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Find me at my permanent law firm tumblr at lawfordigitalcreatives.tumblr.com

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Question

I am considering simply taking this blog, which is currently a secondary blog, and moving it to another account as a primary blog. Do you all think that is a good idea or is it a waste of time since I will, hopefully very soon, have a non-Tumblr website to use?

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Legal Solutions for Digital Creatives

This website is, for now, the temporary website for my new solo-law practice which provides Legal Solutions for Digital Creatives. A bit of information to introduce you to my practice:

                           What, Who, and Why:

Why am I founding this firm in the first place?

What services will my firm supply?

Who will my clients be? 

Who helped me come up with the idea of founding this law firm?

Why should I even hire you; where do you come from?

The following was created as part of an application to an “incubator program” run through my law school that provides mentoring and subsidizes overhead costs for law firms serving under-served clients in a particular community or industry.

  I first began considering the possibility of starting a solo practice because my quite serious Crohn’s disease has made maintaining a “traditional” legal job essentially impossible. In fact, for almost all of 2015 and the beginning of 2016, I thought I was going to have to  leave the practice of law entirely. In short, though the mind was willing, the flesh was not. But I never entirely gave up the hope that someday, somehow, I would find a way to practice law that would challenge me intellectually, allow me to control my work schedule and work location, give me the opportunity to work more directly with clients than I had at my previous legal jobs and, most importantly, allow me to control my work load to accommodate my health. For quite some time, this felt like no more than a “millenial” (whatever that phrase actually means) pipe dream, until I stumbled across a potential answer on Tumblr, of all places.   The idea to found this firm with these particular services and target client market came to me relatively recently. It started when I commissioned a design for a t-shirt from a friend I met on Tumblr who is a graphic designer and does custom work as well; in fact, she designed the picture that is now on the cell phone case I use. While we were figuring out the project, she mentioned in passing that her commission process had  become more professional since she started working at a design firm, as opposed to free-lancing. Together we talked for a very long time about how few on-line creative types, whether free-lance graphic designers, fan fiction writers, or photographers (to name very few examples of a much wider community) understood how to create and negotiate contracts to protect themselves from unscrupulous customers who want to misappropriate their work - either by not even negotiating terms of use in a licensing agreement or simply flouting them if they were negotiated and/or by commissioning custom work and then not paying for it or taking it and immediately beginning to resell it without a previous agreement or even giving credit to the artist who created the work.

As I commented on the legal solutions that could protect against some of these situations, such as clearly negotiated terms of use, “milestone” payments in commission agreements so that a client cannot get to the end of the process, be given a final copy of the commissioned item for approval, and then simply refuse to pay any of the fee (milestone payments require the person pay a certain percentage of the total fee at certain pre-determined steps in the commission process so that, even if they stiff you at the end, you’ve gotten at least 2/3 of the fee. At one point in the conversation, she said  something like "if only I had known you when I was still out there on my own."    

After that conversation, I reached out to some of my other friends who do creative work on-line and it became clear pretty quickly that almost all of them had wanted or needed at least some sort of legal services related to their creative endeavors, but had assumed that they just couldn’t afford it In fact, more than one person said to me something to the effect of the following: 

“people on the internet think they can get away with anything because its not like we can afford lawyers anyway.”   

Having heard all of this, I started seriously thinking that if I could get a small, solo practice, keeping overhead costs as low as possible, that I could provide many of the the relatively simple legal services my friends needed, such as licensing contracts and copyright enforcement, at prices that  freelancers or even amateur hobbyists could afford. And, since I am an individual attorney familiar with the Wild Wild West that is the online world of art and creativity, I could provide services that were far more tailored to my client’s needs than a service like Legal Zoom could do and, possibly, do it just as cheaply if not more so. I also knew that, since so many of the legal issues would occur and re-occur over and over again, that the work I did would be scalable; allowing me to either take on more clients at a decent pace while also allowing me to manage my work load carefully and make sure that I am not taxing myself.

The Tumblr friend who started all this, @amy-draws​ (who has a terrific Society 6 page that you should absolutely check out), has been invaluable in helping me work through questions of what my most important services will be, how much I should charge for them, and introduced me to others in the on-line creative community who, in turn, gave me even more ideas about what kind of services they were interested in. In short, part of what excites me about this firm is that it is almost entirely driven by client demand; I did not sit down one day and think “hmmm, what legal services should I provide...you know, I bet on-line artists need legal help” both because it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me in a thousand years without the input from members of the creative community but also because I think its is both easier and more reasonable to start a business in response to an existing need, rather than starting a business and then trying to create demand that didn’t already exist.

In another conversation, Amy replied to my concern that clients hesitant to hire an attorney over the internet, especially in a world where attorneys have played such a small part up until now by saying, "oh, people will be okay with hiring you through the internet, I mean, you're one  of us." After thinking for a few minutes about how I should break it to her that I can’t actually draw a circle, I realized that she wasn’t saying that I am an artist, but rather that I understand the massively creative, interesting, and diverse work that the digital creative community does every day and, what more, I deeply respect it, not something that is necessarily guaranteed when dealing with (mostly older male) attorneys who could easily dismiss the digital creative marketplace, especially the fan-focused parts, as not being a “real” industry and creatives as not “real” clients.   TL;DR? The fundamental answer to the question of why I want to start this solo practice for these clients at this time is simple; I don't like to see my friends, or people like my  friends, being ripped off when there's something I can  do to stop it.

So, if this is a topic you are interested in, either as a potential client, as an attorney practicing in a similar field (or even not), or just a curious person, feel free to message me here on my Tumblr or at the email address in the header. I would love to hear from you. I especially appreciate suggestions about possible services I should offer, what would be considered reasonable and affordable pricing strategies, and the best way to network and connect with potential clients or people who can refer potential clients as well as contacts from attorneys who practice in similar areas of the law.