Vivek Jayaram is the founder of Jayaram Law, an IP and business firm he’s run for 17 years.
He represents artists, musicians, fashion brands, and tech founders. He teaches at the University of Miami Law School. And in 2026 his firm was named to Fashion Law’s list of the top US firms for fashion and retail, the youngest firm to make it by about half a century.
Here’s our conversation.
Morgan: You do tons of work with creative people, and the firm carries your name. How have you thought about your brand, both as an executive and as a firm, over 17 years?
Vivek: I appreciate the question, and I’ll try to answer it with as much humility as possible, because it might sound like I’m full of myself.
From the beginning, one of my aspirations with Jayaram was to build the first real brand in legal. If you look across our industry, there are firms a lot of us know. Kirkland and Ellis, Skadden, the big ones. But I bet if you stopped people on the street anywhere in the country, from New York to Cleveland to the middle of Nebraska, and asked them to name five law firms, very few could do it.
I don’t think that’s a failure exactly, but law firms have gotten very big and very profitable while never really focusing on their brand. And you saw where that leads recently, with the capitulation to the current administration. If you’re a brand with values, those values guide your decisions. A lot of firms realized they didn’t really live by any values or mission. They were just service providers doing whatever was best for the bottom line.
So from the first couple of months, I wanted to model everything, the identity, the website, how we talked, how we showed up, not after other law firms, but after all the great brands I loved. If you’re in the service business, maybe your clients would appreciate you connecting with them and presenting yourself as relatable, rather than looking exactly like every one of your peers. That was the big-picture philosophy, and over 17 years it’s shown up in everything, from the way we dress to the way the offices look.
Morgan: Who were the brands you looked to when you were building that early identity?
Vivek: It may sound cliche, but I’m still inspired by the Steve Jobs era of Apple.
I’m 48, so I was a teenager and a young adult in the 90s and early 2000s. I was a computer kid. I researched all of it, the Gateways, the Dells, the IBMs, the Apple IIGS. And Apple was delivering the same product everyone else was. A hard drive, a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse. Functionally, nothing different.
But when you opened the Apple packaging, or saw the ad, or heard Steve Jobs talk about the product, it made you feel something completely different than opening the box of the cheap laptop I had my first year of law school. Jobs showed us that design and aesthetics make a material, substantive difference in both products and services.
So everything we do is intentional in that same spirit. The identity, the newspaper we send out, the sneakers we make for the team every year, the holiday gifts, the objects in the office, the events. We’re confined by the same bar rules as every other lawyer. We’re still lawyers. But the way we deliver it, and who we deliver it for, I hope makes our clients and our community feel differently.
Morgan: For anyone who hasn’t seen your videos, you’ve got giant cracks in your office walls, chairs coming out of the walls. Where did these ideas come from? Did you design it all as you went?
Vivek: This is really the origin story.
I’ve played music my whole life and loved all the arts as long as I can remember. Visual art, music, fashion, film, poetry, books, all of it. When I graduated law school, my first job was a clerkship for a great federal judge, which I loved. Then I went into big law, met a lot of great people, got good training. But the culture was completely foreign to me. It didn’t fit who I was.
After a few years of long hours, I realized I was getting detached from the creative community I’d spent my first 25 to 30 years in. That was the spark for Jayaram. I was 29 and I had much more confusion than clarity, but the one nugget of clarity I had was that I wanted to work with creative people. That was it.
And I cast a very broad definition of creative. My first clients were friends. People starting a fashion brand, a couple of musicians, sculptors, visual artists, a few tech founders. People forget that back then, up through about 2013 or 2014, the tech world and the creative world were in the same rooms. Somewhere between the financial crisis and the pandemic, tech went from Soho to Wall Street and lost some of that luster. But back then, that’s how our tech practice developed, because those founders were in the same rooms as the artists and designers.
I didn’t want to draw the hard, bright lines lawyers tend to draw around the attorney-client relationship. If you’d asked 100 creative people in 2010 their impression of lawyers, 99 would have said stiff, inaccessible, speaking a language we don’t understand, so we just don’t use them. So from the beginning we had almost a co-op feel. Yes, we did the legal work, but if a client needed an investor to get a project off the ground, we used our network. If they needed a downtown space for an exhibition or a pop-up, we helped find it.
A few weeks ago we helped put together a deal between two of our clients, KidSuper and Inter Miami. One comes to me looking for a soccer arena to do a fashion runway show, and I think, I’ve got a guy. That spirit is what birthed a lot of this, and it’s why we’ve done everything we’ve done for Daniel Arsham over the years, including producing our own shows of his work during Art Basel Miami Beach.
So when you ask why there are eroded sculptures in the office, for us it feels natural. It just feels like being ourselves. And if I’ve learned one thing in 20 years, it’s that being yourself is always the right answer. It’s also one of the hardest things to figure out. That “for real, be real” is what got me out of big law. An office with mahogany and cubicles and a library, that’s not us. This feels right for us.
Morgan: You’ve said that to advise an industry, you have to be inside it. You’re at the fashion weeks, the exhibitions, the openings. How do you give honest, balanced counsel while wearing so many hats?
Vivek: At the end of the day my job is simple. I’m a problem solver. Given my expertise it’s usually a legal problem, but often it starts legal and morphs into a business problem.
One thing I’ve never understood is lawyers who say, “I’m going to stay silent, that’s a business question.” Then what are we here for? You’re advising the business. If your legal advice isn’t tied to the business reality, it’s probably not the most valuable advice you could give. I’m not saying we substitute ourselves in as CEO. But to solve the problem, you have to place the solution squarely within the best interest of the business.
Last week someone said they were looking for an early-stage investor for their CPG brand. Not a legal question. But I represent a VC on the West Coast who only invests in CPG. So I get them on a call and introduce them. Once you’re providing solutions and value, it compounds. You build your network, you get introduced to more people with more problems. That’s a big part of the game.
Morgan: A lot of people think of attorneys, especially in IP, as being about restriction. What you can’t do. Your firm’s positioning is the opposite. Talk about that.
Vivek: We literally have a written mission, and everyone who joins signs off that they understand it. The mission is to enable original ideas.
And that’s consistent with something the founding fathers put in the Constitution 250 years ago. A lot of people are surprised to learn intellectual property is in the Constitution. It’s not there to stop people or as a restriction. It says right there in the document that it exists to incentivize Americans to make things, to be creative. I think that’s beautiful, because I believe most human beings, left to ourselves, would be pursuing something creative. We’re a creative species.
So IP law isn’t there to restrict people, it’s there to incentivize them to make cool stuff. Sometimes we do that by creating IP, sometimes by licensing it, and believe it or not, sometimes by enforcing it. You stop someone else from using your IP not because that’s the point of existing, but because protecting it incentivizes the creation. Through the whole two-party system over hundreds of years, our IP system has worked pretty well. There are inequities, and you see some now with streaming and Ticketmaster in music. But by and large it works.
Morgan: You represent MSCHF whose whole thing is toeing the line. For anyone who hasn’t heard of the Cease and Desist Grand Prix, brands were practically racing to sue them. Tell us about that.
Vivek: MSCHF is a client, and their GC, John Belcaster, is one of the smartest lawyers I’ve ever worked with. They create artworks and products that toe the line between infringement and non-infringement. The Cease and Desist Grand Prix jersey was a bicycle racing jersey covered in the logos of about 20 of the most prominent US trademarks. Subway, McDonald’s, Burger King, Google, others.
And here’s the interesting part. They never got sued. Subway actually joined in and had some fun with it on Twitter. Each of their projects plays with parody, satire, the First Amendment, infringement.
John and I both teach at the University of Miami, and there’s a line of his that always gets a laugh but contains real wisdom. When MSCHF’s artists come to him with an idea, his answer is always yes, unless it’s criminally illegal. That gets the laugh, but honestly that’s how I advise everyone. Because if it’s not criminally illegal, then it’s just a matter of risk. Civil lawyering is a risk allocation exercise. Sure, go do that. You might get sued for breach of contract, or trademark infringement, or tortious interference. Those are the consequences, and I think we have defenses.
I’m the last lawyer who will tell you not to do something. I’ll identify every risk for you. But when you tell me you want to build a ladder to the moon, I’m going to do everything within the bounds of the law to get you there. It might be incredibly risky, but I’ll get you there. The client whose problem it is, and who’s paying for the advice, gets to decide how much risk to absorb.
Morgan: So what’s the lawyer’s job when the lawsuit is the marketing?
Vivek: They’ve had some great cases. The Wavy Baby case was great. And the one I’m proudest of was the Big Red Boot. We got trade dress protection for it from the USPTO by proving that even though it was just a red boot, it was a very specific red boot that the world immediately recognized. There were a lot of naysayers who said we’d never get it. It was a cool collaboration to advance those arguments and prevail. It also helps when your client is willing to take those leaps with you.
Morgan: As brands try to protect their distinctiveness, what do founders get wrong about what’s actually protectable versus what’s just vibes?
Vivek: A few things. With copyright, people don’t realize until they talk to a lawyer that ideas aren’t copyrightable. You have to fix it in a tangible medium, put it down on paper or in a file. On the trademark side, likelihood of confusion trips people up. They think, I can’t call it Nike, so I’ll call it Nikes, add an S, that’s fine. No, you can’t, because the test is whether it’s likely to be confusing.
And this goes to a hot-button issue the New York Times covered extensively last year: can you protect a vibe? A vibe is a look and a feel, and you probably can’t protect it. The closest tool is trade dress, but it’s not easy. Color palettes, the overall look of something, those are hard to protect. Which is exactly why you should talk to an IP lawyer at the beginning of the process, so you understand what’s protectable.
Because I’ve validated this enough over my career: at the end of the day, all of the value in any brand is in the IP. Anybody can source the same great merino wool or leather or cotton. But only one brand can have the guy on the horse, or the alligator, or the LV monogram. Those trademarks are the entire value of the brand. Same with musicians. The reason a name, image, and likeness is valuable is the catalog, which is copyright.
Morgan: I work with a lot of growth-stage companies, and what I hear is “we’ve got time to figure out the identity and the language later.” How important is it to get it right from the very beginning?
Vivek: Yes and no. I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it.
The one thing you need to get right at the very beginning is the name. And to choose the name, you need to run a real trademark search. Not “I did a Google search and there’s nothing out there,” or “I checked the USPTO and it came up empty.” That’s not comprehensive. You need a real search by someone who knows how to analyze it and find all the common-law uses.
Here’s why. We’re at the tail end of a mid-six-figure situation right now because a startup didn’t run a search, grew tremendously over four years, and got sued by a smaller company that had used the same name two years longer, in a similar class of goods. That whole headache could have been avoided with a $2,000 search at the beginning. And the legal fees aren’t even the biggest loss. Now that they’re established, they have to rebrand. New website, new social handles, new everything. All the equity, gone.
I have founders tell me, we love this name, we’re not going to run a search. And I say, listen, at the very beginning you may love it and it may be a great name. But guess who doesn’t love it yet? Everyone else, because you haven’t launched. Nobody knows it. So it’s okay to fall in love with it, as long as you’re okay falling out of love with it when a lawyer tells you it’s not available.
Right now there’s a big show about to launch that we’re holding up, because I have a much smaller client who has the senior trademark rights. It was supposed to launch last week. Now it’s on hold. All because they didn’t run a search.
So to the early-stage people: form your Delaware C-corp, get your stack in place. Logo? I don’t care about your logo at first. It might change, ours did, logos can add energy in a rebrand. But that main name, the word mark, lock it up early so you don’t deal with these shenanigans a few years in.
Morgan: You were named to Fashion Law’s 2026 list of top US firms, the youngest to make it by roughly 50 years. And clearly you didn’t get there by imitating other firms. How do you do it uniquely you?
Vivek: It’s ironic, but I really believe the best version of yourself is just yourself. The authentic you. The minute you stop taking all these other swings, trying to be someone you’re not, playing this game and that game, and just decide to be yourself, that’s the most successful version of you. And the irony is that’s the version of us that ended up on a list next to the big firms.
How did we get there? Instinct, and being in the real world. We show up to Fashion Week to meet the people building the industry and see how brands show up. We do CLEs and workshops for the fashion industry, and we run a pro bono program for emerging fashion brands called the Creative Legal Alliance. We’re just trying to solve problems and support people.
The legal standard for trademark infringement is likelihood of confusion. If you’re trying to figure out whether brand A is confusingly similar to brand B, understanding the fashion business, the designers, the inspirations, the competitors, it’s a no-brainer to look at the brands in the real world rather than only sitting in a bar association conference talking trademark law with other lawyers. Both can help, but you understand what I’m saying.
Our industry tends to box itself into a very specific look and manner of talking and writing. That’s fine, everyone should do what they want. But there’s room to spread your wings and do it differently. Clients come in every color and stripe, so it only makes sense that their advisors are varied too. I’ve gotten notes from younger people saying it gave them a little encouragement to follow their instinct, and that means a lot.
Morgan: Where’s the easiest place for people to reach you?
Vivek: Email me at [email protected], or DM me on Instagram or LinkedIn. I’m very easy to find. You’ll probably even see my phone number out there somewhere. Morgan, it’s been great getting to know you over the years. I love the way you show up, online and in person.
That’s this week’s episode of Chief Brand. You can listen to every episode here.
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