TCC Podcast #72: Answers to your legal questions with Danielle Liss

Got legal questions? We do! So we invited attorney and online legal expert Danielle Liss to join us for the 72nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. We’ve had this episode penciled in on our list for a long time—partly because we know so many copywriters have big questions about legal issues (and often don’t have the cash to ask an attorney for help). Hopefully this podcast answers a few of those questions. We talked to Danielle about: •  how she went from working in construction law to helping online entrepreneurs with legal needs •  the legal documents all copywriters need to have in place (her checklist) •  what you need to know about choosing a business entity (in the U.S.) •  the critical reason you want to choose an entity besides sole proprietor •  what you need to know about contracts and why you should ALWAYS use them •  what every contract you sign MUST have •  should you include your contract with your proposal or keep them separate? •  what could happen if you work without a contract (the nightmare scenario) •  what you should do contract-wise on a second or third project with a client (think MSA) •  why you probably don’t need to worry about changes to your contract •  the three things you need to include in your website terms and conditions We also talked about what you should expect to pay for legal help and Danielle gave us the lowdown on copyrights—yes, copyright, not copywrite ; ) . She also gives a bit of counsel about when you can use ™, ®, or a service mark, and how to handle conflicts and breaches of contracts. This episode is loaded with need-to-know information that will help you protect your copywriting business. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: TCC IRL Dubsado FitFluencial LegalZoom USPTO website Hashtag-legal.com Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: Kira:What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club podcast. Rob: You’re invited to join the Club for episode 72 as we chat with attorney, marketing expert, and co-founder of Hashtag Legal, Danielle Liss, about what copywriters need to know when it comes to the law, choosing the right business entity, documents we need to protect ourselves, and avoiding the common mistakes online business owners make again and again. Kira: Welcome, Danielle! Rob: Hey Danielle. Danielle: Thank you so much for having me, I’m really excited to be here. Kira: Yeah, we’re excited to have you, and, we—we just need this conversation desperately! Even as I’m listening to the intro, I’m like, I need to know all of this! So, I’m really looking forward to it. Rob: It’s funny that it’s taken this long to get here too… Kira: I know! Rob: …because when we first started the podcast, we made a list of everybody we wanted to talk to, and one of the line items was an attorney. We wanted to talk to an attorney, and yeah. Now we’re seventy-two episodes in... Kira: Right! Rob: So it’s about time. Danielle: Well I am very glad to be the one to talk with everybody. Kira: Yes, great. So why don’t we start with your story, and I’m really curious how you ended up working in influencer marketing and ultimately creating Hashtag Legal. Danielle: Absolutely. When I graduated from law school, I went into litigation. And I live in Las Vegas, and I did a lot of construction law. Let’s just say that’s not exactly how my brain works. So, it was never a great fit because I just didn’t have the passion that I needed to spend all day fighting about drywall. And... Kira: Laughs. Danielle: And there are people who do; I love them for it, but it was not me. So I also started a blog in law school, and, I always had this sort of duel-life; I have my internet life where I was blogging all the time, and I had my work life, which just seemed, you know—get the joy from the blogging because I can’t get the joy from the litigation career that I have. And it turned into a speaking opportunity, because a friend of mine came to me when sponsored content was really in its infancy and said, “Can you read this contract for me?” I said “Of course,” and I read it, and it was horrible. And I said, “Oh my gosh, please don’t sign this!” She was like “You know you, you could probably speak at conferences and tell people about this type of thing”, and I said, “Really? People care about that?” and she said “Yeah!” And so a speaking career was born, but it still didn’t kind of work with the kind of work that i was doing and I wasn’t sure how to build a practice out of it at that stage. So because of my blogging background and because of the fact that I was doing a lot of speaking on influencer marketing, I ended up leaving and joining Fitfluencer, which was a influencer network focusing on health and wellness campaigns. I went in as chief marketing officer and general counsel, and stayed there for about four years. I left after I had my son because it was—it was a job that was really 24/7, and I wanted to have more time to spend and I had almost met my now-business partner. So, we had realized there is just this sort of gap in our industry where people....I don’t want to say they don’t think that legal is sexy, because I of course think legal is very sexy, but people don’t want to deal with that side of their business so I partner and I said there’s a whole here, let’s see if we can fill and start to make legal a bit more accessible to people in the influencer space and in that, sort of, online business world. Rob: So before we jump into all of the ways that you help clients, tell us a little bit more about who you’re typical client is, and who would come to you for help. Danielle: “Our typical client” really covers a broad range. We deal with people who are just starting their businesses and it may be a side-hustle that’s now grown to something that can be full-time and we kind of come in with them at the very early stages and watch them as they grow their business which is something I love to be able to be apart of as they’re scaling, but we also deal with a lot of folks who are more established businesses. The one thing that most have in common is they are in the online space and some way, whether their business is conducted entirely online, or whether they do most of their marketing online, if they’re an influencer—that type of thing—that’s usually the key thing that everybody has in common. Kira: Okay, so I want to hear about what we need to have when we’re getting started, especially what are some contracts or just basics that we’re missing—that you’ve noticed a lot of us are missing? Danielle: Sure. I think that as you’re setting up your business, there’s usually a few areas I tell people these are the things, kind of—use it as your check list to see if you have these in place so that you know where the holes are in your business. And the first is your entity type, which, when we talk about the entity, we’re usually saying, are you a sole proprietor, which means you’re just running your business as yourself; are you a corporation; or are you an LLC, which is a limited liability company. So that’s one area. Then we get into contracts which I think are absolutely critical, and unfortunately, something that a lot of people ignore because they’re not sure what to be into the contract. Website policies are also really important to talk about; disclaimers and private policies and how you use, how people can interact with your site, and then the last piece is intellectual properties. So those are kind of the four main areas that we always use as our check-up for business. Rob: Okay. So, let’s start with entities. This seems to be a really big question, and I have to admit: every time that I have started a business, I scoured the internet trying to help me decide which one is going to be right for me, you know—S-corp, LLC, C-corp, sole proprietor... Why would we choose one over the other? And I know this could easily be an hour-long discussion.... Danielle: Laughs Rob: But could you give us some bullet points, just, you know, what we should be thinking about when we’re choosing the business entities we’re setting up? Danielle: If you don’t with any type of entity, I could start a business right now and say, “I’m going to be in business doing whatever it is”—you could be a sole proprietor. That’s not typically anything that you have to file with the Secretary of State, although depending on where you are, you may need a local business license, so check on the rules there. But you are your business. You are personally liable for anything that happens. So when we start talking about entities, it’s typically that your business it growing as a sole proprietor, or you know right from the start, I do not want to be held personally liable if something goes wrong in my business, and that’s when you start looking at entities. What I typically tell people is, take a look at what some of your goals are for your business. If you are going into this saying, “I know with the idea that I have, I really want to go seek funding, I want to start pitching investors, that type of thing”, you’re probably going to want a corporation, because then you can issue shares of stock. If you go with a limited liability company, or an LLC, it’s a little bit less work—there’s not as many company formalities that you have to follow. You don’t have to do minutes; you don’t have to do annual meetings; you don’t have to appoint a lot of different roles. But you still get that personal liability protection. So for a lot of business owners,