Love Based Legal: Your Number 1 Legal Strategy | The Leadership Circle with Jay Razzouk

Today on the Leadership Circle, we're chatting with Jay Razzouk. Jay is the co-founder of ProScale Legal with his amazing wife, Wendy - and ProScale Legal is the first official sponsor of Be In the Room.

ProScale Legal provides resources for women leaders, specifically entrepreneurs, that are so important regardless of where you're at in business, where you live in the United States, and what you're doing. Legal protection ensures that you protect yourself, your family, your assets, your home, and all of those things in a meaningful way. 

Jay is a lawyer who believes in Love Based Legal – an innovative approach to legal services that puts relationships first.

Meet Jay Razzouk:

For 10 yrs I helped remedy mismanagement at Fortune 100s including Big Pharma and other health companies. I left the corporate sector in 2017 to pursue my passion of helping business owners grow lasting enterprises.

I took a brief hiatus from the law when my wife, Wendy, and I filmed over 150 interviews for a documentary on mental health.

The interviews opened my eyes to how important coaching is to change lives and the world we live in. This further cemented my conviction that love is central to health, happiness, and success, which radically changed how I practice law.

Since starting my own practice, I have been representing coaches & influencers who were inadvertently stepping on legal landmines or facing devastating losses in their business - often due to one bad actor who saw an opportunity to exploit a well-meaning, generous, and under-protected entrepreneur.

After linking arms with hundreds of coaches & consultants, I realized that most were vulnerable to the same kind of devastating issues and that better legal guidance and solutions were needed to help coaches build their business on a solid foundation so they can serve fully, share their message broadly, and help their clients get the transformation they offer.

ProSCALE Legal™ Templates & Coaching was created to fill this need.

Connect with Jay Razzouk:

Free Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/businesslawforpractitioners

Website: https://www.proscalelegal.com

Here's what we'll cover on this episode the The Leadership Circle ...

The Origins of ProScale Legal

"I spent about 10 years working with big corporations trying to fix billion dollar mistakes that really hurt shareholders. I learned a lot about corporate governance - how to run a business, how to reduce risk, and how make good decisions as an executive.

But I got really tired working with the big guys. I wanted to work with entrepreneurs, and help them get on the right track earlier on. I wanted to help them be preventative as opposed to being in court after a major mistake.

Now, I provide entrepreneurs like coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs with all the legal documents and strategies they didn't know that they needed to scale to seven figures and beyond.

I know a lot of people tack on seven figures when they're describing what they do, but we really mean it. I have that experience. I know what it looks like and I want to really help people get there."

The Preventative Protection You Never Knew You Needed

"It begins with the essential templates that a coach or online entrepreneur would need. We break it down into your core relationships that you begin with: your relationship with your clients, your relationship with your podcast guests, your relationship with independent contractors, just the whole works. And we give you a good starting point, a foundation for setting your expectations, being clear, and then having documents in place that make sense."

Love Based Legal

"When you have an airtight contract that nobody could get out of, that's when they feel like a dog backed in the corner and go hire a lawyer to find a way to get out of it and sue you. We want contracts that are aimed at not just winning in court, but will keep you out of it.

When someone goes and talks to the lawyer, that's when there's no longer a relationship in place. As long as you're speaking with one another, you have a relationship, they know you care about them, they're going to likely care about you and not talk to that lawyer. The moment they talk to the lawyer, you've gone a bridge too far.

I've come to realize that all the law is really trying to get us to the point of loving people. Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, don't kill.

I don't know how we got to the point that we have millions and millions of laws just telling us these same few things. So, I help people realize that you can just be your authentic, loving self. This is actually is going to be your number one best legal strategy - loving people."

Number One Risk: Unclear Expectations

"I think the number one risk is just not getting clear on expectations. I think for a lot of us, especially in the marketing space, the online space, we want to use these words, these fancy words, make these huge promises in our marketing materials and then people sign our contract.

Contract says basically I'm not promising anything, not guaranteeing anything. I'm not going to deliver anything. And then someone joins the program and then there's this huge gap between what they felt really was promised.

They never read that contract and now they're upset wanting a refund. So, I really think it's important for people to understand. You need to make sure there's an alignment of what you're promising in your marketing, what you're promising in your contract, and then what you're delivering on the back end. That right there I think is the sums up most disputes."

Pro Tips:

1. Make sure we don't have sales copy in the contract.

2. Don't use fancy words - this is where lawyers tend to know the buzzwords that work well and courts would know.

3. Strip out all the adjectives. This really eliminate a lot of the problems.

Misclassification of Independent Contractors

"There's big name coaches giving advice that basically will get anybody who follows it in big trouble with IRS. A lot of misclassification of independent contractors.

There's been a huge shift in the law - this is relatively new thing for the past five years. There's at least 30 states that are have a strict test. And if you flunk that test, your worker is actually an employee.

It boils down a lot to control. If you are controlling the hours they work, how they work, what they do, you're teaching them, the government will classify them as an employee, which means then you need to be having them on payroll. You have to be following minimal wage laws. You've got to be keeping a part of their wages and paying that to the federal government for their income taxes.

So there's all these implications and it can end up with lots of fines and penalties and fees for this misclassification. We see almost everybody, and I mean almost everybody misclassifying these workers.

The federal government has an interest in having as many people classified as employees as possible. So misclassification is a huge risk. Absolutely huge risk. Attorneys also believe that this is probably one of the biggest risks for businesses. The more workers as you have, the more independent contractors you have, the higher this risk is going to be.

So you're probably thinking, what's the solution? How can I deal with that? I can't afford to be wrong on this. And this is where a lot of people do turn to outsourcing overseas so that you can avoid that risk."

General Liability Risk

"This is usually the one that we associate with insurance. So someone slips and falls - you're covered by insurance. If you have employees at a physical location, this one's going to be a much bigger deal. If you're a health coach or even just coach in general and you're giving advice to people, then you can look at having what's called errors and omissions insurance. They cover you giving that bad advice. It's kind of like your professional liability insurance."

Regulatory Risk

This is being aware of the laws and regulations that are out there. I love coaching because it really eliminates a lot of regulations. So, I work with a lot of people in the health coaching space. They're licensed practitioners. Nobody's more regulated than a licensed practitioner. Everything is being controlled and watched over.

But when you go into coaching, it's kind of like the wild, wild west where you can say what you want, you can do what you want for the most part. And that's why we love it. And we try to get people transitioning there."

Partnering with Jay and Wendy, co-founders of ProScale Legal was a no brainer for the Be in the Room Community. Their focus on the power of good relationships, aligns with our mission and they are proud to help serve incredible female leaders like those inside of our community.

Partnering with Jay and Wendy from ProScale Legal provides the perfect opportunity to get the support you need and benefit from their love-based legal approach.

Connect with Jay Razzouk:

Free Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/businesslawforpractitioners

Website: https://www.proscalelegal.com