Jonathan Hawkins: [00:00:00] And I’ll tell you, we’ve all been there i’m sure the instance where you fire that client that just, for whatever reason, whether it’s, they’re hard to deal with that you’re working your ass off, they don’t pay much or they don’t pay whatever. You get rid of the client. It is like a hundred pound weight is just gone. It’s amazing. The world looks completely different.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Absolutely. And you know what? Standing up for yourself also and not being. Yeah, this is my business. But, you know, I’ve allowed myself to be beaten, whipped around a little bit for the betterment of the whole. But, you know, having the confidence to finally step up and be like, you know what?

I feel just better about not working with them. My self-worth is improved here too. So it’s when you get to that point, it’s a good feeling. It’s a good feeling. But don’t be afraid to try to get to that point ’cause you just gotta have faith that you’re gonna, again, replace the business.

Welcome to the Founding Partner Podcast. Join your host, Jonathan Hawkins, as we explore the fascinating [00:01:00] stories of successful law firm founders. We’ll uncover their beginnings, triumph over challenges, and practice growth. Whether you aspire to launch your own firm, have an entrepreneurial spirit, or are just curious about the legal business, you’re in the right place.

Let’s dive in.

Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Founding Partner podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Hawkins. This is a podcast where I get to interview law firm founders and owners and hear about their journeys and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. And today I’m excited. We’ve got a friend of mine who I recently went shooting with that was a fun day.

I didn’t hit much, but he was actually pretty good. So, welcome Jeff Sladkus is to the show. He’s a I’ll call him a IP trademark, copyright type lawyer here in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s got his own firm, The Sladkus Law Group, and he’s been at it, I think 20 years or so with his own firm. So Jeff, [00:02:00] welcome to the show.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, tell us a little bit about your firm. So, I know it’s not just you. So tell us, you know, how many people, what kind of work you guys do.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Sure. I started the firm January 1st, 2005. So we just had our, you know, over 20 year anniversary, which is really awesome. When I started out, I was working in my apartment in New York City by myself, moved back to Atlanta, hired my paralegal, and just slowly, as the years went by, just grew slowly, but but surely we, at this point we have seven attorneys and five support staff. Our, our business is kind of broken up into a couple buckets. One being trademark prosecution, which is everything you need to do from searching a trademark, filing an application, responding to refusals, getting it registered, and then maintaining it as a big part of our business.

There’s a lot of different feeds for that business. And then on the other hand is our IP litigation group [00:03:00] where we would handle any kind of trademark, copyright, unfair competition, trade secret type disputes in federal court within the trademark trial and appeal board. And we also a subset of that is our anti-counterfeiting brand protection practice, which is really the focus of our litigation business right now.

Jonathan Hawkins: And I wanna talk about that. We were, we were talking about that when we were shooting that day. And it is fascinating to me. So I want to dive into that. But first, congrats on 20 years, man. That’s, that’s good. That’s quite an accomplishment. Well let’s go back, man. So you started out in big law, it sounds like big law in New York which isn’t as bad as they say in terms of working your ass off.

Jeffrey Sladkus: so I didn’t I went to law school in New York. But ended up coming back to Atlanta for my first job which was Appellate Goldstein back where if they could get any warm body they get their hands on. So, you know, there’s like 50 of us hired at once. Worked there for a couple [00:04:00] years and then jumped over to Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, which is now Womble Bond Dickinson, which I think is now  Bond Dickinson, or whatever iteration they’re on now. But I was there for about four years at Powell Goldstein I was doing corporate securities a lot of private placement memorandum some S one filing statements, you know, secure lending deals, which I, I just hated it.

So getting the opportunity at, at Womble Carlyle to be a trademark prosecution attorney was exciting. Something new like everybody else, I really didn’t know what a trademark was or how to differentiate from a copywriter patent. So I spent four years at Womble learning some great, great mentors there.

The ins and out of getting trademarks applied for, registered maintained, as well as the basics of trademark litigation through administrative proceedings they have called oppositions and cancellations, which are within the trademark office, as well as dipping my foot into, you know, [00:05:00] trademark infringement lawsuits in federal court.

So that’s, that was kind of my foundation there. And then I moved up to New York in 2004 to work for firm Pryor Cashman worked for an entertainment attorney up there for about four months. I was filling in for somebody on maternity. And it just got to the point where I’d had enough. So with the encouragement of my dad, you know, I quit and I hung my shingle on, you know, January 1st, 2005.

So.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So what, what pushed you? Was it, the, the hours or the, the environment. You don’t have to go into all the details, but it sounds like you weren’t happy and then your dad sort of gave you that final kick out the door to get you, get you out there.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Yeah. Well, the particular partner I was working for found it amusing to write me, you know, emails in all capital letters, not, not telling me how hands on I was that day, you know, which I can only take so much of which then started having an effect on my desire to go to work and the whole [00:06:00] thing.

I was told by the firm, I’ve been told this by multiple firms that, you know, I’m just not a, I don’t conform very easily. I like to do my own thing, even though I get to the end of the race sometimes before and better, this is how it goes. So, my dad had his own practice in New York City with a partner.

They were together 29 years. He’s a divorce attorney. And then he, he worked until his upper eighties, which I will never do unless, unless I have to. But he is like, son, you don’t, you don’t belong in a big firm. You really don’t like, you’ve seen what I’ve been able to do with my business. Go out and just go after it.

And, you know, having gone to the Business School of Texas, I always thought I was gonna be an investment banker or something of that nature, but the idea of running a law firm, the business side of actually running a business and practicing law was alluring to me. So I, you know, made the jump.

Jonathan Hawkins: So it [00:07:00] sounds like maybe you sort of always knew, or you always had an interest in business. I mean, you went to business school, so, would you say it was probably inevitable that you were gonna start your own firm?

Jeffrey Sladkus: Yeah, I think so. And same with my brother. I mean, the one thing. You know, our dad was a generation older than a lot of other fathers. So growing up during the depression and the his out view on life and the way things should be done. And his number one thing is you always have to work for yourself. You gotta strive to work for yourself.

’cause when you write for yourself, you, when you work for yourself, you know, you write your own ticket and it’s really depending how hard you wanna put in the effort you wanna put in. We’ll, we’ll play a result in, you know, in your future. And I was hungry and in it to win it. And admittedly, I’m a capitalist.

I mean, I don’t gauge success by how much money I’m making, but I do get a lot of enjoyment out of starting a new business unit and growing the revenue in there to a certain point. Then hiring two more people, support that and then [00:08:00] figuring out another product that we can offer and that, that I love. I could do that.

Yeah. For the rest of my, you know, my career, so.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, that’s fun. So, so take me through, so, you know, going from a big firm to starting your own, I imagine you didn’t take any clients with you, or maybe you did. So how was, how was it the early days you, you opened your shingle, did you have any work?

Jeffrey Sladkus: I had a little bit of work. There was, I’m still with them today Sto Corp. A manufacturer of stucco there down off of Camp Creek. They left Juan with me, went to New York and then, you know, followed me on my own. And then another client who I’m still with to this day, refrigerator. They, they followed me and they’re still with me today.

Now Refrigerators acquired 12 companies and has a, you know, a huge portfolio. And, you know, we’ve all kind of grown together, but they, they were my anchors. Then my dad was trying to push me business, you know, my brother admittedly I wasn’t just doing IP work. I was, you know, I had a head for corporate [00:09:00] work Leases make sense to me.

I, I’ve owned and rented a lot of real estate property, you know, so I just started doing anything that I thought. I could, I could serve the client, right? And make some money. So a lot of corporate transactions, some m and a work I did bought and sold the cheeseburger and paradise chain for a client.

I mean, stuff like that. But yeah, there’s still 10, $15 million deals. And it wasn’t for a good 10 to 12 years that I decided that, okay, now it’s time to really just focus, focus, focus.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, 10, 12 year, 10, 12 years in, you decided to focus on the IP stuff along that journey, in that first 10 to 12 years was it just you or how did, did you add people along the way or did that come later? After the focus

Jeffrey Sladkus: Yeah, so you know, the first few years were definitely lean. I mean, when you get outta law school in 98. And they, they doubled our salary before we even started just to keep up with the West coast firms. It was kind of, the whole situation was [00:10:00] surreal. So, you know, you already have a standard of living or a baseline that you’re kind of comparing yourself to.

And it took, it took me years to really, it took me years to get to the point where I’d wake up in the morning and not worry about the phone ringing or not worrying about whether there be a check in the mailbox. And as soon as that started happening. I hired my paralegal that I used to work with at Womble Carlyle away from Womble, and then I started, you know, slow and steady with a, a law clerk from Emory. And then she worked for me through the bar exam, and then I hired her as my first associate. And I remember my father-in-law being like, how the hell are you gonna get enough work to keep her busy? I don’t know, but you know, the way I’ve kind of managed my firm’s growth is that it’s just math. And to me, numbers don’t lie.

And if I can pay somebody $50 an hour, you know, for 10 hours a week, and I’ve got 10 hours of work that I can build, two 50 an hour, I mean, it’s just math and the math [00:11:00] works. So I would always feel comfortable when the math really worked. Very conservatively that it was time to add a person, make a change, do something else.

So from there I hired Erica, and then I hired another associate. That spot got filled a couple times, then I hired a litigation associate. And then it just, it just went from there. And finally we needed somebody to run our litigation group. So Carrie joined us. She worked at POGO back in the day.

We hired another trademark associate. We have a litigation associate starting in in September. But these are all very calculated, well thought out, at least. I think they’re well thought out. But if you build it, they will come type of approach.

Jonathan Hawkins: So a lot of people out there, especially early on, sort of like you, they’re scared to niche down too far. They’re like, I’m gonna, I’m gonna lose work if I, if I go to, to niche. And then oftentimes what [00:12:00] happens I guess you could pick a niche that’s so small that there’s only two clients in the world.

I guess that’s possible. But but once you sort of niche down, it, it, and this has been my experience. I’ve talked to many people. It, it’s, it, it almost, the, the growth accelerates, versus when you were trying to do a little bit of everything, what was your experience?

Jeffrey Sladkus: It exactly that. I got comfortable with saying, okay, I wanna be the best trademark attorney in Atlanta. You know, and then it morphed into being, I want to have the best trademark prosecution firm in Atlanta. Now this, you know, so I always had my mind on, I wanted to be the best at what we did, and to do that.

I did feel like niching down. We specialized for, well, we still do, but what really helped my firm grow is I had relationships with a lot of Italian attorneys and their firms represented some of the biggest brands in the world. And I just thought, okay, if I really focus on this, what are the other firms doing [00:13:00] wrong?

And I just started asking my colleagues, and it was pretty clear, number one, they were too expensive. You know, everything was on a flat fee and I knew what they were charging ’cause I was the one billing it. Number two, the response rate was horrible. You know, the biggest fear of any trademark attorney is gonna be a deadline.

Did I miss a deadline? We make the deadline and there are last minute things and I started seeing at the bottom of emails, please confirm receipt in old bold in caps. And I realized like they really stress about this because in New York, people, you know, roll in 9 30 10, by the time you get your email, it’s the end of the day in Europe.

So what I decided to do is, okay, how do we address that? How do we address the price and the quality needs to be equal to or better than what they’re getting? So I basically slashed the flat fees that, you know, the big firms were charging to. Something was still very reasonable. And then I started getting up at 5 30, 6 o’clock in the morning.

Every [00:14:00] morning. I still do, and I fielded emails from my Italian clients. And the feedback I got was like, wait, what time are you up right now? We’ve never gotten an email back that early from the US Council. And I said, well, I want you to know that I’m reliable and that I know there’s important deadlines and that I’m always gonna be here round the clock. And I did that for a decade plus, but every morning, like just, yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: that’s a cool story. I mean, that’s cool. I mean, a good example of how to differentiate, differentiate yourself and just client service. Man,

Jeffrey Sladkus: That’s it. And it’s surprising when you, when, when I hear, when we get new clients, it’s almost like our firm sells itself because no one seems to like their attorneys. But what happened with the, the, the lawyers at this, these two big firms I worked for, as they started leaving and going to other law firms.

They were like, Hey, we’ve got this guy Jeff, [00:15:00] you know, you don’t need to use Frost Zelnik. You should use Jeff. And they go to Pelli Tire or Versace or Montclair Armani and just, I started getting all this crazy work coming in from, you know, this little old Jeff sitting in his basement is doing Versace’s trademark work.

Yeah. I started pitching myself a little bit at that point in time, saying, all right, this is working. Now you can build a model around this. And then I did. I built up the staff and the systems around that to make sure that they were well taken care of. And they know that at any point in time they email us, they’re gonna hear back within hours. It’s tiring.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was looking at your website. There’s something on there, Amazon IP Accelerator what is that? I was curious what that

Jeffrey Sladkus: Sure. So when you’re a seller on Amazon. There’s a lot of counterfeiting on Amazon which we can talk about later. But one of the things you can do to protect your brand [00:16:00] if you’re selling, you know, pencil cases called Pencils r us. Within a day of being on there, counterfeiters and suppliers and Asia start dumping the same stuff for less, and they start naming it something similar to yours.

So what the accelerator was meant to do is for new brands that were applying through the accelerator program, there were 12 law firms at the, at the beginning that were vetted by Amazon’s legal department, and they said, okay, if you use any of these 12 law firms, then when you apply to register trademark because you’re using one of those firms, we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that it will get registered and we’ll give you brand protection immediately.

So then they could start asserting that brand against counterfeiters or third parties who are trying to knock ’em off. So we’ve, through that program, we have, we’ve touched clients like in everywhere. It is crazy. Everyone’s trying [00:17:00] to sell something into the United States, and this is the key to the, you know, Amazon’s like the key to the west.

So, we, I mean, I had a full-time associate just doing that work. It is lower margin work but it’s still good work. But we’ve, we’ve kinda reduced our profile to focus on keeping our clients happy, but also higher margin work.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so what’s the process to get approved by Amazon? You said there was only 12 firms. I mean, that seems like a high bar to pass. I don’t know.

Jeffrey Sladkus: yeah, it was just one of those right place, right time. The one of my associates back in the day Susan, she lived in Bend, Oregon. That was another thing I learned that I can work with. There’s a lot of great people all over the states that have got a lot of great experience that they wanna share.

You don’t just have to look here in Atlanta. But after she left my firm, she went in house and she went at Amazon and then she was tasked with putting this together. She’s like, Hey, Jeff. I was like, Hey, [00:18:00] you know, kinda like, sure, I’d love to. She’s like, I bet you would. So it was kind of handed to me just through a relationship.

It wasn’t handed to me, but it was a relationship thing.

Jonathan Hawkins: Wow. You know, you’re right. Sometimes luck, sometimes it better be lucky

Jeffrey Sladkus: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: good. I guess it’s better to be good and lucky. That’s cool. And so you mentioned earlier, you know, you, you were working with some of these big Italian brands fairly early in the career or very early in the life of your firm.

And I, I’ve heard you sort of refer to it as a blessing and a curse. I don’t know if you, what do you mean by that? Or what did you mean by that when you told me that?

Jeffrey Sladkus: It’s a blessing and a curse. So, number one, you know, when you’re trying to feed associates, you wanna provide steady work, right? So steady workflows, you wanna have some real reliable sources. Well, these Italian firms were very reliable sources, but in order to get that work, they’d beach up a little bit.

You know, you’d [00:19:00] take a, have to take a hit on your rates. Lot of write offs that from time to time if a big client wasn’t happy or something didn’t go, you just, you need to sell your soul a little bit. Just a little bit. You know, and after doing that for 15, 16 years, I, you know, I, it’s not like I felt like I owed the firm something because I put in a lot of hard work and we all did over the last decade plus.

But they were trying to negotiate like 30% discounts on my rates. And just at this point, I couldn’t do it anymore. So we had an amicable discussion with a lot of the firms that we’d love to continue working with you, but it’s, we can’t discount our rates. And interestingly enough, nobody has stopped working with us. And, and so we’re making 30 points more on, on every, on everything we’re doing. And, it, you know, just again, impro, improving the margins, just looking internally, like what can we do to make margins better, make more money? And you know, it’s the 80 [00:20:00] 20 rule that, that, that work was really a pain in the butt sometimes, and it took up a lot of our time.

But again, it’s, it’s good work. But I had to get it to, to be on par with the other work we’re doing. And it took me 15 years to do that. 16 years.

Jonathan Hawkins: I gotta ask, do you take quote business trips to Italy a lot for these clients?

Jeffrey Sladkus: Well, I just got back we, my wife and I have been lucky enough to, and that’s another thing that I did early on in my career is my wife and I would go to Europe, we’d fly to Italy to Rome, see the law firms in Rome, then go to Milan, see affirms or a couple firms and a lot of fashion brands that are there.

Then we go to Torino, which is an industrial city, but that’s where. The big law firm, Ako Basian partners to go visit them. And I just go on a roadshow, you know, and again, no US attorney was dropping what they were doing and just going into their firm and, and Torina saying, I’m here all day. I’m [00:21:00] gonna buy y’all lunch.

I have talking points, we have slides. Pick my brain. Tell me what I’m doing right. Tell me what I’m doing wrong. And, and, but just sitting there at a table with everybody once a year just made a huge difference. I started making. You know, Facebook friends and people on our holiday card list, and it, it just, you know, it turned into a, a pretty close relationship by, by doing that with a lot of people.

Jonathan Hawkins: So the second thing I gotta ask is, you know, what does your and your wife’s closet look like? Are they full of these Italian brands or

Jeffrey Sladkus: no, luckily she’s not, she doesn’t dig that stuff.

Jonathan Hawkins: I.

Jeffrey Sladkus: you know, we’ll bring home a lot of bocce chocolate, that, that’s kind of what goes, goes over well in our house. So.

Jonathan Hawkins: cool. So that brings us sort of, so I’ll call it your, your newer practice. And this was really sort of fascinating when we, we really started talking about this, your I’ll call it your anti-counterfeiting practice. And so maybe explain what that is and maybe how you [00:22:00] got into it. It sounded somewhat fortuitous or, or I don’t know, you just sort of fell into it.

I’m, I’m really curious, but it’s, it’s becoming a big part of your first practice, it sounds like.

Jeffrey Sladkus: It is what we do in general, you know, everything we do here is brand protection. So if you want to trademark registered, helping you with that process is brand protection in its base most basic form. You know, we would do customs work for Armani and Versace, and we still do for, for a bunch of clients.

We get these notices in say, you know, somebody imported a hundred pairs of these shorts. They’re fake, they destroy ’em. Fine. Custom. Actually customs is a very good program that uses taxpayer dollars to go after that stuff. So it’s free. If there was a website that had an infringing product on it, you can take that website down. If you saw a listing on a Alibaba or Ali Express, or even Amazon that was fake, you do a take [00:23:00] down, have it taken down, and it all goes back up again, and just take it down again. Take it down again. Seize the stuff of customs, write a demand letter, and then it just all happens again. So one of my buddies who was, who rented from, from us for a long time, mark Siegel, a litigator.

We just took a step back and said, you know, we’ve got all these high fashion brands that are, have been counterfeited forever and will be counterfeited forever. The current tools we have are just not effective. So we started studying what some other lawyers were doing up in, in New York and around Florida.

A couple kind of pioneering lawyers. Who had devised their own way of amassing large amounts of, of sellers on e-commerce marketplaces in Asia and suing them in a batch of two to 300 defendants. But then also getting authority from the court to freeze their bank [00:24:00] accounts at. Whatever marketplace, whatever they use to process their, their financial transactions.

And with that came a temporary restraining order to take the stuff down. And what we ended up with fast Forward is a system where we gather hundreds, if not thousands of counterfeit products a month by brand. And we file lawsuits in federal court, we freeze the defendants, the counterfeiters money, and then we negotiate settlements for our clients.

Out of the frozen funds and that has added the third prong to the brand protection that was missing is there was no deterrence effect. You see it, you take it down. Bad person to go back up. This is the first time ever we were able to really punch somebody in the stomach and take some money and they know that if they did it again, we cash ’em again and.

We’re really encouraging ’em just to go counterfeit somebody else. They’re not gonna [00:25:00] stop. Unfortunately, that’s, that’s how I feel. But never have they been punched in the stomach and that pay damages and, and never has it cost them anything. So that’s kind of the, the, the knockout punch we added to this enforcement program and it’s been wildly successful.

We filed probably almost 150 lawsuits in federal court in the last four and a half years for UGA and. Off on the shelf and Quicksilver Billabong, board riders Montclair Outerwear, stone Island, just, we just Juicy Couture Juicys back in fashion. But one of the things that happened to me, again, whether it’s the right place or being at the right time, my father-in-law was an in-house attorney for Universal Studios for a long time.

And he has a lot of friends in the industry and he was speaking with one of his friends, Andy, who’s in his running club about what I was doing. And Andy said, you [00:26:00] know, I just managed a transaction where Marilyn Monroe Estate was sold to a, a big private company, authentic Brands Group. I bet they’d be interested in that.

So got the connection, spoke to Nest Council, made the pitch. And they signed on immediately for us to handle Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, which from a brand protection standpoint, you know, Marilyn Monroe is kind of a crown jewel that it just, it’s endless. Same thing with Elvis. And as we prove ourselves to them, they just opened up their their book of clients to us.

And what they do is they buy distressed brands and then they turn ’em around. Get some economies of scale. So through them we started doing work for, you know, David Beckham, Shaq Juicy vision did just, just a whole, you know, Muhammad Ali, it, it’s, it’s great ’cause they keep acquiring brands and we’re, we have almost like a constant feed of work, which is unheard of in a litigation practice.

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s an [00:27:00] interesting business model, buying distressed brands, turning them around that, that’s, that’s very interesting. So we were talking to, I mean, like you said, this is sort of innovative and sort of, on the forefront of enforcement. And so, you know, you get to basically immediately. Freeze the accounts.

Is this before you even serve them with the lawsuit?

Jeffrey Sladkus: Yeah, it’s an ex part. They order, they don’t get any kind of notice at all until it’s been frozen and their store has been taken down. It’s pretty drastic. And over the last few years, more, more and more firms, mostly in the northern district of Illinois have started doing this type of work on behalf of, you know, property owners and some people fly straight, some people don’t. But a lot of judges or a lot of critics, there are a lot of critics out there saying that, why is it fair for you to sue all these people? And they don’t have notice and you know, you take their money. And, but the [00:28:00] answer is because they’re counterfeiters.

And if they get noticed, they’re going to pack up their bags and run and they’re gonna close their bank accounts. And up until then, no one’s, no one’s given us any other suggestions for any other remedy. So you can complain about it all you want, but this is the best tool we have in place right now to deal with this.

So

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so you, you said you filed a bunch of these here in the Northern District, so I guess the judges there are, are used to it by now, but early days. I mean, how do you convince ’em to, to actually do this?

Jeffrey Sladkus: yeah, the, the judges, thank goodness, Mo, most of ’em are on board. The vast majority are, but the good thing is they ask questions and they’re very concerned about due process. They wanna make sure people have noticed that they have a right to be heard. So there, there are concerns, but in the first few cases we filed for the Elf on the shelf we, you know, we went to court with a thousand of these things showing how wire sticks outta the arms and how it’s a consumer safety issue also, and also showing.

How many [00:29:00] lawsuits my clients filed, how many take downs they’ve had, and saying, we need an extraordinary remedy here. These are Asian counterfeiters, they can disappear. And we just sold ’em on it and they said, yeah, we’d have to post bonds, big bonds in the beginning just to, you know, they were cautious.

But once we proved to ’em that people were getting noticed and people were getting an opportunity to be heard and that we started settling these things. At a PI hearing, we would accommodate someone who wanted to call in, you know, and to, or a lawyer that would call in. So we play it very by the book. And I think that’s allowed the judges to get easier and, and more accepting of the process.

Real quick. Thanks for listening. If you’re getting any value out of this podcast, please take two seconds to hit the subscribe button and leave a five star review. It would really mean a lot to me. Now back to the show.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you’ve talked a little bit about. I wanna talk about how you’ve gotten your clients in your cases. And you’ve talked about sort of, you know, being in the right [00:30:00] place at the right time which is great, but that’s not enough. I mean, you gotta close the deal and you say you make the pitch.

So, maybe give me a little flavor, man. How did you learn this? You know, any advice on, you know, you get the introduction, the door opens, you walk in, how would I or some other lawyer out there, you know, any advice on closing the deal?

Jeffrey Sladkus: Sure. I say this for no other reason that. You know, my brother and I were blessed with the gift of being able to make people feel comfortable to schmooze and to just close, you know? And a lot of times it really is not that hard ’cause I’m a trademark attorney. Oh, I hate my trademark attorney. Great. Here’s my card. I’ll take, you know, sometimes it’s like that easy.

But what I tell the people in my office, I also believe that some people are just not made for it. And that’s okay too. You know, we need people to work in law firms. Also, the business development is important clearly, but people, you know, it’s not the only thing that’s important here.

I [00:31:00] tell people in my firm think of a few things that, about what you do that will captivate somebody when you tell ’em. Yeah, this is what I do. Yeah. I, I, I work for the highest fashion brands in the world. Oh, you like your wife likes, you know, versa. Oh, great. Yeah. But we just confiscated, there’s just stories that, that come from our day-to-day work, which people universally find to be pretty cool when you’re talking about shutting down counterfeiters in Asia, you know, everybody’s been to New York City and saw purses being sold, you know, on blankets, you know, on, on, on Fifth Avenue or Times Square.

It’s no different. It’s just off the street and online now. But people like hearing these stories and that’s typically my entree to get myself on the table, but then also allow them to feel comfortable to then tell me about themselves and what they do and, and see what kind of needs I can, I can fulfill for them.

Jonathan Hawkins: So I wanna shift sort of to, [00:32:00] I’ll call it the internal working, sort of the, the business of your firm. We’ve talked a little bit about marketing, but you know, how is your role, what’s your role now? And maybe how has it changed over the life of your firm? I mean, when anybody starts a firm. You’re doing everything, you’re doing the legal work, you’re doing everything.

But as you start to grow, I mean, obviously as the owner, a lot of times your role changes. And, you know, oftentimes you get to the point where you’re not really doing any legal work. But so what about you? What, what, what’s your day to day like now and how has it changed since over the life of your firm?

Jeffrey Sladkus: My role now is more of a just oversight. Like you said, I, I really don’t bill hours anymore. It’s occasional that if I’m doing a couple hours of work, but I really feel that my job is to develop business and, and give it to the people in my firm.

And keep them busy. So business development is still my lap. I’ve, I’ve always enjoyed the accounting side and the bookkeeping side, so I still do that myself. A lot of people gimme, you know, some flack for that, but [00:33:00] I it’s just something I’ve always, as part of running the business, something I’ve always enjoyed doing.

But I, I’m available. I try to be available at all times as just a consigliere type. What do you think about this? What do you think of this? What do you think of this? This is what I think this, you know, and just kind of pat people, keep ’em in the lane. But you know, I don’t really wanna do any real legal work anymore, to be honest with you.

So I think I’m, I’ve positioned myself pretty well.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, so take me through this. So, this is a, you know, common, common experience. You know, the clients are calling you and they’re like, Jeff, we want you to do it. We want you to do it. You know, how did you how did you transition that element of it? No, no, no. So and so down the hall. They’re much better than I am, or we work as a team or, or my rate is now 5,000 an hour.

You want someone, I mean, what, what, what did you do to get out of it?

Jeffrey Sladkus: Good question. So on the trademark side, it’s been an easier transition because Eric has been involved with their [00:34:00] work for so long. You know, on, on the litigation side where I spend my time, I just follow the advice of one of my clients and I just jack my rate up to something that I thought, if you wanna pay me hourly to do work at this rate, then that’ll incentivize me and it kind of narrowed it down to three or four clients.

But they’re the old, you know, they’re the ones that have been with me forever. And, and so, everybody else, I, I typically try to build a relationship with either Erica and Trademark Prosecution or Jason on litigation side, but I’m always copied. I’m always there. People know they can pick up the phone and call me and I’m on top of what’s going on.

So I will tell you that I did just, I don’t lose many clients, but I did lose one recently. And because they did not feel like I was spending enough time focusing on their work, so I did get that feedback recently and I did, I did. I had to push the work off to somebody else in my firm, but someone was very, very qualified, but they just wanted me to do it.

And so unfortunately that [00:35:00] that happened recently, but it taught me a little bit or lesson to be a little bit more hands on.

Jonathan Hawkins: so, so there’s multiple sides to this cube, let’s call it. So part of it is what we just talked about, the client dynamic of maybe wanting you to work, do the work. Then there’s sort of the lawyer dynamic where you’re like, only I can do the work, or, or you know, are they, there’s just some roadblock to de being able to delegate.

Did you have that problem at all or was that fairly easy for you? Get handing it off to the other attorneys?

Jeffrey Sladkus: I mean, the trademark stuff, yes. That, that Erica’s had down for a long time. She’s been with me 14, 15 years, so she really has that down. Stuff that I grew up doing at Womble, software licensing leasing, well, we didn’t do that anyway, but transactional work, we, we just stopped. So, because that, those were the deals, there was like, this is what I excel at, you know, anything on a piece of paper, make a deal, [00:36:00] work.

I just didn’t wanna do the work anymore because of the time commitment and the stress. So we just, I now refer that out to any number of people, so

Jonathan Hawkins: All right, we’re gonna, we’re gonna shift gears a little bit for a minute and then we’ll come back to the firm. But know, the other thing I learned about you on that day of shooting is that you are also a big reggae fan. I’m like the only one that I know of all my friends, so I’m glad to finally meet somebody else that.

Seems to love it as much as I do. So

Jeffrey Sladkus: That

Jonathan Hawkins: how did you get into it, man? Tell me that

Jeffrey Sladkus: reggae. In high school one of my best friends, Josh, he and I just started to just really grab onto it. You know, it all starts with hearing Bob Marley at first, right?

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s right.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Then when you go all the way back and listen to the first album and you learn about Peter Tosh and you’re like, oh, okay. Ooh, this guy’s interesting.

And at the time, in the late eighties, early nineties, [00:37:00] the Reggae Sunsplash concert would come through Atlanta. And we’d go to that every single time. We’d go to every single reggae concert that we could possibly, and there were a lot more bands touring back then. A lot of the bands that we love, like Third World steel Poles.

Jonathan Hawkins: pulse. Yeah.

Jeffrey Sladkus: I think like, I mean, some of these bands are still still touring, but we were able to see a lot of great music in our, in our high school and early college years. And it just, it’s just been a love of mine. I, I love the Jamaican people. I love the island. They’re the most relaxed, chill people I’ve ever met in my life.

And that’s kind of what you look for from reggae music, you know.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. I, I, I love the feel, man. It’s, it, it puts you in a little bit of a trance. You know, the, so, you know, I, I mentioned it. You were out of town. The, the concert about a month ago now came through stick figure. Incredible man. It was badass. Stephen Marley was one of the opening acts who I’d never seen before, but it was [00:38:00] almost basically just like a cover.

You know, performance of all the Bob Marley songs, and he sounds just like him. Sounds just like him. So he is playing, you know, some of the big Marley hits, and then they played some deep cuts, you know, some of the more obscure stuff, but it was, it was, it was cool, man.

Jeffrey Sladkus: That’s awesome. Where was that?

Jonathan Hawkins: Up in Alpharetta, the Marris amphitheater. Yeah, but, so I had seen stick figure, I don’t know, three or four years before. And it was good, but they’re way better now. I mean, they’re getting their, their live show is just getting way better. So, if you ever get a chance, man, you,

Jeffrey Sladkus: Oh definitely.

Jonathan Hawkins: anybody listening, you gotta go see these guys.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Hey, go see steel Pulse while you can.

Jonathan Hawkins: I did see them years ago, I guess in the late nineties. And that was cool. Glad I gotta see them. So, yeah, there’s a lot of good, a lot of new, really good stuff American, and there’s some good island stuff too, but yeah. Anyway. All right, well, cool. Next time the show’s in town, we’re, we’re going [00:39:00] together.

So you’re on my list now, you’re. So, okay, back to the firm. So, you know, again, you just celebrated your 20th anniversary for the firm. I imagine there’s been ups and downs. As you look back, are there any things, I’ll call ’em, lessons learned? So the way I like to frame it is things that you did that maybe you’re like, yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

Or things that you did, but you’re like, man, I should have done that way earlier.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Yeah, there’s a million of those things honestly, just tripped all over myself for, for a very long time. A lot of it was being Pennywise at pound foolish, not recognizing the value of bringing people in to help free up some of my time. Just, you know, which, which payroll company we use, going to the cheapest, you know, just learning. Yeah. Cheapest and best. But, you know, putting these foundational elements of the [00:40:00] firm in place earlier on would’ve been really better. I found that, you know, with a full comprehensive benefit plan, there is the, you know, employee retention aspect of that when you start matching 4 0 1 ks. You know, we pay for all of our employees health insurance, you know, their entire premium, and we, we try to now offer a platform that’s at least as equally attractive as, as going to a bigger place.

So.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you, you mentioned sort of investment into the firm. And this is something that, you know, I struggle with. I think I’ve talked to many people that struggle with it and it’s, you, you see where you want to go. And you’re like, I know what to do. I don’t know how to get there. But you have limited resources to invest to get there.

Can’t do everything all at once. And sometimes you, you spend the money or whatever and it takes a while for it to pay off, so then all of a sudden you maybe have a cash flow issue. So what’s your approach on sort of the investments into the [00:41:00] firm?

How do you balance sort of the investment into the firm and getting out over your skis?

Jeffrey Sladkus: Okay. As far as financial investment or like personal investment

Jonathan Hawkins: I’d say mainly financial. ’cause I mean, you’re, unless you’re borrowing, I mean, I guess you could borrow money, but you’re funding the, the growth and investment, and that’s both people marketing systems, technology. You’re funding that presumably outta cash flow. Or maybe you’re borrowing money.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Okay, I get it. So the firm is, you know, I’ve grown the firm just basically on my own financing. I’ve never, I have a line of credit, but I’ve never drawn on it. I’m a firm believer that when we get a bill, we pay it. I try to treat other professionals like I want to be treated. There were many, many times throughout the course of the years where I had next to nothing in the operating account.

And I, you know, I’d have to make a contr capital contribution for, you know, that that was back when the, oh my God, run to the mailbox days. But, [00:42:00] you know, spending money on document management systems or on online bill, you know, billing systems, things like investing in technology has been worth every dime.

You know, anything that’ll help increase productivity. And also, you know, from a, from a financial side. Not only on like, how much am I investing, but looking at the work we have, and I was saying before, what kind of margin are we making on this work? You know, is this good work or bad work? And starting to eliminate the bad work.

Knowing or feeling comfortable that good work is gonna fill that place. And that’s something that we’ve been doing now for the last couple years. So like I said, it’s not a financial investment, but not a lot of people are in a position to say. I don’t really wanna work with you anymore. I’m not trying to say that in a, in a negative way other than over the last 20 years.

We’re fortunate enough now to, to pick and choose the work, and now, you know, listen, it’s gonna [00:43:00] flow down. We try to have that workflow down so the next Jeff Sladkus is, you know, that’s out there busting their ass to, to get out of a big firm or whatnot. It’s just kind of the evolution of, it’s a natural evolution to practice, I guess.

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s, that’s such a great point. I mean, I’ve been there too. You have, you have this work that’s high revenue. And you’re like, Hey, we’re making money, but the margins are so razor thin that maybe you’re actually losing money. And if you don’t step back and say, wait a second, let’s analyze this everybody’s pulling their hair out and going crazy trying to get this done it’s just not worth it.

It’d be better just to jettison the work and not have it. And I mean, I’ve been there, so I, I get it. And a lot of people I think are there, but they’re scared. Or they don’t have time to, to stop and just sort of analyze the situation. So I don’t know. Any advice to folks out there that may be in that position?

Jeffrey Sladkus: Once we started doing it, it was very I don’t know, it it, the effects it had on the whole group [00:44:00] was very interesting, so. I didn’t really have to sell anybody on the financial side. That was my decision that, okay, we’re gonna, I’m comfortable, we’re gonna lose this work and, and replace it.

Another, another big benefit. Well, the biggest benefit I found from getting rid of the lower margin work, other than financially has been that, you know, my support staff and employees, they didn’t like working for a lot of these clients. So there was tangential, you know, benefits to it. Also, they were like, when I started hearing, you know, we’re not gonna do work with x, y, Z firm in Italy anymore.

They’re like, thank God. I was like, what? Why didn’t you tell me? Like, it wasn’t bad, bad, bad, but we have this other stable clients that are, that we love working with and it is always a problem. It was always something.

So I didn’t realize the positive effect that it would also have on the people in the firm who are doing the work.

So, you’re gonna make the money up elsewhere. And especially if if you’re getting rid of lower margin work you’re gonna make it up. You just have to have faith that you’re gonna go ahead and get [00:45:00] it.

Jonathan Hawkins: And I’ll tell you, we’ve all been there i’m sure the instance where you, fire that client that just, for whatever reason, whether it’s, they’re hard to deal with that you’re working your ass off, they don’t pay much or they don’t pay whatever. You get rid of the client. It is like a hundred pound weight is just gone.

It’s, amazing. The world looks completely different.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Absolutely. And you know what? Standing up for yourself also and not being. Yeah, this is my business. But, you know, I’ve allowed myself to be beaten, whipped around a little bit for the betterment the whole. But, you know, having the confidence to finally step up and be like, you know what?

I feel just better about not working with them. My self-worth is improved here too. So it’s just uh, when you get to that point, it’s a good feeling. It’s a good feeling. But don’t be afraid to try to get to that point ’cause you just gotta. Have faith that you’re gonna, again, replace the business.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So you, you’ve seen a lot over the last 20 years with your firm. [00:46:00] As you look to the future, what, what’s the vision? What’s next?

Jeffrey Sladkus: You know, we have a new associate starting in September, so getting her plate full, getting her onboarded and trained. You know that this is the traditional, you know, first right outta law school. She clerked for us for a couple summers and through last year, but we need to make a big investment of time, all of us to, to pitch in, to get Kristen trained.

But for me, slow and steady right now is where, where I like things. It’s everything is kind of moving along. Growth has been organic. The phone rings from a lot of referrals for smaller things. I feel like if I need to amp up the work, I can just start looking at the brands we manage and, and figure stuff out.

I don’t know that I want to grow much, much bigger. I do know that this is my 28th year of practicing, so in a couple years, I would like to take a big step back and, and [00:47:00] turn the reins over to some degree, to, to my partners. You know, both, both of ’em who will likely run their practices have been with me more than a decade.

So I think they understand that that’s kind of the next role for them. But I don’t know that I’m ever gonna really step completely away. It’s just, it, it is for something you built by yourself and it’s your baby. I, I’ve, I’ve gotten three or four interviews in the last four or five years. From, from larger firms asking, you know, is it time for you to merge?

Like, it’s almost like there’s surprise. I’m, I’m surviving, you know? And as I say that, and there was news, you know, about a big firm, you mer you know, like it’s never been right to me. The culture is the thing that, one of the biggest differentiators here. I don’t keep track of people. I don’t, they don’t have to ask permission to go to the doctor’s appointment or go to their kid’s soccer match or whatever.

So, I’m, I, I, it would take a very [00:48:00] special deal for me to transition this company, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. ’cause I, I fiercely guard the culture of this place and that’s what people signed up for and I feel like I owe it to ’em to, to maintain this so.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So if you weren’t practicing law, what would you be doing? Or if you weren’t running a firm, maybe I’ll say it that way

Jeffrey Sladkus: what would I be doing? Well, part of this inspirations from my dad who had no hobbies and after retired from law, got on the New York State Ethics Committee. Then after that went on this committee and. So I’ve purposely become pretty mediocre at a bunch of things, hobbies, and I just would like to dive into those hobbies and you know, I like exercising, staying healthy, but right now it’d be taking a part of old k guitar and refurbishing it.

That’s kind of what I’m doing, working on [00:49:00] right now. So I don’t, I don’t seem to think about legal work while I’m doing that.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Very nice, very nice. So, so let’s, let’s end with this. So if I’m a lawyer out there and I’m thinking about starting a practice, or maybe I just started a practice, any pieces of advice you might have for them as they are starting down this path.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Yeah, just resolve to the fact that you’re gonna have to put in a lot of hard work for probably a long time and you know. Nothing’s just gonna be handed to you. And I’ve been in some very lucky situations, but I feel that over the last 25, however many years that the hard work I’ve put in, I really do feel has, has created those possibilities for me, and that I finally matured enough to know when to capitalize on, on them and how.

So don’t be afraid to put in the long hours and don’t be afraid to go out and network and just get known. Get your name out there and if you feel comfortable enough [00:50:00] to find that little, that little area of your part of law, like I did with the trademark prosecution work. with what?

You know, what, what’s not being done very well in this whole business? Ah, these three things, well, let me fix this. I’m Sure there’s two or three things that can be fixed in a lot of practice areas that would differentiate yourself from a lot of people. And would be attractive. So just try to find that thing or things. And you’re gonna fail one or two times or three or four, but you don’t know unless you try.

Jonathan Hawkins: Great advice, great advice, Jeff. So thanks man for coming on. If anybody out there wants to get ahold of you, what’s the best, best way?

Jeffrey Sladkus: Email somebody else. No.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah.

Jeffrey Sladkus: meant that

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. Go find him on his website.

Jeffrey Sladkus: Jeff@sladlaw.com. Jeff@sladlaw.com

Jonathan Hawkins: I love it, man. I love it. Well, yeah, thanks for coming on, man. This has been fun.

Jeffrey Sladkus: my [00:51:00] pleasure.

OutroUpdatedWebsite-1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the founding partner podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on the latest episodes. You can also connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn and check out the show notes. With links to resources mentioned throughout our discussion by visiting www.lawfirmgc.com. We’ll see you next time for more origin stories and insights from successful law firm founders.