more contract or maybe disputes, you know. And so you kind of get access to the whole team. I like to say you get the right expertise from the right attorney at the right time. Yeah. And obviously, if we're thinking about making wise decisions, making good decisions, you know, I think about, you know, the things that we constantly put in our, you know, ongoing threat analysis, you know, so what can go wrong here? And doggone it if it isn't legal things that end up in that, you know, in our SWOT analysis that we kind of almost, I would say almost always there's something legal related in that threat box that could happen.

6:24And it sucks, but that's the way that it can be. Yeah, it's, you know, we don't like to be the bearers of bad news necessarily. But if you can get ahead of those issues, if you can really use somebody strategically, if you feel like you can access the expertise ahead of time, you can avoid most of that stuff. It's just, again, we, for whatever reason as an industry have said, let's make it really difficult and disincentivize people from actually using us. And then we'll help them solve the problems after. And it'll cost 10 times as much. And, you know, maybe that's on purpose. I don't know. But it's not the way I like to interact with my clients if I can.

7:01Yeah. Well, Jeff, would you mind maybe just telling us a couple of stories? And I'm hoping maybe you can give us some stories that might be either cautionary tales or tales of redemption. And we'll all grab a cocoa and listen as we are inspired to make sure that we don't put ourselves either in the same position or we put ourselves in the position that we can make sure that we have that same positive outcome. Yeah, for sure. do you have any context for me? I mean, I can make stuff up, but if you have any... Client stories, like, so I'm thinking about this, you know, story of a client that, you know, something bad, really bad could have happened, or again, because they took preventative measures, they really dodged a bullet, or maybe you had a 911 call come in, and you're like, oh yeah, let their pain be your story, and da-da-da-da-da.

7:50Yes. Yes. Well, so I actually just recounted a bunch of stories from one of the clients that I worked with a couple years back. I'm on a LinkedIn post, so people can go there and check that out. But let me tell a few of those here. One that I like to share is that I was sitting at home one night just browsing Facebook, and I came across an ad from one of my clients. I work with a lot of e-commerce clients, and they run a lot of ads. And that ad, they're great with their ads, but, you know, marketing departments and legal tend to not necessarily see eye to eye all the time because marketing wants to be a lot more edgy than legal perhaps wants them to be.

8:30So as I was sitting at home, I saw this ad and I'm like, oh, I wonder if they've got permission from the very well-known celebrity that they just put onto their ad and referenced it. And I said, so, you know, so I just get on my text and I'm like, hey, team, I just saw your ad. I really like it. My guess is that we don't have permission from this celebrity because it would have cost a ton of money, right, to get to get that permission. And I said, why don't we take that down until until we can sort this out and figure out if we've got permission? Because if we don't and the celebrity, you know, wants to make it an issue, that's a million dollar issue right there.

9:10Right. And it's just because they launched an ad with, you know, perhaps unauthorized celebrity usage in it. So that's that's the type of stuff I run into just casually because I am quite, you know, connected into my clients operations and stories. So that's one one story to share. Yeah, well, yes, don't don't use likenesses to promote your brand that you don't have permission for it. there's one. I mean, could you imagine, Jeff, if someone had just put your face on their product and, you know, you enjoying their, you know, green gummies or something like that. And then imagine being someone like, wait a minute, you know, and just because someone is a public figure, you know, we all, I mean, do you mind maybe just addressing that really quickly?

9:58Like, where's the line on that? Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. So public figures, I mean, there's a lot of different classifications, but people who are well-known, right? They have the right to control how their name, image, and likeness are used. And in fact, this is so important that you hear it. You hear, you've heard a lot about it, I'm sure, recently with the, with like the NCAA, right? You get a lot of the NCAA athletes who over the years haven't had the ability to monetize their name, image, and likeness for their own benefits because it was prohibited by NCAA rules for them to make money and all this stuff.

10:32Well, that's opened up, right? We've heard that. And I don't know what the stats are, but I figure there are a lot of college athletes who are now making probably hundreds of thousands, maybe some making millions off of their name, image, and likeness, right? This is a very monetizable thing for people who are famous. And since it's monetizable, they have the legal right to control how they monetize it. And when somebody else without out-authorization comes in and says, boy, I'd really like to leverage that, you know, celebrity's name for my product, they don't have the right to do that. That's, it's like, it's very similar to infringing on somebody's trademark.

11:11You know, you can't just go take Coca-Cola's name. I can't take it and be like, well, you know, Coke endorses my law firm and you should hire me because, you know, Coke likes me too. You know, Coke could be all over me. They'd be like, wait a second, we didn't authorize that. You're just trying to piggyback onto our brand that we've built. And so it's the same for celebrities. It's the same for these college athletes who now have that right to do that. And you can't just take that. It's kind of the broader field of intellectual property, the areas where people have created value in something intangible, but they get the right to control that as if it was their own property.

11:56All right. So we've been talking about how you engage. And Jeff, your website is intellectualstrategies.com. Listen, I'll just say I'm a huge fan of having smart people in your orbit at all times, right? It just helps us make much, much smarter decisions. And Jeff, I know maybe some people might be using AI or ChatGPT quite a bit for simple questions. What advice would you get? I mean, without bad-mouthing AI, because I'm sure there's some application there that I think is valuable. But where would you say, sure, cool, use that, but you also need to make sure that you have competent legal representation and advice that is not AI for this reason, this reason, and this reason.

12:46Yeah, no, I love AI. I use it every day for various things. Some of them are legal and some of them are marketing. I use it all the time. It's a tool we all should be using and use well. It's great. The issue with AI and legal specifically is that AI doesn't know what the guardrails really should be for legal things generally. And more specifically, they don't know what the guardrail should be for your company, right? Your company is a little bit different from your neighbor's company, your friend's company, or your competitor's company. and if you don't have the right legal guardrails in place, you're just swinging in the dark, right?

13:27Like I'm not an architect. I don't know what all the rules are. I could probably find out what the rules are for designing and building a house and stuff like that. But in order to know where those guardrails exist with AI tools, you kind of have to be an expert already, right? Because if I go in and I say, hey, what I want to do is I want to, you know, do a contract with a supplier who's bringing goods in from, you know, China or wherever now. And I just say, you know, draft me a contract. AI may or may not know that I don't have certain payment terms that I can do. It may or may not realize that a lot of Chinese contracts are different in very major ways than just U.S.

14:14supplier contracts. There's just a lot of things that you don't have the context for when you put it into AI. So I think what I would say is use AI if you want to, but understand that if you don't know where the guardrails are, AI is not going to create them for you. And so you're still kind of going in blindly, even though maybe you feel a lot better about how blind you are. Awesome. All right. So by the way, I'm going to, Jeff, I'm going to promote your LinkedIn. You're a great follow. I just found myself getting sucked into your post about this topic for today right now, 30 days from now, it's old news, but Crumble,$24 lawsuit for using music in their TikToks that they didn't have permission for.

15:04What are they thinking? Yeah, yeah. My God. That's a big no-no. So that's a head scratcher that someone thought that that was OK. It's a pretty bright line rule, too. You know, this is where somebody I don't know what the I don't work with them. I don't know what their what their what their thought process was. That's a pretty bright line that they just crossed. Why they would have done it, I don't know. But the irony to that post, if it doesn't stand out, is that they they really went after, you know, in Utah, we had the cookie wars a couple of years ago. where they went after another cookie company because they said, oh, you copied our box.

15:40Infringing our IP. You infringed our IP. You copied our box. You copied our business model, which ironically was all kind of really, really soft out there claims that would be hard to enforce. And yet it comes to light now that they've crossed this extremely bright line. I don't know them. I don't have anything against them. But that should have been avoidable. It kind of sounds like a little bit of a for me and not for the, or for the and not for me kind of thing. Perhaps. All right. So your website, intellectualstrategies.com, our friend that's listening, what do they do? Oh, you know what? If somebody wants to get in touch with me, reach out.

16:23I love talking to founders. I love hearing the stories. I love hearing the chaos that maybe you've created, the problems you're trying to clean up. I love hearing where you're headed for the next, you know, 12 to 18 months, what you're building. So what I love to do is have a free 30-minute strategy call with potential clients. You can get on my website. You can see my calendar. You can book a call with me or maybe another teammate. And let's chat about where you're at. Let's roadmap out your legal issues. Let's talk about where those guardrails are. That's kind of what I do day in and day out.

16:53And I just love working with cool people, working on innovative projects. You and me both. Jeff Holman, founder, CEO of Intellectual Strategies, found on the web at intellectualstrategies.com. Jeff, it's been a great conversation. Josh, thanks so much for having me. It's been my pleasure.

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