Jeff Holman Podcast Transcript
Jeff Holman joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Jeff Holman. Jeff Holman, founder of Intellectual Strategies, is changing the way startups and scaling businesses access legal support. As the creator of the first fractional legal team at Intellectual Strategies, he’s made it possible for companies to tap into expert legal advice at key points in their growth without needing a full time in house team.
This innovative approach means businesses get exactly the help they need when they need it and without the hefty overhead, helping them navigate everything from early stage challenges to high stakes scaling decisions. But Jeff’s expertise doesn’t stop there. He’s a multifaceted entrepreneur with degrees in electrical engineering law and an MBA.
blending technical savvy with a sharp legal mind admitted to practice in California, Utah, and before the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office. He’s a true jack of all trades, an inventor, a strategist, and an attorney who’s been tackling complex business and legal problems for over two decades.
Well, good afternoon, Jeff. Welcome to the show.
Jeff Holman: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Appreciate you making the time, jumping on, doing a podcast. We’re just an hour apart. You in Salt Lake City, me in Kansas City, freezing to death today, but it’s all good. I’m just glad you were able to make the time, Jeff.
This is so fun. So Jeff, I’m going to jump into your first question. You pioneered the fractional legal team model at Intellectual Strategies. What inspired you to develop this approach, and how does it differ from traditional legal service models?
Jeff Holman: You know, it’s really all about bringing legal into a more accessible format for small businesses.
You know, a lot of my clients are very small startups, growing startups, and being able to get the right advice up front can save them tons of headache. And that’s just been something that the legal field Frankly has failed to make accessible for these businesses. So as I’ve been in private practice and in house, as we call it with companies, I’ve just realized there’s a better way to do it.
And the result of all of that is this fractional legal model where we essentially bring the whole team to the clients and we perform as if we’re an in house legal team of our clients. So client could essentially stick their head in the virtual door of our offices and say, Hey Jeff, I’ve got a quick question.
Can I bug you for a minute? As opposed to what normally happens is the fear of getting billed 15 minute increments of time or 6 minute increments of time, paying 100 for a phone call, whatever it is. It just stops people from asking the questions that they should be asking of the people that they should be asking those questions of.
So, we’re really trying to make legal services for startups accessible.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And I personally can vouch for this that, you know, I needed a contract drawn up basic NDA is what it really was. And I think it cost me a thousand dollars. And then later on, I saw something online that was almost identical.
And I’m like, Oh my gosh, but I don’t know the difference. Right? So I appreciate you bringing some competition to the market to level the playing field. So people, small businesses, especially can jump in and get that service. So thank you. I appreciate that. Jeff with degrees in electrical engineering law.
And an MBA. How has your multidisciplinary background influenced your perspective on legal challenges faced by startups and scaling businesses?
Jeff Holman: Well, that’s a great question. On the one hand, I certainly understand when somebody’s bringing a new product to market, they’ve got an inventor who’s created something they want to bring a piece of hardware or an e commerce product into the market.
It allows me to understand the technical aspects of The product that’s being developed on the business side. I also understand the financial impact of funding or lack of funding on the business. And then, of course, you know, meshing that together with the legal. Essentially, I spend a lot of my time interpreting between the different professions, right?
Talking to the, to the technical team, talking to the business team, bringing my legal expertise in trying to explain it to each of the different disciplines that I’m working with. And so in reality, having the different background areas that I do, I would call myself as much as anything, I’m a, I’m a translator trying to make legal concepts and legal issues more accessible to kind of like I mentioned before, more accessible, more attainable, maybe more applicable to the clients that we’re working with.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And again, having that diverse background makes you kind of an expert in that field, especially around technology companies, people that are, again, just starting out in a field of just being a startup or an entrepreneur. So I appreciate that. And Jeff, intellectual strategies offers a unique fractional legal team model.
Could you explain how this model operates and the specific advantage it provides to startups and scaling businesses?
Jeff Holman: Yeah, the model is different in the sense that, you know, we’ve all heard of, I think, a lot of different fractional types of executives popping up. We hear about fractional CFOs, fractional CMOs, even fractional general counsel or fractional legal personnel.
Historically, in the legal field, we would call those people outside general counsel because they’re You know, not part of your business, but they’re kind of operating in that general counsel role. Today, fractional general counsel is what you call it. What we’re doing differently at Intellectual Strategies is really bringing the full legal team to the table.
So, the things that you deal with when you don’t have the full team are you get stuck with some bottleneck issues, right? If I’m the only attorney that a client has access to. Even if I’m really good and really fast, there will be times when they need access to different expertise or different, you know, maybe more capacity than I have.
And I can only give them the expertise I have and the capacity I have at that time. So bringing the legal team to the table allows us to kind of spread that workload across the right attorneys with the right expertise at the right time. And it really eliminates a lot of the bottlenecking. That’s probably the first.
The second real advantage, maybe I joke about this a little bit, but it’s nobody likes to hire attorneys. And so when you need an attorney, you really need to find the right attorney for the problem or the issue that you’re dealing with. And as you progress in your business, you’ll have different issues, different legal needs.
So you’ll need to hire different attorneys throughout the progression of your business. Well, when you have a legal team like ours, we actually have the full team available. We can probably handle almost any question that you have from the time that you have that cool idea that you want to start a business around to the time you’re actually operating as a business.
So it relieves people of the need to do that legal hire multiple times over throughout the course of their business because we can bring all the experts again to the table at the same time. And make them available as clients need them.
Brian Thomas: That is so cool. You know, the way you broke that down is, you know, we see a lot of these fractional different, in every industry, popping up all over the place.
But the fact that you can bring your whole team and it be available for that business, without having to hire an in house counsel or, you know, hiring a high paying law firm. I really like this model. And it’s time that we disrupt this space as well, just as we’re disrupting other spaces. And I think it’s, it’s about time for small businesses.
So I appreciate the share. And Jeff, the last question of the day I have for you, the legal landscape for technology companies is continually evolving. How does intellectual strategy stay ahead of emerging trends to provide relevant and timely advice to clients?
Jeff Holman: You know, I think like anybody, we’re watching the trends.
My background is in patent law specifically, and then, you know, after getting my MBA moving more broadly into general counsel roles, kind of like a general contractor in a construction project perhaps, where they know enough about each of the disciplines to help guide the homeowner through that process, even though they’re not the ones doing the specific construction tasks across every discipline.
And so having this team approach that we do, I can look out for those changes in law, those kind of movements that are happening in my areas of law that I’m an expert in, while my other teammates can watch their areas of law that they’re expert in. And so we get pretty broad coverage. As the landscape moves, and then when you layer on top of that AI and everything that’s happening in the AI world, it’s, it lies no different.
In fact, maybe it’s even a faster paced type of changing environment because it’s been so stagnant in a lot of ways traditionally. That there’s a lot more ground to make up and AI is going to do that for us. So we’re seeing all sorts of AI tools pop up and a lot of firms and even non lawyers at this point are offering kind of AI enhanced legal services either through a law firm or perhaps through a tech company.
So we’re trying to stay on the forefront of those things that are happening and even in some cases. A few of those companies have hired us for our expertise to come and make sure that their AI tools are doing what they’re trying to do and not going off and doing something that is not the quality that they’re trying to achieve with the tool.
So we’re following it and also in some cases supporting that and hope to be, you know, working hand in hand with those technologies as they develop.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Gosh, Jeff, this podcast has probably talked about AI in every episode for the last 18 months. Uh, and I’ve, I’ve talked to everybody in every industry, big and small companies, but you’re absolutely right.
AI is a game changer and folks like you working hand in hand with these LLMs will only make it better. And I’m so excited that you’re starting to again, disrupt this space so you can level the playing field for those smaller businesses. Jeff, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Jeff Holman: My pleasure, Brian. Thanks so much for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Jeff Holman Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
