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Welcome to another game changing episode of Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur podcast. Legal challenges can make or break a growing business. But what if startups scaling companies could access top tier legal expertise exactly when they needed it without the hefty overhead of an in house team? Well, today's guest is revolutionizing the way businesses handle legal strategy, making it smarter, more efficient and completely scalable. As founder of Intellectual Strategies, he pioneered the fractional legal team model, giving entrepreneurs a flexible, cost effective way to navigate everything from early legal hurdles to high stakes scaling decisions. With a background in electrical engineering, law and business, he's the rare blend of inventor, strategist and attorney you'll uniquely position to bridge the gap between technology, intellectual property and business growth. He was admitted to the practice law in California, Utah and before the US Patent and Trade Office. He spent over two decades tackling complex business and legal challenges, helping ambitious companies protect their innovations and scale with confidence. So if you're an entrepreneur looking to stay ahead of those legal pitfalls and power your growth strategy, this is the episode you want to listen to.

Because today, joined by the legendary Jeff Holman. Jeff, thank you so much for being here.

I'm glad to be here and I'm glad to learn that I've achieved legendary status, apparently.

Well, with everything you've done in your life so far, I would have to slap on that title of legendary. If you don't want it, I, I could take it off.

I don't, I don't mind it. I'm not finding you on it, I'm just acknowledging it.

Ah, okay. You're just accepting it into your life. Now you can go and tell all your friends.

That's right, that's right.

Podcaster called me legendary. But Jeff, I'm interested because you come from electrical engineering, which is one thing that's very structured, and go to practice law, which is again somewhat structured but still in that gray area depending on where you're going, because you got to use those words and now business, they don't fit together because you're losing the structure if you go at it. If you look at it from engineering to business, like there's a lack of like full on structure. Like where I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, engineering, you know. So I want to know what made you decide to, you know, jump into different fields and now become an entrepreneur?

Oh, I don't know if anything made me decide, man. It's just, just who I am. Right. Isn't that how entrepreneurs are? They're, you're kind of born, not that you can't adapt and acquire skills, but you're kind of born with this mental attitude of hey, that's kind of cool, I'll try that out. And you're also born with this attitude of hey, this is really chaotic. But I think it doesn't really bother me that much. So you've got to really be able to absorb the chaos, I think. So.

I don't know, I view it maybe the engineering side of me just kind of separates them out and like, well, there's this engineering layer and there's this legal layer and there's this business layer and you know, which ones do I draw from? In any given circumstance, you know, it's probably, probably a, just play it by ear and see what skills I can bring to the table, I guess.

And I'm curious, when was your first brush with entrepreneurship? Was it very young? Like, were you surrounded by entrepreneurs at a young age or was it, hey, a midlife crisis or quarter life crisis or some sort of crisis may have. Hop this up.

Oh, if, if I'm looking back at my life, the two, the two first instances I think for entrepreneurship. One, my dad has been a, his own, he's run his own company for 45 years. He does real estate development. You can't get a much more chaotic, big swinging type of business than real estate. Right? You, you win big, you lose big and you carry on. So I've, I've, I'm sure that I've inherited quite a bit from him, both genetically possibly and just watching him go through his business. The other one that stands out to me is I was doing something, I don't remember if it was part of like a scouting activity or something outside of that. And I was walking around the neighborhood trying to sell like stuff out of a magazine.

It was like wrapping paper and it was probably a fundraiser for school. I don't even know, but I vividly remember failing at that. And I had to go back to some of these neighbors and be like, yeah, I never finished this, here's your money back. And just thinking that wasn't a great experience. So you might think with that experience, I, I would have avoided being an entrepreneur. But, but no, I didn't. I, I actually love the chaos of.

It because, yeah, as you said, like, having to go back and admit it defeats. It hit you in one of two ways, either being okay with the defeat and going, okay, next time I have to do better. This is very shameful. I don't want anyone to know this, so I'm going to go do things that I won't fail at, I won't, you know, fail at, so I don't have to bear that shame anymore was.

I don't know how to find those activities. Even, even this morning. I, I usually play tennis pretty well, but this morning was terrible. I, I won seven games total out of three sets, which, if you don't play tennis, six of those games came winning one set with a partner, and one game came out of the other two sets. Had I won, I would have won 12. So it was like one out of 12. It was terrible. I mean, that was a long path for.

Oh, it made perfect sense to me. The engineering didn't. The engineers will know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I played one set really, really well. I'll translate it into business speak. I played one set really, really well. And with me and my partner, I played two more sets terribly, and we lost terribly. So defeat's just, that's just part of life, right? Not that, not that I love it.

I don't love it at all. I, I kind of hate it, probably like a lot of you guys do. But it's, I've, I've learned to accept it better. There's a lot less shame than that day that I had to go back as, you know, like a eight or nine year old and say, hey, here's, here's your check back. So.

And this is what I want to kind of touch on because you, you, you said, said that you're not ashamed to lose. Was that something that you just naturally kind of had, or did you have to kind of build up a resiliency to make sure that when you did fail, it didn't hurt as much, you know, like losing two sets of tennis to one. I think I said that properly. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

So is this something I built? I don't know if I built. You know, here's what I'd say. I would say I probably mask it as much as anything I mean, none of us love to lose. None of us. So it might be a bit of a stretch to say, oh, there's never any embarrassment, you know, with a loss. None of us love it. I kind of get too invested in some of my clients and I hate to, I hate to let them down even. Right.

Even though that's not a loss, but I can't. Maybe we can't accomplish something that they want to do for whatever reason, and I hate to even tell them that, but I guess I just mask it. I say, well, the engineering side of me, since we've kind of gone this way already, the engineering side of me says, well, in the overall system of things, this one thing isn't going to make or break me. It's just one more experience and if I can learn from it, I actually am better off. And again, in the grand scheme of things, system level thinking, that's not a bad thing.

And do you think that helps you being the entrepreneur side, having that understanding, like, hey, this may, this may suck now, but in the big scheme of this doesn't suck and I can learn for sure.

Yeah, it definitely does. I would call it solution oriented. Right. It's, it's a matter of you look at a situation and say, well, you know, how do we get here? And we can either sit and say, well, that was terrible and that sucked and I hate this person and I can't believe, you know, circumstances came out this way and we didn't. Like, you can sit and focus on all the stuff that happened. But, but I have a buddy who called me up or texted me the other day and he said, hey, I just, I just pulled a Jeff Holman on, you know, another friend of ours. I'm like, what does that mean? He's like, he was complaining to me about his business a little bit and I said what? You would say what you said to me lots of times, oh, wow, what's your next step now? You know, what are you gonna. What, what, what, how are you gonna, how are you gonna, how are you gonna maneuver this one? You know, so it's kind of like, you know, next step, solution oriented thinking.

I think that's what it really is.

I love that with what you do. Like, I wanna know, like, obviously you've defended a lot of patents for small, big sized companies, right? As, as an attorney. What is one thing that entrepreneurs specifically in the digital world, because it's a completely different world than the physical world. What is one thing that us business owners should look for when we're in the digital world to protect ourselves from maybe patent issues or any type of legal issues.

Yeah. So the number one thing with any entrepreneur, patents or other legal stuff would be document what you're doing. I mean document in a way that says, here's what we discuss what we decided and in enough detail. It doesn't always have to be a legal document, that'd be great. But it's expensive and kind of formal. But document, how did you know? What are the two perspectives of the people that are entering into an arrangement thinking and get that on paper, get people to sign it, Be like, yeah, that's what I'm thinking. And that's what I'm thinking. If you can document it, you would be leaps and bounds ahead of other inventors, other business owners.

I mean, from a patent perspective, if I can broaden that out to IP broadly, because patents are about inventions and trademarks are about brand and copyrights are about creations. Right. There's kind of a whole bunch of different big bucket. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, on your wall there you've got, you know, one of the icons of ip, you know, Mickey Mouse. Yes, Mickey Mouse has been the driver behind us copyright laws getting changed over the years to protect Mickey Mouse. Or I guess it's Steamboat Willie. Right.

The predecessor to Mickey Mouse. Anyway, with ip, the one thing I would say about IP in particular, because I think IP is critical for businesses is it can be one of the most powerful but most valuable tools in your toolbox. It might not seem like the most urgent or the most important if you're thinking of Stephen Covey's quadrant four quadrants type of approach. But it is probably eventually for a successful business, one of the most important pieces of one of the most important assets you can have in your business. So it's a speculative bet because all ip, you kind of secure it up front, you push for it, you apply for it, you pay for it and you hope your business will turn out. And when it doesn't, you wish you hadn't spent the money, but when it does, you wish you had spent the money on the right IP for sure.

How did the idea of creating this fractional legal team come about? Because obviously, yes, having an in house attorney seems to be only for, you know, the members of billions. And the other show that I'm forgetting right now was based off the Murdochs. But you know, like the rich and powerful seems to only be the companies that have an in house legal team of one too many. How did you come up with the idea to help out the Smaller people.

You know, it was an evolution. Like a lot of businesses a little like, you know, start something, take action, pivot, you know, observe, figure out. That didn't work quite as well. Maybe there's another thing. So it's a, it really was a series of little things, maybe one or two pivot points, like critical points in that journey. I went in house, I'd run my own law firm, I'd been an attorney for a bunch of companies. And I went in house and like two weeks and I said, I'm doing it wrong. This is not the right way.

This is not exactly what businesses need. And so that was a real eye opener for me to look at the executive team and be like, how do I really be a partner to the executive team? So that was number one. Number two was when I left an in house job, I was excited because of some of this new perspective I'm getting to start my practice again and operate with startups and scaling companies exclusively. And when I did that, I kind of fell into this fractional general counsel role because this company wanted to keep me on. They wanted me to help them find their new gc, the new general counsel. And I thought one or two months later, I move on a little bit. It wasn't, it was a year and a half later, it took them. So I just operated in pretty much the same capacity I'd been in when I was their employee.

But for the next 18 months I was doing my own thing and had other clients. And so I was experiencing a fractional role. Right. And then the third thing is every fractional that I know of, who operates by themselves, which most do they run into the same problem. You know, you become your, the biggest asset for your clients because you're bringing a wealth of experience and knowledge at a fraction of the price, fraction of the time. But you're also the biggest bottleneck for that, for that expertise. And as a, as a one person team, you can't get around that. So, you know, when I got to that point I said, well, again, there must be a little bit better way to do this.

You know, why don't we bring more experts to the table, why don't we widen that bottleneck a little bit? Because I might be a good attorney, but I'm a better bottleneck and I don't want to be. So, you know, so bottlenecking was, was really the driver. It was just noticing a problem and maybe using that engineer in me and saying, I bet we can solve this and, and so we're doing it now on a, with a team approach. And you know, it's, it's still, it's kind of a mix, right? It's bringing the expertise of a normal law firm to the table for companies, but it's also bringing the scalability of a fractional practice and kind of that integr, really collaborative nature of a fractional leader into the mix and just doing that. And sometimes I say that. I'm like, well, every law firm should be doing this, and they should, and many of them to some degree could, but they just don't. And they've chosen. They're stuck in a different type of practice.

They probably won't change. People like me will bring this to the table and we'll offer it where other people who could should. But don't.

I, I, I was going to ask you this because I, I'm interested because, yes, like you, like you said, there's a big shift in businesses now going like, hey, we don't have to work like five, five days in a row, 24 hours a day to build our business. We can do it like in four hours. There's a lot of help because of the Internet streamlining, yada, yada, yada. You hear about unicorns, make one solo solopreneur unicorn. As you know, I want to know, because you are kind of disrupting the legal world right now with what you're doing, becoming a fractional legal team. What has the response been from your lawyer colleagues who are still in that, you know, or your attorney colleagues? I don't, I don't know. Yeah, what's the proper term? But in the old school, kind of like, I don't want to say dinosaur because it's still current, but it looks like a possible stone age in doing business.

Yeah, lawyer and attorney in the U.S. same same thing. Use either one. So that's not, that's not a problem at all. You know, it's funny, it's funny you asked what my, what my colleagues, you know, I went to school, graduated with a bunch of people, get together with them still. We have lunch and, and every lunch they're like, so what are you doing now, J. What are you up to now? You know, when I, when I, when I was in my own practice before going in house, I, you know, had a law firm with a couple partners and we called ourselves by our last names as every law firm, you know, proper law firm should, I guess, went in house, came back out, and I'm like, I don't, you know, I don't want this to be tied to Jeff Holman. I mean, I'm a critical part of it, but, but I want my, my clients to see me as any of their business.

You know, you start a marketing agency, you don't normally these days call it by the partners, last names. You know, you don't even put their names on the, on the website. A lot of times it's just agency X and, and these are the services we offer. And you don't require the CEO of that company to be your point of contact on every single client. So I, you know, I called my law firm Intellectual Strategies, kind of a play on business strategy and intellectual property and IP strategy altogether. And my friends would be like, so are you practicing law? Like, what is that? Like, it was just a foreign, it's a foreign concept still to a lot of people. They're like, I don't, like, I don't get, like, why would you do that? And so from the legal field, it's a little bit mysterious, which I don't mind. From the business side of things, there's also this newness to it.

Right. And so anytime that you have something new from a branding perspective, you have to kind of balance, okay, do I. How descriptive is my brand versus unique, which is a total trademark thing that a trademark attorney should be doing. Right. How descriptive is it and how unique is the name and protectable. And then how much effort do I need to put into actually educating my clients as to what I do? And so there's kind of a balance. I struck a balance that I'm comfortable with, but there's a little educating. You don't hear the word Intellectual Strategies and say, that sounds like a fractional law firm.

You know, you just don't. So I, so I get the, I get the benefit of protecting my name because it's unique, but also educating my clients a little bit as to what we do, which is of course why I'm here talking with you and other people. And that's a, that's a good balance for me.

I love it. I like that you're, you're on the forefront because you are trying something new. It seems to be working. You're not, you know, unless that's an imaginary background, it looks like you're done. Fine. It's a real background, but you're, you're changing the game or at least changing a bit of it, how people think. And this is great because if there is any lawyers listening or potential lawyers listening, they're like, hey, I can do something similar to what Jeff's Doing maybe a small boutique style law firm that specializes in stuff. I love it that this is something I get to talk with entrepreneurs.

That's why I love talking with them, talking with you guys, because you guys change everything. It's amazing.

It's cool, isn't it? Because entrepreneurs, I mean, they're always coming up with hair brain ideas. You know, you, me, we, that's what we do. We just are like, well, what if we try that? Would that work? And it's not all about them. I know some guys, it's all about the money. I'm going to make as much money as I can, you know, and, you know, that's a part of it, I guess, for a lot of people. But I think again, going back to how we started, we're just kind of born with this need to create an experiment and see what happens.

I always say it's the curiosity. It's just I need to know how. I have a drive of needing to know how something works. That's mine. I know that's 100% me, that I need to know how business works. I need to know how podcasting works, I need to know how the algorithms work so I can figure out how I can help people to become famous. Famous and stuff like that. It's always like my need to know how.

Right?

Yeah, that's, that's a big driver of mine. That's my why, if you will. But I want to jump into the future because I've had a very interesting career so far. You touched on a lot of different things. You're doing a lot. Where do you see yourself personally, Jeff? And strategic. I just forgot intellectual strategies. Sorry.

In 10 years.

I could see intellectual strategies being 20 times the size we are right now. I've got a plan for it. I don't think 10 or 20 years is how long it will take us, but we've planned for growth and it's been five solid years of setting up the foundation for what we're doing. Maybe that makes me not a great entrepreneur in some ways. I see businesses that have gone from nothing, not even a thought in someone's head to a pitch at a local competition or a local group and then a two man team. And then they raised $3 million and now they're going on and some of them have sold. So I've seen the evolution of these entrepreneurs go really fast for some people in the time that I've been slowly building this, this product or this service the way that I want to build it. And so my philosophy might Be a little different from some of these really fast moving entrepreneurs.

But this is something that I can totally see building and making a difference for more and more companies over the next five or 10 years to the point where we're 20 times the size that we are and the structure's there in place. I feel like there's been a ton of good, not just academic, you know, spreadsheet number, but, but a lot of good practical information. A lot of good practical. You know, I don't even, I'm just blanking on the word, but just thought going into how do we structure this so it is a competitive, sustainable solution for, for our clients for the long term.

Where do you see yourself? What are you. What is Jeff doing? Is Jeff still CEO?

What was the time frame? What was the time frame?

In 10 years?

In 10 years, 10 years, I could totally be doing this. Yeah, if you had 10 years ago, what am I going to be doing? I'd be like, I don't know that I'm going to be practicing law anymore. I was running a law firm. I was doing all patents. I worked with innovators. I loved the innovators, but the practice was a little bit stale. It was a little bit recipe cookie cutter. And I was like, I need to be working with clients in a different way.

And I kind of took my route and followed that path for a bit, landed here, and I love it. I could do this long term. Which let me point out, because a lot of attorneys and some, some of these same friends that I mentioned, you know, I go to lunch with occasionally, they have hated their job since day one. I don't blame them for it. Right. I don't say that as like, oh, you're a terrible person or whatever, like you made a bad decision. It's none of that like, like they made a choice. Job satisfaction just was not a high priority for them, apparently.

Right. And 10 years ago I might have said the same thing. I'm like, I just not do what I want to do. Since I started this practice five years ago. Six. Six years ago, 2018, whatever that was. Seven years ago. Seven years ago.

I love what we're doing. It has ups and downs like any business. But I love what we're doing. I love who we're working with. I love the model. I love that it has longevity to it. I believe. I love that it brings a lot of value to clients who are day in and day out in chaos and trying to bring the thing in their brain into reality so that it ex.

And I just I love that. And this is something I knew long term for, for sure.

I love when someone finds their passion and they just. The fires lit, the boilers ready and they're going all in on it until the last breath.

The engineer in me wants to hide all of that, but you know, the business guy in me says no, let.

It out in the, the attorney, the orator and you has to, has to let everyone know. What do you do to invest in yourself? Because obviously you're an engineer, you're a law guru at this point in my eyes, or a legend, if you will. And you're a business guy, you figured out a new way of doing ordering that others haven't. How do you invest in yourself? What do you do to invest in yourself?

That's maybe 12 years ago, I would say, just thinking back on some milestones, I said to myself, I need to prioritize me and I'm married, I've got four kids, I have a great life. And just to pronunciate really well, I have a great life and I have a great wife and I've got great kids. I really like what I do. And all of that's come about in part because one of the decisions I made 12 or so years ago was to say, hey, I've got to make time for me in the morning. So my me time is really morning time. It's a fitness thing. You'll find me playing, like I mentioned, playing tennis. You'll find me playing soccer or futsal with friends.

Fortunately I can still do that and have fun at it. And you'll find me lifting weights. You might find me running a little bit, skiing, snowboarding on my mountain bike. There's, there's. I have a need to be outside, to be active. And if I do that on a daily basis, I'm pretty, I'm pretty revved up and ready to go every day.

So simple. I love it. The simplicity works the most. I find when you're investing in yourself and anything that can get your juices ready and going is the best thing. Yeah, we, we are unfortunately coming to the end, which I hate, because Jeff, you're, you're awesome. No wonder you're a great attorney. Talk and you tell stories and they're amazing and it's a great time, but I'm going backwards in time. We went forward before, we're going backwards to 10 year old Jeff.

He's sitting right here. You know, he, he had that little shame, you know, with not finishing the finish.

Fundraiser.

Yeah, fundraiser. Taking the check back, having to give that check back, he, he still feels that. What advice do you want to give back to young Jeff?

I think first I start off with an ACDC song, get little Jeff pumped up a little bit. I'd be like, you got this, man. You got a good life ahead of you. So the one thing that I've actually adopted this as my slogan for my law firm and that is innovate with confidence. You know, you're making me wonder like if I was sitting with a therapist right now, I'd be like, well, maybe this is the reason that confidence is so important. Because as a kid, when I was nine, you know, I don't know, I think confidence really, you know, that's what I would do for 10 year old Jeff. That's what I would do for my own kids. That's what I would do for my clients.

I'd be like, listen, what can we do to make sure that you have confidence in the process? And I think confidence comes from action, by taking action. And this is partly what makes it easier now to take action. It's like, well, fear is always forward thinking. It's kind of making the future, it's being afraid of the future, things that haven't happened, right? And taking action dispels fear because once you've acted, you actually know what's going to happen, you know, the results. There's no more reason to be afraid. You might not like the outcome particularly, but you don't have to fear it. You know, it's just, oh, well, that's what it is. Maybe it turns to sadness, maybe it turns to happiness, but it's no longer fear.

And once you dispel fear by action, what's left? I mean, you just, why not be confident, right? Why not say, I've been there, I've tried that, I'm still here. Like, let's, let's try the next thing. So confidence, that was the short answer too.

I love it. No, love the long answer, love the short answer because you just distilled everything again, showing your prowess as an attorney and an orator. I'm going to jump off stage here, Jeff. I want you to let my audience know where they can find you, follow you, maybe even if they're looking for some legal advice or need a fractional legal team, they can check you out. So the floor, sir, is yours.

Great. Happy to, happy to share. So we as a law firm are very available to potential clients. What we try to do is make ourselves available for a free 30 minute strategy call. So when people kind of want to figure out what their roadmap is coming up or they want to talk about the messes they've made and how to clean those up. Or maybe the future milestones they're working towards and how to align the legal actions with those milestones. We'll do a free 30 minute strategy call. A lot of people can jump on my website, intellectualstrategies.com and they can see exactly how to book a free strategy call there.

I'm also on LinkedIn a lot and I love connecting with people, so feel free to connect there. You'll see my picture and you'll see something that says building fractional legal teams or something like that. So happy to connect on LinkedIn. Also.

Jeff, I want to thank you so much for being an amazing guest here on the podcast, sharing your journey and your stories with us.

Thank you. It's been my pleasure.

Phil to my audience. Make sure you check out the show notes down below to connect with Jeff. I'll make sure you have his LinkedIn there as well as that link to that free 30 minute call that you guys consult that you can get with him and his legal team. I want to thank you all for listening. Again, a big thank you for Jeff for being here. And remember to always invest yourself.

Thanks for joining us on Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. The podcast mogul reminds you that your journey to freedom and success starts with one powerful move investing in yourself. If today's episode sparked your fire, hit that follow button on Spotify and drop us a comment. Share your wins, your challenges, and what drives you to break free from the corporate grind. Remember, you're your best investment. Always invest in yourself because your potential is limitless. Until next time, keep hustling and take control of your destiny.