Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted small business podcast host. I'm here with Phil Crowley, who's going to introduce his business, his background, and tell us why we should trust him as an expert in his niche.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Super, Jeremy. I'm very excited to be here. I'm the founder and the managing partner of Crowley Law. It is a boutique firm for lawyers who are passionate about helping, like sciences and other technology entrepreneurs avoid being taken advantage of as they pursue their dreams to take great ideas from the laboratory bench to the patient's bedside and also from the garage to the marketplace to improve the lives of thousands or millions of people. It's something that has excited me and my team for quite some time and is part of the story of my life, which I'd be happy to share.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: I love that. Tell me what's the most outrageous cause. It just jumps into my mind. What's the most outrageous cause where you've had to get involved legally because an entrepreneur had an idea and wanted to get it to market.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: There is one in particular that I can share with your audience and that is one of my clients who came to me having a problem in his particular business, his particular partnership, and he needed to expel basically a non performing partner. And what he had done because he wanted to save money was went out to the Internet to get an operating agreement for his limited liability company.
Only it turned out not to be an operating agreement and he was not able to expel his partner. And just to put some context around this, what his business was was it was kind of a biological business. It was creating a new brand of vodka. And so he was supposed to be the seller, the marketeer in sales, and his friend was supposed to be doing the distilling. Well, it turns out that his, his friend and partner got a little bit too fond of the juice and would be sleeping during the day at the plant and nothing was getting done. So my client had to not only do the sales and marketing, but also do the distilling. And so he said, well, I gotta get rid of this guy. And there was no legal way that he could force the person out. And then on top of that, his partner went out and got a lawyer and sued my client, claiming that he had stolen money. But he had been the one who put in the $50,000 to get him started. So he almost lost his $50,000. They were able to resolve things amicably, although at the cost of some potential litigation. But it shows that how when people try to do it yourself in this particular area, they can wind up kind of stepping on a landmine without knowing it. So that's the most outrageous that I've been involved in.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: It does seem like there are some best practices there for entrepreneurs when you're stepping out of the solopreneur because, you know, I know that and I'll come back to the landmines for solopreneurs in a second. But it, while we have this door open, it does seem like there are some fundamentals, like what's in your checklist, what do you advise as, you know, first steps if somebody is concerned considering, you know, putting themselves on that market, like looking for a partner, looking for, you know, to work with somebody, looking for a co founder.
What are those, you know, those low hanging fruit to check off and pluck before you get too far down the path?
[00:04:21] Speaker B: Well, I think it's incredibly important and this is not so much a legal issue as a human relations issue, Jeremy, and that is to sit down with your, your co founder or someone who's your potential co founder and have a really deep discussion about what is your vision of the future. I mean, is this a business you're going to try to grow quickly and sell out or is it something that you want to keep as more or less a lifestyle business and do it part time or, you know, what's the intention and what commitment is each of the persons willing to put in and over what time period and then to ask some difficult questions, which is, well, if we decide to part ways, how would that look?
Because see, when people are in agreement and they're all enthused about starting a project they don't want to think about, it's like getting married. Yeah. And so it's good to have a prenuptial agreement. The prenuptial agreement is a founder's agreement and the documents that a good business lawyer would put around the relationship to protect the parties in the event that things don't go according to plan. And so I always recommend that people go out and think very hard about what this business is and what's going to look like and go through the exercise of trying to put together a written business plan with your potential partner and think through some of the aspects of the business that you'll need to figure out along the way. And just don't be too harsh on yourself. The business plan will be wrong, but the business planning process forces you to really think critically about who's going to do what and what your financial constraints are. Are you expecting both parties to put in boatloads of money.
Is one party going to be the idea person and perhaps has some patented technology and the other person is going to be working every day at the business. And getting those things right is incredibly important because I've seen so many business dissolve, not because I didn't have good ideas, but because people got so angry with each other that they did things that were, were in their own worst interest economically in order to spite the other person. So that's why I say make sure that you're comfortable with the work ethic, with the personality, with the aspirations of your potential business partner, and then find a lawyer who is interested in helping you figure out the right configuration for your collaboration. And you know, I know many people are afraid to go to a lawyer because they, they hear the stories about unending legal bills. But you can, if you search around and ask questions of lawyers, if they become hostile and have the feeling that they are the expert and they can't be bothered to talk to you, that's a good indication that that's not the right lawyer for you. But there are some of us out here who like to talk to entrepreneurs. And in my case, I'm a former research physicist. So I got my undergraduate degree at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and did well enough to get into the PhD program in experimental physics at Harvard. And as I was studying my quantum mechanics and my superconductivity was the area I concentrated on, I could see I was getting about 7 miles deep and only about a half an inch wide. And before the things that I was doing in the lab came to fruition and actually helped people. And so I wanted to find a way to help people more directly, which is why I became a lawyer.
But folks who can find lawyers like that and who are interested in trying to help people. And for technology entrepreneurs, there are a lot of accelerate technology accelerators around. I'm on the board at Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania is a big part of one of the largest technology accelerators in the United States in the state of Pennsylvania. But there are many around which have mentors and lawyers who are willing to dedicate their time to particularly technology entrepreneurs. And so you don't have to do this all by yourself. There are other institutions out there that can help you. But even if you're not in the technology area, there are business lawyers that focus on helping smaller companies.
And you can check around and find those lawyers with friends who have started their own business, who do they use, who have they liked, and use your own network to Find somebody who's kind of simple patico with the sorts of things that you need to make sure that you have somebody help you identify the legal landmines that stand between you and commercial success.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: I'm curious, for your own business, what's been one of the biggest hurdles or challenges you've had to overcome while you've been working on growing your law firm?
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Ah, that is easy. It's my mental mindset kind of getting out of my own head and because, yeah, I was a physicist, I was a Wall street Lawyer, I spent 30 years in the Johnson and Johnson law department, one of the largest diversified products medical products companies in the world. And so had kind of a structured view on what a legal practice is like. But in order to help the most people, I had to learn the importance of marketing and marketing in the digital area, which I know you're an expert in, Jeremy, but this is really incredible. It was incredibly important for me about two years ago to commit to hire someone who was kind of an operations and marketing consultant that I forced myself to listen to and do the things that he suggested that I do. So we're into. We created a very deep, over a period of 18 months, a very deep website which has increased our lead flow and then to work with a website designer that manages our backend and has expertise in SEO and even more importantly now getting attention from the AI search engines and then on top of that, realizing that a lot of people don't know what lawyers do and don't know why they need a lawyer. So what I've been doing is working with another group so that we post regularly to our seven social media channels and then we do from the very deep website. I've got about 100 blogs on the website. So every week we take a blog I create scripts for in the tone of each of the seven channels. So for LinkedIn it's very professional. For TikTok it's very energetic and playful and give an explanation of what's in the blog and then we post a link to the blog and that has just dramatically increased the number of inquiries we get from people who may not have understood the sorts of things that lawyers can do for them and why they may need a lawyer sooner rather than later.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: So there was a study and I'm scrolling to find it from Ignivedo and I want to challenge you on it to see where you fall because it said the study was 1824 local businesses were mystery shopped, 68% never responded within 24 hours. The average reply time was 68 minutes with only 5% responding within 5 minutes and 88% never. Only followed up once and never again.
So my challenge slash question for you is do you know where you fall within that study? Are you and your team responding within five minutes in the same day or within 24 hours? What's your response when somebody wants to get, wants to work with your firm?
[00:14:20] Speaker B: We try to do it within 24 hours and we have. And this is another aspect of the work that my marketing consultant helped me figure out.
We use a very well integrated CRM system, customer relations management system called Lawmatics, which is kind of based on Salesforce, but it's really set up for lawyers and it helps us to keep track of the leads, to identify what has come in and to deal with it in a very organized way. So that we have organized flights of emails that go out to people who have contacted us and are unresponsive. So we have one flight of emails from them for them, then we have another flight of emails for people who have an initial discussion with us but decide that, well, I haven't decided yet. So we have another flight of emails for them. And then for those that kind of don't decide to work with us, we have kind of an evergreen list of long term nurture so that we have a flight of emails that go out monthly. They get our monthly newsletter and we try to keep them warm because at least for our potential clients, even though they may not be ready today, they may be ready at some point in the future. So we don't want to lose track of them. And so I think we're at least above average for smaller companies in terms of our follow up thanks to the automations that we have in the CRM.
With respect to the upfront, we're working on a system to have our outside receptionist call up people who sign in through the website within five or ten minutes afterwards. So we're aspiring to the track that you have indicated, but we're doing better than a lot of law firms. I've spoken to a couple of possibilities, Jeremy, where they say, well gee, you answered so quickly because they got no response from the other law firms and we were able to respond and get back to them within a day. And for our clientele that seems to be pretty good because they're looking for some sophisticated services. It's not like buying a new watch or a translation device or a new camera.
You're trying to get somebody help, you do something that's at least moderately complicated in terms of forming A business or dealing with a business problem.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: It occurs to me, you know, do you work a lot around regulations and helping businesses trying to break into a space or creating new material or processes within a space where there's regulations? Like I work with air monitoring company and I would imagine, you know, the regulations for the manufacturing process probably add a lot of red tape.
So is red tape negotiation, slash, cutting, slash, just awareness processes?
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. I mean, while I was at Johnson and Johnson, Johnson Johnson had many medical products, biotech, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, medical devices, all of which had to go through the Food and Drug Administration. So for much of my time at Johnson and Johnson, in addition to doing my deal work, I did FDA regulatory work for our high technology products. And for about seven years I was the chief FDA regulatory counsel for Johnson and Johnson's biotech and high technology products.
So I understand the intersection of business needs and regulatory needs and the strictures that are on people who are trying to develop products in the life sciences. It's a lot easier in the technology area, although there is increasing regulation and concerns certainly about artificial intelligence and about privacy concerns online.
But those regulatory regimes, if they're recognized early enough, can be designed into the product rather than having to run around and deal with them after you've already designed the product or may have to redesign aspects of it in order to comply with those regulations.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: You touched on it. And I'm curious, from a legal aspect, what's the most surprising outcome of the fast pace of development of AI and LLM technology and its integration into the entrepreneurial sector?
[00:19:42] Speaker B: Well, I think that seeing the dichotomy among in the legal world framework of law firms that forbid its use and those that embrace its use and try to use it.
And I think the law firms, and there are some very big law firms that are trying to learn how to use it institutionally.
The law firms that embrace AI will be looking at in the rear view mirror at the law firms that haven't embraced AI. I found it to be just incredibly beneficial, particularly in communications, in our marketing efforts, and even in initial research. In the initial research though, I tend to see lawyers going with tools from established companies because everybody has heard of those stories of lawyers who file briefs, the court and the system, ChatGPT or whatever you're using, hallucinates and creates cases and cites cases for principles that they don't apply to. And the lawyers are so lazy that they don't pick that up, they don't review that. And as officers of the court, we're required to do that. Sort of thing. So there will be, I think, an increasing set of sanctions on lawyers who use it inappropriately.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: But.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: But realizing its limitations and limiting the scope of use, I think can be a great help. And I've spoken to a lot of artificial intelligence entrepreneurs and the ones who seem to be successful understand that what they can best do is to create an agent that is narrowly focused, but very deep and very skilled and learned in their particular focus, rather than trying to cover the waterfront. And I think that those that find a niche of people who have a particular need that they want automated can be very successful.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I've definitely experienced that myself. And there are so many pitfalls of just taking the technology at a surface level and just thinking that it can do anything is half of the problem. You know, if you're not aware of the nuance, not aware you haven't read WolframAlpha's seminal piece of how ChatGPT actually works. If you don't understand the nature of LLM models that they're just predicting the next word and they're using their lexicon, their training data to answer that material pulling from the Internet, you know, wrapping queries. All of those mechanisms, you know, can be tailored down or broadened based off of creativity. So if you're using just Claude and you're just logging in from the website, you get such a high, what they call high temperature response. Because that box can take anything and you could prompt it for a nursery story, or you could be asking for your schedule for next Tuesday, or you could be asking about an assassination during a particular period in time. Any of those things could pop in there.
And that, that's good, that it's creative, but it's bad for repeatability. And so knowing that you can have models that have a much lower temperature, you know, defined within CLAUDE code as a specific skill to reduce the likelihood that it will hallucinate or come up with something that isn't real. Like, it took me like a year of interviewing people to realize that I've been using even Claude, just basic Claude wrong and had. Hadn't had been doing things over and over. Like, I took our.
The first couple times I took a transcript from somebody and gave it to Claude. I had to reread it because it invented an entire section of the conversation that we never had.
So that was beginner mistake. But now I've got, you know, my Claude code temperature turned way down. It's only specifically. And then it's. You have to audit it afterwards. So you're absolutely right. That There are. The more niche and focus that you laser focus that capability, the more likely you are to have a survivable, you know, and ethical and applicable support for your business that's going, you know, take away those tasks within your company. So I think it was, I think it was Dan Kurtz or Melta Laver who said, oh no, it was Brett Sklar. He said chatgpt and Claude are taking tasks that were easy away, making the hard tasks easy and making the impossible tasks within your grasp.
And I love that.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: That's a very good analogy. And I think we. One of the great things that leaders of small companies and any company can do is to encourage your staff to use ChatGPT and Claude and others in private mode to play around with and become comfortable with and try things and fail because you learn more from failures than success. But being tolerant and giving people the space and encouraging them to do, I do that with my staff to have them comfortable in doing things. And I'm very open in sharing with them the things that I use AI for to try to help them think through how they could use artificial intelligence. Because I think that one of the great things about leading an organization is to try to help people achieve self realization and realize how good they are and not to be a micromanager, but to stimulate them to want to grow and to want to develop. And I have to do that if we're going to grow to the extent that I'd like to grow.
And gaining competency and familiarity with artificial intelligence is going to fuel part of that growth. So we encourage them to use the private mode so that we're not sharing any information and training the large learning models, which is extremely important for us because we have confidential client information, but learning how the systems work and what you can do with it and being in kind of a learning environment I think is very stimulative to staff and makes them more likely to want to stay around and be engaged. So that's part of, I think, the benefits of being forward thinking about these kinds of tools.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: I'm curious about other aspects of entrepreneurship, either through your own experience or your observation.
Having played a legal role with different organizations, the founder of a company plays a unique role and they kind of set the tone and energy.
What is the best way to ensure as an entrepreneur that what you create is going to stay in the same lane where you intended it to go? And this comes to mind. There's a apple piece company that started in 1910 and it exists now and makes the same apple pies now and they have the same, you know, ethic and it's one of the best apple pies. It's delicious.
But you know, obviously the person who made the first apple pie is not alive anymore. Their, their grandchildren are, you know, and the great grandchildren are the ones now running the company. And how do you formulate a company that is going to take your DNA as an entrepreneur and hold true to it versus, you know, some of the, you know, companies that we've seen that have kind of had their souls stripped away. I've seen it happen where with you know, hostile takeovers or you know, they take on, you know, investment people who drive them to scale when was tap clicks and they, you know, changed their business models because they wanted to grow and they took on investors. But those investors pushed them to do things that were against their original mission cores. So what are some of those ways that a founder can kind of future proof the company that you want to put into the world?
[00:29:23] Speaker B: Good question, Jeremy. There's no real way to future proof a company.
What you can do, and I experienced this in my 30 plus years at Johnson and Johnson is set out a challenging and inspiring vision of what the company is intended to do and what it stands for.
And if you go out to J and J, you will be able to find our credo.
And the thing that was remarkable about the credo is it starts out with our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses, mothers, fathers, patients and others who use our product. Everything must be of high quality.
The next priority is being fair to your suppliers.
The next priority is having safe working relations workplaces for the employees and to provide fair compensation.
The next responsibility is to the communities in which we live and being environmentally conscious and paying our fair share of taxes, putting aside money for bad decisions and hard times.
And finally, if we do all, all of those things, the stockholders should receive a fair return.
And people don't realize that in 1943 when Robert Wood Johnson promulgated the credo, he was the majority stockholder of Johnson and Johnson.
So he was saying put me last, but do all these things first and you'll do okay. So you'll do well by doing good. And it's just an ethic that was not just put up on the wall. Because if you look at the ethics and the goal statement of Enron, one of the most fraudulent companies of the 1990s, you'll see a wonderful statement of principles. But they were crooks. You know, it was not, it was not really enforced at Johnson and Johnson.
I was Just amazed at the extent to which they came back to the creative. They came back to celebrating how to get things done and how doing things, how we do things is so important.
And so I took that. And so Robert Wood Johnson passed away in 1969. The credo continues to have an impact on Johnson and Johnson to this day.
And so what I took away from that was, well, what we need to do for Crowley Law is to have a set of values that matter and that we work on together. So I got the team together and I said, well, we can't have 27 values, but we should have five values that the majority of us agree on and focus on those.
And then just to help people remember them, I created a graphic. The letter PI and the ace of diamonds. Well, PI P I is for professionalism and integrity and the ace of diamonds. And I always say the diamonds are my staff, is accountability, communication and effectiveness, efficiency.
And we talk about those every week at the staff meeting. And when somebody evidences one of those characteristics, I always like to call that out at the staff meeting and respond to that and focus on that. And so I found that having a set of standards that people can participate in, putting together and then can commit to and see in their everyday opportunities, their everyday work, that those are values that the organization values, I think is a good way to set your organization off in the right direction. Also, it helps for engagement. The employees feel like they're part of something that's bigger than themselves. It's a set of values.
And so I think that leaders who lead, rather than kind of try to micromanage what people are doing would be well advised to think about if they don't have an expressed set of values that they constantly talk about.
Give it a try. I mean, it's worked for Johnson and Johnson for over a hundred years.
[00:34:24] Speaker A: Absolutely love that. Give a final shout out if there's any resources you'd like to point entrepreneurs at, any ebooks or conferences that you're doing or newsletter letters that you're sending out for the audience. I'll make sure that these get linked in the show notes where where they go up unscripted. Small business.com you can read the library. I do tons of interviews with other entrepreneurs like Phil. His will be going up there after this show, after this goes goes up. So if you're curious and want to find out more about him and you're trying to find that resource after he says it, you're listening and driving. You can find it atunscripted small business.com But Phil, go and shout out and let people know how they can connect with you and what you've got for them.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: All right, Number one, my book on Amazon, avoid Startup Failure.
Learn the top 10 causes of failure for technology startups and how to turn them to your advantage. Available in softcover, Kindle, Audible and for my Hispanic friends in Spanish as well in the softcover. And then also our website. We have virtually 100 blogs out there that deal with some of the key topics that can help startup companies, particularly in the life sciences and technology space.
Succeeded.
As a former scientist, I have a soft spot in my heart for innovators in those areas and I want you to succeed because what you do is so important for our society. Taking great technologies and helping to improve the lives of thousands or millions of people.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: Absolutely love it. Thanks so much for stopping by, Phil.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: It was my pleasure, Jeremy. Thank you.
