Lawyerpreneur

Claire Parsons discusses how her mindfulness practice has helped her be a happier person and a better lawyer. We talk about how writing and speaking about mindfulness and struggles she has experienced has opened up a new community to her. And we discuss the importance of getting comfortable with your own weirdness.

You can find and follow Claire on LinkedIn and on her YouTube channel.

 When you love your work as an intellectual property rights lawyer and you're an artist at heart and you have small children, that might all culminate into writing a children's book to help children understand what intellectual property is from an early age. Or at least that's what happened for Atlanta-based lawyer, Becki C. Lee. 

After writing a poem about what patents, trademarks, and copyright are so that young entrepreneurs, creatives, and tinkerers could be educated and empowered to understand their IP rights from an early age, Becki enlisted the help of her former bandmate, Walter Jaczkowski, to illustrate the book.

This interview is all about Becki C. Lee's journey as a person, the development of her new book Do You Draw Pictures?, and what's next.

Buy the book from your preferred retailer: Do You Draw Pictures?

Visit Becki C. Lee at littlegavels.com.

For as long as I've had the idea for Lawyerpreneur, Marc Randazza was always on the list of people I wanted to talk to. Sometimes when you've been thinking about something for so long and built up an expectation for it, you find that the thing can't actually live up to it. 

But that wasn't the situation with Marc Randazza. Here's a list of topics we discussed:

• Getting started in 1st Amendment work
• Why writing articles and opinion pieces has been important for Randazza
• Representing people on the fringes of society
• Using the press to help build your platform
• Marc's advice for entrepreneurial lawyers

Be authentic. Be true. Present your successes. Talk about your failures. Discuss your struggles. Provide useful content. Develop relationships, not networks. These ideas are the core of Alex Su's social media marketing success. But they aren't just principles he applies, they are a part of who he has formed himself into. 

In Episode 24 of Lawyerpreneur, Sam Mollaei talks about the importance of being virtual, scalability, and automation in his law practice.

For a while after my interview with Sam, I was thinking about our conversation (and there was a lot to think about). I was struck with a line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when Butch says, "I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals." That's what it was like talking with Sam. He's applying proven business principles that five years from now, other lawyers will still be arguing with themselves that those ideas just wont work in their law practices. Sam's got vision while so many others are wearing bifocals. 

After a career in corporate America, Ruth Kaufman launched into her second act, leaving the security of her day job behind. Kaufman had been acting and doing voice work for two decades, a long enough runaway that she was confident in her ability to succeed in the creative work she was prepared to make her day job. In Episode 23 of Lawyerpreneur, Kaufman and I discuss her second act of acting, writing award-winning novels, and other creative work.

 This is the Lawyerpreneur episode that I should have recorded yesterday. That I should have released yesterday. But I didn't. You want to know why? Because I chickened out. Because this episode is about how personal relationships are central to our businesses and necessary for our long-term success. And it's somewhat personal, so I bailed on it.

So I've tried to redeem myself today. This episode is about the business of personal relationships and our obligation to use our platforms to help elevate others. 

Our regularly scheduled programming got derailed by both life and work this past week. So Episode 21 of Lawyerpreneur is a short episode with updates about various projects I'm working on both on my own and with other lawyers, and how you can interact with them.

My "What I'm Doing Now" page: jeremywrichter.com/now/

Do You Draw Pictures? by Becki C. Lee and Walter Jaczkowski.

Articles about the business and craft of writing at expectantwriter.com.

In today's episode, I discuss what to do if your big break never happens and the myth of the overnight success story. But I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise, most "big breaks" are the culmination of years of hard work and determination by people who kept showing up every day and doing their work.

Portions of this episode are an excerpt from my book Stop Putting Out Fires.

 In Episode 19 of Lawyerpreneur, Lisa Lilly and I discuss her transition from full-time lawyer to having an author business as the primary source of her income. We also talk about how operating her own firm gave Lisa the confidence to know she could successfully run her indie author business.

Lisa Lilly: https://lisalilly.com/

Lisa's Writing Blog: https://www.writingasasecondcareer.com/

Lawyerprenuer: https://www.jeremywrichter.com/lawyerpreneur/