JPG Legal

I formed a new entity through which I would develop legal tech software, called Communer. This entity would exist in a dual-entity structure with JPG Legal, handling the non-lawyer services that I plan to offer to entrepreneurs and small businesspeople.

Needed another law school graduate to help us with the work, so we hired one. Now we had a team of three! I started building out private offices for everybody with a contractor. He ended up disappearing with our money and the job mostly unfinished, so we hired somebody else to replace him and finish building the offices out.

It was clear that I was going to be hiring more employees soon and we were already cramped in the retail space. My girlfriend and I were also spending too much time running the retail space and not enough time on our online businesses. So we managed to get our entire security deposit back for the retail space and we moved into a large, beautiful office in DUMBO in an old converted warehouse, with views of the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges.

I had too much work for one person, so I had to hire somebody to help me with it. I hired a recent law school graduate. Initially she worked at a desk in the retail store in the Lower East Side of Manhattan that I ran with my girlfriend. I had to build out a lot of internal systems to switch from a one-person business to a multi-person business.

Moved from DC to NYC with my girlfriend (we met at the WeWork, where she also had an office for her business, funnily enough). We both wanted to move to NYC for various reasons. We opened a small retail store and crafting space on the Lower East Side about 1.5 months after we came to NYC, and I set up the JPG Legal office in the back.

In May I told my day job that it was clear that my website was starting to make enough money to become my day job, and I transitioned out over the course of about two months. I signed a lease for a private office at a new WeWork that was about to open up, a 7-minute walk from the basement apartment I lived in, in Northeast Washington, DC. Because the WeWork had not yet opened, I got dibs on an amazing two-person-sized office that was larger than usual and didn't share any walls with any other offices. I was so happy!

I was lucky that I had recently started a day job as in-house counsel at a small local labor union (Teamsters 922), so I was financially secure. Then I got luckier when one of my local clients hired me for enough work to warrant sending me a $5,000 check.

I used that $5,000 to launch my first Google Ads campaign, which was terrifying. I didn't know much at all about Google Ads and did my best when setting up my first campaign, trying to guess what ad language would make sense and how much I should pay per click.

Once I launched the campaign, I got very depressed. For months I had been fantasizing about the potential of my trademark website, how it would eliminate the need to have a day job, how it would make me successful, and now I was at the moment where I'd find out if that was actually going to happen or if it was all a waste of time.

Fortunately, the ads started working very quickly. I was spending way too much per click, but people were actually hiring me as their lawyer for trademark work through the little form I'd built, which was both mind-blowing and really exciting for me. I managed to tweak my ads enough that by the time I'd blown through the entire $5,000, I had just started spending a small enough amount per click that the ads would start paying for themselves meaning I never needed to invest any additional savings into my business after that.

Finished building out the first full version of the trademark page on my solo practice website. Clients who found the page could enter their information, hire me, and pay for the package upfront by credit card or PayPal. Just needed to launch an advertising campaign to see if it worked.

After helping a few local businesses with their trademark registrations, I realized that trademark clearance and registration would be a great legal service to commodify online. Looked at examples of firms already doing this for inspiration. Unfortunately, didn't really get started on building my website out for this until several months later.