Episode 160 – Lindsey Corbin

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Automated Transcription

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Lindsey Corbin  0:00

I think that’s a fantastic question. And something that I’ve frequently debated with my colleagues in the legal field. I believe that the pandemic has changed the legal field, as we know it. I think that clients want a different delivery of services, a different style of delivery of services. I think that they don’t expect that the law firm has a fancy 20th, 100th-floor lobby for them to go meet their attorney. I think that everybody can now come to the table in a slightly different manner in a good way.

 

Richard Matthews  0:40  

Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what I can fix that I can help people I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money, and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

   

 

Richard Matthews  1:35  

Hello and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I’m live on the line with Lindsey Corbin. Lindsey Are you there?

 

Lindsey Corbin  1:41  

I’m here.

 

Richard Matthews  1:42  

Awesome. So glad to have you here, Lindsey. So what I want to do real quick Lindsey is dive into your Bio so people will know who you are and what it is that you do. So Lindsey Corbin is a trademark industry expert with over 15 years of experience in encompassing both in-house and big law. In 2020 which is last year in the middle of the pandemic you founded delegate.legal. And Lindsay’s highly qualified paralegal who has been assisting attorneys across the country and has overseen fortune 500 trademark portfolios brand protection programs and successfully helped build legal policies. So with all of that, my question sort of is what is it that delegate.legal does? Who are your primary clients? What is it that you help people do?

 

Lindsey Corbin  2:26  

Sure, yes, thank you for having me. So delegate.legal is a virtual IP paralegal firm. So IP being intellectual property, so patents, trademarks, and copyrights. And we work with law firms and corporations all over the country to handle their trademark needs, work with their patent filings and prepare any copyright applications. Most of our clients are small firms or solo practitioner attorneys. And then we do also serve a role with some in-house legal departments when they just need a short-term contract assignment or need some assistance with some overflow work. We are there to help. And we are all senior-level paralegals. So we don’t have to be trained to do our jobs, which makes us really beneficial, because we can just step in and assume responsibility., and 

 

Richard Matthews  3:23  

Awesome. So do you guys ever go direct to market with your services as well? Like we have an e-commerce brand? Could we hire you to do trademark work? Or would we need to go through a lawyer who would then hire your services? I’m just curious how that works.

 

Lindsey Corbin  3:37  

Right. So we technically cannot provide trademark services directly to the consumer. We do get phone calls from consumers where we can point them to the Trademark Office website. You don’t need an attorney to file your trademark application, but it is highly recommended. And so when we get those phone calls, we do refer them to some of our clients. So we might end up working with that individual but not directly.

 

Richard Matthews  4:06  

Okay, so you do work almost exclusively with other lawyers. So you don’t work directly with the end market.

 

Lindsey Corbin  4:14  

Correct. We are not attorneys ourselves. And so if we did that we would be walking a line of something called unauthorized practice of law, which would be a really bad idea for us. So we do work strictly with attorneys and in house legal teams that have attorneys

 

Richard Matthews  4:33  

Awesome. So what I want to talk about then is how you got into this business, on your bio, you started this last year, and we talk on this show, every good comic book hero has an origin story, It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today and we want to sort of hear that story. Were you born a hero? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to start delegate.legal? Or did you start a job as a paralegal and eventually moved to start your own business? Basically, we want to know where you came from? How did you get this business off the ground?

 

Lindsey Corbin  5:03  

Sure. So if we go way back to the beginning of time, or when I graduated from college, I wanted to go to law school, I thought that I was going to be an attorney. And I took the law school admissions test, the LSAT, and I didn’t do very well on it. I did, okay. But at that time, I was living in a big city with very competitive law schools and didn’t get in twice. And so when I didn’t get in, I wanted to figure out where my career was gonna go. And I was very fortunate to get a position at a law firm in Atlanta with an attorney who let me learn trademarks. She was a trademark attorney. And she could see that I was a self-starter that I wanted to go teach myself, I really love doing the research and kind of finding the answers on my own before asking the question. And so that’s what I started doing. And I really fell in love with trademarks. I then had a couple of different career jumps into different law firms, and then into big corporations all staying within trademarks. And then, unintentionally, about 10 years ago, I got a phone call from an attorney who said, we don’t have enough work to really sustain a trademark paralegal full time. But would you be interested in just doing some freelance contract work? And I said, Sure, no big deal. So that was my first foray into this. Not really paying attention, or being aware of really the full ramifications of that, that this could be a thing. And so then I continued on my career, I actually spent four and a half years working in private equity, on a legal team, they’re more in the franchise space, even so, it’s a tiny bit out of the trademark world, but I really always had that entrepreneur spirit, when you work in private equity, and especially when you’re dealing with franchisees and franchises, you’re seeing individuals who are risking their life savings to start a business and to really do something for themselves. And that’s inspiring. And when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I was sent home to work remotely, and actually got a phone call and my salary was reduced, because most of our franchise, franchisees, and franchise systems had also taken a financial hit at that point. And so I just got a phone call from a colleague that said, hey, we have an attorney who could really use some help from a trademark paralegal with a lot of experience, do you have any bandwidth? And I went, Well, sure, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, like no big deal, I’m happy to help out. And then slowly throughout the summer, I started really observing the need for strong trademark paralegals to help in some of these other firms. And so I woke up one morning, literally, and said, my name is gonna be delegated.legal, I just, I just came up with it. And then I went after the logo, and then I sort of put all the wheels in motion. And it’s been an overwhelming eight months or so, in a good way.

 

Richard Matthews  8:45  

So you went from just the pandemic sort of inspired you to start a business to actually getting into running your legal skills through the entrepreneur lens if that makes sense.

 

Lindsey Corbin  8:59  

It did, working from home for that extended period of time was really a mind shift. I had gone from this incredibly busy, private equity world where you’re running a mile a minute, every single day, you’re on call constantly, if the managing partner wants something, you have to get it done. So then working from home where I could do all of that, but then I also got to spend a little bit more time with my family. And so I thought, well, how can I use this as an opportunity to continue to stay home? Maybe slow down my life which I’m sure we’ll get to but ironically did not happen. But then continue to enjoy this new world post-pandemic or current pandemic. I don’t even know if we can say post-pandemic yet but so it really came about is just a product of COVID product of sitting at home and wanting to think about what’s next.

 

Richard Matthews  10:02  

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what I’m curious about is, how big of an impact do you think this is like industry-wide for the legal world, that the pandemic has just changed the way laws are being practiced? And people who are doing work like you were doing, are sorting having to come up with new ways to work in the system? Or are you sort of unique in what you’ve done?

 

Lindsey Corbin  10:26  

I think that’s a fantastic question. And something that I’ve actually frequently debated with my colleagues in the legal field, I believe that the pandemic has changed the legal field, as we know it, I think that clients want a different delivery of services, a different style of delivery of services, I think that they don’t expect that the law firm has a fancy, 20th floor, whatever lobby for them to go meet their attorney. You’re not expected to sit at your desk in your office and grind. And instead, law firms can start to show some grace to their associates to the women to the moms, the dads, and really sort of change the profession. As we know it, I also think that it’s, well, I hope that it also is going to start to impact legal fees as well, and maybe start to plateau legal fees, legal services, can be very, very expensive, and can be out of reach for most people that really need them. And so perhaps without the overhead of that fancy building, maybe some of those services, those fees can plateau, I’m not sure they’ll drop as much as I think we would all love them to drop, but it would be nice if they quit climbing so high.

 

Richard Matthews  12:02  

Yeah. And it’s interesting, cuz I think as the world sort of moves forward, and we realized that not everyone needs the fancy building in New York, or Chicago or LA, you’re seeing people move across the country and spread out of the big cities. And I think that’s going to impact a lot of industries. And we have a different world, where you realize that, hey, I’ve been working virtually for four or five years now. And then last year, everyone realized, oh, everyone can work virtually, there’s still stuff that has to be done in person. You can’t hammer a nail into a wall without actually being there. I haven’t figured that out yet. But there’s a lot of services that you don’t have to be in person for. And I think that it does a number of things for leveling the playing field. Where I can actually hire a New York Attorney if I wanted to, not have to be in New York. And I guess there’s probably state limits for that you have to find someone who is barred and different. I don’t know how that works exactly.

 

Lindsey Corbin  13:07  

It depends on your practice area.

 

Richard Matthews  13:09  

I don’t understand that entirely. But you know what I mean.

 

Lindsey Corbin  13:13  

Well, it also affords that opportunity for that New York attorney.

 

Richard Matthews  13:15  

So anyway, it’s just changing.

 

Lindsey Corbin  13:18  

Sorry.

 

Richard Matthews  13:20  

Go ahead.

 

Lindsey Corbin  13:22  

I was gonna say it also affords that New York Attorney to go to Wyoming or go to Montana, or go to Nebraska, go wherever they want, and take their knowledge and expertise. And still practice what they love without being in a big city. Or maybe they want to go live in an RV and travel around, and they can work from anywhere they want. I mean, that’s more apparent now than it’s ever been. I mean, if you had said that. 

 

Richard Matthews  13:52  

That’s what I do.

 

Lindsey Corbin  13:52  

Somebody on my team does that she and her family have been traveling around in their RV for almost a year now. She homeschools their son, and she’ll check in with us from whatever National Park they’re in. Two years ago, if you’d said that people would look at you like you’re crazy. But now, it’s like, oh, that’s cool. Have fun, no big deal.

 

Richard Matthews  14:18  

Absolutely, because I’ve been traveling full time for four years. And it went from the last three years. People are like, well, that’s nuts. How are you doing that? To oh, of course. cuz that’s what everyone’s doing.

 

Lindsey Corbin  14:30  

Right. Great.

 

Richard Matthews  14:31  

So we’re no longer special anymore. Which is cool. Because I think more people getting to travel and experience and have more time for recreation for their family can be nothing but good for just our society as a whole. I think there’s a lot of benefits to that. We’re not losing ourselves in work. So my next question for you is about your superpowers. And we talk on this show, every iconic hero has a superpower whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call down Thunder from the sky, or super strength, in the real world heroes have what I call a zone of genius. And that’s either a skill or a set of skills that you were either born with, or you developed over time, that allows you to help your people slay their villains and come out on top in their own journeys. And so the way I like to think about is if you look at all the skills that you develop in your life, you probably have one skill that sort of like the common thread that ties all of them together. If you think about it like that, what do you think your superpower is in your legal business?

 

Lindsey Corbin  15:33  

I have an uncanny ability to remember many things. Kind of the most random of details that I can recall on no notice. So for example, being in the legal field, and being in my role as a paralegal, you are often tasked with working on a ton of different cases, or a ton of different trademarks, or when I was in private equity, all of these franchisees. And I was probably addressing 15 to 20 things at any given point. And I have the ability to just recall details, essentially, at a moment’s notice. So if I were to get a phone call, I would be able to say, Oh, thank you for the phone call. Mr. Smith. Yes, back on August 1, we talked about this. And here’s what I think the next steps are. And I will say that that’s a pretty great superpower in my field. That’s definitely something that’s a common thread is just being able to remember, all of the minutiae in essence.

 

Richard Matthews  16:52  

It irritates your children, they can never win an argument because you know, all the details.

 

Lindsey Corbin  16:57  

Basically, but they try.

 

Richard Matthews  17:01  

So, can you take just a couple of seconds for our audience who may not be as familiar with the legal field? What is the difference between a lawyer and a paralegal?

 

Lindsey Corbin  17:10  

Right, so good question. So an attorney has gone to law school, and they’ve taken the bar exam, which is this really Deluxe test it’s over two days, I believe, basically, you’re given a problem, and you have to solve it, but you have to use the skills that you learned in the argumentative nature that you’ve learned to pass the bar exam. And then you become licensed to practice in that particular state, and sometimes you can be licensed to practice in a few different states, but for the most part, it’s one state. And then a paralegal is really a broad term used for an individual who has probably some specialized skills in a particular practice area. So trademarks, personal injury, bankruptcy, immigration, you name it. They work really closely with the attorney, they probably draft the documents for the attorney. In my role, I have a bachelor’s degree in legal studies, and then I went to get additional paralegal certification from Emory University. Sometimes a paralegal will take a registered paralegal test. That is frequently practice areas specific as well. One of the things about the legal field that is different but often misunderstood is that just because you are a paralegal or an attorney, it does not mean that you know everything there is to know about every type of law. So if you if I’m in the trademark field, and I know trademarks, really well, I know absolutely nothing about personal injury or bankruptcy. And so you’re not going to go see an orthopedic doctor to solve your heart issue, you’re going to go to a cardiologist for that. The legal field is the same way you want to go see the specialist that really practices your area of law,

 

Richard Matthews  19:33  

It makes a lot of sense. So bringing us back around to your superpower with the ability to recall details does that superpower delineate across the skill sets between a lawyer and a paralegal were having that ability to have all the details really allow your clients to lean on you to know what the details of the case are and what the applicable laws and the stuff that needs to happen for them to actually go and make their arguments to make their cases.

 

Lindsey Corbin  20:03  

Definitely. So a lot of times my clients will call, what I like to call, pick my brain. So they will call, they’ll put time on my schedule, and they want to talk about the details of their case. But then they also want to know how that applies, or what arguments they can make, to have their case be more successful. Or if there’s something that they’re looking at before it becomes a case, they often want to call me to understand how they should proceed, how they should maybe file their application, their trademark application in a specific way, or if they should list a certain type of good or service in their application, because they think it might be more successful. And so I will get a lot of those phone calls. To say, okay, well, have you ever worked on this type of case? What do you think we should do? And the answer is almost always yes. I’ve seen it in my career, here’s how we handled it. Have you thought about this approach? To maybe think outside of the box a little bit. So I get that question frequently. And then I will also be asked very narrowly. Have you worked with this particular platform? Maybe it’s social media, maybe it’s an online marketplace? Have you ever had a situation where you have something removed from the platform for a legal issue? And so they’ll have to go back and say, Oh, yeah, I did work on that 10 years ago, and this is what we did, or whatever the answer might be.

 

Richard Matthews  21:41  

So questions like, as off top of my head, one of our brands we’re struggling with Amazon because there’s a couple of brands that have similar names to ours. They’re close, not the same thing. And they keep linking our brand store names together. And then Amazon keeps telling us well, it’s because it’s your fault. your trademark is too close to someone else’s, it’s not our fault. And we’ve always been curious, is there any sort of legal stuff around that? Because we have trademarks? So we have our trademark, and they’ve approved it as our official trademark on Amazon from the US trade stuff. And it’s just curious, is that the type of questions that you get, from your lawyers, like really nips kind of stuff?

 

Lindsey Corbin  22:28  

Yeah, so definitely, and here’s why. So a lot of times the attorneys that I work with practice by themselves, they’re not in a law office with a hundred other attorneys, they don’t always have a resource that they can call to get their questions answered. And so a lot of times, I become that resource. And so I’ll get the phone call from the lawyer that says, hey, we’ve got a client that’s having this issue on Amazon. Have you ever worked on Amazon? Do you know anything about it? And the answer is, yes. Because for the past several years, I’ve worked with a major children’s product company, with their brand enforcement, so I help them with their YouTube, their Amazon with their Etsy, all these things, protecting their brand. And so I’ve worked a lot with the Amazon team, and how to reach out to Amazon, Amazon can be challenging to correspond with. And so learning all of these things has become a really useful benefit to my clients because they can call the chances are, I’ve worked with whatever their problem is.

 

Richard Matthews  23:47  

That’s awesome. So you have like a breadth of knowledge that sort of has become your superpower in your ability to recall that brings it back. So I want to talk about the flip side then of your superpower, which is your fatal flaw. Just like every Superman has their kryptonite, or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets victory without going mad, you probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something you’ve struggled with. For me, there were a couple of things as a young entrepreneur, one of them was perfectionism, where I could always tweak it a little bit more, do a little bit other things before I shipped it and brought it to market. Or another one I struggled with for a long time was lack of self-care. Where I didn’t have good boundaries. So I let my clients walk all over me. Right, and you  But I think more important than what the flaw is, is how have you worked to rectify it so you can continue to grow your business and turn delegate.legal into the business you want it to be? Hopefully sharing a little bit will help our listeners learn from your experience.

 

Lindsey Corbin  24:45  

I have a couple of flaws. Maybe my clients won’t hear that. I’m just kidding. The first thing I did when I started my business was to hire a bookkeeper because I knew out of the gate that finances and numbers are always going to be my kryptonite, they were always going to be the thing that I never really understood and would never put the time into doing properly. And so I kind of knew that was going to be a struggle. And so I wanted to solve that right away. The other thing that’s a flaw is, I tend to be a people pleaser, I want to say yes to everything. I want people to know who I am, and to know my brand and to say kind things, and to say, Gosh, Lindsey is really good at what she does. She’s a stellar trademark paralegal. You should call her because she gives fantastic service. She’s responsive. And that comes at a cost. I haven’t entirely solved that yet. I mean, hiring my team has helped. But at the end of the day, I’m still inherently the one who says yes. to things that I probably shouldn’t say yes to. Because I just feel compelled to help everybody, I probably give away so much free information that others might charge for. Because again, I’m saying yes. And I believe in an abundance mentality. So I think there’s always enough to go around, but at what costs and that’s what I’m struggling with. It’s that and I’m giving of myself so much, that I then become overwhelmed and probably be overworked. And then the lines between family and work, not they’re not even blurred. They just didn’t exist. And so you’re sacrificing self-care. I get that. It’s the saying, yes, it’s the people-pleaser,

 

Richard Matthews  27:05  

Yep, you feel that you feel that deep down.

 

Lindsey Corbin  27:09  

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  27:09  

And what’s interesting, is, I have a couple of things that may help you with that because I’m getting to a point where I’ve started to rectify that in my own business. So a couple of things that have helped me. One of them was becoming really narrow with what we offer in our business that’s done a couple of things. One is if it doesn’t fit into this world, and for us, what I’ve been doing for years is, I help people build what I call heroic brands. And for years, we were getting to the point where we were doing everything from helping them build their website, to hiring their photographers to do their copywriting, to developing their products, like there’s just a whole host of things that happen that go into that. And we’re getting to the point now, where our agency just does the podcasts distribution, like the actual audience building at the end. And that’s our whole business, the Push Button Podcast, and now it’s, once we have that one really narrow focus, it’s become a lot easier to say no to things that don’t fit into that very narrow focus. So that’s been really helpful. So anyone who’s listening who’s in that sort of the same position that you and I are, it’s really helped me to have a really narrow focus on like, hey, this is the thing that we do. And we do this really well. And we do it at a really high level, and we do it for clients, and you get better results, it’s also helped us grow. So that’s been beneficial there. And the other thing that’s been really helpful is particularly because we travel, and we work from home. And I know that since you work from home now it’s useful to have hard limits on your calendar when you allow yourself to have phone calls and other things. And so for me, it’s like Monday through Thursday, my office hours, and I take Friday off now. But reducing the office hours that I have. And when I get a message on Friday afternoon, just making sure my clients and everyone that I work with knows like, hey, these days are days I take for my family and just sort of training them that way. So they know. And then they don’t expect a message to be responded to on Saturday night, things like that. And I know, it feels bad sometimes to let a message sit there for a couple of days. But once you get used to it, your clients start to appreciate it and they start to realize that like hey, he’s, I don’t know what the word is. But they take it as inspiration to do the same thing in their lives and take the time for their families because you’re like, hey, this is when I work and this is when I have stuff in my home. So anyway, that’s been really helpful. And then the other thing that does is it also helps you grow because instead of having an unlimited amount of time spent on your business, you’re like I’m I have to fit it into these hours. So you start focusing more on what’s the important stuff I need to get done during these times. And when you work on the more important stuff, you grow instead of working on stuff that’s always just, whatever is being reactionary, if that makes sense.

 

Lindsey Corbin  30:09  

Yeah, I definitely tried the hour’s limitation. But there’s a component of self-discipline that goes into that.

 

Richard Matthews  30:22  

That’s true.

 

Lindsey Corbin  30:22  

I’m okay at it. Yeah, I mean, I definitely block out my calendar from 8 to 10:30 every morning, for a host of reasons, whether it’s sort of getting the kids settled for the day or so telling myself that I’m going to check a certain client’s emails at this time, whatever reason I try to block those two hours out, and then I limit when I take new client calls. But again, it’s the self-discipline, and that’s something I’m still working internally on and would say to every entrepreneur, having been doing this for eight months, and having just incredible growth. In those eight months. It’s okay, right? I mean, you’ll get there and I keep telling myself, some days, it’s better than others. And when I have a bad day, because I did too much, then I know that the next day, I need to go to bed earlier or check out a little bit earlier, to get the kids to bed or whatever. I mean, that setting those boundaries is definitely something that I’m continuing to work on.

 

Richard Matthews  31:36  

And just being aware of it too, is the biggest step in the right direction, because, you know, hey, this is the thing I’m working on, and you’re putting stuff towards that. That’s the biggest step. Especially when you’re growing a business, sometimes you’re gonna have a lot of times where you’re stretching, where you are putting a lot of time and effort into growing. It’s that whole rubber band mentality, sometimes you stretch so you can have a big growth, and that’s okay. It’s okay to sacrifice a little bit of your boundaries and whatnot in growth periods. Because you know, it’s temporary. And then you can set things aside as you grow and move forward. So, talking about your common enemy. Every superhero has an arch-nemesis, It’s the thing they constantly have to fight against in their world. In the world of business, it takes on a lot of forms. But generally speaking, we put it in the context of your clients. The people that hire you to do something, and it’s a mindset, or it’s a flaw that they have that you constantly have to fight to overcome, so you can actually get them the result that they hired you for. And so if you had like your magic wand, and every time your client hired you, you can bop them on the head and not have to deal with that problem. What is that common enemy that is constantly dealing with your clients?

 

Lindsey Corbin  32:56  

Trust the system. So a lot of our clients have not used a team like mine to handle their work. They’ve done it themselves, or they’ve had one person on their staff. And they’ve not used a full team as we have. And so I really need my clients to trust the system, trust that there are 10 women who are there to get the work done, and that I’m overseeing them, and that the projects will get done. And you don’t need to micromanage it, you can just trust the system.

 

Richard Matthews  33:40  

So how does that end up looking when you’re working with clients? How do you manage those expectations and help them learn to trust your system? Because I know that’s pretty common in a lot of areas, especially if you’re in the service business, is getting your clients to like, hey, we do these things this way, because we know it’ll get the result that you want. And I know you’re not used to it, but you have to learn to trust that. So like we do the same thing with our clients because you know, we’re in the podcasting space, and we do a lot of stuff. We’re like, hey, just let our editors do what they do because you’re going to get the result you want if you just let our team do what they’re trained to do. So what’s your advice for people who are in that service space where you have to train your clients, so to speak, to trust your systems.

 

Lindsey Corbin  34:28  

My recommendation or my advice would be at the outset of the relationship, not only do you put your best foot forward, you put your whole best self forward right you make sure that the client knows that you are responsive that the work is getting done, that you are meeting or exceeding their deadlines, which have to be set in a reasonable manner. So that was one of our flaws, was that we were over-promising or under-promising, if you will. We just weren’t meeting deadlines and clients were kinds of going, well, I thought you had a team, I thought that you could do this. And we had to adjust those expectations, we had to say, you’re right, it won’t happen again. But the reality is, we’ve grown so much, which is a fantastic thing, there are more of us now that can offer the service to you. But our delivery times have changed. And so part of it is managing that expectation right out of the gate, so your client knows what to expect. They know your delivery time, they know your delivery style or delivery method. And so they’re not waiting around wondering what that end product is going to look like.

 

Richard Matthews  35:53  

Yeah, I think one of the things that’s really helped us is after we’ve been doing our work for almost a year, I went through and we had our team do an audit on, what are the hours it takes to do certain things. So now we know how much manpower and how much time it takes to deliver on an hour-long video editing, for instance, or how long it takes to do transcription or how long it takes to do the graphics. We have a really good understanding, which helps us in two ways. One, it helps us know how we should price our stuff because we know what the man-hours are required to get something done. And then it also helped us on the managing expectations side like, hey, when you submit your episode for this, it’s going to take this long to accomplish this stuff, and this long to accomplish this thing. And so It makes it a lot easier to manage expectations. Once you’ve been working long enough to really know what your systems are and how long things take. Have you sort of seen that same thing happen in your business as you’ve been getting more and more into it?

 

Lindsey Corbin  36:55  

We’re trying, we’re drinking from the firehose a bit. So we’re just now starting to pay closer attention to timesheets for our team. Think about how long things should take just from our years of experience doing them? And then going back to our team and saying, this should really take you an hour not to? How can we help make you more efficient? Or what seems to be the struggle? Do you need more training? Is there something that we can do to get that efficiency down? So we can all be more productive, and then we can manage better if we know that it’s going to take an hour to get that drafted. And we see the other things that are on your plate, that we can manage that client by saying, okay, we think she’ll have it done in a day or two or whatever the case may be. But I will tell you, that’s something that we are still working through, we have not solved that yet. And again, when you’re drinking from the firehose, it can be a challenge some days.

 

Richard Matthews  38:08  

Yeah, it’s an early business growth problem, you’re like, we’re good at this, we do a great job of it, but not all the systems are built yet not everything is bulletproof. And it’s getting there. And you have to find where the leaks in the bucket are, so to speak, and where, where everything sorts of fits, and how much time it takes. And one of the things I’ve realized too is not everyone on your team is going to be you, so if it takes you an hour to do it, maybe it takes someone else with a similar skill set an hour and a half, and you’re gonna have to average those things out across your team. And all that stuff you have to figure out as you grow. I know, because we’re still doing that in a lot of ways in our business. And I know, it’s an interesting sort of thing to deal with as a CEO, and growing your company is figuring out where all those things are. Because man, if I could just replicate myself 100 times we’d be perfect because then I know exactly how it all goes down. But that’s not the way the world works.

 

Lindsey Corbin  39:13  

Yeah, so it’s funny that you say that because earlier I mentioned that the first thing I did was get a bookkeeper. The second thing I did was hire a project manager, not another me because I knew that at that point. I mean, this was in the fall, I was only maybe a month or two really into this seriously. And I knew that I could do the work. What I couldn’t do was keep it all straight. And so I brought on a project manager who’s now my director of operations, and her job was to systemize my company. And so we happen to rely very heavily on Trello. To the extent that I really want to be a case study for the Trello company and what we’re doing, because what we’re doing, I think we’re sort of taking it to the max. But then she’s now developed all of these systems that I never could have done. And I certainly wouldn’t have put the time and energy into it, I would have kept taking it all together. And now it legitimizes us as a company because when clients call, we have a very systematic way of doing things that they fall into. So that they call, they sign up with us, we have onboarding, we have account managers. And that really shines with our clients because we give the appearance that we have our act together, which goes a long way to brand trust and reputation, and all those things that are really important to a new business owner.

 

Richard Matthews  40:52  

Yeah, absolutely. And we’re sort of the same way we run our whole business on Trello. And build all of our systems on it. And that’s one of our sales points, actually, when we bring clients on we show them. Like here, these are the systems we build for our clients and will be building one of these for your show as well. And so much though, we’ve gotten, I’m halfway through a course on teaching people how to use Trello to build systems and processes in their business because it’s a really robust system if you use it properly. Yeah, having your systems in place, and building those kinds of things really helps legitimize you and helps, at least it helps us close deals, and I’m sure it helps you guys do the same thing. So it’s really cool.

 

Lindsey Corbin  41:32  

It’s been amazing. And it’s not something that I could have done. I mean, if I didn’t have her, I would probably still be hacking it together. And I’d probably be living in more chaos than I already am. So it’s been a very nice addition. And it is part of our sales process. When you onboard with us, you pay your onboarding fee. And part of that comes with a Trello board. And these are clients, a lot of our clients don’t or haven’t quite figured out their own internal systems for their law firm. So when we’re coming to them with a developed system, that they can then use and interact with us in real-time. That goes a long way to trusting the system, back to the earlier point.

 

Richard Matthews  42:15  

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you use the term chaos because that’s actually the thing that I teach people in the course on building systems and processes. I was like you either gonna have, what I call poorly managed chaos, where you’re going to have solid business systems. And it’s a powerful thing in your business. Because you can run your business chaotically and a lot of people do. And they struggle, they’ll struggle with growth and whatnot. But once you sort of build systems that allow you to scale allows you to have, what you were talking about earlier, that big growth comes when you have systems you know, you can trust, and then you can actually tell your clients to trust your system because you have a system in place. So, I want to move on a little bit and talk about the flip side of your common enemy. So if your common enemy is getting your clients to trust the system your driving force is what you fight for, Instead of what you fight against. And so just like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information, what is it you fight for at delegate.legal and your mission, so to speak, what is it?

 

Lindsey Corbin  43:22  

My mission is to give solo practitioners and small firms access to senior-level IP paralegals. Intellectual property is such a niche in a legal field that professionals are well compensated and not readily available because a lot of the corporations or bigger law firms will scoop them up and pay them a premium price. And for most of our clients, that’s not an available option to them. And so I want to give them that access. The other thing I want to do is give them a resource to ask questions. Growing up so to speak and by growing up, I mean, after graduating college and starting out my career, in the law firm life, and even in some of those early corporate experiences, I believe that hallway conversations are invaluable. And when you’re in your own law firm, or even in a small firm, you don’t always have that at your fingertips. You can’t just go down the hall and stick your head into somebody else’s office and get that question answered. And I want to be that resource I want to be available to answer questions and to ultimately help these attorneys provide the best service and the best experience to their clients to grow their practice. Again, I believe in an abundance mentality, there’s more than enough work to go around for anyone and everyone that wants it. But I want to be sure that when you go get that work, you’re doing everything you can to be the best attorney that you can be, and to provide your client with the best service and the best resources to get their brands secured, and then to continue to protect their brand after they’ve got doctorates registered.

 

Richard Matthews  45:24  

Absolutely. I love the idea of the hallway conversations and providing that for the smaller law firms. One of the things that popped in my head too is, you have us a secondary market that you’re serving, which more than just the lawyers you’re providing the services to, but the team that you’re building, you said you have 10 women already on your team, and being able to take their career and their skills and be able to still apply them and take advantage of the new world opportunity that we have with post-COVID legal services like you were talking about earlier, and still apply and build and grow their life, I don’t know if you’ve thought about your business that way. But it’s at least a whole another segment of the market that you’re impacting without them having to go out and build their own business.

 

Lindsey Corbin  46:18  

Yes, I mean, being a freelance or a contract paralegal is not a new concept, there are definitely companies that are doing it, it’s relatively new in the IP field, which is probably why we’re having such success. But to be able to give women the opportunity to stay home, if that’s what they want not to lose their careers, they’re still very much working, they’re still very much earning as much money as they want to earn. But they can stay home and do it. And if that law firm says that everybody’s going back to the office on September 1st, because that’s the arbitrary deadline for ending this. And if they don’t want to do that, then we’re here for them. I mean, I can’t tell you how many phone calls I get from paralegals who want to join our team. And I wish I could take everyone. Right now the budget wouldn’t allow for that. But that also gives me hope, that as we grow, that people are seeing the value in what we’re doing. And they’re seeing that there is a world where they can work from home all the time, and they don’t have to be in that office, or they don’t have to be in any office for that matter. And it can be on their time doing the work that they love.

 

Richard Matthews  47:34  

That’s an incredible place to be an incredible service to offer. So I love that you’re serving on both sides of that, and it’s one of my favorite things about entrepreneurs in general, that’s why we run the show. It’s the whole idea that entrepreneurs are not the villains, that so many people culturally so many times they’re made out to be. And it’s definitely cool to have that benefit. I want to talk about a couple of practical portions of our show, I call this the Heroes Tool Belt. Just like every superhero has an awesome tool belt with gadgets like batarangs, or web slingers, or laser eyes, or big magical hammer, I wanna talk about the top one or two tools you use in your business that you couldn’t live without, it could be anything from your notepad to your calendar, to your marketing tools to something you use for your product delivery. I know you already mentioned Trello, anything that you think is essential to getting your job done and doing what it is that you do.

 

Lindsey Corbin  48:29  

The first thing that we rely heavily on is Slack. You know, when you have a remote team, based in an RV, based in Pennsylvania, or Minnesota, you have to be able to communicate in real-time as much as possible. So we rely heavily on Slack. We also interact with our clients using Slack if they would like that way our clients have real-time access to us. And then the other thing is my Notebooks, I have three of them. Actually, I have six but I only have three going at the moment. And throughout my career, I’ve often told anyone on my team, if you can’t find me, all you have to find are my notebooks. So that was sort of my version of succession planning, especially when I was in the house. If you can’t find me just find my notebooks and that holds true now because sometimes you just have to be able to write down something super quick. So between Trello obviously, Slack, and my notebooks. That’s what makes the world go round for me.

 

Richard Matthews  49:38  

Yeah, and the same way here we got a remote team and we did rely on Slack forever. We actually just recently migrated both of the organizations that I work with off of Slack to another system called Twist, which you may want to try and I’ll give you one reason, so you know how Slack has your three columns. You’ve got the channels, and they have the content in the channel. And then when you have a thread, it opens up in the third panel. The primary difference between Slack and Twist is that it’s a middle channel, like when you’re actually in a channel, you can’t talk in that channel, all you can do in that channel is start threads. And then all the conversation happens in the threads. And that made all the difference for our organizations in terms of being able to keep track of everything because it does something really unique. And that it gives you an inbox at the top of your inbox channel, and all the threads that you’ve been tagged in, you can just click through and follow up on all of them. And it’s made all of our teams more difficult to get lost. Slack is easy to get lost in. And all the different stuff that’s going on. So anyway, the way we handled that, because I had one of my organizations with like, we need to find something different than Slack because we’re struggling with it. So I found a Twist. And I was like, let’s just test it for a week, we’ll put Slack on pause, we won’t turn it off. And we’ll do anything with it. We’ll just try Twist for a week. And commit to communicating in it, we put all the same channels in it and all the same stuff. And I was like, we’ll do it for two weeks, we’ll follow up in a week, see what everyone thinks, and both times I did that with both organizations, we got a week into it, they were like, you’re in Slack, we don’t need that anymore. It’s free.

 

Lindsey Corbin  51:23  

Okay, we’ll have to try it

 

Richard Matthews  51:24  

Pretty the same as slack. And it works the same way where you just have a limited history, worthwhile to test out. It’s the same kind of thing. You got your iPad, and your iPhone apps, and your desktop apps, and you have the same chat stuff. And it adds a little bit of that magic of email where you have that inbox sort of thing. But you get all the benefits of the live community sort of live chat system that you have from Slack. So anyway, it’s sort of like the best of both worlds, I think. So that’s my recommendation recently for people that are as invested in Slack as you are and we used to be so worthwhile.

 

Lindsey Corbin  52:03  

Good to know, I will check it out.

 

Richard Matthews  52:06  

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Richard Matthews  53:44  

So I want to talk about a couple more things. One is your personal heroes. So every hero has their mentors, Frodo had Gandalf Luke had Obi-Wan Robert Kiyosaki had his rich dad, Spider-Man had his Uncle Ben, Who were some of your heroes, were they real-life mentors, speakers or authors, maybe peers who were a couple of years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far in building delegate.legal?

 

Lindsey Corbin  54:05  

So I would be remiss if I didn’t shout out an attorney by the name of Cynthia Lee, who was the attorney that first allowed me to learn trademarks. I mean, she saw something in me that really changed the course of my career and taught me trademarks. So she’s always been a resource. And I’ve always been able to connect with her annual trademark meetings and kind of all those sorts of things. And then this one might be kind of silly, but I have always really admired Sara Blakely. Obviously, she’s incredibly successful. And we all know her and now she’s made her millions. But she also didn’t get into law school, and look what she’s done. And so I sort of used that as a way to say there’s more to my story. You don’t always have to do the thing that you set out to do, it’s kind of thinking that it’s okay to not take your prescribed path in life or the path that you thought you were going to take.

 

Richard Matthews  55:23  

Yeah, that’s true. Sara Blakely, is she the founder of Spanx or something, is that right?

 

Lindsey Corbin  55:29  

That is correct. So she set out to create a product for women that she was told she couldn’t create. I mean, the lack of a better way to put it. And clearly, she did. And clearly, it served her quite well.

 

Richard Matthews  55:42  

Yeah, that’s awesome. So then I have one more thing I want to chat with you about before we wrap this interview. And it’s your guiding principles. One of the things that make heroes heroic, is that they live by code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap the interview, I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles you use regularly in your life. Maybe something you wish you knew when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

 

Lindsey Corbin  56:09  

So one of my favorite sayings in life, and I think it’s been attributed to a couple of different people. But I think Bobby Knight is one of them, the IU basketball coach, and that is the will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win. And that was something that I was always taught as a child as I was growing up and in high school sports, and then, setting out on that college scholarship in athletics. And even today, I always want my team and want my clients to understand the preparation to understand that I am always here. I never want my team to think that I’m not equal, but I’m not Yeah, I might be the CEO. And I might ultimately write their paychecks. But I also want them to know that I am a team player and that I am right there with them in the trenches, and will step in and get the work done. And that, there are things you have to put in place, you have to prepare for whatever that win is, I know what I want my win to be. But I also know that that’s years away, and you have to put in all the preparations first, and you have to get your foundation and you have to work the long hours and really invest in what you’re doing. In order to get that win. And that’s almost more important than the ultimate end goal. Is all of those hours that you’re putting in on the front end.

 

Richard Matthews  57:47  

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And there’s a lot of truth to that too, the preparing to win is more important than the will to win. And one of my favorite sayings that go along with that is, luck favors the prepared. And people say all the time, well, you’re so lucky that you do what you do. And I’m like, it’s not really luck, we put a lot of effort into getting our business to be able to run virtually, and we could travel and do the stuff we want to do while we’re running a business and growing it and luck favors the prepared. And I think that’s something that more and more people should learn to live by. Because that whole picture where someone looks like an overnight success. But what they don’t see is I don’t see the years and years and years and years of work that went into becoming an overnight success. And anyone who has that thought that, oh, they were just lucky, or they were just an overnight success or something like that. They’re not seeing the whole picture. They don’t see the underside of the iceberg.

 

Lindsey Corbin  58:47  

So I couldn’t agree more. And I don’t think I could have done this five years ago, I think that there is something especially in a business like mine, where you need to have that experience you need to put in the time the energy through the grind of late nights, long hours, many attorneys, many environments in order to get here because I think that binds another level of trust, and another level of sincerity to my business overall. I mean, when you’re hiring us, you’re getting me but you’re getting my team and you’re getting a combined, 40 years of experience and trademarks or something. And that isn’t something that’s done overnight. I mean, that’s many, many long hours and late nights in practice and trial and error. And so there’s so much value that goes along with that.

 

Richard Matthews  59:56  

Absolutely. I completely agree and I really appreciate you coming on to the show and sharing your story with us today. So that’s basically a wrap on our interview. But I do finish every interview with a simple challenge I call the hero’s challenge. And I do this, it’s sort of a selfish thing to get access to stories I might not otherwise find on my own because not everyone is out looking to get on a podcast as you might be. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network, who you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? first names are fine, and why do you think they should come on our show and share their story?

 

Lindsey Corbin  1:00:30  

There is an attorney. Her name is Sonia. And she is also in the trademark space. Her story is really fantastic. She was a practicing attorney. But she saw a need for additional education for attorneys. And she took it upon herself to create a vast library of courses and trainings, and products that teach attorneys trademarks, which is a new practice area for most of them. And really expand the opportunities that are available to these attorneys. And so I think that there are many attorneys that are forever indebted to her. She certainly was somebody who helped me get delegated legal off the ground. And I love when people think outside of the box and become perhaps an unsuspecting entrepreneur, I’m not sure that she set out to be that way. But she’s certainly become that. And I think it’s, it’s pretty amazing. And the things that she has done for the trademark community are pretty spectacular.

 

Richard Matthews  1:01:47  

That’s awesome. Yeah. So we’ll reach out later and see if we can get an introduction to her. And maybe she’ll come on and tell us her story. That’d be awesome. If not, that’s not too big of a deal, but we try. So what I want to do to just finish up the interview is, just like in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people who clap and cheer for the heroes, acts of heroism. We want to know where people can find you if they want your help in the future, where they can light up the bat signal so to speak, and say, hey, you know what, I would love to get your help, as an attorney to get trademark work done. And I think more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to reach out and light up that bad signal?

 

Lindsey Corbin  1:02:26  

Sure. So my website is delegate.legal, pretty simple to remember. And we work with companies. So any corporation if you’ve got an in-house attorney, or if you are looking for some trademark help for your portfolio, we definitely love working with companies. But with attorneys, in particular, our typical client is somebody who’s got their own firm, or maybe one or two, they are looking to bring what I like to call bring joy back in their life. So they are becoming overwhelmed with the number of things that they have to do to run their own firm. And they want to start to delegate that out so they can have some of their own time back. Maybe they love talking to their clients, but they don’t love drafting trademark applications. We can do that. Maybe they love drafting trademark applications, but they don’t necessarily want to do client intake calls and answer client questions all that we can do. And so our mission is really to help our attorneys bring joy into their life by delegating out everything they don’t want to do. And so that’s really how we like to get started is to work with our clients on that. Again, delegate.legal is really the best place to find us.

 

Richard Matthews  1:03:53  

Awesome. Your name is just perfect for what it is that you do. If you want to get rid of those things you don’t like to delegate.legal. So, thank you so much for coming to the show today, Lindsay. I really appreciate getting to hear your story and hear what it is that you do. So it’s been fantastic. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before I hit this stop record button?

 

Lindsey Corbin  1:04:16  

Don’t be afraid to delegate. And when you do remember that process is king. So when you go to delegate out that first project, make sure you have a process in place for what that’s gonna look like.

 

Richard Matthews  1:04:28  

 

Awesome. I couldn’t agree that more process is king. I love that. So thank you again for coming on today, Lindsay. Really appreciate it and we will talk to you again soon.