Alyssa J. Devine with Purple Fox Legal

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Purple Fox Legal Ms. Alyssa Devine. How are you?

Alyssa Devine: [00:00:33] I’m doing well and thank you for inviting me today. I’m excited to be here.

Stone Payton: [00:00:38] Well, it’s a delight to have you on the show. I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. I’ve got a ton of questions. We’re probably not going to get to them all. But but maybe a good place to start would be if you could share with me and our listeners mission, purpose, what you and your team are really out there trying to do for folks.

Alyssa Devine: [00:00:59] Absolutely. So we do offer legal services. I don’t like to call Purple Fox Legal a law firm, though, because that has a very negative connotation. And so I intend I’m very intentional about being modern, being approachable, being at least more transparent about pricing and making legal just making legal simpler. It doesn’t have to be so hard. You know, if you if you don’t understand the contract, I think that it needs to be rewritten. That’s sort of my attitude about about certain things. But and there’s just a lot of misinformation out there, too. So I’m just trying to help out entrepreneurs, you know, different content creators and trying to guide them in the direction that that they want to go.

Stone Payton: [00:01:52] So, you know, I had to ask, where did purple come from? What’s the story on that?

Alyssa Devine: [00:01:59] Yes. So I was very intentional about picking something other than my name. I started this firm in September 2021, so it was right in the middle of the pandemic. So the, the majority, um, you know, everybody was online. That’s, that’s where everybody did their advertising. So I needed to stand out. I needed to be distinctive. Um, and so I kind of, I wanted. Something that was just kind of just popped, you know? So the Color Purple represents wisdom and creativity. And then the fox, of course, cleverness, but also getting out of tricky situations, which is what a lawyer does. Well, preferably I like to prevent those tricky situations from happening at all. But I felt that that that combination of elements, the combination of those connotations, um, represent my law firm and what I do.

Stone Payton: [00:02:59] Well, let’s dive into the backstory a little bit. What were you doing prior to this? What was the, what was the path that brought you to having your own firm like this?

Alyssa Devine: [00:03:10] Well, I didn’t at first. I didn’t want to be an entrepreneur. I think I think a lot of teachers might say that. And actually, my first introduction to entrepreneurship was was through my grandfather. He is a farmer in Indiana and has been his whole life. And as I grew up, you know, every season, I witnessed his struggles, you know, dealing with the incredibly high risk that is involved with farming, not just from a physical safety perspective, but just from a financial business perspective. You know, he could not control the weather, but that was a huge determining factor for, you know, the yield of his crops at harvest. But he could spray pesticides on these crops, too. You know, so. So bugs, other other creatures didn’t, you know, eat his literally eat his profits. So it was all about risk mitigation and and I went to school, law school, and I got my MBA and I kind of. Said to myself, well, you know, I can spot these issues, but why am I not doing it for myself like I can? Why am I just doing it for myself? Why? You know, I can I can do this for a lot of other people. So I’m trying to connect the business and the legal because they’re often at odds. Um, and I think that’s a reason that people run away from, you know, when they see the legal department or the HR department, they run away. But I don’t want them to feel that way.

Stone Payton: [00:04:52] So now that you’ve been at it a while and you started at a very let’s call it an interesting time in history. Yes. But now that you’ve been at it a while and you’re doing it your own way, what are you finding the most rewarding? What are you enjoying the most about the work?

Alyssa Devine: [00:05:10] I think the most rewarding thing is to to see the see my clients, you know, as as they as they grow and are expanding their business. And um, you know, since, since my company is pretty new, I’m growing with them. So it’s more, we’re more of partners versus, you know, attorney client, um, if that makes sense. There’s a lot of collaboration, Uh, and I think that’s how we get the best solutions for, for people. Um, you know, the better I understand somebody’s business or how they want to do business, which may not be how they’re currently doing business. So we got to, got to bridge that gap. Um, and just kind of seeing, seeing clients grow, um, and just be successful, that’s really rewarding. Not all, not all attorneys can can say that, you know, the like, for example, trust and estates. You know, you don’t, you don’t get to see your work outside of work necessarily, but I do and that’s rewarding to me. So motivating.

Stone Payton: [00:06:19] Let’s talk about the work a little bit. Do you find yourself gravitating primarily to other people who are entrepreneurs or run small or mid-market firms? Have you have you found yourself working in a niche or two or on a specific set of like a category of in the legal domain? Or what’s what’s the work been like?

Alyssa Devine: [00:06:40] So the majority of my clients are service based and they’re small or medium sized businesses. And what’s kind of interesting to me is that the majority of my clients are female. But why this is interesting is because the majority of my website visitors are male. So I just kind of find that a little interesting. Um, but there’s a, there’s a great female entrepreneurship community in Nashville. It’s very authentic and genuine, and I’m very grateful to be a part of it.

Stone Payton: [00:07:13] I’ll bet you are. So in my world, I come from the training and consulting world, and now I’m in the media world and I have an opportunity occasionally to blend the two. But IP intellectual property is always has always been a part of our career when we’ve created what we felt like was intellectual property, we wanted to protect it. I have run into situations over the years where someone felt like we infringed their IP and we had to have that conversation. You find yourself working through those issues quite a bit, right?

Alyssa Devine: [00:07:48] Yes, I think more on the preventative side. But yes, I do have people come to me when they do get a cease and desist. You know, when somebody does come to them saying, oh, you’ve infringed my trademark or my copyright, Um, so I mean, I think. I think education is kind of step one because if you can’t identify the different types of intellectual property and figure out what you have, then how are you going to protect it? So you know, what? What trademarks do we have? Which ones should we protect? You know, it’s maybe it’s not necessary to register all your trademarks, but you need to register some probably in every business has at least one trademark, at least one. So it’s just very, very important to be aware of these issues.

Stone Payton: [00:08:35] So you mentioned preventative just now. And earlier in our conversation, you talked about the the agreements, the contracts being well, or at least what I took from it was was simple and understandable. And, you know, where you really do understand what you’re agreeing to and it’s clearly communicated. So I’m kind of picking up a theme from you that let’s get it right early and then we won’t have to deal with all the hairy stuff later. It sounds like that’s a real thrust for you in your practice.

Alyssa Devine: [00:09:07] Yes, it is. And it’s an incredibly popular approach, as I’m sure you could guess. It just it just doesn’t like not everything legal has to be hard. It just doesn’t have to be so hard. We can make things better. We can be more transparent about pricing. We can make contracts, you know, where a one paragraph isn’t a whole page, single spaced. You know, we can we can do better. I think we can do better. And I’m and I’m actively trying to do better for my clients, for my community.

Stone Payton: [00:09:41] Well, so many small business people, at least in the circles that I run in, you know, sometimes we have to take a few risks. We throw our hat over the fence, we fly by our seat of the pants, and we get to a point where things are starting to to work. And I think maybe some of us I’ll at least speak to myself, you know, I might have the tendency to to leave some things undone that could really hurt me down down the road. And I guess I’m operating under the impression maybe before, but certainly after you get just a little bit of traction, you need to you need to least take some kind of inventory and get someone with some professional expertise to say, okay, Stone, you’re an equity partner in this network. You’ve got your own studio, you’re doing some consulting. Here’s, you know, is that what it looks like early on? Like, talk to me a little bit about what the what the the client relationship and the early work looks like. Do you just sit down and try to get a feel for their business and the kind of contracts they are writing? And yeah, walk us through that.

Alyssa Devine: [00:10:48] Yeah, absolutely. I think I think that’s that’s part. That’s all part of it. Um, another part of it is about a conversation about, you know, what, what’s your long term goal here? Like, is this, um, you know, is this going to be like a family business? Are you going to sell this business to, you know, others in the future or. Well, in the short term. Even future. Um, so those kind of conversations help help guide my thinking and kind of what needs to be done because, you know, if you, if you buy or sell a business, there’s a lot of due diligence involved with that. And one of the most important parts is the trademarks. Where did you get the trademarks? How like are they registered? You know, when when was it first used? All those things are very, very important. And if everyone doesn’t if a if a seller doesn’t have all their ducks in a row, that can cause a huge, huge problem and greatly diminish the value of their business, you know, if they do want to sell. But there’s also just business succession planning. So kind of like taking like looking at the long term, like are we are we going into different states and kind of like working my way backwards, so to speak, to to prevent all these different types of problems. But I think I think the trademarks is sort of the core. Um. I started just the starting point because if you don’t have a brand, you don’t have a business. They’re there. They’re intertwined very, very closely. Um, but yeah, there’s also just a lot of different contracts. So like for websites you have to have a privacy policy and terms of use. Um, you know, if you don’t, then you could be violating consumer protection laws, like just kind of getting, getting the foundation right. Is is critical. Absolutely critical. You can’t scale you can’t grow unless you have the foundation set up. Absolutely.

Stone Payton: [00:12:50] So I bet you’re running into a patterns. I bet you see some of the same mistakes over and over. And you’re like, maybe you don’t say it out loud. You’re like, okay, here we go again. Yep. Seen this before? What are some of the common mistakes or the common things that are undone or done wrong that you’re like running into over and over with your clients or before their your clients? Yeah.

Alyssa Devine: [00:13:17] Well, I mean, going back to trademarks, people will start a business. It’s so, so important. So they’ll start a business. They’ll, you know, they’ll, they’ll gain customers, they’ll develop a website, they’ll spend all this money and time and resources building this brand, and then they get a cease and desist. And then there’s litigation. Then they have to change their brand in addition to paying all those litigation costs, the average cost of a trademark lawsuit is actually $400,000.

Stone Payton: [00:13:49] Holy moly.

Alyssa Devine: [00:13:51] Yeah. So that’s that’s quite a bit of money. And that’s, you know, that’s obviously not including any cost of rebranding, which is also incredibly expensive, at least tens of thousands of dollars depending on where the business was, you know, in their in their growth journey of growth. But. Getting that right is so critical. And it’s it’s it’s much easier and cheaper to prevent these problems. So I like to tell people like what what the what a good process would be is to do a trademark clearance search for a name that you want to pick, want to use. And then once you do that, then you want to secure the domain names, the social media handles, all those sorts of things. And then you file the paperwork to create the LLC or other business entity and then you file the trademark. So why you do it in that order is because you want the LLC or your business entity to be the owner of the trademark and you want that name to be on the registration. So that has to exist before you file the registration. But those two things should be done very quickly because there are a lot of, um, I’ll just say bad actors who watch those sort of things and, you know, steal up domain names and social media and all those sorts of things, which used to be actually a huge, huge problem about 20 years ago. And I think I think we’re going to see a little bit of that now that we have the the I. Uh. You know like.com. I. So the URLs I’ve.

Stone Payton: [00:15:28] Actually got a couple of questions around AI and how that impacts your practice and your clients in just a moment. But I’m curious, when you made the leap into entrepreneurship, did first of all, I’d love for you to just describe what that was like. I mean, it’s got to be a little bit unnerving if you’re accustomed to coming from a what a lot of people envision as a more secure environment. But did you have somebody coaching you through that transition or a mentor or anything like that? Or did you just dive in head first and just trial by fire and you just made your way through it?

Alyssa Devine: [00:16:03] And maybe maybe a little bit more of the second. I realized in my in my last year of law school that this that starting my own business was going to be a possibility and that I needed to educate myself as much as possible. Um, about, about starting a business in general. Um, you know, managing a business, but also just kind of different. Elements regarding the legal industry. So, for example, there are a lot of restrictions around legal marketing. So just kind of making sure that I, you know, was very aware and cognizant of those rules. Well. But yeah, that was a I think I think I sort of, you know, did a bunch of research and, and watched videos and attended class and all that sort of thing for probably about a year before I started my business. So I, I don’t, I don’t want to say I kind of jumped in head first trial by fire, I guess it kind of was a little bit after that. But but I did a lot of prep work. I did a lot of prep work.

Stone Payton: [00:17:10] Well, but that’s your wheelhouse, right? I mean, that’s what makes you such a good attorney is you know how to do the research. It’s something that that you enjoy doing and, you know, and you go through and check all those boxes, so. Well, that’s encouraging. You mentioned legal marketing, and there are some parameters that you have to operate within. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a for a practice like yours? Like do you have to go out and market or is it more of an educate kind of process? I don’t know how you go out and sell legal business. I’m convinced if someone sits down and has a conversation with you, you know, and they’re like, Well, yeah, we need to talk. And you know, oh, boy, where you been? Yeah, but like that first conversation, how does that do? You have like process? You have some sort of sales and marketing process or something.

Alyssa Devine: [00:18:04] Um, you know, I have kind of like my intro pitch, but, you know, one of the, one of the legal marketing rules is that you cannot solicit people, um, you know, live either in person or by phone. So no cold calling or anything like that. That’s that’s definitely not okay.

Stone Payton: [00:18:21] Is that is that pretty much all over the country or is that kind of state by state or do you know.

Alyssa Devine: [00:18:26] Yeah, that’s that’s pretty that’s a pretty standard rule across across states. So, um. So, you know, when I go to different networking meetings and stuff, like I can’t just go out and hand people business cards because that would violate that rule. I have to wait basically for them to ask me for that information. So it’s it’s it’s very restrictive, I’ll say. But but I do I focus my sales and marketing efforts on education because once I, you know, obviously want to provide value and, you know, people, you know, that get that information, they can they can see and realize, oh, wait, this is this is an issue with my business. Like I need to get in touch with this person. Um, and the exception to, to that kind of prohibition against live solicitation is if you’ve had like a prior relationship with somebody or if they’re like a family member or something like that. But I’ll just say it’s there for a good reason. But it’s also it’s also makes it very hard for us.

Stone Payton: [00:19:30] Well, I bet it does. And so you but you do have a great deal of. Specific expertise and experience in this domain. And there’s so much that most business owners don’t know. We don’t even know what we don’t know, right? So if there’s a place for us to go that’s credible, to learn a little bit about trademarks and and it’s probably not only new information, but probably unlearning some things because we probably have some misconceptions or misbeliefs and we just got it wrong. But if there’s a repository or a person or a somewhere where we can go and say, Oh, let me watch this little video or listen to this audio or read this article or something. And then over time, then I guess you’re building credibility. And I’m like, okay, yeah, I’m going to reach out and and talk to the purple folks. Yeah.

Alyssa Devine: [00:20:25] Yeah, absolutely. And I, um, well, actually, a good example of that would be sometimes I try to I can convince people to accept payments in a certain way and that can help automate their bookkeeping. And I kind of like, educate them a little bit about that sometimes, you know, maybe I’ll talk to their bookkeeper or CPA to set up, you know, the QuickBooks side of things. But, you know, if you do cash and checks like that’s that’s a lot harder to automate. So they’re taking more time to do that or hiring somebody to take care of that. Well, if they, you know, accept payments through, you know, something like Stripe or or other types of things and we put that in the contract, they can automate that. They can they can save money and time by doing things a certain way. So I try to think about those things. In addition to the legal protection. I think operational efficiency is, is also maybe undervalued. Um, but, but I think it’s important.

Stone Payton: [00:21:28] Well, it seems to me like you would never run out of topics. I mean, you probably have this whole big list anyway and just going out into the marketplace and having conversations with people in this, just listening to them talk about their challenges and even their victories. Probably like every time you go somewhere, you’re like, okay, I got three more topics. I’m going to go. I’m going to go write an article or I’m going to do a YouTube or whatever. I bet you would never run out of topics.

Alyssa Devine: [00:21:54] Yeah, I think that’s probably true. Unfortunately, I would run out of time to create those videos.

Stone Payton: [00:22:00] So I hear you. I do want to talk about I of course, it’s all the rage at this. At this point. My business partner specifically is very fired up about it. It’s helping him craft even like crafting questions for interviews. And and there must be a gazillion other use cases for it. What impact, if any, is AI having on your world and maybe even on some of the the folks you’re working with, like these other small business people? Are you starting to see it have some impact?

Alyssa Devine: [00:22:35] Yes. And the law is still trying to catch up to those sorts of things. So we’re applying you know, the technology is probably a good 20 or 30 years ahead ahead of the law. So we have to we have to be creative in how we apply the law and interpret the law a little bit. But as far as how it affects the legal industry, there was a New York attorney who unfortunately created a brief using AI. The problem with that was that the cases cited, the different resources cited within that brief were not real. And then, yes, yes, this this actually happened and there were fines imposed against that attorney. And I’m sure that client was very unhappy with that. Um, so I mean, that’s. Expecting to do everything and basically be a person is probably not a good expectation or standard to have, I’ll say, in terms of how it affects, you know, content creators, entrepreneurs. Um, there, you know, there are a variety of uses for it. Um, and for, for, from my perspective, the danger is in using it for content creation. So we’re seeing more and more lawsuits or disputes about, about AI, about copyright infringement. So there’s OpenAI has been has been sued by a number of authors for copyright infringement.

Alyssa Devine: [00:24:12] Um, and it’s kind of a question of, well, is there actually copyright infringement because who’s creating the work, the AI? But. But it’s not the company who created OpenAI that’s doing the prompts either. So. And. Creative works that are created by AI aren’t copyrightable. So there’s like. There’s like the big question and then there’s like so many different, like kind of sub parts to that question that we have to kind of figure out so that we can we can evaluate risk, mitigate risk and, you know, maybe, maybe edit some contracts and stuff like that. But I will I, I’m not anti AI at all. I just think that there is a very you have to be wary about it for content creation, but it is incredibly helpful for, you know, like interview, developing interview questions or you know getting getting ideas for social media, post other types of things. I think that it is extremely useful in the operational process. And I’ve you know, I’ve heard I’ve heard from different people how they use it. And I think it is a great benefit. I would just be very wary about the content creation part.

Stone Payton: [00:25:32] Well, it’s a brave new world and job security for you, right? There’ll be all kinds of precedent and different cases that come up and you’ll be able to. So we’ll keep an eye on that. I’m interested to hear about what passions, if any, you have outside the scope of your of your work. My listeners know that I like to hunt, fish and travel. So when I’m not, you know, visiting with folks like you and learning about their world, you know, we go and do and are there is there something you have a tendency to nerd out about or really dive into outside the legal profession?

Alyssa Devine: [00:26:10] Well, I think just learning in general, honestly, I love watching documentaries. So one of my favorite docu series is actually called The Food That Built America. I don’t know if you’ve seen that or heard of that. It’s a history on the History Channel, but it goes through the, you know, the history in the beginning of a lot of different global well yeah. Global brands that we that we have today. So like Hershey, Heinz Kellogg, all these different people. And it’s so fascinating to kind of see their honestly their entrepreneurial journey, their struggles and maybe some of the not good decisions, decisions that they made and how how how the world was a little different back then. But, you know, I think the well, the episode with Milton Hershey was really interesting to me because at whenever I first watched it, I didn’t understand the concept of a company town. So it’s kind of like my introduction to that. And I was like, Wow, that’s really cool. Like, you know, he cared so much about his employees, like he made a town. Um, so just, just kind of like being introduced to that and also just the story of the underdog. You know, a lot of those a lot of those folks were either immigrants or first, you know, first generation Americans. And that creates a lot of struggles in and of itself. So. Yeah, just kind of coming from nothing and then, you know, building this empire. Like, that’s. That’s always a very fascinating story.

Speaker4: [00:27:50] Well, I’m so.

Stone Payton: [00:27:50] Glad I asked for a lot of reasons, not the least of which I wrote down. It’s the food that built America. Is that right? Yes. I’m going to go because I like the documentaries as well. And it sounds like you learn about how they built their business. And so so thank you for that. All right. Before we wrap, I’d love to if we could leave our listeners with just a couple of actionable tips. Number one, Tip Gang is if you’ve got a question, reach out and talk to Alyssa or somebody on her team and and and do that. But short of that, is there something that small business people, mid market folks, people like me could be doing not doing reading You know just a couple of things that we could take a little immediate action on.

Alyssa Devine: [00:28:41] Absolutely. I think, yeah, there are a couple of different things. So one is just to assess the different types of IP your business has. Like that. That doesn’t require, you know, hiring an attorney necessarily. Just just identify all those different things. Another is to make sure your website has, you know, those policies that we talked about, the privacy policy terms of use, but also to make sure that your website is, you know, ADA compliant. That is, I’ve been seeing a very big increase in those types of lawsuits. So definitely that’s, you know, as simple as, you know, downloading a plugin, that’s that’s a very easy fix. But it can it can be very disastrous if it’s if your website is not ADA compliant. Um, and then I think third is, you know, when was the last time your contracts were reviewed by an attorney, if ever? You know, can they be updated? Do they reflect your process, your client journey process accurately? Is there a way to improve that? What can we use contract law to? To solve pain points. That’s that’s another thing I kind of focus on. I, I usually tell people, you know, I think entrepreneurs should ask two questions. So how do, how do they want people to feel when they encounter their brand? How do they make that a possibility?

Stone Payton: [00:30:13] Very well said. All right. What’s the best way for our listeners to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or someone on your team? What’s the best way for them to connect with you and tap into your work?

Alyssa Devine: [00:30:27] The best way to contact us is Purple Fox legal.com. We are also on social media, Instagram and Facebook and have a ton of different tips and educational post to begin to help people out.

Stone Payton: [00:30:42] Marvelous. Well, Alyssa, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show this afternoon. Thank you for sharing your insight and your perspective and keep up the good work because we need you.

Alyssa Devine: [00:30:57] Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Speaker4: [00:30:59] All right.

Stone Payton: [00:30:59] Until next time. This is Stone Payton for our guest today with Purple Fox Legal Miss Alyssa Devine and everyone here at the business Radio X family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.