From Risk to Revenue: Jeff Holman on Fractional Counsel for Fast-Growing Businesses
Episode 150 Frederick Dudek (Freddy D)
When should founders really call their lawyer? In this episode, Freddy D sits down with Jeff Holman, Founder of Intellectual Strategies, to unpack how fractional legal teams help startups and service providers protect IP, tighten contracts, and move faster—without breaking the bank.
If you’ve ever felt that traditional law firms move at the speed of red tape, you’re not alone. Jeff’s fractional model flips the script—offering predictable retainers, proactive counsel, and full-spectrum coverage across patents, trademarks, contracts, and fundraising. Instead of billing by the hour, his team partners with founders to reduce risk before it bites, and to build a legal foundation that scales as fast as the business does. It’s law as a strategic advantage, not a slowdown.
Jeff breaks down the two types of business risk, how to frame legal priorities by severity (not fear), and why founder-friendly retainers are transforming the legal landscape. Plus, hear the story of a “heart-to-heart” patent negotiation that proves advocacy still wins over algorithms.
Whether you’re drafting your first MSA or building an IP moat around your product, this episode gives you real-world playbooks to safeguard growth and scale with confidence.
What You’ll Learn:
- The two types of risk every founder must manage
- Why fractional legal beats the billable-hour grind
- The power of human advocacy in IP protection
- How to make contracts a growth accelerator, not a bottleneck
Protect your momentum, not just your paper.
Discover more with our detailed show notes and exclusive content by visiting:
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Guest Quote Spotlight
“There’s kind of two types of risk in business… is something bad going to happen? And if something bad happens, how bad can it be?” ~ Jeff Holman
SUPERFANS Framework™ in Action – Freddy D’s Mentoring Minute
- Stakeholder Obsession: Jeff’s team is designed around founder realities—flexible retainer, broad coverage, and proactive counsel at the exec table.
- Effortless Experience: One integrated team for 95–98% of startup legal needs = fewer handoffs, faster decisions, stronger context.
- Advocacy: The examiner “heart-to-heart” is advocacy over hours—do the right thing to get the right result.
- Network Effects: Warm intros and values-aligned referrals turn non-clients into future superfans and partners.
One Action. One Stakeholder. One Superfan Closer.
Action: Audit your top 5 recurring agreements (MSA, SOW, NDA, vendor, reseller).
Stakeholder: Your next best customer currently stuck in legal review.
Outcome: Trim friction, shorten time-to-close, and create a “this team gets it” experience.
Freddy D’s Take
I’m all about partners who protect momentum. Jeff’s model moves legal from a cost center to a confidence engine—the team that lets you ship, sell, and scale with guardrails. And the truth about contracts? Nobody cares… until everybody cares. Fix them now.
Guest Contact Info
- Jeff Holman — Intellectual Strategies
- Website: intellectualstrategies.com (book a free 30-minute strategy call)
- LinkedIn: “Jeff Holman — fractional legal teams” (open to connect)
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Intellectual Strategies
- IBM
- Intel
- Apple
- Ninja Prospecting
Copyright 2025 Prosperous Ventures, LLC
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Transcript
There's kind of two types of risk in business.
Speaker A:One is, is something bad going to happen?
Speaker A:And the other is, if something bad happens, how bad can it be?
Speaker A:But I am the world's biggest super fan.
Speaker B:You're like a super fan.
Speaker B:Welcome to the Business Superfans podcast.
Speaker B:We will discuss how establishing business superfans from customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially.
Speaker B:Learn why these advocates are a key factor to achieving excellence in the world of commerce.
Speaker B:This is the Business Superfans Podcast with your host, Freddie D.
Speaker C:Hey, superfans superstar Freddie D here.
Speaker C:Welcome to episode 150 of the Business Superfans, the Service Providers Edge podcast.
Speaker C:In this episode, we're joined by Jeff Holman, founder of Intellectual Strategies, a law firm.
Speaker C:Reshaping how startups and scaling businesses access legal support.
Speaker C:Jeff helps entrepreneurs solve one of the biggest frustration in business growth, getting the right legal help without breaking the bank or slowing down innovation.
Speaker C:Through his fractional legal team model, Jeff gives founders flexible, scalable access to specialized legal expertise, helping them protect their ip, close deals, and grow confidently.
Speaker C:With a background that spans engineering, business strategy, and law, Jeff's superpower is translating between the technical, legal and business worlds with ease.
Speaker C:If you ever felt that traditional legal services hold your business back, this conversation will show you a smarter, more collaborative way forward so you can innovate with confidence while your legal team has your back.
Speaker C:Welcome, Jeff, to the Business Superfans podcast.
Speaker D:Great conversation we had before we started recording.
Speaker D:You're just the next door up in Utah.
Speaker D:We're down here in Arizona, so we're neighbors and glad to have you on the show.
Speaker A:It's my pleasure to be here.
Speaker A:Freddie, thanks for having me here.
Speaker A:And we are neighbors and I'm slightly cooler than you are this time of year.
Speaker A:I hope you're not getting any smoke from the fires.
Speaker D:No, not at the moment.
Speaker D:We've had some cool close by, too close where you could actually see them.
Speaker D:So was it last year or the year before?
Speaker D:Something that kind of makes you really pay attention to what's going on?
Speaker D:Oh, you can actually see the fires.
Speaker D:Jeff, let's go back.
Speaker D:What was the pivotal moment that made you decide to become an intellectual lawyer and create an organization that's really helping people with their IP properties, their trademarks, and a multitude of other things that you guys do?
Speaker A:There are a couple along my kind of winding career path, and I went into engineering initially knowing that I wanted that as a background, but not necessarily thinking that I would be an engineer for my career.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:I Just said, oh, let's get my electrical engineering degree, see what I do next.
Speaker A:And I thought maybe I'd go into business.
Speaker A:I took a turn.
Speaker A:At one point, a friend approached me and we had a conversation.
Speaker A:I'm like, oh, patent attorney, that sounds interesting.
Speaker A:I don't know much about it.
Speaker A:And engineering turns out to be a fantastic background to get into patent law and help inventors with their inventions.
Speaker A:And so I did.
Speaker A:And that was kind of step one from there.
Speaker A:After practicing for a while in Silicon Valley and starting my own practice and working for companies like IBM and Intel, I then had maybe a more pivotal kind of moment in my career, which was a whole combination of things that we can get into if you want, but it's trying to figure out what intellectual property really does in a business and how it fits into the business strategy.
Speaker A:That led me to getting an MBA so that I could study the academic side of business a little bit more, which led me to going in house as an attorney, which led me to realizing, and this is the moment right here, oh, shoot, I'm working the way that lawyers taught me to work.
Speaker A:I'm not necessarily working the way that my clients benefit the most.
Speaker A:If I work that way, that going in house and having that experience of being on the executive team of a business as opposed to being on the outside taking kind of individual phone call requests, that was really pivotal to my career and eventually leading me to where I'm at now, which was a wholly ground up design for a law firm of how we can actually be the best partners and scale with the types of clients that we work with, which are startups and scaling businesses.
Speaker A:The most pivotal moment, aside from maybe going from engineering into law, which was a bit of a surprise to my wife, the pivotal moment was going in house and saying there's a better way to be a partner to the clients that I work with.
Speaker D:Interesting.
Speaker D:We have a similar background because I started off as engineering as well and then transitioned into sales and marketing.
Speaker D:So again, completely different direction.
Speaker D:But that background really complements what you and I are doing because you've got to really have some technical know how to really focus on the details, because the details is really what's important, especially in what you do, and especially when I'm selling or was selling manufacturing and engineering software was really where did that business want to go and how can I help them accomplish their goals?
Speaker D:You're doing it in a sense of being able to not only help the business get their goals, but actually intellectual property and their assets and their knowledge that they've created so that they can scale from that perspective.
Speaker A:I think you and I probably have had a lot of kind of parallel experiences, I imagine, of a lot of context switching between you're talking to the tech team, at least in my case, you're talking to the tech team, or you're talking to the business leadership, or you're talking to the other attorneys.
Speaker A:And you have to get a draw from those different perspectives and backgrounds.
Speaker A:And it's a real advantage in a lot of ways because you just draw from more experiences and you have more insights that other people just haven't had because they haven't been down those paths.
Speaker D:And that makes you actually connect with the individual more on a same level.
Speaker D:Because now all of a sudden, as the customer, they go, well, all right, this person actually understands my business and the challenges I'm going with.
Speaker D:You build more of a rapport and a trust factor because you've got credibility of understanding.
Speaker D:Because a lot of times I've seen people come along, and I'm sure you have too, Jeff, is that they talk to talk, but they can't walk the walk.
Speaker D:And you and I bring a different part of the equation is we can actually talk the walk.
Speaker A:Some people are surprised.
Speaker A:They get into business conversation.
Speaker A:They don't think the attorneys knows the business side of it sometimes or the tech side of it.
Speaker A:I'm sure you've seen the same thing, because engineering and sales are quite different disciplines in a lot of ways, and the personalities that you find in those disciplines are different a lot of times.
Speaker A:So to be able to mesh both of those, that's kind of a superpower of yours, I would expect.
Speaker D:Likewise with yours.
Speaker D:Let's go into some of the things that you guys offer because it's really important and I've experienced it and I'll share about some of my stories when it's appropriate.
Speaker D:Because I've dealt with trying to get a patent, I've dealt with trying to get a trademark, and I finally succeeded.
Speaker D:But there was a multitude of hurdles that I had to go through.
Speaker D:I want to really talk a little bit about what are the services that you provide that helps people like me that need some of those services?
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Speaker A:Oh sure, it's great context for the rest of the conversation.
Speaker A:I think.
Speaker A:I started out for 15 years doing patent law, essentially helping people get patents on their inventions.
Speaker A:People from IBM, intel and Apple down to garage inventors.
Speaker A:That was really my main focus.
Speaker A:What I found by doing that was I was pretty niched.
Speaker A:When people, when my clients started talking about fundraising or entering into licensing agreements or contracts or selling their business, they would often just turn and go to somebody else.
Speaker A:They'd be like, oh well, you're a patent attorney, you don't do that stuff.
Speaker A:Being able to have that background has been good because it's pretty unique.
Speaker A:I realized that there's a way to practice that's maybe more of a partner with my clients by broadening what we do.
Speaker A:This goes back to the transition we talked about earlier when I went in house and I realized there's a better way to practice.
Speaker A:Part of that was we need to provide small companies that we work with have all the same problems just at a different scale as really large companies.
Speaker A:So you need a lot of different disciplines and they're scaling at the same time.
Speaker A:They run into different issues at different times, whether it's they need their patent or they need their trademark or they need their contract.
Speaker A:What I did is I kind of took my IP focus background, meshed it with the business and said, well, how do we design it so that we can actually provide a breadth of services and scale with the clients.
Speaker A:It resulted in what I've now termed a fractional legal team.
Speaker A:We come in and we're essentially an out of the box legal team for small businesses that most clients will engage with us on a monthly retainer scale to the amount of legal that they have going on.
Speaker A:And as they grow or shrink, will grow and shrink with them.
Speaker A:It's really meant to be a long term, flexible solution for people that all kind of originated out of the IP patent side of things, but has morphed into more of a team approach that tailored to giving the best partnership experience to clients.
Speaker D:I know that when we were looking years ago, about 10 years ago, when my wife and I had a company, we were competing with a company that was about 50 million in sales and we never lost to them.
Speaker D:We had a unique approach and we had a clever idea that we were coming up with.
Speaker D:Trying to find a patent attorney that would understand what we were talking about was quite challenging because we went through a lot of different ones and a lot of them just said, this is no good, this is never going to fly.
Speaker D:We found one, but it was still challenging to work with because they never bought into what we were doing.
Speaker D:I think that's a big difference is you need to have an agency like yourselves that really partner up with the business, understand that business and work in tandem with that business.
Speaker D:Because a lot of times I have found an experience because I've worked with a lot of lawyers.
Speaker D:A lot of it is just transactions.
Speaker D:I mean, I've seen it where it's just a transactional aspect.
Speaker A:I don't want to bash attorneys in any way.
Speaker A:There are a lot of good attorneys out there.
Speaker A:We're kind of trained up by other attorneys to be transactional and to respond to a question question when it's asked rather than to partner up with somebody and be there for kind of to help with the executive side of things.
Speaker A:Your experience is not unique.
Speaker A:And I think what it's done is it's made a lot of people feel like, well, it's hard to work with attorneys and I don't want to hire attorney if I don't have to hire an attorney, which is counterintuitive to me because we as an industry of attorneys are supposed to be really smart people and supposed to be really helpful and insightful.
Speaker A:And yet we make it a little bit difficult for clients to work with us or to want to work with us.
Speaker A:That's really the barrier that if I could break down any barrier in the legal profession, at least in the industry I'm in working with small businesses, it would be I want clients to want to call me and to bring me into conversations, not to not want to call me and avoid me.
Speaker A:I think we're all better off by involving legal in the executive level decisions and strategy than not.
Speaker A:But you got to find the right person to do that.
Speaker A:Because otherwise, like you've probably experienced hiring people, not everybody's the right fit.
Speaker D:It's something to say when you actually have a relationship where you can call your attorney and say, hey, Jeff, I want to bounce this stuff up.
Speaker D:You're saying, okay, I got five storm, whatever.
Speaker D:I don't get an invoice because you spent five minutes and you get billed for 15.
Speaker D:I've experienced all this in the past.
Speaker D:Actually.
Speaker D:I've got one person that helped me get my registered trademark.
Speaker D:For business superfans, I went through multitude trademark attorneys.
Speaker D:Most of them said, oh, this is never going to fly.
Speaker D:They looked it up and says, oh, nah.
Speaker D:It was like they weren't willing to put in the effort.
Speaker D:The person that I ended up going with, she took the time to learn what was my vision, what was it all about.
Speaker D:We built a relationship.
Speaker D:She understood where I was going.
Speaker D:And the first time I got turned down, she went back and repackaged it, reposed it, and actually corrected the agency individual because they were wrong and went to their boss, got it done.
Speaker D:Took several years, but I got it.
Speaker D:She understood my business, what my objectives were, and could then properly convey that.
Speaker D:And made phone calls to talk to people because emails can go so far.
Speaker D:You gotta go old school once in a while and actually up the phone and have a phone conversation with people.
Speaker A:I love hearing those stories because they might be a little less frequent than they should be, and it's glad that they're happening.
Speaker A:It reminds me of a couple stories maybe six years ago.
Speaker A:I was working on a patent for a friend, and I'd actually met him because I loved his product.
Speaker A:I just reached out, I said, hey, if you're not patenting this, you should.
Speaker A:It's really cool.
Speaker A:It was a bike component for cycling.
Speaker A:I said, hey, let me see what I can do to help out.
Speaker A:And he had already worked with an attorney.
Speaker A:The attorney had come back.
Speaker A:At one point he would say they tried to charge him like 3x what they should have for this one part of the process.
Speaker A:In fact, you're familiar with the office actions in the patent world.
Speaker A:I'm like, that's really weird that they did that.
Speaker A:They might not have wanted to have you as a client anymore.
Speaker A:Perhaps.
Speaker A:I'm not sure.
Speaker A:So I called him and I said, hey, if you haven't done this, I have.
Speaker A:But I run into this issue and I got involved.
Speaker A:And over the course of the next couple years, I remember distinctly having like, his invention should have been patentable, but the patent office Sometimes you get into these difficult personalities and maybe communication issues at times just because there's a lot of diversity there.
Speaker A:I actually got on the call and I remember telling my team, I said, hey, I got to call this examiner.
Speaker A:I don't know how the conversation is going to go.
Speaker A:I'm not even sure what I'm going to tell him because I've told him he's wrong already and that's not working.
Speaker A:But I got to call him because our client deserves the next step here.
Speaker A:He deserves to get a patent for this.
Speaker A:I called and it's totally not an engineering thing to do in a lot of ways.
Speaker A:I had a heart to heart with this guy and I just said, hey, listen, he's aminer.
Speaker A:We've been down this path.
Speaker A:We've been back and forth.
Speaker A:We've both shared our perspectives.
Speaker A:I said, let me tell you now about Sam the inventor.
Speaker A:Because Sam, he's done this and this and this.
Speaker A:He was manufacturing these pieces himself.
Speaker A:He knows that this doesn't exist out there.
Speaker A:I said, sam deserves an invention and I'm here to help him get it.
Speaker A:I don't think we're skirting around any rules, but I need your help to help me help Sam.
Speaker A:My staff was sitting there and they dropped what they were doing.
Speaker A:They just listed my phone call.
Speaker A:And not that I did anything spectacular, but it was a totally out of the box approach that most patent examiners hadn't heard before.
Speaker A:I just said, this guy needs this.
Speaker A:This is what he's been working on for a couple years now.
Speaker A:Through that heart to heart, we came to a conclusion.
Speaker A:We came to an agreement and said, hey, yeah, we think that there's a way to do this and we got it through.
Speaker A:It's not a normal approach.
Speaker A:It's not an approach that fits into the billable hour necessarily, because what am I going to do?
Speaker A:Turn around and charge Sam $10,000 for a phone call?
Speaker A:I'm not going to do that.
Speaker A:I want Sam to want to call me, not not want to call me.
Speaker A:It's just the right thing to do to get it through the process.
Speaker D:That basically had a low probability until you had that particular phone call with that individual.
Speaker A:That's absolutely true.
Speaker A:In fact, I reached out to him just recently.
Speaker A:He's not pursuing that anymore for business reasons, but we stay in touch and he's a great guy and he is one of my super fans.
Speaker A:I guess I haven't called him that before, but on this show, that's exactly what I them.
Speaker D:That's where the idea I came up with business.
Speaker D:Super fan.
Speaker D:You got the fans that got their faces painted, the jerseys, the banners, the tailgate parties.
Speaker D:Who are they promoting?
Speaker D:They're promoting their team.
Speaker D:The idea was, why can't businesses transform all their stakeholders?
Speaker D:Imagine what would happen to your business if 15% of all your stakeholders were promoting your business.
Speaker D:It would explode.
Speaker C:Let's get back.
Speaker D:Do you have another story that you want to share with us?
Speaker A:Yeah, I'll share another one because it goes along those same lines.
Speaker A:It was just actually yesterday I got a phone call.
Speaker A:So I have a system where new clients come in and they set up a free 30 minute call with me because I like to hear what's going on and hear about their business and decide if that's a good fit for what I'm doing and they can do the same and decide if I'm a good fit for them.
Speaker A:So we'll have a 30 minute call.
Speaker A:Well, I got a call from a kid named Ethan.
Speaker A:He's in college here locally.
Speaker A:He got on the call and the first thing he said is, hey, I want to be upfront with you.
Speaker A:I'm like, yeah, great.
Speaker A:I like that.
Speaker A:I actually was talking to my partner who's sitting over here.
Speaker A:I think we looked at your website.
Speaker A:It looks like my partner talked with you a year ago about this invention.
Speaker A:I said, oh, well, yeah, I know Gabe.
Speaker A:Gabe's the son of a friend of mine.
Speaker A:They live in the Seattle area now.
Speaker A:Anyways, through some miracle of connections, Gabe's dad had sent him to me a year ago and then some other random sort of person had made a connection that referred them to me.
Speaker A:And I just said, hey, well, you've gotten two great referrals.
Speaker A:Now that both happened to lead to me.
Speaker A:I've already talked to Gabe about the invention.
Speaker A:Why don't we sit down and we've got 20 more minutes.
Speaker A:Why don't we talk about your business a little bit and if there's some legal stuff I can provide, that's fine, but let's talk about where your business is going.
Speaker A:And so we just spent the time, because I've seen a lot of businesses, I have some business insight that I can share.
Speaker A:So even if somebody's not hiring me for a patent in the moment, they might eventually.
Speaker A:We said, well, tell me about your business.
Speaker A:What's happened since last year when I talked to Gabe?
Speaker A:What progress have you made?
Speaker A:And they'd started making some sales and they'd started to develop out their technology a little bit better.
Speaker A:They've identified competitors.
Speaker A:It's exciting to see these guys making progress along the way.
Speaker A:But I guess the point I want to get at is sometimes it's important for us as attorneys to just take the call and make the most of the call.
Speaker A:The way that it benefits the client, not necessarily the way that we get to bill it out at maximum billing rates.
Speaker A:That's a little bit about my philosophy I guess is just let's establish a long term relationship.
Speaker A:I'm not here for the 6 minutes or the 15 minute billing rate.
Speaker A:I want the long term relationship.
Speaker A:I want to see you succeed.
Speaker A:I want to be associated with you when you succeed.
Speaker A:To put it in your terminology.
Speaker A:I want to develop a super fan who hopefully at the end of this.
Speaker C:Engagement wants to paint their face and.
Speaker A:Intellectual strategies, colors or something like that.
Speaker D:Sometimes the business will not happen.
Speaker D:Okay, let's be realistic.
Speaker D:You may share some value and everything else and life gets in the way and they don't do business with you.
Speaker D:However, they may turn around and it may come up in a conversation and they may say, you know what?
Speaker D:Need to talk to this guy Jeff, He's a great guy.
Speaker D:And that's one of the things I had in one of my guests on the show that was several many episodes back, talked about the fact that he was doing entertainment types, bar mitzvah and multitude of different parties and stuff for people.
Speaker D:Those people just could not afford his stuff.
Speaker D:They wanted it, but they just couldn't afford it.
Speaker D:But he still turned them into superfans.
Speaker D:The way he handled it that even though they couldn't afford his services, they were still a mouthpiece for him because of the way he handled them.
Speaker D:I'm just catapulting off of what you're saying is sometimes it may not be in the transaction tomorrow or it may never be, but then that person might refer you 2, 3, 4 people down the road.
Speaker D:That works just as well.
Speaker A:Yeah, especially in this scenario with two college age innovative kids that are probably got a 40 year career of innovation ahead of them.
Speaker A:I totally agree with you.
Speaker A:If they want to call me, and I want them to call me when they come up with their next invention or they raise their money to pay for this or whatever it is.
Speaker A:It's a relationship thing from a sales perspective.
Speaker D:We make decisions emotionally and we justify them logically.
Speaker D:What you're doing is you're planting seeds with these individuals that will sprout in time.
Speaker D:You need business today, but you also need business tomorrow.
Speaker D:You need it in three years, you need it in five years years.
Speaker D:You need it in 10 years.
Speaker D:So there's enough road out there to really cultivate that whole garden that's going to grow and provide you with opportunities.
Speaker A:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker A:I think to go along with that, the mentality has to be one of abundance.
Speaker A:There's plenty of work out there.
Speaker A:If I don't work with this individual now, that's totally fine.
Speaker A:It might come in the future if I never work with them.
Speaker A:There are others.
Speaker A:I've talked with some other attorneys who just again, not to bash, but to maybe give some context.
Speaker A:I talked with a friend of mine who runs a practice and I said, hey, working with these big companies, when you have these smaller companies come through, we're really good with them.
Speaker A:The way we work with them, it just fits well.
Speaker A:I said, if you're interested, feel free to pass people my way while we're good friends.
Speaker A:His response was kind of shocking to me.
Speaker A:He said, jeff, I would rather quote them my high rates and if they take it, great.
Speaker A:And if they don't take it, maybe they'll take it later.
Speaker A:I would rather have them out there as a lost lead effectively than to send them somewhere else where they won't come back to me ever.
Speaker A:I just thought, first of all, we're good friends.
Speaker A:I thought this is a relationship thing, but maybe that's business and personal don't mix.
Speaker A:But second of all, I don't know that you're not really serving that client or you're not helping that individual get further down the road.
Speaker A:They're going to be stuck forever perhaps, or they're certainly not going to come back to you.
Speaker A:If you could offer a connection to the next step that they need, how much more powerful would that be, even for your relationship long term than if you just kind of stop that progress because you're unwilling to help out?
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:It struck me as an interesting approach.
Speaker A:Doesn't necessarily mesh with the way that I've chosen to approach my could have formulated.
Speaker D:There could have been some referral exchange back and forth.
Speaker D:If this is out of your wheelhouse, that's fine, pass it down me and I give you whatever the deal is for giving me the opportunity if I close it and vice versa.
Speaker D:If this is something that we can't handle because it's a conglomerate, global, big ass company, then I'll hand that back to you.
Speaker D:And it bewilders me how sometimes people looking at the hand and missing the whole forest in front of them that's out there because those are great partnerships to create.
Speaker D:I've created those in the past in the software world where we shared different customers, they needed this technology and I didn't have that technology.
Speaker D:Well, go see that guy.
Speaker D:And I let that salesperson know that hey, so and so is going to be calling you because they need what you've got.
Speaker D:They'd be like, oh, wow.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker D:And they send me some stuff because there's enough for everybody out there like you just mentioned.
Speaker D:I'm surprised on that, but it is what it is.
Speaker A:Contrast that though, with another experience that had a similar opportunity but a different outcome.
Speaker A:Just about six weeks ago, I onboarded a new client that was coming over from a really large law firm.
Speaker A:They were looking at their financial Runway because again, we're working with a lot of startups and scaling companies and their runways are kind of wild sometimes.
Speaker A:And they said, hey, we've loved working with this really large law firm, but they charge like triple what you charge.
Speaker A:We need somebody with the skill set but not the billing rate that they've got.
Speaker A:So we're going to transition our work over to you.
Speaker A:As part of that transition, they put me in touch with the prior attorneys.
Speaker A:I called them and I said, hey, we're helping to manage this client now and would love to coordinate on what we're doing.
Speaker A:And here's how we work because it's a little bit different.
Speaker A:You might see not just me, but my team.
Speaker A:I explained how we work and they coordinated on stuff.
Speaker A:But then he said, hey, just as a side note, Jeff, the way you've described how your law firm works is really interesting.
Speaker A: There's like a: Speaker A:We probably have some opportunities.
Speaker A:We should schedule a lunch and sit down and see if we can collaborate because I'll bet there's a lot of work that we have that comes through us and we could pass to you.
Speaker A:You're probably right sized for that work.
Speaker A:There's probably some stuff as those companies have these larger transactions, you need the capacity and resources to help them with that.
Speaker A:We can help with that.
Speaker A:It was just a stark contrast, that conversation with an attorney I didn't know to the attorney that I was good friends with and know really well, but didn't turn out the same way.
Speaker D:So let's look at capitalizing each other's skill sets so that we maximize the value that we're providing to potential customers as well as existing customers night and day.
Speaker A:Yeah, I love that you said maximizing value because I think it brings up the point that we need to attorneys all the time.
Speaker A:I'm like, we're running a Business, we need to bill for our time in some way or bill for our work product.
Speaker A:But we have to be in the mindset of what is the client's perspective here.
Speaker A:The client doesn't value our time the same way we valued it.
Speaker A:They value outcomes, they value responsiveness, they value these other things that aren't necessarily the internal drivers of our business.
Speaker A:We need to know that.
Speaker A:I think when an attorney at a really large firm that could very easily just say, yeah, it doesn't build my bottom line, I don't want it.
Speaker A:When they say, you know what, there's probably opportunities to collaborate, there's some bottom line in there.
Speaker A:But I think that approach also has giving a nod to the client value and the way that the client would see value on their end, not just the way that the law firms or service providers or whoever it is might see value.
Speaker A:I like that you said that now.
Speaker D:And they're going to refer those companies to other people that they know within their circle of influence.
Speaker D:It just propels itself.
Speaker D:Let's talk a little bit about all the services that you provide for.
Speaker D:You've got a great background in this, and so I know that you provide the IP stuff, patent trademarks, but let's go into all the other services that you guys provide.
Speaker A:When we started this fractional legal team, we really decided that we needed to be able to provide all the services, or basically all the services that a startup company needs along the way.
Speaker A:That's everything from forming a company to hiring your first employees or setting up your partnerships, what we call corporate governance, maybe bringing on investors, setting up customer agreements and vendor agreements, and then of course, all of the patent and trademark, the innovation around your business.
Speaker A:We really developed a skill set and brought a team together really deliberately to provide what I typically call it 95 to 98% of what every startup and scaling company needs.
Speaker A:Because we limit the need for you to go out and hire multiple attorneys, because let's face it, nobody wants to hire one attorney, let alone have to go hire four or five or six different attorneys for different skill sets.
Speaker A:So we try to bring that together into one hiring touch point, one activity.
Speaker A:And it's bringing the team that somebody needs for basically everything that they're going to see, the variety of things they're going to see as they grow their business.
Speaker A:There's a few areas we don't really practice.
Speaker A:We don't.
Speaker A:And we're all business.
Speaker A:We don't do estate planning or we don't do criminal stuff.
Speaker A:There's a lot of areas of law we don't do then some really specialty areas that at times our clients need a little bit.
Speaker A:We might need to go to those big firms and recruit somebody who they just do import export controls or they do really sophisticated tax planning or health care regulation, things like that.
Speaker A:We'll bring experts in and help collaborate with them on our team if we can, for the clients.
Speaker A:But it's a general small business practice with a kind of a unique emphasis, innovation.
Speaker D:You really said an important thing that I really want to emphasize.
Speaker D:It's you've got maybe three, four different lawyers, but they're all part of the same firm.
Speaker D:So you guys can also brainstorm and talk about, okay, this is what's going on with Johnny's business.
Speaker D:Well, here's what we're doing.
Speaker D:What are you doing on this thing?
Speaker D:Versus trying to get five or three different lawyers that are independent talking and communicating and brainstorming for the betterment of that business.
Speaker D:The other thing that I want to emphasize is that you're really providing an invaluable service to that business because having worked with distribution channels and contracts and nobody cares about the paperwork until everybody cares about the paperwork.
Speaker D:I mean, we've heard it many times.
Speaker D:Nobody looks at it, nobody cares until something goes wrong and then everybody brings out the contract and all right, what does it say?
Speaker D:It's really important to have that as a backstop because when you need it, you need to have a good contract.
Speaker A:That's so true.
Speaker A:That's one of the difficulties with law.
Speaker A:There's kind of two types of risk in business.
Speaker A:One is, is something bad going to happen?
Speaker A:And the other is, if something bad happens, how bad can it be?
Speaker A:There's a lot of stuff in business where is something bad going to happen?
Speaker A:Is it really bad to your business?
Speaker A:It's probably manageable.
Speaker A:But then there's a few things that is something going to happen?
Speaker A:It's pretty unlikely, but if it does, you're in big trouble.
Speaker A:There's kind of understanding when to put the right resources on those and how to have those conversations every day with small businesses, because small businesses aren't all printing money.
Speaker A:Where do you want to do it?
Speaker A:Let's have a conversation about what makes sense for your business, because what makes sense for my business versus your business versus somebody else's?
Speaker A:We're probably going to come up with three different answers to the same scenarios because our businesses are just different.
Speaker A:Our strategies are different.
Speaker D:As a fractional CMO guy, we got into the point where this guy was trying to say, okay, we're going to cancel your contract and you're going to become a subcontractor to me.
Speaker D:No, that's not how this works.
Speaker D:We finally parted ways and I had a clause that we had to have 10 day notice from one another.
Speaker D:I could have said, you owe me for 10 days worth of cash.
Speaker D:Chose not to turn into a big thing because it would have just made a mess out of everything and it wasn't worth the headache.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:No, that's another whole area of law, litigation.
Speaker A:We helping clients.
Speaker A:We've been helping and I avoided litigation for a long time.
Speaker A:Like, we don't do it.
Speaker A:I don't like it, I don't want to do it.
Speaker A:It's not good for your business.
Speaker A:But eventually, when you're the team for these scaling businesses, they run into problems either because something bad happened or because they've been so successful.
Speaker A:They kind of attract the trolls who are looking to leech off of the success.
Speaker A:I finally said, well, let's bring somebody in.
Speaker A:We have Trevor on our team.
Speaker A:He's a fantastic litigator.
Speaker A:But it's a balance.
Speaker A:Litigation, I think the saying is quite true.
Speaker A:Nobody really wins in these big fights.
Speaker A:The attorneys make money and maybe they're winning in that sense, but it's not something I even like.
Speaker A:It's not a winning strategy.
Speaker A:You mentioned before that a lot of people make sales decisions based on emotion and then they justify it with logic.
Speaker A:I think I haven't necessarily thought this through all the way.
Speaker A:I'm thinking about it on the fly here.
Speaker A:But I think the reverse might be true for litigation.
Speaker A:You're like, well, the contract says you owe me and you didn't do it.
Speaker A:Then the emotion kicks in to justify the dispute.
Speaker A:You're like, well, now I'm all in and I'm gonna hellfire and brimstone is coming.
Speaker A:I'm not gonna quit until this is over.
Speaker A:And logic by that point sometimes leaves the building and it's really tough to recover from that.
Speaker A:I'm gonna have to give more thought to that after we talk.
Speaker A:Because the sales versus legal dispute, if.
Speaker D:You don't control them, sometimes can send you down the wrong road very quickly, especially in business because you become no longer making rational decisions, you're making emotional decisions.
Speaker D:And those usually don't work well.
Speaker D:That's like with this company that I talked about, that individual is making emotional decisions because they used to running the family business.
Speaker D:And I was changing things up and got them over a million dollars worth of potential business in six weeks.
Speaker D:And it was way over his head.
Speaker D:He couldn't handle that kind of stuff.
Speaker D:Had to go back to his old way of maintaining control.
Speaker C:Yeah, those we kind of wrap up.
Speaker D:How can people find you?
Speaker A:I love to connect with people.
Speaker A:I love to hear about innovators stories and challenges and where they're headed.
Speaker A:I'm pretty open on LinkedIn.
Speaker A:You can find me over there.
Speaker A:I look like me, I say something about fractional legal teams.
Speaker A:Happy to connect on LinkedIn.
Speaker A:And then like I mentioned before, our law firm is Intellectual Strategies and we do free 30 minute strategy calls with potential clients to just kick around ideas and hear what messes people have made that need a little cleanup and hear the milestones they're working towards that might need some prep work so that we're all tidied up for our transactional wedding or mergers or sale or whatever it might be.
Speaker A:And people can just get on our website www.ellectualstrategies.com and connect with us there.
Speaker A:If they want to do that 30 minute call.
Speaker A:Those are the two best places to connect with us.
Speaker D:And thank you so much for your time, Jeff.
Speaker D:Great conversation.
Speaker D:Like I said, love to have you on the show down the road.
Speaker A:Yeah, thank you Freddie.
Speaker A:I've had a great time talking with you.
Speaker D:Thank you.
Speaker C:What an insightful episode with Jeff From Intellectual Strategies.
Speaker C:We explored how rethinking the attorney client.
Speaker D:Relationship can transform not only your legal.
Speaker C:Strategy, but your entire business growth journey.
Speaker C:Jeff's fractional legal team model shows that when service providers focus on partnership, alignment and trust, everybody wins.
Speaker C:It's not about hours billed, it's about impact delivered.
Speaker C:If you're a service based entrepreneur, remember the way to serve your clients today shapes the superfans who'll champion your business tomorrow.
Speaker D:Thanks for tuning in today.
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Speaker B:We hope you took away some useful knowledge from today's episode of the Business Superfans podcast.
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