In this protective episode, Jeff Holman, Founder and CEO of Intellectual Strategies, shares fractional legal strategies for business protection. If you struggle with legal blindsides or IP risks as a startup, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What IP roadmap aligns with your growth goals
– Why early legal audits prevent costly disputes in stage 2
– How fractional teams deliver expert advice without overhead
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed podcast. It’s the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder, and I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and I’ve seen this happen all the time. There’s founders who’ve successfully built a thriving organization. They’re leading their team, they’re setting big goals, they’re taking ground. Maybe they’re even writing magazine articles about you, we’ll see. But then suddenly, like, out of nowhere, they’re blindsided by a legal issue they never saw coming. And in my own experience and what I’ve walked others through the in their coaching relationship, I have seen nothing take the wind out of your sails faster. It just like, like, literally sucks the blood from your head and it just like, all the all the things, all the things, I’m feeling it already, I gotta stop all right, but the question is, like, what do you do about that? Can you avoid all of it? When do you avoid all of it? And what you’ll realize is, hey, we’ve been spending a lot of time growing the business, but we’ve not spent a lot of time protecting it, and now it’s not like those early days when you had nothing to lose. We actually have something to lose, and we need to learn how to protect it. And so here to help us do exactly that is the one and only Jeff Holman, who is founder of intellectual strategies and is changing the way that startups and scaling businesses access legal support, as the creator of the first fractional league legal team at intellectual strategies, he’s made it possible for companies to tap into expert legal advice at key points in their growth without needing a full time in house team. This innovative approach means businesses get exactly the help that they need when they need it, and without all the hefty overhead. His fractional legal team model is revolutionizing how companies access the legal support they need, empowering them to focus on their core business at the same time, he handles the complexities in the background. Well, Jeff, welcome to the show. Excited to have you here. You know, we’ve kind of opened up with this, but like it just feels like nothing can stop the train, and right at the moment that it does, all of a sudden, a wheel falls off. Why does this happen? And what do we need to do to think differently about it as founders?
Jeff Holman
Yeah, no, Scott, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. You’re speaking my language. Scaling companies is awesome, and it’s chaotic and it’s fun and it’s full of surprises. Sometimes the bad surprises, like you talked about, there’s really two reasons why, why legal issues pop up into the business and deflate the leadership a lot of times. The first ones may be more obvious, and that is, people let these things fester. They know they should have done something before, and they didn’t do it, and it sits in the background, and all of a sudden you start to see success, and one of your former employees, or an employee who’s on the edge, comes and says, Hey, where are my stock stock options? You promised me stock options? Well, you knew you hadn’t done it. It’d been sitting in the background. You were going to get to it, and it just didn’t happen. So one, you let things kind of slide, because you’re in growth mode, or you’re in, you know, just startup mode generally, and those things pop back up later. The other is kind of interesting phenomena that we’ve seen, and that is when, when you start to see success, people out in the world start to see that you’re seeing success, and when people out in the world start to see that you’re seeing success, sometimes they want a piece of your success. And so we see a lot of people who get hit early on, after they’ve, you know, they’ve hit their stride, and then they start, you know, they start to say, hey, let’s, like, get out there more broadly in the world. Let’s expand our market share, whatever. And they get hit with some of these kind of, what I would call nasty lawsuits, these nuisance, nasty people, other attorneys, who come out and they say, Hey, I’ve got somebody who’s going to sue you for ADA compliance issues with your website, or I’m got somebody who’s going to sue you for, you know, whatever your business is, they’re going to find some regulatory issues, federal or state, and they’re going to say, You owe me some money for that. They want 10 or 15 or $25,000 from you and and you know that may or may not be, you know, gut wrenching for some businesses, but it’s like, what? Why does this happen? You know, and it’s, it’s probably too, too naive to say that it’s just part of the business. But it really does come. You know, success brings some of these challenges with them.
Scott Ritzheimer
I think one of the things that makes it so hard is you sometimes, like, the dollar number can be like, game ending, like, that does happen. I don’t want to downplay that. But even if it doesn’t, like, even if it’s 10 grand and like, that’s a rounding error in your strategic planning process, if that, there’s something about the principle of it that just goes to the heart of a founder and so here’s where I want to go first, actually, is like, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with the emotion of, hey, this just hit, and I, if I let it, it’s going to take all of my thought process. It’s going to take all of my time. But is it worth it? How do you help folks? Through those that that first early window?
Jeff Holman
Well, you’re absolutely right, because it does. We see we see really busy, really successful people who get totally sidetracked on this. They’re like, Hey, I read through this, and I was reading through this, and I did some research, and I came back, I think this is what we should do. And I’m like, that’s totally fine. Let me tell you, we’ve seen this before. We’ve handled it before it’s going to probably work out this way. There might be a little bit of posturing back and forth. So a lot of is really just working with people who’ve been there and done that, right? Yeah, and having see it’s just like a coach. It’s like coaches seen either themselves or working with lots of people they’ve seen behind lots of different curtains. And so you you can help people who haven’t seen around those same curtains know what to expect when, when we pull the curtains back, it’s going to be okay and and there is a, there is a playbook for this. The other side is following their own playbook. It’s similar to what we’ve seen. So it’s really just knowing that, knowing that there’s some confidence in going down that road, and that it probably most of these things are manageable. They’re, you know, not fun, and you don’t want to pay any money if you don’t have to. But they’re, but they’re financially feasible to tackle and overcome. And there’s, there’s a lot more to your business to be focused on than some of these hiccups,
Scott Ritzheimer
Right, And that brings us to a lot of the work that you guys do there is Ritzheimer mentally to save folks from that time. There’s so much. It’s not just the emotion of it, but it’s the time of it that it can get sucked into the endless Googling and now the endless chat, GPT ing. So the problem with that, though, is getting the when in because there’s kind of two equal but opposite extremes. You could bring a bunch of people in too early, pay a ton of money and not really ever amount to anything. Your business doesn’t grow, and there’s nothing to protect. Be in the extreme. Or the other extreme is we wait until you know, not. We’ve not, we’ve been sued or had the the notice, but like, we’ve tried to fight it nine different ways, and it’s like on its very last breath, and then we bring somebody else in. There’s these two kind of wide extremes. Somewhere in the middle is the Ritzheimer and the right way to bring in someone to help you out. What is that? Right time and right way?
Jeff Holman
There’s 2.1 it’s not the it’s not the last one that you described. It’s not after the fact, after everything, everyone’s entrenched. The issues become bigger than it needs to be. That’s that’s not the one. The two points are this one, get somebody in early to roadmap. You know, it’s just like, it does not cost a lot, whether, if it’s 500 bucks, 1000 bucks, $5,000 like, get somebody to roadmap, what you’re working on in your business for the next 18 months, and say, Where are my legal issues going to come up? What are the critical things? Right? There’s because you mentioned risk. Like, it doesn’t always have to be like significant consequences to the risk, and it doesn’t always have to be a high likelihood that risk is going to happen, but some combination of, will it happen and how hefty will those consequences be? You’ve got to kind of balance those out. So if you roadmap, like, there, there are, you know, just like you do stages in the business, there are definite points of, you know, like a business objectives, people working towards movement, actions that the teams are going to take, that you can say, well, you’re likely in the next 18 months to have these five items come up. That’s big things you would imagine, fundraising, hiring people, firing people, bringing on a new strategic partner, you know, new suppliers, launching new products. You know, reworking your brand, like those are, those are major mile points that are likely to have some legal impact to them. So road mapping those out in the first instance will give you, I think, a lot of clarity and hopefully, a lot of comfort in knowing that you have at least a heads up as to what’s coming down the road. Then when things do pop up, you know, getting somebody involved early again, even if it’s just a quick phone call to say, hey, we had this happen. Should I be worried is this? Is this likely to blow up? What, you know, what should I be thinking about? You don’t necessarily need memos and, you know, filings and everything for every little issue that comes up, but a quick phone call, five minutes, 15 minutes, an hour, depending on the issue, can really save you. And that’s, I’ll admit, that’s where the legal profession has really failed its clients. To a large extent, we have created some of the biggest obstacles, either financially or psychologically, even to say, hey, if you’ve got an issue, call me. I want to be accessible for you. And instead, people are like, I don’t know he’s going to bill me 15 minutes for a phone call. And I like, we’ve made it so people don’t want to call us to get our advice. And that’s absolutely the opposite of what it should be.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I want to drill a little further on that, because it can feel, especially with the way that a lot of founders are wired, that you’re kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Right. Sometimes you’re like, Hey, can you look at this contract for me? And it’s like, you know, as soon as you send it, they’re going to write it back with like, 100 things wrong. And. Somehow, like, it’s worse than never having children or something. There’s this kind of like, it feels like an overreaction to a lot of founders who just like, how hard can it be? Like, let’s move on past it. So I’m gonna use a different group that we have a similar problem with as founders, and that is, never ask a development team, can we do this? Okay? Right? Because the answer is always yes. It’s the real question is, how much is it going to cost to do this? Yes? So is, what is the parallel of that in the attorney world? How can we get founders and attorneys communicating more effectively?
Jeff Holman
That’s, that’s the key, right there. I think you know every founder that you got your sales guy or your technical guy, right in a lot of businesses. And then the other people that they bring on really readily and easily is some finance guy. They like, hey, we raise money. Hey, we need to do our bookkeeping, we need to pay our taxes. And they bring a finance guy on. I think founders need to start thinking of legal at least like finance, like it’s just a function that you bring on because they because not only is it a service, but if you’ve got the right attorney, you know, just like your CFO is doing financial projections and helping you anticipate where some of those cash flow issues might be, your legal guy should be doing the same thing. It should be, Hey, you guys are, as I said, road mapping, and you should be anticipating when those things are coming up, not just reacting to them. You know, the key is, how do you get to that point with your legal guy when you’re used to knowing that, you know you don’t want to talk to legal let alone talk to multiple legal people, if you have multiple issues going on at once?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s this. There’s a thing that happens at this stage for founders, when they’re kind of building out their leadership team. They’re looking at who they’re gonna allow to advise them on their decision making. And there’s kind of the obvious sales and the obvious operations, and then there’s just, like this junk drawer of everything else, right? Like, we think of administration as legal, HR, technology, financial, like, all of it kind of gets GNA, yeah, sgna, all of it, and and so the question is like, well, who in the world can can answer all of these things? Because if you get someone who’s very technically sound, they don’t know anything about the legal aspect of it, and vice versa. And so what I really like about the way that that the industry is developing, especially fractional, is that you can, you can kind of address the junk drawer approach with an equally kind of dispersed set of help. And so here’s, here’s because there’s the I’ve seen folks who’ve come through have been fractional legal, you know, fill in the blank. What I haven’t seen is a fractional legal team, and you’ve really stressed that in a lot of your website and the work that you do. So tell us a little bit like, this isn’t a fractional attorney. This is a fractional legal team. What’s the difference?
Jeff Holman
Yeah, I mean, that is the difference. It’s a team approach. The reason it’s a team approach several things. First of all, you don’t have one legal issue in your business. You have multiple across sales and employees and investors and your corporate entity, and you name it. Legal is there. It may not be an active issue, but there’s a potential for it to become active, and not one attorney should be handling all of that. For you, my background is patents. I’m excellent at patents. I’m really good with trademarks, and I’ve become very proficient as a general counsel, helping to guide small businesses in all their illegal issues. But I’m not the guy who’s going to do your employment stuff, you know? I’m not the guy who’s going to do some of your really hyper technical privacy things. And I realized that early on, right? So I’m like, Hey, why am I trying to do and manage all these things. When any real company, when you get to the right stage, you’re going to have a small team of attorneys with the experts that you need in different places. So that’s one. The other is a lot of fractional people. They’re passing through. And I don’t, you know, I don’t say that to say that’s wrong, but they’re often in between jobs, and they’re like, hey, I’ll pick up a few clients. You know, we’ve picked up several clients from people who were passing through momentarily and six months later, after they’d, you know, really been onboarded into a company. They’re like, Oh, I found a full time job. I’m going to go work there. And that company is then left, you know, saying, Well, okay, I guess we’ll restart hiring process, you know. So there’s no longevity with single fractional people is harder. Burnout is higher. And so that’s another issue that we try to tackle. And then the last one, really, is gatekeeping. You know, when you go to, and this is more related to, you know, a law firm, law firms, people are like, Hey, Jeff, how come? How come all these law firms, with all these, you know, hundreds of attorneys, don’t just do this and and wipe you out of business. I’m like, they should. Like, they literally should. They’re not built for it. Their business model is different. Is different and doesn’t really support the way to do it. But the other really big thing, and it’s tied to their business model, is they’re mostly really siloed, gatekeepers in the business, right? The rainmakers in those businesses, they they’re super protective of their clients. They don’t want. Their associates talking to the to the to the clients. And so I’m like, Hey, listen, there’s nothing more. Again. I don’t want to block communications between the client and the legal team. That’s counterproductive. I want, I want our clients to feel like they can go talk to me. They can talk to anybody on the team, as if we’re just down the hall from them. Poke your head in the door for the Ritzheimer or if you don’t know who it is, any person ask them, you know your question, and let’s deal with it as a team. We’ll get the right resources to the right place at the right time. So it’s just, I don’t know. As I was doing this, I kind of fell into that fractional General Counsel solo role, and it didn’t take me too long to realize there’s a better way to do this. And so I started building it into the team approach, and it’s been fantastic.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I really do. There’s this idea, especially from folks who’ve not had legal issues in the past, that kind of attorneys are attorneys. It’s kind of like doctors or doctors, you know, it’s like, to some extent, they all have some basic training, but like, if you broke your foot, you wouldn’t go to a heart doctor. It doesn’t really work that way. And so I love this idea of being able to provide that kind of combination of care all under one umbrella that is fantastic and highly needed for most founders at this stage.
Jeff Holman
Can I build on that just because I’ve talked to people? You know, you get it. You get somebody who’s like a real sophisticated patient, right? Or has a lot of, a lot of needs, you know, cancer patients, and they’ve got all these issues you don’t have, like you’d mentioned, you don’t have one doctor just treating them, right? They will conference with each other. They’ll get into a room and they’ll say, Okay, what’s the issue going on? And what do you think? And what do you think? What do you think? And they all have their specialties. I mean, that’s, I’ve used that analogy before, and that’s, that’s a great analogy to say, This is what a team should look like, you know, working for the client, as opposed to, you know, I, I just canceled my appointment this morning for tomorrow. I got a cortisone shot last week because I’m getting older, I guess, blew out a disc, and it’s caused some nerve issues for me. I’m, I’m sure some of your listeners can relate. And, you know, everything’s good, but, but my they’re like, Hey, we got you scheduled for a follow up. And I’m like, Yeah, that’s fine. Cortisone shot in my back is not what I need, right? I’ve got a different issue. Cancel that. I’m going to go schedule with somebody else who who can tell me about the nerve issue, not about the disc issue. So, right? You know, just got to move to the right, move to the right person for the right issue.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right, and being able to get that through the expertise of another is extremely helpful, especially when they have your best interests in mind. So Jeff, there’s this question I ask all my guests, and I’m gonna ask it of you here as well. I’m interested to see what you have to say. So what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish every founder watching or listening today knew?
Jeff Holman
Can I share two? Yeah, I’ve got two, because so the first one might be obvious from my website. If you go to my website, if you ever get an email from me, it says, innovate with confidence. I think that helping people to overcome the fears involved with doing something new, and that’s what a lot of our clients are doing. They’re they’re disrupting because they’re doing something nothing. They’re doing something nobody has done before. And so doing that new stuff is there’s a lot of fear involved. And I run into a lot of inventors, specifically, who who are fearful, and you see this great invention, and then they just, they just freeze up. So the one thing that I would say to a lot of those people, to summarize a lot of other things I’ve said, is, you know, action dispels fear, right? So you’ve got to take action to get over the fear. If any of your if any of your people, are at a stage where they’re saying, I don’t know, I just, I just can’t do this, like, think it through, make up an action plan and take the action that’ll dispel the fear, because fear is just fear of what’s going to happen the future. And once you’ve taken the action, there’s no more future to be afraid of. Yep, the other thing that I think is really it’s something that a lot of people should be doing more of, and that is strategy. This whole discussion of strategy, I was kind of a big issue for me. I got into it thinking about IP strategy in the beginning, and how that fits into business strategy and all this stuff going through my MBA program, like a whole journey I’ve been on for 10 years. The thing that I think, I wish a lot of founders knew was that this concept of strategy, strategy is actually something you can achieve, right? There’s, there’s like, really complex, disjointed teachings out there about strategy, but there are some approaches where you can, you can really articulate your strategy in a way that’s super helpful. And you know, we don’t have time to go into that today. I’ve got a thing I call the five factors of business strategy that I came up with because it didn’t exist out there, similar to the fracture legal teams, I came up with it because it didn’t exist, and I talked to a lot of my clients about it, because about it, because it makes strategy, you know, reachable. It makes it something that you can actually talk about for your business and implement. And so I guess those are the types of things that I would leave, you know, take action to dispel fear and really think about how to be strategic in your business. And. And realize that it’s something you can do if you have the right framework.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, Jeff, there’s some folks listening, and it’s, you know, it’s, it’s time. They could use the help. And they love the idea of a fractional team, but they don’t exactly know what that means just yet, and they’d like to know more about it. Where can they connect with you? Where can they find more out about the work that you and your team do.
Jeff Holman
Yeah, best place is to reach out to me on my website, intellectualstrategies.com I do a free 30 minute kickoff call, strategy call with people. We’ll start to talk about your roadmap. We’ll figure out, you know, what are the messes that you’ve got hiding, maybe under the bed that you’ve been putting off starting to lose sleep over some of the things coming up, and we’ll just walk through that in 30 minutes. Have a call and see if it’s a right fit, if it’s the right time for for them to bring somebody on board in some capacity. So that’s a free strategy call at intellectualstrategies.com.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, fantastic. Well, Jeff, thanks for being on the show. Really a privilege and honor. Having you here with us today. Love the work that you do, and couldn’t encourage folks more to check it out, get some help, and Jeff’s a great place to start. And for those of you watching and listening, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Jeff Holman
Jeff Holman, founder of Intellectual Strategies, is changing the way startups and scaling businesses access legal support. As the creator of the first Fractional Legal Team at Intellectual Strategies, he’s made it possible for companies to tap into expert legal advice at key points in their growth—without needing a full-time, in-house team. This innovative approach means businesses get exactly the help they need, when they need it, and without the hefty overhead. His Fractional Legal Team model is revolutionizing how companies access the legal support they need, empowering them to focus on their core business. At the same time, he handles the complexities in the background.
Want to learn more about Jeff Holman’s work at Intellectual Strategies? Check out his website at https://www.intellectualstrategies.com/ to sign up for a free 30-minute consultation and learn more about how you can benefit from a fractional legal team.