Technology

Thriving Law Firm Devoted To Creatives Gets Creative New Office Design

Jayaram Law focuses on clients building the future.

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Vivek Jayaram

It’s almost cliché to remind lawyers that this is a service profession. From articles to webinars to conference talking points, everyone keeps proclaiming that we need to understand that law is a service profession. Yet, as someone who write and speaks about the legal profession with some regularity, I’m certainly not giving up this point. It’s cliché because it’s something the profession honestly still needs to be bludgeoned over the head with. And it’s a cheap point to get the audience to realize you’re a “deep legal thinker”TM worthy of their attention.

That’s why it’s refreshing to talk to the attorneys building small, nimble practices that focus on what the clients want and, more importantly, understand what the clients are going to want down the road.

Jayaram Law Group is built around serving creatives and innovators in art and technology. When a firm focuses on a unique client instead of forcing the client into the defined practice categories that dominated legal work in the 19th century, the practice looks a bit different. Jayaram handles copyright… but also corporate startup work. It handles transactions… and litigation. It’s designed around the kind of client that needs just that suite of legal representation: a creative architect opening a studio or a video game design team kicking off development. What do they need to get their businesses started, protected, and what services are they going to need in 5 years when the success they dreamed of at the start has finally come to fruition?

Understanding where a client is and where they’re going spills over into the firm’s very business model. When I spoke with firm founder Vivek Jayaram, he explained that the firm prices its services with an eye on the long-term. A brand new startup may not be ready to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars per hour billed — and it’s why a lot of startups make critical errors in the early days as they struggle to do work in-house on the cheap. Jayaram sees these potential clients as long-term relationships and prices its work to get baby companies they believe in through the door, confident that cultivating a relationship with a growing company will pay off over the long haul.

It’s also why the firm offers subscription pricing plans providing both flat and recurring fees for companies to affordably — and perhaps more importantly, predictably — secure the legal services they need for their growing business. For all the talk of alternative fee arrangements around the industry, the billable hour continues to reign supreme at the top of the market, and that was probably inevitable. It’s in the entrepreneurial sector that we should have always expected innovative fee thinking to take hold.

Wendy Brasunas Heilbut

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New York partner Wendy Brasunas Heilbut, recently named to NLJ’s 2019 Technology Law Trailblazers List, brings some unique experience to her practice. Unlike most attorneys out there, she actually spent time on the other side of the desk, leaving Biglaw to work with a startup and a non-profit before being lured back to the outside counsel side. It’s the sort of experience that can prove invaluable when trying to serve clients in these fields — clients who can’t be “square-pegged” into the same business model firms use for IBM. There are risks and concerns that someone who’s been there will identify that others won’t.

That ethic of meeting the client where they are spills over into the entire firm culture. The firm’s new Chicago offices, designed by client Snarkitecture, eschew the traditional law firm model to highlight the personality of a firm dedicated to creatives.

The features dug into the furniture are exceptionally cool — they’re hard to see in this picture, unfortunately, but imagine this reception desk with a veritable topographical map across the front.

The whole point is to create a space that the clients feel comfortable in. Several years ago, we wrote an article about a law firm partner pontificating that associates need to dress up in the same mid-century dandy style that he prefers, replete with frilly pocket squares and watches that cost more than cars. At the time, I pointed out that building a relationship of trust with a client actually requires lawyers to dress in a way that makes the client comfortable.

Certainly there are some clients who want to see an attorney dressed like a relic of a bygone era. But a tech startup or a sculptor are going to want to see someone meet them where they are. They don’t want to see someone sloppy, of course, but they want to see someone who can meld professionalism with modern style. Someone who the client would trust as a professional, not someone grasping at a Platonic ideal of professional style tossed aside in the 1960s. The same is true of an office. The clients Jayaram serves — the clients driving the 21st century — don’t see a wall of law reporters and deep mahogany as indicia of professionalism. They see that as posing.

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And it’s working out for Jayaram Law. The firm’s advised over 500 companies to date and looks to expand on its niche as a firm dedicated to its creative clients.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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