Over the last decade, the creative industry has blown up, fueled by advances in technology and social media.
More and more people choose to take control of their creativity, lives, and finances by starting their creative businesses. This doesn’t just represent a shift in people’s choices but a change in how our system is structured. People have options they never had before, changing our economy’s face.
We support this and want to see more and more people thrive – especially those in groups who have only sometimes had access to these types of opportunities.
But there’s a problem that comes with all of this.
As people venture out into starting and building creative businesses, they have substantial unmet legal needs and need more business support to become genuinely successful. Many of these business owners need more support regarding business and legal affairs.
And the choices on offer to meet their needs are dismal.
The two dismal choices: Legacy Law Firms and Online Form-Fillers
On the one hand, they can work with Legacy Law Firms who charge hourly for confusing legal advice or take their chances with Online Form-Fillers like LegalZoom. Neither of these choices gives creative entrepreneurs a great experience.
A Legacy Law Firm might be a great choice if you’re a national bank, big technology brand, or oil company, but don’t do the job for creative entrepreneurs operating on a smaller scale.
Online Form-Fillers provide one-size-fits-all information that leaves a lot of new business owners confused and looking for answers.
The good news is that many creative entrepreneurs want to invest in legal but want an alternative that suits them and doesn’t involve unpredictable fees or do-it-yourself solutions. They want actual legal advice and business guidance that’s tailored to them.
While lawyers are primarily to blame for the shortage of options available to small creative businesses, it also means that lawyers have the power to change the situation.
That’s what we’ve been working to do.
We’ve spent the last decade refining a third path that gives creative business owners the legal support and coaching they need.
It’s called the Creative Lawyer movement.
What is a Creative Lawyer movement?
People often view creativity and law as oil and water.
That means that a Creative Lawyer movement will strike many readers as oxymoronic.
We get where that comes from.
Creativity is all about possibility and creating something new, and law often feels like the department of No. Instead of enabling their clients’ creativity, too many lawyers and legal departments focus too intensely on risk, hobbling their clients’ creative aspirations.
We reject that.
The law seeks to support creative endeavors, and as Creative Lawyers, our mission is to use the law to help creative entrepreneurs turn dreams into a tangible reality while addressing avoidable risks.
As a Creative Lawyer, our role is co-creator.
And law is a creative tool that we can help our clients use.
It’s not just about “protecting” and being defensive; it’s also about having the ability to help your clients create impact, financial abundance, peace of mind, innovation, and more.
That means learning to say “yes” while providing counsel that can keep clients out of trouble. Being a Creative Lawyer doesn’t mean going counter to the traditional role of lawyers; instead, it means supplementing the conventional role of lawyers by taking a broader and more holistic approach to meeting people’s needs.
That involves considering clients’ and collaborators’ emotional, practical, and experiential needs. It means understanding that law does not happen in a vacuum and that lawyers can provide much better help by connecting law to non-legal concerns and doing so in a way that clients find engaging and actionable.
Finally, being a Creative Lawyer isn’t just about the types of clients that we serve – creatives – but it’s also signaling that we’re creatives in our own right and that our role extends well beyond the traditional purview of lawyers.
Why can we talk about being a Creative Lawyer?
We can discuss being a Creative Lawyer because we’ve been doing this work for over a decade. In that time, we’ve helped thousands of business owners build better businesses while completely removing the anxiety these people feel about engaging with critical legal stuff.
We can talk this talk because we’ve walked this walk.
We’ve worked with people on Day Zero of their business journey and with people you have heard of and who have become household names.
So, these ideas don’t come from abstract theorizing but from consistent testing and refining based on feedback from real-world clients.
During this time, we’ve been religious about collecting good and bad feedback from our clients to know what’s working and what we might need to change.
By doing this, we’ve created an experience that our clients love, positively impacting their lives so that they can make more and create better.
About our practice
We’ve also become known for breaking with the traditional practice models of Legacy Law Firms by offering flat rates and subscriptions for legal services. Our subscription service for creatives is probably the longest one running and has paved the way for dozens of other lawyers.
But it’s not about the practice models.
It’s about our approach to working with clients that takes in the whole of their experience and allows us to connect more deeply. These practice models enable us to do this but are simply the means to this end.
It’s also not about the practice areas.
We work in practice areas directly impacting creative businesses: trademarks, copyrights, contracts, corporate formation, etc.
But our approach can work with any practice area, whether that’s wills and trusts, real estate, or some other adjacent area. Maybe our approach will work better in some areas than others, but it probably applies to almost every single one.
The bottom line is to become a co-creator with your clients, no matter what area of law you practice.
Here are some ways we do that.
How Creative Lawyers serve creatives the best
Be a creative participant or enthusiast.
At Counsel for Creators, we’re all creatives.
We’re designers, writers, podcasters, DJs, candle-makers, film buffs, and game enthusiasts. We might not always be world-class in these things, but we all keep in touch with our creative selves.
That part is essential to serving creative clients because it’s hard to be a good co-creator if you choose not to engage your creative abilities.
Engaging in the creative process constantly reminds us of what it feels like to make something and connect to it. Being reminded of this feeling means we can relate to our clients doing the same.
Also, being a creative participant means that we understand how innovative practices and businesses work.
Knowing first-hand what it takes to build a website, take payments, promote your work, get feedback, and do what it takes to get things out into the world will always help you understand exactly what your clients need regarding help.
And we define creative work rather broadly, too. It might mean “traditional” creative endeavors such as painting or singing. Still, we define it as making social content, designing business offerings, running a side business, or bringing about a social movement.
It also means being an enthusiast.
That could mean going to galleries, shows, tours, cultural events, or maybe being a connoisseur of music or film. Beyond your enjoyment, it allows you to connect with clients who move in these worlds and expect you to do so.
Prioritize emotional intelligence and connection.
If you ask most people what lawyers are like, they will say something like “logical” and “good at making arguments.”
That may be true, but it’s also pretty entry-level for a Creative Lawyer. It’s barely what you need to serve as a competent attorney who doesn’t lose their license.
But it’s not enough to be a solid Creative Lawyer.
A Creative Lawyer must build emotional intelligence. A Creative Lawyer must know how to connect emotionally with clients and colleagues and account for the subjective experience of those you serve.
When people come to lawyers for help building a creative business, they seek legal assistance.
But they also seek other things. They seek to be validated and seen. They seek reassurance that they aren’t messing everything up, and they don’t want to be made to feel stupid or talked down to.
Too many lawyers ignore all of this and give generic and wooden advice that does nothing to help their clients take action or create something new out of nothing.
Be authentic.
When we started practicing law, the idea of a lawyer having a personality would be bizarre and unwelcome. At least, that’s how it felt to us.
In the early 2010s, it was still a world of lawyers in suits – and that was it.
If you looked at any website around that time, it was 100% lawyers in suits. The biographies of the lawyers would say nearly nothing about the lawyers outside of where they graduated from school, what types of cases they’ve done, and what areas of law they specialize in.
The implicit message here was that there was no room for authenticity and that the best way to serve clients was to put aside your personality and create a professional persona.
It was hard to see another way, honestly.
But over time, we learned that the best way to serve our clients was to bring our whole selves to the job. It felt unconventional at first – because it was. It went against our training to fit into a “lawyer persona.”
But connection became much easier as we became more comfortable sharing parts of our lives, interests, and other human aspects. And as connection became much easier, we served our clients better.
It helped us to match with the right clients, and for creative clients, having a lawyer who felt like a friend made it easier to reach out.
Focus on the customer experience.
If you ask a room full of creative people what they think of when someone says “lawyer,” they will probably say something like “expensive,” “difficult to work with,” or “intimidating.”
That’s not the experience we want to offer to our creative clients.
The experience that we want to create is: “worth the investment,” “surprisingly easy,” and “I felt seen.” These are the types of things that many people write when they leave us a review, and it’s what makes everything work.
Creating this experience is an intentional process that relies on having great systems.
Not just technology systems but transparent, written processes and intents that allow one attorney or a team to work together to produce an outcome you specify.
It doesn’t matter what technology you use if you become clear on the outcome you seek to create for your clients. Technology, automation, and AI should all be put into service to make a positive experience.
Don’t be funny about money.
Know that many creative clients feel good about investing in legal for their business – many understand that it’s a vital part of making everything run right.
Understanding that creative entrepreneurs want value and are willing to pay for it, we design ways for them to get legal services while making money less of an annoying issue.
The key often becomes breaking the mold in how we offer legal services.
Lawyers have traditionally dealt in hourly work, which is uncool for two reasons. First, it creates an unpredictable billing situation that misaligns incentives for lawyers and their clients. Second, it creates a grueling treadmill where the only way for lawyers to make more money is to work more hours.
The alternative is to focus on flat fees and subscription fees. These billing methods support the goal of becoming more efficient, providing more value, and creating an aligned and easy-to-understand financial relationship with your clients.
