To commemorate EmergeCounsel’s eighth anniversary, I decided to review my professional raison d’être/ “reason for being.” Many clients know EmergeCounsel as a go-to source for comprehensive and process-driven trademark and IP protection. Others know me personally as an empathetic business attorney with transactional and litigation/conflict resolution skills.
The story of the founding of EmergeCounsel is one of both necessity and introspection:
I began my legal career in the criminal and then civil courtroom; I transitioned into in-house business counsel work for a Fortune 50 company, partly because I thought it would be secure. Instead, the company sold four years later after a financial collapse.
I took my exit package and chased my passion for helping at-risk youth through an at-risk student analytics business. Unfortunately, I did not contemplate some issues: it was hugely cash-intensive, required a market created in a tough niche, and long/unpredictable sales cycles. Add to that; I had no C-level, investor relations, or frankly even management experience.
Regardless, over seven years, one major international financial crash and several millions of revenue and about the same amount of capital burned later; the company did pretty well to the point we came really close to obtaining a sizable exit. But, as fate had it, instead, I raised even more money to scale, and that money ousted me shortly after my father’s death.
My Motivator
In the spring of 2015, as I sat in my basement moping, my intuitive wife asked me to write down my skills and employ them immediately.
Taking my wife’s advice I created a list of my skills: I am managerially and financially competent. I am also an empathetic listener, a good attorney, and creative.
Additionally, I listed how I have utilized my skills in previous positions: Controlling fairly sophisticated profit and loss (P&L) and negotiating publishing rights. I built a CRM and managed outside salespeople. I built a twenty-person team and was a door opener and closer by creating meaningful client relations in the K-12 education space. In nearly every professional role, I protected data, brand, privacy, patent, trade secret, publishing, and other forms of intellectual property.
EmergeCounsel – Emerges
Within days, I formed EmergeCounsel as a relationship-focused, empathetic, and go-to strategic counsel for business and intellectual property matters. We began by focusing on flat fee systemized, attorney-driven trademark/brand protection branded TotalTM®. We have scaled that out to include copyright and other strategic mappings of intellectual property protection (IP Strategy Plan and TotalCopyright™). Through these platforms, our team of attorneys and paralegals has serviced over 700 clients on various intellectual property portfolio matters.
For many of those clients, we have grown relationships that far exceed the initial brand protection work because our ultimate passion is understanding our clients, their needs, and the law, AND we applied all the knowledge to become an empathetic and meaningful part of their growth strategy.
I have become their inside/outside counsel for our most established clients. I love that role; I get to know the intimacies of our client’s businesses and their management and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Through the process, I help management make significant business decisions objectively; together, we have acquired and formed businesses, figured out entity structure, raised money, licensed valuable IP and other assets, negotiated equity agreements, prepared and reviewed contracts, taken care of crisis’, fought for justice, faced the formidable and even successfully exited.
Deliberately, regardless of how our clients choose to work with us, EmergeCounsel has made our fee structure for business legal services mutually beneficial and non-alarming.
Raison d’être
After eight years at EmergeCounsel, I have learned that every business likely needs legal counsel, but not all realize the importance of a meaningful relationship with that counsel. Matthew McConaughey once said, “(m)y lawyer has become a good friend of mine over many years. He and I continuously have conversations.” Building client relationships and legal business and IP strategies are not only objectively meaningful. It helps us better protect your business, and; it is what makes me happy.
I have been in our clients’ shoes, and ultimately, while I certainly have my strengths and weaknesses, I confidently say I am the business (and IP) attorney I would want to use if I were in our clients’ position. This is my professional raison d’être/reason for being”. Thanks to you, our clients, EmergeCounsel, and I should be around for the next several years.
We are around when you need us, schedule a call with our team today.