Brian Scherer: [00:00:00] Surfing is a great teacher. So not every wave is your wave. I Would start with that. If you paddle for every single thing that you think is an opportunity. You’re going to exhaust yourself and you’re not going to catch any. That’s a really good one.
Another one is you can’t just wait for the wave to come to you. There’s actually some, they call it like, I mean, you basically have to paddle into the point. That just means there’s a place that you have to get to. And some pre work you have to do to even get on the wave. So opportunities don’t just fall on your hand. You have to put yourself in the right position to get the opportunity.
[00:01:00]
Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Family Partner Podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Hawkins. Looking forward to today’s episode. We’ve got Brian Scherer on with us. He’s got a really interesting and winding path that we are going to explore here. And he’s doing some really cool stuff here as of late that I’m sure we’re going to talk a lot about.
But real quick, you know, I’ll give you the high level and then Brian can so he grew up on the East Coast, went to law school in the East Coast, worked there for a while and now he’s on the West Coast. He’s got his own firm now. So, Brian, why don’t you introduce yourself? Give us a short introduction.
What you used to do, what you’re doing now, and we will go deep on all of it. So welcome.
Brian Scherer: Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate you having me. I often find that my life is like not too interesting, but maybe my, it’s just because I live it. So hopefully it is helpful or interesting to other people. But yeah, I’ve been an in house lawyer pretty much for my [00:02:00] entire legal career.
And that’s the only career I’ve ever had. Minus some odd job that did during college. So, I went right from college to law school. I actually don’t advise people do that. It was what I did cause I didn’t know really where I wanted to go. But I did go straight through, so seven years of school.
And then when I left, I just went full into in house life. I did litigation and then I got into FinTech and worked for essentially four different. Early stage fintech and PropTech companies. And that was for 10 years, basically in house life never worked at a law firm and never did outside practice until 2021, when I took a leap of faith.
Mostly because I wanted to do two things. I wanted to see what it was like to build a practice. And that was an interesting an interesting time. And then also I wanted to build a a company and build on an idea that [00:03:00] I had. So that was kind of like the birth of HeyCounsel and the birth of me practicing as sort of like a freelance. Solo attorney and then ultimately joining a distributed firm called scale.
Jonathan Hawkins: So let’s talk about the in house stuff for a minute. You know, you’ve got what I would say is sort of the traditional in house. Type role at a traditional big company. But it sounds like you were in house for a lot of startup type companies. So, and I know that’s just a completely different atmosphere.
So is that when you got the bug to think, Hey, I want to try to start something, build something my own, or had you always had it.
Brian Scherer: I’ve always had it. I’ve been a huge in the worst way possible. I’ve been a huge idea guy. Like I always have ideas. Never execute. Pretty much lived like my life that way for 30, you know, 33 years until I actually did something. I started businesses here and there. Like I got going on a food truck at one point.
Never actually got the food truck, but had a whole business plan and everything. I got started like a photography, drone [00:04:00] photography company when it was like 2016 and drones were becoming a thing, you know, I always had ideas always wanted to do stuff and always took a couple steps and then backtracked.
But when I was in house, I think. You know, I wasn’t just in house, I was also a product counsel in house. So, I was very involved in at least being the lawyer for teams that were building things all the time. And so I got to see how the sausage was made. And many times I was, It’s not that I was unimpressed because I was working with really smart people building really cool stuff.
It was just that it was made so obvious to me that it doesn’t take rocket science to build a product that people want. And oftentimes I would be critical from a product perspective as to how they were doing it or building it. And my feedback was well received and then things would change. And then I felt, you know, I felt like, okay, if I can sort of be part of this, then I can do it myself.
And so I think it gave me the confidence. It wasn’t like it turned me into a different person. It [00:05:00] just gave me the confidence that I could one day maybe build products that people want.
Jonathan Hawkins: So in your role as in house counsel over the product teams, you know, I’m trying to think about, I’ve served in house too. So, you know, sometimes you’re in the meetings, sometimes you’re not. Sometimes you find out about the decisions that were made, you know, weeks after, and you’re like, wait, I should have been in that meeting and I would have told you something differently.
So when you’re giving them these suggestions, are they treating them as lawyer suggestions? Are they like, oh, this is a product suggestion.
Brian Scherer: Yeah. I mean, the thing was all the, it’s a good question. It was hard to always remain the lawyer. I like couldn’t help myself. To like opine on things that probably weren’t legal in nature, but because they were in regulated spaces, I mean, you really only have product counsel when you’re worried about regulation or you’re in kind of like a tricky industry that requires legal input when you’re building the products, not every company needs a product counsel.
So, but for the products that we were building, like legal was the [00:06:00] product, or at least a large part of the product. And so I think a lot of the input that I had kind of like the legal and non legal stuff was so intertwined that I often got messed, like I often got in the weeds on maybe the non legal stuff too, because it all kind of, was dependent on each other.
So yeah, part of it was, I couldn’t help myself. And part of it was just part of the job.
Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So you’re in house and you moved to the front, a variety of different companies, eventually you said you went out on your own. So, overlay that on your geographic locations and moves along the way to, you know, where were you at each stage, like geographically.
Brian Scherer: Yeah. I started.
Jonathan Hawkins: I guess I’ll add, did that play any part of sort of some of the moves you made business wise, legal wise?
Brian Scherer: Yeah, I mean, the geographic journey is like as interesting as the career journey. I started in New York City. I thought that’s kind of where I was supposed to go. Cause that’s where a lot of the [00:07:00] big time lawyers that I looked up to had gone and got good jobs. So when I was in New York, I was doing litigation for JP Morgan.
I didn’t have a lot of passion for that job and I, didn’t have a lot of passion for the city as well. So ended up kind of searching for something that was more my speed, something more outdoorsy, ended up moving to Salt Lake City. For a job that I got with a FinTech company called Prosper.
And that was sort of the beginning of my journey in FinTech startup world. That job kind of fell apart. They got rid of that the subsidiary that I was working for. So, after six months I was kind of like. Searching for something new both in Salt Lake and maybe, you know, elsewhere and ended up landing a job with a competitor called lending club in San Francisco.
Jonathan Hawkins: So real quick before we go to San Francisco. So did you decide you wanted to move to Salt Lake then get the job or the job opened up so that you moved to Salt Lake?
Brian Scherer: I applied to probably a [00:08:00] hundred different places to get out of New York. So, mostly I was looking, honestly, the location was the less important thing. I knew I wanted to leave New York, but I didn’t know where I wanted to go. What was important to me was that I was working for a company and a, doing a thing that I was excited about. Cause I think the hardest part for me was waking up and every day and not loving what I was doing.
I’m just, I think part of me, like thinks I’m spoiled in a sense that like, Oh, you don’t have to love what you do. Like so many people have jobs where they, it’s their job and then they leave their job and they do what they love to do outside their job. I think I don’t know if I could exist that way. Like, I don’t think I can do jobs that I’m not excited about, which is why I kind of always feel like I’m searching for something. And I feel so grateful right now that I have I mean, it’s taken me till I was 37 to really feel like I do have that right now with between hate counsel and the work I do for my clients.
But yeah, I definitely was searching for a job that I wanted to [00:09:00] wake up to do. And I thought I found that and for a while I did find that until they, they let me go in Salt Lake and working for Prosper. It was like the first time I had a job which was this product counsel, compliance counsel type role where I was, you know, it kind of excited to do the work.
Jonathan Hawkins: It’s nice. Nice being near the ski slopes too. I’m sure.
Brian Scherer: Oh yeah. mean, that was an added benefit. My mom kind of, when I told her I was moving to Salt Lake, cause we had been skiing as a family since I was three years old. My mom, I remember she cried on the phone and I think she kind of knew I was never coming back home, no matter where I ended up, I wasn’t going to be east.
So yeah, I just, I remember that her just knowing that like, I’m going there, I’m going to skip 50 days and I’m never going to come back.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, that’s sweet. So, okay. So then you end up, you get from Salt Lake, you end up in San Francisco. Is that where you are now?
Brian Scherer: No, I’m down in San Diego.
Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. All right. Well, take us on down.
Brian Scherer: Yeah. So I honestly, the move to San Diego happened because of COVID [00:10:00] mostly. My girlfriend at the time wife now her and I started dating right before COVID. And then during COVID, we just took the opportunity to take a few trips because you know, the world was kind of shut down and we need to get out of San Francisco, which is where we met.
And one of those trips was San Diego. We kind of looked around when we got down here and we’re like, why are we not living here? And then we just made it a priority to do that. We were both working remote jobs at the time. Six months later, we moved in together for the first time in a spot down in Solana beach.
Jonathan Hawkins: And so since you were remote, didn’t really matter where you’re living, I guess.
Brian Scherer: Didn’t matter. And there were a lot of people doing the same thing, moving down to San Diego. The secret was out. So I think we were doing it along with the rest of San Francisco that was working remote.
Jonathan Hawkins: Nice. Okay. So you make your way down to San Diego. Are you still in house down there at the point? Are you, had you started private practice at that point?
Brian Scherer: No. So that was 2021 and I was working for blend at the time. [00:11:00] Blend is a, FinTech company that builds basically SAS for banks and credit unions. If you apply for a loan with more with Wells Fargo, then you have interacted with blend software.
So that’s basically more or less what they do. And that’s where I was for two and a half years. All the way through big, you know, big mergers and acquisitions and an IPO eventually. When I left, it was about six months after the IPO, the IPO in 2022. So yeah, I was basically out the door in 2022 from blend.
Jonathan Hawkins: Cool. Did Did you get options? Did you get to participate in any of that?
Brian Scherer: I still have them, but the price that I got them at.
Jonathan Hawkins: You sounds good, right?
Brian Scherer: It was a really difficult time for any company to go public. There was a very short window kind of during 2021 when all the stimulus money was in the economy and everyone was rushing to go public. And if you were going public and [00:12:00] early, you know, 2021, you were doing really well.
End of 2021 into 2022, everything just tanked, all the tech stocks tanked and blend was not an exception. And we basically didn’t have a chance. I mean, we IPO it around $21 and I think by the time the lockup period was over, blend was down like 4 or 5 dollars and then it went all the way down to one. I think there were talks of it being delisted.
It was not a good situation, but the company, you know, I’ve always believed in the company and what they’ve been building, believed in the leadership. And I held on to most of it. It’s climbing back up. It’s at four something now or 5 dollars. My hope is it gets back to IPO price, but it’s going to be a long road.
Jonathan Hawkins: uh, Nice, that’s cool. so you left there and then is that when you went private practice or?
Brian Scherer: Yes. So that’s when I left Blend, I didn’t leave necessarily to leave Blend. I left because. It’s actually an interesting story. So, I got excited [00:13:00] about the, an idea that was more related to enabling general counsel to be. You know, better GC’s. So, basically setting them up with the infrastructure, both from a networking perspective, but also from a software perspective to do their roles better, I kind of saw what my general counsel was doing on a daily basis and having the experience of working underneath GC all the time.
I felt like I could maybe. You know, make things easier, make things better. So I actually pitched an idea that was so separate and different to an accelerator called on deck and they love the idea so much. And I also think it was a frothy time. So they were handing out checks. That they wrote a safe investment for this idea that I had.
And so I, when I got that opportunity to basically invest in this company and try to build it I went for it and I told blend that I was leaving to build a company. That company was called, [00:14:00] HeyCounsel was entirely different idea than what it is today. But that was the impetus to leave blend.
And at the same time, I wasn’t using that investment to pay myself because I couldn’t, it wasn’t enough money. So I knew I had to stand up my own practice and do a little bit of legal freelancing. So that’s what I did.
Jonathan Hawkins: And so it sounds like, and you can tell me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like legal for you, your law practice now is really more of a side hustle to support you for your main passion project company. Hey, counsel, is that right?
Brian Scherer: Yeah, that’s what it’s morphed into. I mean, I think originally I was excited about the idea of being a freelance lawyer. There was a lot of talk at the time and it’s only been growing that like freelancing is the new thing fractional GCs, fractional counsel there was like the start of this trend where remote work was big.
Technology was, really improving to the point where, you know, you could leverage your own skills and ability way [00:15:00] better than you could before and basically take on more complex work. And so all of that stuff was kind of swirling and I was thinking, why don’t I be an early adopter of this new kind of way of practicing?
I quickly retreated. So, I did about three months of me kind of practicing truly on my own and doing basically picking up little freelance work here and there. And it was like, it was contract work. It was work that I was doing for both my old employer and then work that I was doing for friends who were running similar businesses, the ones that I was used to people building, like in the FinTech space and stuff like that, it was very, just contract work, I wouldn’t even call it a law firm.
But at that point, I, kind of felt like, okay, I need to join something bigger. I need to learn how to be an outside counsel, essentially. So I joined scale at that time and they were building this kind of new age distributed type of practice where the lawyers are 10 99s and it’s eat what you kill, but there’s this [00:16:00] communal type arrangement where if you bring in work, you get compensated, you get origination fees.
You can work other people’s projects and clients as well. And so there’s a really defined structure there and it it was super helpful for me to join up there.
Jonathan Hawkins: So you were able to perhaps maybe generate more business that way, maybe plug it in there and sort of build your practice a little bit.
Brian Scherer: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I basically learned how to be a lawyer, right. Like from the outside. Something as simple as billing at the end of the month. Like I had never done that before. It’s not overly complex, but like if you’re, if you’re starting a practice, it’s like, okay, so like, when do I send the invoice?
Like, is it net 15 or net 30? What’s normal? How do I reach out if they’re not paying me on time and little things about like, you know, collecting retainers, like just the very basics of running a law firm, all of that was so foreign to me that I felt like. To do it on my own was silly. So why not learn from people who’ve been doing it?
And I [00:17:00] was friendly with some of the early lawyers and founding lawyers over at scale, they kind of threw me the life raft and said, if you’re going to be building hate counsel. Why don’t you bring your FinTech experience over here? Help us. We help you. And it’s gonna be a great experience and it was. It really was for two years. It’s really been great.
Jonathan Hawkins: That’s an interesting perspective. I’ve met with, consulted with, you know, been engaged by lots of attorneys over the years that have needed to start a practice, but usually they’re coming from. An existing firm, you know, private firm. So they at least have some of that. They don’t know about, you know, some of the business stuff, but you come at it from a completely different angle.
I mean, you’d never been in private practice and sometimes we forget, you know, billing a client, you know, some of the basics, it’s just, you know, if you’ve never done it, you’re like, what is this? You know, how do you do it? Maybe you had gotten bills from outside counsel, but you know, actually doing it.
Brian Scherer: Yeah. I’ve always been a buyer. I’ve always been a buyer. Legal services I’ve never actually provided them for money. [00:18:00] And it is just, you know, it what’s not rocket science, it’s very easy to figure out. I think for me, I was overwhelmed with all the things going on and the promise of kind of joining.
People who could mentor me a little bit, teach me the rope, so to speak it was comforting for sure. And it was lucrative in the sense that I could work other people’s matters where I could, you know, actually provide value on the FinTech side.
So, it was good all around. Yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: I’m curious about your perspective as you said, you were a buyer of legal services forever, and then you’re on the other side of it, that perspective of being on the buy side of the law firms, how does that, does that give you any insight or help you in terms of servicing your clients now that you’re outside counsel.
Brian Scherer: A hundred percent. Yeah. The bad experiences shine through for me when I was in house really shaped my mindset in terms of when I was in house and I had a bad experience, I always said, if I were in their shoes, I would do it so [00:19:00] differently. And most of the counsel we used were great.
And I think where lawyers seem to fail the most is in the client experience side of things. Understanding what your client wants. And providing that and for some reason that like kind of like hospitality approach that you get in other industries, you don’t really get that much in legal. And I don’t know why that is, but I think that’s such a failed opportunity.
So simple things like responding to things on time, that’s table stakes. But really providing your clients with a, soup to nuts experience. And I guess what I mean by that and not talking so abstractly we paid a lot of money for work product. And we never knew like for bigger projects, it would be like. There wasn’t a true like scoping phase that moved to a work phase that moved to a feedback phase that moved to the final product. It was just a conversation that led to a basically a, a period where you didn’t hear from [00:20:00] them.
So it was like lots of convo, then a dark period, and then we’re product on a bill. Never knowing what the bill would be. Never knowing what they were doing behind the scenes, what we were expecting to get in terms of work product, what was the thing going to look like? All of those things, like when I get design work done for, HeyCounsel, there’s a scoping phase. We do a, low fidelity wireframe.
We do move to high fidelity designs are made. I kind of know where we are. And then I also know, you know, we’ve scoped how much it’s going to cost. So at least I have an idea. It doesn’t have to be totally accurate. I feel like lawyers are very nervous about giving estimates before they do the work.
And I get why I’ve been on that side now. And so I understand like, it’s kind of hard to always give estimates, but at least give them a large window. So I think that experience having happened multiple times, getting the sticker shock feeling like I was in the dark for so long, it really framed [00:21:00] how I’ve approached giving my own legal services and doing work product for my clients.
I always scope things out. I always take a lot of time in the beginning to talk about how I’m going to do stuff. And so that they, I never deal with sticker shock when it’s a client of mine. It’s just. Yeah, it just shouldn’t happen. It’s sloppy in my opinion.
Jonathan Hawkins: To all the lawyers out there. Brian just dropped some serious gold there. I think that was fantastic. I know we all need to work on that. It’s, you know, it’s a work in progress probably always, but it’s the whole black box approach that you described is not the way to do it. Goes into the black box and then the work product and a bill comes out.
Right?
Brian Scherer: Yeah, it’s, it’s discomforting as a client, right? And you feel like in a way you’re in the wrong too. It’s like, there’s a little bit of gaslighting happening too, because the lawyer just drops it on you. And you know, and I know, I guess being on the legal side of things, when a bill goes high, you don’t want to negotiate against yourself.
You [00:22:00] did the work. You have a rate. So you send the bill and you’re not going to say, Oh, I’m so sorry. This is so high. Like, but you feel it when you send it, it’s like, I’m sending this bill and there’s going to be this kind of, there’s going to be this sticker shock. And I, I just, I try to avoid that every single time I try to, I really take the time to scope out.
The whole project. And I, and for each mini task, I think about the hours it’s going to be minimum, maximum, and then I add it all together and that’s my estimate. And I always say like, this is an estimate. I don’t know if it’s going to be accurate. But I’m trying to do my best to like get them prepped for what this thing is going to cost.
If you’re getting work, because. People think it’s going to cost less and then it costs more. That’s a bait and switch. And then if you’re sending the bill and not kind of saying, Oh, it’s a little high, like that’s gaslighting. So I just, I feel like there’s, but it’s something that the legal profession and perhaps a couple other professions that I’m not privy to.
It’s common, it’s common practice. I don’t know why. Yeah, maybe [00:23:00] because in, when I was on the other side of it, I worked for corporations that had a lot of money. And so, the firms didn’t feel too bad about it. I don’t know.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, it’s a tough conversation, but one that I think every lawyer needs to think through. And I think some of this, you know, there are a lot of lawyers out there that are doing sort of what you’ve described both an hourly practice, flat fee practices, all sorts of practices. So, everybody out there think through that. That’s really good stuff.
So, all right, I want to move on to Hey, counsel. But before we get there, so you were with scale, but recently you’ve gone out, you’ve got your own solo practice now. You know, is it, how would you describe the practice now and then how I’ll say sort of the work you do for HeyCounsel in your firm, how do you sort of balance or what is the balance between the two?
Brian Scherer: So the work that I do now is. What I would just describe as freelancing legal work. So I have essentially one really large anchor client. I’ll just say that I do essentially a full week’s of work for full [00:24:00] week of work for and then I have, you know, one or two smaller clients who need things here or there that I’ve kind of hung on to.
And all of that is sort of in service to this idea that my nights and my weekends are devoted to HeyCounsel. And it doesn’t leave me much time to do anything else. So it’s turned me into a really boring person and I’m losing friends, but it’s short term. So the goal really is at a certain point, hopefully in 2025, transition fully to HeyCounsel.
As that business grows, but right now yeah, it’s the practice is mainly me just picking up clients that I know I can do work for and basically keeps my life stable. Right now. Yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: All right, cool. So let’s talk about HeyCounsel. So you said you got some funding as you say, safe funding to start it. So what is it, man? Tell us what kind of business did you build and what are you building?
Brian Scherer: Yeah, it’s a great question. And that the answer to that changes a lot. So, [00:25:00] but I think we’ve definitely figured out exactly what our path forward is. So, in the beginning. It was a marketplace. It was a talent, legal talent marketplace for a very niche problem, which the problem was early stage companies don’t really know where to find lawyers and, or who are lawyers who are affordable and, or lawyers who would accept equity that was like the original value prop you know, are there lawyers who would take both equity advisor and advisor grants and do some like real tangible legal work.
And so we actually started in that area and grew pretty quickly. The problem was. Dealing in equity is very difficult as a business model. So I realized that pretty quick.
Jonathan Hawkins: So before you talk about where you pivot so when you say marketplace, you know, how would you know? So there are companies that need counsel then you get counsel that want to work for companies and then what role? Did HeyCounsel play and how did the marketplace work?
Brian Scherer: Yeah, it was pretty simple. I mean, [00:26:00] companies who needed lawyers would come to our marketplace and we would sort of do like a bespoke matching service where we provided three to five options of lawyers who could get the work done. And then they matched with the lawyer and they actually engaged counsel outside of the platform.
There was an ongoing kind of like subscription fee that the client would pay HeyCounsel while they were continuing to work with the lawyer and that, and we would help manage the relationship. So it was a very basic model and it was really just designed to figure out, is there something here?
Is this a business model we could grow? And the answer ultimately was probably not. It was a much smaller problem than I had thought. It was a problem. And we were definitely helping people out, but it was a smaller problem. And then we kind of expanded into just a traditional legal talent marketplace.
Same concept, throw the equity out the door. We’re just, we’re transacting in dollars now. And that grew to a point where we were, I think by the time I [00:27:00] shut that marketplace down, we had billed. or lawyers through our platform had billed 50 grand on that last month. So we’re doing about 50 grand per month of legal billing through the platform when we transitioned to the community.
Jonathan Hawkins: And so would the platform send the billing?
Brian Scherer: Yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: And there’s sort of be the middleman the transaction that you’d collect the funds disperse the funds. Is that how that worked?
Brian Scherer: Platform was actually, it had a stripe integration that allowed the lawyers to send the bills and the lawyer would collect. So we actually didn’t stand in the middle of the funds. We weren’t taking a cut. We were still doing a subscription basically a subscription model. But it did allow the lawyers to bill through our platform.
Yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So then what was the next move after that?
Brian Scherer: Yeah. So, I mean the reason we let, I mean, I talked to a lot of people too, or like, Oh, wow, it’s doing really well. Like you’re growing the amount built to the platform. It seems like, you know, it’s going in the right [00:28:00] direction. Why do you want to pivot? I kind of knew I didn’t want to, I was kind of like, I was going in a direction.
I didn’t, want to take the business and I was kind of following the money. We weren’t making a ton of money because we weren’t standing in the middle of the transaction. It’s something I never wanted to do. And I can talk about that and the why behind that in a little bit. But ultimately I felt like I was growing into a staffing company and I didn’t want to grow into a staffing company.
There are tons of legal staffing companies and legal talent marketplaces out there that essentially do what I was doing. And they do it really well. There’s law trades, there’s Priori, there’s Axiom, there’s contracts council, there’s a million. And it felt like I was just kind of rebuilding what they had already built and maybe trying to take a little bit of the market share. And it wasn’t something that excited me. Instead, what was really exciting was the community that we built through this. So we had a Slack channel of all these lawyers who were getting work for a platform. And there was this really cool vibe inside the community of people helping each other [00:29:00] out. They were all freelance or like, you know, lawyers building their own firms.
And I decided, you know, wouldn’t it be cool to build for them and kind of build the scaffolding of a law firm around them so that they could really practice to their best capacity and, but they wouldn’t have to join the, join a firm, right? They don’t have to share P and L. They don’t have to they can build their own brand and their own culture so to speak.
So that was like the AHA moment, which was also like, is this even possible? Like, are people even going to want this? But it was exactly where I wanted to take the business. So I just decided I would do it like I wasn’t making tons of money through the marketplace so much that I was running away from anything and I was the only employee.
So I just decided that’s what we’re going to do and shut down the marketplace.
Jonathan Hawkins: So how do you do that? So you’ve got people that are plugged in, they’re used to the marketplace. I mean, how do you, you just come out and say, sorry, guys, we’re shutting it down tomorrow, tell me about the messaging and how you how of let everybody [00:30:00] know?
Brian Scherer: Yeah, I mean, we actually, a lot of the engagements continue to happen. And so we still took revenue from that. It’s actually what kind of like funded the community in the beginning. So it was a gradual thing. We kept the engagements going until their natural end. All of them essentially came to an end. And then I was so behind the scenes.
I was kind of thinking like, how do I just start to make this community better so that the lawyers stay for the community once we shut the hose or shut the, you know, the faucet of, you know, new clients coming through. But I also realized that lawyers care about new clients, which is kind of a stupid thing to say, but it matters and it’s something that I actually kept.
So instead of like marketing this as a marketplace, come get your lawyer and lawyers would come for the clients. I kind of just kept that, like that part of our website up, we did a lot of marketing in the beginning to get a lot of clients coming in the door and they were, are still like to this day, referring people.
To come find their lawyer [00:31:00] through, HeyCounsel, but now it’s just the community and we’re not taking a cut. We never did take a cut, so I’m happy to make introductions. It works kind of in a very similar way where somebody comes and says, Hey, I need counsel through our website. They fill out a form and then, you know, three to five lawyers will reach out in 24 hours or less, and they’re all community members.
So now it’s not the business isn’t the marketplace. It’s the business of the community, but a service to the community. Is this like marketplace element. So it all works together in a way.
Jonathan Hawkins: You know, Communities are hard to build. I think just from the outside looking in, it just seems like they’re hard to build. Has that been your experience? And then, you know, how have you gone about, you know, successfully building this community? And I’ll say to the people out there, I’ve been part of it now for, I don’t know, a few months.
And it’s, I mean, it’s hopping. I mean, it’s very active. I I’m in several and it’s one of the more active communities I’m a part of. So it’s like, you’re doing something right. I don’t know how many members are [00:32:00] in there, but it is very active. So how did you cultivate that and get it going?
It’s hard to do that. I think.
Brian Scherer: Yeah, we have about 250 people inside our Slack group. And we’re growing at about, I would say a lawyer per every two days. And that’s kind of the pace we want to be at. Not too fast, not too slow. The question of where the magic comes from, I honestly don’t know. Like, I don’t know if I could reconstruct this.
If I tried, I pay, I think a lot of it came from. The fact that we started as the marketplace and my goal was to get the best lawyers I could in that marketplace and focusing on the talent and the people as the supply and then transitioning to, and this wasn’t by design, but then transitioning to a community.
I think that is what kind of created such a great community it was the fact that we focused on the people and high caliber attorneys and that the conversations in there were natural, they weren’t forced. It wasn’t like I was [00:33:00] jumping in and asking people, like, how was your Tuesday going or, Hey, everybody talk about your favorite food.
Like there was none of that because it was business at first. It was, Hey, I have a client who. Has this issue, has anyone dealt with this? And those were all things happening on the platform. So it was like, it was very organic conversations that had a purpose and that momentum has remained all the way through when we transitioned to you know, when the community became our purpose.
So, yeah, I don’t know if I would ever go about the same, you know, I wouldn’t map it that way if I were to draw it up, but I think that’s what probably led to it being such a vibrant community today.
Jonathan Hawkins: So, let’s talk about the lawyers that are in there. How would you describe, you know, what sorts of practice areas, what sorts of [00:34:00] lawyers are in there? And then, you know, how do you get in? Is there an application process? What’s the vetting process like?
Brian Scherer: So there is, I’ll tackle the second question first. There is a vetting process and there is an application process. There are some minimum standards and then there are just more like intention and you know, what we evaluate what the attorney’s goals are. So I’ll break all that down. So the minimum standards are five years experience practicing and we look for consistent practice.
So not the journey man or woman lawyer who’s come back after 20 years and is standing up a practice who hasn’t been practicing law for so long. We look for people who are like, have high intention. I want to build a practice of any sort. It could be a freelance practice. It could be a fractional practice.
It could be a law firm. They want to 20 people. But we look for that type of energy. But five years experience because we don’t want anyone to green. I will [00:35:00] say they are loose standards. So there are exceptions made every now and then and we’re still trying to figure out exactly as a community who we want in and who we don’t.
And then the other standards, obviously you got to be in good standing with uh, you know, have a license to practice and be in good standing. There’s no geographic restrictions. So you could be practicing in Canada. We have lawyers who practice in India. Yeah. And the E.U really anywhere.
And those are basically the minimum standards. And then when we ask questions around, what is your intention for building your practice? Why do you want to join the community? And those are really designed to weed out anybody who is more trying to sell some sort of product or service into the community.
Who is a lawyer, has a law degree, but their goal isn’t building a practice. Their goal is something else. So, we have to be very conscious of that. One of the, to answer your, the question we were just talking about, how do we kind of keep the magic in the community? Part of it is just making sure the wrong people don’t [00:36:00] join and there’s not spam in the community and people aren’t annoying other people because it can happen really quick.
I’ve been part of a lot of communities as well, and the quality of the community can get diluted really fast if you let too many people in with the wrong intentions.
Jonathan Hawkins: And so, in terms of practice areas, is it business focused or is it all, I mean, do you have personal injury, family law? I mean, is it all over the map or are there certain sort of core, I would say, you know, type practices.
Brian Scherer: Yeah, it’s definitely the core is in business law. Could be anything from commercial to regulatory to corporate employment law, anything sort of business related. We don’t do a lot of consumer and I shouldn’t say we don’t do. There aren’t a lot of consumer law attorneys, the personal injuries, the family law type stuff yet.
I think it’s hard to figure out exactly how we fit them in. One of the interesting things that happens inside the communities is lawyers ask for, [00:37:00] does anybody know, does anybody know a good personal injury lawyer? Cause they’ll have a friend and right now they’ll have a friend who needs help. And right now, one of their only outlets is HeyCounsel to go find that help.
So we do get a lot of those inquiries. I think there’s probably an in between state where we could have maybe a list of attorneys who have been like vetted or approved by our community members who handle those types of things, but maybe they’re not inside the community. Or maybe one day we do open up to more kind of like consumer law type.
I shouldn’t say consumer law cause that’s a whole different practice, but those types of consumer focuses. So yeah, it’s a good question. It’s mostly business law.
Jonathan Hawkins: And so that maybe leads into the next question. Just looking down the road, you know, you’ve made a pivot or two already with, HeyCounsel sounds like you’ve sort of hit the stride. You sort of, you’re feeling it right now. You know, as you’re looking at the next how many years, you know, where do you see it going?
And what are you, what are you trying to, [00:38:00] to build now?
Brian Scherer: Yeah. Great question. When people ask me what our mission is or, you know, what’s the goal? I always say we’re going to build a law firm without the law firm. Where we want to support lawyers. With the power of a big firm without having them sacrifice their ability to build their own thing, build their own brand, their own culture, and have their own P and L.
And be rewarded for that risk that they’re taking. Right? So all the things that I’m building right now have to do with what are the, when you take a law firm and then you disaggregate into all these different pieces, what are those really important pieces that are super value add that we can do.
There are going to be plenty of things we can’t do, right? We can’t, like, get in the weeds of particular matters and coordinate coordinate legal services and have our hands in that type of stuff. We’re not a law firm. We can’t provide legal services. But there are things such as networking, such as knowledge repositories, document [00:39:00] repositories, technology that we can provide or provide at a discount.
Provide access to it at discount. There’s a million different things that we can do and we just have to kind of pick apart, you know, what are those one or two things every year that we really want to lean into? 2025 is going to be interesting. I’m really focusing on I guess, two areas.
One area is business generation, lead generation. So how do we amplify the lawyers inside the community? How do we expand their reach? How do we get eyeballs on their practices? And so that’s, the most important thing. And then number two is shared services. So how do we reduce the cost of some of the things that lawyers do day in day out, whether that’s paralegal help, research assistance how do we basically create a, an ability for lawyers to share the cost of those services and share those services so that starting a practice is a little bit more approachable.
Jonathan Hawkins: That’s really interesting. The other thing I’ll say that again, I’ve been in there just for a little while, there’s a lot of I don’t know what you call them [00:40:00] panel discussions, webinars, events, whatever, virtual event type things. There’s a lot of that going on, lots going on in there.
Just, and again, very vibrant. I see a lot of that sort of referral type. Stuff going on a lot of posts. They’re really good stuff. So, just real quick, anybody out there that might be interested in HeyCousel, what’s sort of the best way to find it and maybe apply if they’re interested.
Brian Scherer: Yeah. HeyCounsel.Com is the website and the application is really, really simple. It should take 90 seconds and then we’ll do an onboarding call and get you set up. So, it’s $35 a month. We try to keep the price extremely low so that there’s absolutely no reason that you can’t join.
And so, yeah, that’s you find.
Jonathan Hawkins: That’s cheap, man. Dollar a day, pretty much. That’s cheap it’s nothing.
Brian Scherer: There’s a dollar option too. If you want to sign up and you want to pay the 365, we have that for annual. So yeah, that’s an option.
Jonathan Hawkins: That’s sweet, man. I’m looking forward to see where you take this thing again. I’ve been [00:41:00] really impressed with, you know, my short time there. So good work and keep it up. I want to pivot for a minute away from HeyCounsel and talk about sort of from my point of view, looking at sort of what you are doing and what you’ve done, it looks like you have, you know, really uh, what I call sort of designing your life, I’ll just call it, you know, you’ve proactively designed your life the way you want it to be guess the first thing is was that a conscious decision or was it sort of by accident?
Brian Scherer: I wish I could say it was conscious, but it’s totally, I mean, life, you know, this as being a human being, like life is a lot of luck literally starting from the beginning. So I’m lucky that I was born into the family that I was born into. I’m lucky where I was born. We all kind of, in a way, won the lottery in terms of if you were born in the United States, you were born in the best country there is.
So I don’t know. I, I feel like a lot of my life is lucky. So I definitely am not gonna take credit for designing the, my current situation, which I’m very grateful [00:42:00] for. But I will say I think subconsciously I’ve driven myself to kind of surround myself with things that give me energy, that being outdoors staying kind of like physically active.
And kind of, yeah, and doing the things that I think make me happy. And that’s probably the way I’ve designed my life is my energy source is my curiosity and my happiness. And if I don’t have that I’m a sad puppy. So, yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, you’re a good example to people talk about you know they think if you get a law degree you sort of have one path to take and maybe 30 years ago, that was the case. You know, there’s really one or two paths to take as a lawyer where nowadays, there’s so many different paths. I mean, obviously you went straight in house.
You did, you wrote that for a while and now you’re doing this. It’s, you know, all these opportunities are out there for people. You’re not stuck. Where you are. I mean, I get it. Sometimes you have debt you have to pay off student loan debt. So maybe you have to get those paid off. But, you know, as [00:43:00] a lawyer, there’s lots of options.
You’re not stuck doing the routine lawyer gig. So, you know, as you for anybody out there looking back on your journey, taking into account, you know, obviously we’re all pretty lucky where we are. Any advice for anybody out there that says, you know, I don’t like what I’m doing now. Maybe I should try something different.
Brian Scherer: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really hard to break the inertia. So I definitely don’t want to discount that. Like when you’re, and I’ve been there, I mean, I had moments where I was going down a path, even when I was in law school, I had moments where I said, you know, should I leave?
And I think, it was really hard to make that decision because I was always, you know, there’s, so many things with the inertia. There’s what will your parents think, you know, is the money you’ve already paid for law school? Is that going out the door? Are you burning that?
There’s that sunk cost fallacy. You want to see it through a couple more years, but a couple more years kind of leads to a couple more years. So it is really difficult to buck the trend if you aren’t feeling like you’re going in the right direction having said that there are [00:44:00] absolutely no rules in this world we’re literally living in a simulation, nothing matters.
We’re all dying, we’re all gonna end up in the same spot. So if you’re not happy and you can do anything about it, you should do it. It’s gonna be painful. My path was not one of just like pure jubilation. There’s like a lot of trial and tribulation, even in my, like, you know, from the outside in easy and perfect life.
Like, life is difficult. Every day is difficult. But yeah, I mean it’s, you make the difficult decisions and then you fight through it and it makes the current a little bit better. Like I, I think I really, I truly believe there are no rules. There are there life. All right, let me back up. Life is about knowing what rules to break.
Jonathan Hawkins: You’re a lawyer, man. There’s laws, man. Come on.
Brian Scherer: Life is about knowing what rules you can break and what rules you should not break. And there are obvious ones. You should not murder anybody. You should not steal. You should not cheat. You should not do those things. Beyond that, like the things that you [00:45:00] think are reasons why you can’t go and do what you want to do.
Most of them are probably BS and you’ll get through them if you put your mind to it. So, so yeah, I mean, if you’re stuck, there’s definitely take a step back. There’s a path out. There’s a creative path out of that.
Jonathan Hawkins: I’m a big believer mindset is maybe one of the most important things. Either get out of the one you’re in or get into the one you need to get into. as you look back this meandering path you’ve taken, is there anything that maybe you wish you had done sooner? Or maybe you wish you had not done.
Brian Scherer: I do wish I became an astronaut and that was like
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, if you make enough money, you can now, you know, buy a, buy a ride up. Right. Can’t you?
Brian Scherer: uh, That’s the goal.
Jonathan Hawkins: You got to blow. Blow. HeyCounsel up big. So you can get a ride up there.
Brian Scherer: That is truly the end goal get into space, but uh, other than that, yeah. And things I wish I did differently. I think just, I guess having these internal conversations with myself [00:46:00] earlier, you know, I’m in my mid 30’s now, not too old, not too young.
But you know, if I kind of had these realizations earlier on that I truly had the capability to do what I wanted to do and actually. You know, put myself to work and doing the hard work of figuring out what that was you know, I think I would have been a little further along, but also regret is like a stupid thing because it’s wasted energy and I’m here now.
So I don’t know. I mean, I won’t know until I die, whether or not the decisions I made were right. And maybe I won’t even know then. So.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah. I’m with you. So you mentioned you really liked the outdoors and doing, you know, outdoorsy types of things. I know you’re really busy running these two different, you know, your law firm and HeyCounsel how often do you get out and get to do stuff? And what do you do for fun?
Brian Scherer: Well, I live in San Diego, so it’s easy. It’s easy to get out and do stuff. I surf now a lot. I surf in the mornings. When I [00:47:00] can I think having my wife and I had a baby that’s kind of thrown off my routine a little bit. But try to get out there. We have a good balance. We both know it’s important for both of us to get our outdoors time.
So, so we do a little bit of uh, sharing the responsibilities there, but yeah, I surf a lot. I try to work out in the morning, every morning, it puts me in a good mindset. And that’s, basically my routine.
Jonathan Hawkins: So how old’s your baby?
Brian Scherer: Uh, 11, almost 11 months.
Jonathan Hawkins: Ooh, yeah. You’re busy, man. You got a law firm, a business and a baby. That’s a lot, man.
Brian Scherer: It’s good, it’s busy. It’s really, the baby is. One thing I learned, I was so nervous about having a baby because I thought my career and my life had to be in such a good place before it happened. And then we had the baby anyways, and I realized the shot, there was no shot clock and life goes on and it’s truly been awesome being a dad.
Jonathan Hawkins: So, and that’s a really good point. There’s never the right time for anything [00:48:00] to start anything, whether they’re having a baby, start a business, start a firm, there’s never the right, perfect time. You just got to do it. Right.
Brian Scherer: You just got to jump in. That’s a hundred percent true. Yeah. There’s never going to be a good time to do anything. The right time is now.
Jonathan Hawkins: So now that you’re a surfer, there’s probably got, there’s probably some good. Metaphors about catching waves or whatever that you can apply to business or life, you got any good ones that you can pull out quickly?
Brian Scherer: I was going to write a book about this. I swear. Surfing is a great teacher. So not every wave is your wave. I would start with that. If you paddle for every single thing that you think is an opportunity. You’re going to exhaust yourself and you’re not going to catch any. So, that’s a really good one.
Another one is you can’t just wait for the wave to come to you. There’s actually some, they call it like, I mean, you basically have to paddle into the point. And that just means there’s a place that you have to get to. And some pre work you have to do to [00:49:00] even get on the wave. So opportunities don’t just fall on your hand. You have to put yourself in the right position to get the opportunity.
So those are the two things. It’s like, you can’t paddle for everything. But you still gotta paddle. You still gotta do the work to get in the right position. I forget where I heard this, but like, maybe it was the NVIDIA CEO, what’s his name, Jensen.
He said like, you gotta be, the apple may fall out of the tree, but you gotta like, you still gotta be under the a under the tree . Like, you still gotta be in the right position to catch the apple. Like part of that I know that’s not a surfing metaphor, but yeah. You gotta be able to paddle to the point.
And that’s the metaphor. Yeah. There’s a lot of surfing man.
Jonathan Hawkins: Those were two good ones. I wrote those down. That’s, That’s good. You know, the other one, one that I think of, I’m not a surfer, but the one I think of is when the wave is there, you got to ride it and ride it hard, right?
Brian Scherer: Yeah. You don’t have, like, too many opportunities, too. So that’s another thing. Like, surfing is actually an interesting sport to try to [00:50:00] learn, especially like late in life, because I picked up when I was 27. You don’t get many shots even when you’re practicing. Like if you’re learning how to play tennis, you can go to a wall and hit the ball a thousand times against the wall and work on your swing.
When you’re surfing, like the only time you get to actually work on surfing minus like some stuff you can do on the ground is like when you’re on a wave and that doesn’t happen too often, especially early on. So like your reps are so small and your window is so small to actually learn how to do things in real life.
So it’s a really tough sport to learn and like stick with. It’s probably the only thing that I’ve like really beyond HeyCounsel that I’ve really stuck with. And kind of like fought through it’s but it’s fine, man. If you ever get the opportunity.
Jonathan Hawkins: All right. A couple more questions. If you weren’t practicing law or running a council, what do you think you’d be doing?
Brian Scherer: I would probably be helping my wife run her business.
Jonathan Hawkins: What does she do? want to, You want to plug her business? What does she do?
Brian Scherer: [00:51:00] Absolutely. She’s a professional home organizer and she started her business about six months before I started HeyCounsel. We both were W2 employees before that. She had this calling basically for her entire adult life that she, you know, she was good at organizing, turning chaos into not chaos and she took a flyer.
She just made a leap and started taking on clients. Organizing their homes, their belongings. Now she has three years later, she has a team of 10. And we, her business is called ready, set, organize, and she’s the, top rated on Yelp and, you know, number one on Google she’s in San Diego.
She’s, awesome. He’s killing it and only growing. So she is going to make me a stay at home dad. Hopefully.
Jonathan Hawkins: It sounds like she needs a reality TV show. That’s what it, I think that’s next.
Brian Scherer: I agree. I think the problem is like. She hasn’t gotten used to being on [00:52:00] camera and like for social media. I mean, you probably get it cause you’re running a podcast and it doesn’t come naturally to most people. You do seem like a natural, but I’m sure it wasn’t that way in the beginning. And for her, it’s like, she has to record herself for all these TikTok’s and Instagrams.
And she, calls it like cringe mountain. She’s like, I have to get over cringe mountain before I can like actually do this. So maybe one day there’s a TV show.
Jonathan Hawkins: I mean, I think that’d be a really interesting TV show. I mean, you go in to see the, the shit show and then the other side of it. Right.
Brian Scherer: Yeah, I mean, it’s a lot. There’s also a ton of hoarder, like, TV shows out there that she’s like, I can’t even watch this stuff. It’s so brutal.
Jonathan Hawkins: Oh yeah, be tough. Well, cool, man. You know, there’s a whole lot more we could talk about, but I want to be respectful of your time and we’ve been going a while now, but this has been real fun. I like, again, I like what you’re doing over there. HeyCounsel been real impressed with what I’ve seen and I’m not super active in there.
I mean, I’m not as active as the other folks in there. It’s really sort of amazing. So keep doing what you’re doing and [00:53:00] uh, you know. It’ll be fun to watch. So for people out there that want to get in touch with you, you know, plug HeyCounsel again. Is there any, any other way that would be good to find you connect with you?
Brian Scherer: Yeah, I mean, I’m active on LinkedIn. You can shoot me a message on LinkedIn. Otherwise, HeyCounsel is where you’ll find me BrianHeyCounsel.com is my email. Feel free to reach out and if you want to join the community, just apply HeyCounsel.Com.
Jonathan Hawkins: Sweet. Brian, it’s been fun, man.
Brian Scherer: Likewise. Thanks for having me. It’s been nice going through the memory lane.
Jonathan Hawkins: It’s fun to look back and see how far you’ve come, right?
Brian Scherer: It is, you know, It’s felt like just a good conversation. So thank you.
[00:54:00]
