Hi, and welcome to CreativeBusinessLawyer.com!
My name is Alexis Neely, and I’m the lead law business mentor here, and also the gal who developed the Creative Business Lawyer® model to serve business owners, like you (and me), who need trusted counsel as we build our lives and businesses.
You see, when I first started out in business, I knew nothing about business, even though I was a lawyer.
And frankly I got some pretty bad advice from the legal, insurance, financial and tax professionals I hired back in the early days.
They simply didn’t get me.
And because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, I didn’t get them either and didn’t even know enough to ask the right questions along the way.
For example, my first CPA told me I didn’t need to incorporate my law practice because doing so wouldn’t provide liability protection for me since I was providing a professional service and she said there wouldn’t be any tax savings, even if I did.
Well, I guess she didn’t realize I wasn’t just building a small one-woman show solo practice because I ended up hitting a million bucks in revenue and having an unexpected $120,000 tax bill that could have been half that, if she had advised me properly.
But, frankly, she never got to know me or my vision or my business enough to truly do that. She was a tax filer, not a true trusted advisor.
And, most lawyers are like that too. Maybe you’ve experienced it yourself. You go to a lawyer to incorporate your business or set you up with a trademark. And they do just that, but nothing more. Then, you never hear from them again. Unless it’s to send you an invoice for the work they just did.
Until something potentially bad happens, and then you are scrambling to figure out what to do. Wishing your lawyer would have been more proactive about reviewing your legal agreements, ensuring you weren’t signing anything not in your best interest, making sure you had the right type and kind of insurance in place, working with you on your financial systems and helping you ask for the right tax guidance from your tax advisor.
But that’s not how lawyers have typically operated, at least not since the days when the town lawyer was the trusted confidant.
In the past 50 years or so, the business of lawyering has become more about escalating conflict rather than resolving it. Lawyering has become about forms and documents, and getting it done as quickly as possible. Lawyering has become reactive instead of proactive.
Well, we are changing all that here at Creative Business Lawyer®. If you want forms and documents, go online and use a service like RocketLawyer, LegalZoom or Trademarkia. You can surely do it yourself, if you think that’s the best use of your time and energy.
We think that the best use of your time, energy, and attention is to stay focused on bringing your Great Work into the world, serving your clients and customers, building your team, and creating more while your Creative Business Lawyer® handles things like legal agreements, ensuring you get paid on time, protecting and enhancing your intellectual property, minimizing your risks, ensuring you have the right kind and type of insurance and financial systems. And ensuring you don’t overpay on your taxes.
If you’d love to be able to stay focused on doing your work in the world and have a trusted advisor by your side, to support you in making faster, smarter, better decisions, as you do, search our site to get started with a Creative Business Lawyer®, specific to your industry today.