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Description

Laurie Lee, JD, attorney, and owner of The Legal Department speaks with Jason A. Duprat, Entrepreneur, Healthcare Practitioner, and Host of the Healthcare Entrepreneur Academy Podcast about how small business professionals can benefit from legal services. Laurie discusses when to reach out to an attorney for advice, which legal issues you can handle on your own, and the importance of properly protecting your clients. 

Episode Highlights:

• What is Laurie’s background?
• The legal industry is typically focused on money and winning. The Legal Department is focused on serving businesses that serve others and does this through relationship building.
• Laurie’s business model for The Legal Department uses fixed fees for their services and is based on whether you have an Infrastructure Plan or prefer a project-based partnership.  
• What are some of the legal issues business owners can handle on their own?
• Is it true the creation and implementation of something provides some level of copyright protection? Or should everything be submitted to get copyright approval?
• Laurie shares her advice for copyrighting materials you produce. 
• What does Laurie say small business owners should know about trademarks? What about logos?
• What happens when people try to include proper nouns in trademarks?
• What are the highlights of Laurie’s infrastructure map?
• How should a small business owner conduct a risk-benefit analysis when seeking legal expertise?
• What legal resources does Laurie recommend for small business owners?

3 Key Points:

1. It’s critical to find an attorney you can communicate with effectively. Avoiding your attorney is the worst thing you can do. 
2. Don’t ignore the structure of how you set up your employees and contractors. 
3. Everything you provide as a service provider counts as intellectual property and it needs to be properly protected. 

Tweetable Quotes:

• “Our money and our time is very valuable and if we're spending that on dealing with conflicts, we're not spending it on growing our businesses.” – Laurie Lee
• “The more you avoid getting legal advice, the more risk you have." – Laurie Lee

Resources Mentioned:

• Infrastructure Map: https://thelegaldepartment.law/what-we-do/
• The Legal Department Website: https://thelegaldepartment.law/
• United States Patent and Trademark Office: uspto.gov
• U.S. Copyright Office: https://www.copyright.gov/

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