Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Steven Weigler, Founder and Managing Partner with EmergeCounsel

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Steven is the Founder and Managing Partner of EmergeCounsel, whose mission is to provide a worldwide clientele with legal counsel on the protection of intellectual property and business assets at a lower price point than large legal firms.In order to fulfill its mission, Steven developed systems-based approaches, which combine best-in-class legal technology for legal research and management with a strong empathetic human element.Steven is especially passionate about brand protection where he developed TotalTM®, a proprietary trademark prosecution system that combines predictive search technology, powerful docketing software, and passionate and knowledgeable trademark counsel on a competitive flat fee.Steve not only has decades of experience as counsel but also previously headed a successful educational technology start-up in which he served as Founder, CEO, and General Counsel for seven years. He was also a Senior Attorney for a Fortune 50 tech company. In part because of his combined experiences, he acts as general counsel to entrepreneurs and companies especially those in the eCommerce and SaaS space.Steve is a member of IR Global, an international legal network, and through his involvement is able to service foreign businesses with US interests, as well as US businesses with foreign interests.Steve has received many awards, including being named a Super Lawyer for three consecutive years (2021-2023).Learn more:https://emergecounsel.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-steven-weigler-founder-and-managing-partner-with-emergecounsel

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with this Stephen Weigler, who's the founder and managing partner with Emerge Council. Stephen, welcome to the program. Good to talk. Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you because I know you've got some specific areas of expertise,

but before we dive into that, give us a little bit of your background. What's your story? And how did you get into the legal profession? Sure. So I always, I think when I was growing up, I always was very interested in law and justice. And my story is really one of passion and finding. my right fit because I when I grew up and when I went to undergrad and everything, it was always in political science and I had a career working on Capitol Hill for a little while. And then I decided

through that work that I wanted to be a prosecutor. And so I, but I only wanted to be a prosecutor in a really large city. So I started my internship in New York and then went to to Miami where I was a prosecutor for five years and then really realized like this is not a keeper of a job. And so it's it's very stressful, difficult. You're dealing with a lot of issues involving crime and welfare that just aren't easy to deal with. And when everyone else was getting lunch at like a nice restaurant or something or even like getting lunch. I was sitting like in someone's jail cell. I'm interviewing them.

So it was really, and especially when you start out, and I was only in my 20s. So through that, I really had like a career decision to make. And I ultimately became a attorney for a large Fortune 50 company focused on telecommunications. And through that experience, I really learned a lot about corporations, corporate law. I also went to business school at night, so I really got an understanding of business and law. And also, really, through that experience, I worked for AT&T, the understanding of brand. It's not like you know what a telephone line really is, or like how the telephone works. You know that you subscribe for a service and the brand or the legacy of AT&T is worth,

you might pay a couple extra cents for that because, or not, because you know of the customer experience. So I learned a lot about brand, just working for like kind of a commodity company. Then 18th got bought. I got some money and I took it and started my own, well, it was a predictive analytics company focused on school districts. And so we had predictive algorithms on whether a student was going to succeed or fail based on some social emotional skills. That's a social emotional skills assessment. And did that for about seven years.

Grew the company, the good, the bad, the ugly. I was able to raise a lot of money. I was able to make it at times profitable. The big issue we had was dealing with business to government. Cash flow was always a huge issue. Anyway, the ugly prevailed and we had some hard times. and I exited, although whole, I exited, and I was, took some time and I was thinking about some what I could do and really took all those skills and put them down on a piece of paper of what I'm

good at, what I know how to do. And that was the evolution of Emerge Council through the encouragement of my wife. So we've been doing this for eight years. It's a combination of business and IP and what really I look at is the attorney relationship for entrepreneurs having been one is sacrosanct. And it's a super important relationship. But it's not like your C-suite where you talk to, like your CFO or your chief marketing officer all the time. So it's a separate channel. It's a separate relationship.

And so my practice is very holistic. I really want to get to know the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial organization and really be able to have a relationship with them, understand what their strategy is, understand, or lack thereof, what their needs are, and be able to provide this kind of business general counsel. along with that, I have specific expertise in brand protection, in building IP portfolios, and frankly, building anything that involves building value in the company so they can ultimately exit. And as I was telling you to finalize that, right now we're in the middle of like seven exits, especially in the e-commerce space. And we love the reward that entrepreneurs get when they ultimately are able to grow the company that it's a trap. Now, it might be something they want to keep, but that it's attractive to other organizations.

And that's our ultimate goal. So we're really goal-oriented. And finally, finally, is we really focus on processes so we can provide flat fees or cost regulated, strategies because I know a lot of people are daunting, are daunted by the idea of calling an attorney and having them think that they're running up the bill when they're sitting on the phone chatting. And we do everything to avoid those types of bills. So put that all together. That's what Emerge Council is.

Just that little bit. Yeah, yeah. So I'm sorry to ramble out or not. No, it's great. It's really broad. and it made me think of one specific thing I want to drive in deeper that I think will help clarify my mind as well as maybe people listening. You mentioned about exiting a business. Well, I work with a lot of financial services professionals like financial planners and they work with businesses

to help them make financial decisions during exiting. You're working on the legal side. But I'm sure that you would agree with something that we come up with a whole lot when I talk about that, which is you can't just wake up one day and go, oh, I'm going to sell or exit. So let's go ahead and put a plan in place. This has to be years and years in advance, because to your point, if you have the proper IP intellectual property protected and your processes and all of these things in place, that elevates the value of your company so that when you do look to exit, now you're selling more than just some idea. It's like, oh, this is a protected IP, and now you're getting way more value as the, as the buyer. So talk a little bit about how protecting that IP is so essential for

the purpose of exiting one day down the road. And you might decide not to exit, but you need to protect the IP anyway. Sure. So you couldn't have articulated it better. The basically intellectual property strategy involves and business strategy in general, really, involves building walls of protection. Businesses generally, if I hung up a sign and it just said sandwiches and I put together a bologna and cheese sandwich and sold it, I probably wouldn't do very well. There's no distinction in my product. There's no distinction in my business and there's no distinction in my branding or intellectual property. And so my company really has very little value. So businesses, by their very nature, want to create customer experiences that drive business home.

So either it's going to be the price is cheaper for higher or higher quality and or higher quality and or the customer experience is absolutely amazing, or it has buzz, or it's just an amazing product. All those things need to be protected. if I have an amazing, say I have an amazing product. If I don't protect that product, it's going to be very difficult to grow that company because a competitor is going to come and offer that same product at a lesser price. These are just laws of economics. Unless you own a factory in India or China, they're going to be able to somebody in the world who's going to be able to undercut you on price

and you really need protection. You can't get that, you can't backtrack on that type of protection. You need to look at it like this. You have to build a wall of protection, a business protection and intellectual property protection. When you're building, what you're building. It's no different than a house. You have to build a foundation to build the house. If the foundation's faulty, the house is going to cave in. You have no protection.

So we're really focused on building that wall of protection. At the beginning, the protection can be a chain link fence. Like it doesn't have to be, but it has to have some kind of foundation to it so someone camp either if it has nothing, it's you really, you're starting in the wrong place. And if it has a foundation that cracks very easily, then that's really not good either. So we're experts. We're basically foundation layers. And we know how to do that at a really economical price. We know how, and again, but you have to kind of, A, know what you're doing, like work with an attorney that knows what they're doing. And B, you have to, you have to really have a strategy on getting from point A to

point B, and we're really good at flushing out your own individual strategy. Because, you know, we're not the sandwich maker. We're not the unique product manufacturer. We're the person that looks at it and says, all right, I've seen a business like this scale, ABC. We have flashy processes to get this IP and, you know, frankly, business foundational structures in place that would match your business plan. And we can do that economically. And then we'll touch base periodically whenever you want. We're not even going to charge for that.

We're going to touch base periodically. And as your business grows, so will your wall. So will your strategy. So will your protection. And so will your needs. You know, you mentioned building relationships and being empathetic. Why is that so important in your work? Because some people would go, you're my attorney.

I tell you to do this. You do it. And we move on. So talk a little bit about building relationships. And what does that uncover for you as the attorney to then provide higher value to your client? Sure. So it kind of goes to what value people are, business owners place on attorneys. Some business owners go to like legal zoom or a document service and say,

well, you know, this says I can print out these documents, fill in the blanks, and I have an operating agreement or I have a, say, a trademark. But there's no strategy underlying that process. and usually it could cause more harm than it's worth. It's no different than, you know, self-treating yourself in medicine. So why is that? It's not that attorneys are smarter than the entrepreneur. Many times we're not.

It's, you know, a lot of times I'm dealing with someone that has maybe a PhD in physics or something that I had trouble passing undergrad. that. It's more that we're trained to there's facts and fact patterns, and then there's fairly intricate law in both business law and IP law that you have to apply the specific facts to and then come up with a strategy. And that's what we're trained to do. So it goes back to the foundation thing. If you don't really think that you want to tell you. your attorney or you're just like, hey, I need an operating agreement on my eyes are glazing over. I can't wait to get rid of this. And I'm not going to tell you much about it or share, you know, ultimately what I want to do. You know, that's a philosophy on an attorney that we're really going to have to work really hard to change your mind on that. That doesn't do anybody. It's going to be really difficult. Yeah. So, you know, and really it's a pretty easy conversation.

and most entrepreneurs like to make a pitch, I'm no different. And so, you know, you really hear like, or are enthusiastic about their business. And, you know, that's just entrepreneurs. And so just listening to that and understanding what their passions are, what their trigger points are, what their motivation is. And then, you know, get to ask them what their problems are, if any. And through that process, you can also see, like, kind of the sophisticated, of the entrepreneur. If they've done this like 18 times,

well, you know, there's, they kind of, the conversation can be very short. If there's ways that we need to guide the entrepreneur through it, we're very used to that and very comfortable with that. And frankly, it gives us a lot of pleasure. So whatever,

that's a whole reason that it's like on my dime, I'll have a conversation with basically anyone that's looking for services involving business or legal, business and legal work. Because I really need to get to know the entrepreneur and their trigger points to really be able to help them. And it's just a very natural process. It's kind of like what you would do in anything else. It's like if you were an architect, well, you would kind of want to get to know that unless you're building a slot home, you would kind of want to get to know the client and what their tastes are and what their needs are before you start drawing up the plans.

Otherwise, we're going to take the plans and throw it in the trash. You know, Steve, and it makes me think about if I was a business owner hearing these things about intellectual property and being protected and growing and scaling and exiting. I would venture to say that there are some types of intellectual property in a business that maybe a business owner wouldn't think, I don't need to do anything with that. So what are some of the things that are the non-obvious forms of intellectual property that really need to be protected that maybe a business owner wouldn't really recognize right off but are really important? Sure.

There's two really easy ones or obvious ones. It's number one, brand. So brand is really, it's not just the name of your company, although that's a really good start. It's the whole customer experience. So it's like when you, for better for worse, when you walk into a McDonald's, I could blindfold you, Mike, and put you in a McDonald's in, probably in Mexico City. And you would, I could take off the blindfold, you know you're in a McDonald's because the customer experience is always relatively the same. So the same holds true for, so that's a competitive advantage, brand.

And so you have to protect your brand and you start with the name. So we offer free knockout searches, meaning we'll figure out if your brand is protectable. And then obtain, we have a process called Total TM, which is our flat fee trademark process. So that's just an obvious no-brainer. If you try and sell your business, unless you have the next cure for cancer and you don't have a brand or a brand that they can quantify and say is protected, you're done. Like it's just not going to, your M&A is not going to happen. or it's going to happen at a very reduced price. So that's number one.

Number two is a lot of entrepreneurs don't know the value of copyright. So a lot of marketing copy describing the customer experience, a lot of the colors, a lot of the colors schemes, the way of the layouts of their marketing brochure, the layouts of their website are all copyrightable. And if you get registered copyright and you have an infringer, there's something called statutory damages, and the threat to the infringer is daunting. But you have to register all those things.

So what we do is we put together kind of a copyright trademark strategy called a, we just call it IP strategy plan. But it's like where we map that all out, you put it in like what is your marketing play, how can we protect that marketing play at a really low cost? and then it's all organized and we put it in a, in a, like, zip file that we can revisit periodically. But that's the kind of thing that I think very few acquires, unless it's a specific play, are looking for a patent. And unless you, you know, really, we talked at the beginning about really thinking about this at the very beginning, if you thought about at the very beginning and you have something patentable, which means that it's an invention,

or a design patent protects a unique, absolutely unique invention design. If you did that at the very beginning, well, that goes in the portfolio. If not, like most entrepreneurs, it's really those two things, copyright and trademark. And finally, if you have like this secret sauce, like you, for example, I'm talking to someone who has a Japanese idea for barbecue, that would be what's called trade secret. And so if you're going to put people in the kitchen making your special barbecue sauce or whatever, you really need to put in place a trade secret agreement.

And people don't know that. They're like, well, I'm keeping the sauce secret. Meanwhile, they have like 18 prep cooks making the sauce. So that's something that needs to be dissected. That comes up a lot less than the trademark, which comes up number one, and copyright, which comes up number two. And through this conversation, Stephen, it's really apparent to me that people don't know what they don't know.

And if you as a trademark and IP attorney are building the right kind of relationship, you are the one kind of asking questions and peeling back those layers of the onion to kind of discover and figure out and see where everything fits together and make recommendations like, hey, did you consider? Did you realize that? And so I think so many of those things just come up to where people, they're busy. busy running their business, not thinking in the realm that you do. So having someone come alongside and having that empathetic relationship being built just as really powerful. So I just

think it's been really informative learning what you do with your clients. If someone is listening to this wanting to learn more and then even reach out and connect with you, what's the best way they can do that? Sure. So I think that the easiest way is, and there's a lot of information We post blogs semi-weekly. It's at WWW Emerge E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-N-S-E-L-E-R-G-E-C-O-N-S-E-L-L-com. And we service clients all over the world. We have office hours that are like, you know, midnight, my time. So wherever you are, don't feel daunted.

There's a scheduling app on the website that you can just schedule. schedule time with me, we have free 15 minutes, get to know you consults. And if it's a trademark issue, I'm glad to do a free initial what we call it knockout search using some software that I pay a gazillion dollars for. Excellent. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Likewise. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders to learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.

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