Since I fell in love with rock climbing in 1999, Yvon Chouinard has been one of my heroes. In December 2005, I learned about his business philosophy through his enthralling autobiography, Let My People Go Surfing. In the pages of this book, I discovered the social enterprise community, and my life & legal practice immediately changed. For the better.
First, in January 2006, Brand Geek joined 1% for the Planet. I began providing pro bono IP legal services to the organization, and was invited to join 1% for the Planet’s inaugural outside Board of Directors in June 2006, on which I served as Secretary of the Board through December 2009. Serving on that Board (and surfing!) with Yvon forever will remain one of the highlights of my career.
Soon, I realized that my law firm could operate much more consciously, first through its own practices, and then through the clients it serves. Recognizing that the planet needs all the legal support it can get, I took on pro bono work for several environmental non-profits. And then came my epiphany. I realized numerous benefits come from working with other social enterprises. For one, the people are awesome! I strive to WOW my clients by exceeding their expectations for what an attorney-client relationship can be. That’s easy to do while serving people whom I admire and consider friends. I also discovered that being in tune with the clients I serve has enabled me to see things others miss, which uniquely helps me protect my clients’ brands and avoid potentially costly mistakes. Most importantly, we are stronger together than we are on our own — there’s a multiplier effect when do-gooder businesses do business together; our collective impact is so much greater than what we can achieve individually.
In February 2009, I joined Rimon Law Group, which was also a Certified B Corporation at the time and one of the first businesses to become a California benefit corporation. I served as a Partner and the Chief Sustainability Officer at Rimon until July 2012, when I joined Exemplar Law as a Partner and their Sustainability Steward (akin to a Chief Sustainability Officer). Rimon was the first corporate law firm nationwide to fully adopt project-based billing, abandoning hourly billing entirely (hooray!), a feature that Brand Geek maintains today. I left Exemplar in 2015 and returned to running Brand Geek.
Lawyers love to tell you that brands embody goodwill. While goodwill is that touchy-feely emotional experience that stakeholders have when interacting with the brands they support, more pragmatically, it’s also the quantifiable likelihood of repeat and new engagement with stakeholders, be it with one’s employees, contractors, suppliers, investors, or purchasers. It’s the brand recognition that keeps stakeholders engaged. Goodwill is an asset that can be booked on a balance sheet and leveraged as security for debt. But it’s those feelings that motivate me to do the work I do. The feelings of community, purpose, and joy that I experience from the brands I represent is for me what it is all about.
