Legal Requirements for Online Business Made Simple

You can do a lot right in your business and still plant legal landmines without realizing it. We brought attorney-turned-founder Bobby Clink on to walk through the simple, practical steps that keep online businesses out of trouble—so you can grow without fear of rebrands, takedowns, or messy disputes. From naming a podcast or course to handling email consent across borders, we break down the exact checks ambitious creators should run before momentum builds.

We start by separating copyright (your content) from trademarks (your brand) with real examples: why a five-minute trademark search saves a five-figure rebrand, what’s worth registering with the Copyright Office, and how AI-generated content changes what you actually own. Then we move into email: GDPR consent done right with unchecked boxes, why CAN-SPAM is not a hall pass, and how to keep your list-building clean without tanking deliverability. We also tackle the overlooked risk of memes and GIFs in newsletters, the right way to license images, and the safe lane with Canva’s terms.

Contracts get the spotlight too. Bobby explains why written agreements protect relationships, not just revenue, and how to structure terms that match the reality of your offers—scope, IP ownership, refunds, termination, and more. To make this easier, we explore Bobby’s Plainly Legal platform: a free Legal Manager that audits your business and prioritizes tasks, a powerful agreement generator with e‑signature, and Chat Legal for quick, vetted answers. The goal isn’t to turn you into a lawyer—it’s to give you the confidence to build, market, and sell without second-guessing every step.

If you found this helpful, follow the show, share it with a founder who needs a legal tune‑up, and leave a quick review so more builders can find it. Your support helps us bring on experts who save you time, money, and stress.

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Chapters

• 0:35 Setting The Stakes: Legal Risks
• 1:34 Bobby’s Journey From Litigator To Founder
• 4:37 Why Skipping Legal Early Backfires
• 5:30 IP 101: Copyright vs Trademark
• 11:39 Email Law: Consent, GDPR, CAN-SPAM
• 17:16 Copyright Traps: Images, Memes, GIFs
• 21:15 Contracts: Get It In Writing
• 28:19 Safe Use Of Canva And Licensing
• 29:19 Plainly Legal: The Free Legal Manager
• 33:28 Agreement Generator & Chat Legal
• 36:52 Future Features & Final Takeaways

Transcript

Jenny: 0:35

Are you running an online business and not sure about what legal requirements you need to have? Could you possibly end up with a big lawsuit or get yourself shut down? In today's episode, we are going to make sure that we let you know the legal requirements that you need to run your online business confidently. Hi, Bobby. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Bobby: 1:00

Hi, Jenny. Thanks for having me. Um I'm uh good. I'm I can't complain, although I guess I could, but no one would really listen if I did.

Jenny: 1:08

Well, I'm excited to have this conversation about legal requirements for online businesses, made simple. Um, but before we actually jump into that, will you introduce yourself and your business to my listeners?

Bobby: 1:21

Yeah, sure will. Um, although you made a mistake, you just handed an ex-litigator a microphone and said talk, which could could mean I talk a long time. But um, for those of you who don't uh don't know me, uh my name is Bobby Clink. I'm an attorney by training, uh graduated from Harvard Law School with honors back in 2002. For the first almost 10 years of my career, I did the very traditional thing, worked at prestigious law firms, worked for the Justice Department as a prosecutor, did all of those things. But quite honestly, it never really fit me because I'm I'm a punk rock kid from Texas. That's what I was growing up. And so putting on a suit and representing Fortune 100 companies, fighting other Fortune 100 companies was kind of eh. Um, but but it's what I did. Um, I made a switch in 2010 when I was coming out of the Justice Department, uh, joined a small firm, uh, entrepreneurial, mainly on the plaintiff's side, in in bigger commercial types of cases, um, and made a quintessential entrepreneurial mistake when I did that. Um, I I joined basically uh I was a partner in name only. So I wasn't actually a partner in the partnership, didn't have any equity ownership. And, you know, I had a letter that said, here's what your salary will be, but you understand that we actually don't have cash flow all the time, so we won't be able to pay this all the time. We'll make it up when when we can. Um, so I did that and they treated me completely fairly along the way. But there would be periods I'd go six months without pay because we didn't have a lot of money, and then I'd get a big chunk of money. The problem was when my wife got pregnant in uh 2013, and I approached him and I said, Hey, we need to solidify something and make me partner because quite honestly, I had all the downside risks, but no, no guaranteed upside. And we couldn't come up with a resolution because we hadn't talked about it in advance. And so feelings got hurt um when my daughter was about three months old, is when it came to a head, and I found myself holding a three-month-old and deciding I needed to go start my own law firm. And so I did that in 2014. Um, I had a lot more time than I had clients at the beginning. And so I fell into the world of online marketing. Uh, I don't know how it happened, but I got myself HubSpot inbound marketing certified along the way. And it's just been kind of ever since then, this has been my path. And I opened my current business in a much different iteration, though, back in 2017, helping online business owners, coaches, course creators, anybody who's basically selling knowledge or expertise to get their legal stuff uh in place. First, the business was your online genius, then it was just bobbyclink.com. And in 2023, we switched over, started the process of switching over to a SaaS, a software offering called Plainly Legal, which is now where I do business. So that that is the shortest that I could give that story uh and do it any justice.

Jenny: 4:23

Nope. That's perfect. And I appreciate that. Um, it's always good to hear someone's story and how what they can take away from it and what they would change ultimately, and how you then learn to grow. So I love it. So let's kind of jump right in. Many entrepreneurs jump into business without thinking about the legal side. Why is that risky?

Bobby: 4:44

Well, it's risky because you might be making mistakes today that could be planting kind of landmines or time bombs in your business. And they're not going to go off at the beginning. They're going to go off later when it's very, very painful. Uh, and again, to some extent, the story of me having to part ways with the that other law firm is an example of this. I mean, I don't know that I could come up with a worse time to have a business relationship kind of blow up in your face than when your daughter is three months old. But that's what I had happened because I didn't, we didn't do the work in advance. We just said, oh, we'll deal with it later. We'll deal with it later. And those are the types of things that can happen. Um, but I'll give you some concrete issues. If you start a business or if you start a podcast, for example, and you don't check the trademark, you don't check to make sure that someone else isn't already using that name. Here's what's going to happen. You might build that podcast up, build equity in it. And if someone has a trademark, guess what? They're not going to hear about you at the beginning because you don't have a brand yet. But let's say you get successful and then all of a sudden they come out of the woodwork. After six months, after a year of do you doing this podcast, and they say, Hey, uh, that's nice of you, but we own that name and you can't use that name for your podcast. All of a sudden, you're going to be in a spot where you have to rebrand and you have to do it kind of in an expedited emergency way, not in a planned out, thoughtful way. And so, like, that's just one small example. And a podcast is one example. A course could be even worse because your course, you're going to have branding on the entire course. You're going to have to reshoot the entire thing. You're going to have to do all of that to get rid of this issue that you could have avoided with a five-minute search at the outset. And so it's kind of you can either spend five minutes now and hey, maybe find no problems and nothing would have gone wrong. But there also might be something where if you don't deal with it, it could go wrong and it could go wrong spectacularly later.

Jenny: 6:50

And I love those two solid examples. So, kind of building off of that, what should entrepreneurs know about protecting their content, brand, or digital products online? What should we be looking for?

Bobby: 7:04

So the first thing I would tell you is let's make sure we kind of understand and let's define some terms here because some people will get these things a bit confused. And I understand it can be confusing. So there are two main types of intellectual property that online business owners need to think about it. And stepping back for a second, intellectual property is just a fancy lawyer word for anything that you can own that you can't hold in your hand and isn't a piece of dirt, basically. So it's not something physical, uh, it's something kind of ephemeral in a way. And there's really four types of intellectual property. One of them we don't have to worry about it's patents because that's inventions. And generally speaking, nothing that we do is novel enough and the type of thing that could be patented. So we can kind of exclude that. Then there's an area called trade secrets. This is kind of your intellectual property that you keep secret. Anything that you keep confidential and you take steps to keep confidential, if it has commercial value, that gets protection. Again, in our businesses, that can come up when we're hiring people, when we're doing things like that, but it's not really as much of an issue at the outset. The two big areas to understand are copyright and trademark. Copyright is all about content, trademark is all about branding. So anything that you create that has any spark of creativity or originality will be protected by copyright with a small copy at short sentences, for example, may not be copyrightable. So, for example, the title of a book is not protected by copyright because it's too short, but anything longer will. So if you write a blog post, that will be protected by copyright. If you create a podcast, that's protected by pop uh by copyright. Courses, all of those types of things are protected. The best part about copyright law is you get protection automatically. You don't have to do anything to get protection. The second that you create something and you put it into what's called fixed form, it gets protection. And don't worry about the fixed form. Once you've created it, it's in fixed form in a sense. Once you publish it on the internet, once you save it to a hard drive, any of that stuff, that is in fixed form. And so you get that protection automatically. Now, I have to say though, because the law is kind of weird and sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense. You have protection automatically. Other people can't steal it, they can't take it and use it for themselves, but you can't actually enforce it. You can't file a lawsuit unless you have registered it with the copyright office. And so there's kind of this dance of, you know, what should you register, what should you not? Registration with the copyright office is a pretty simple process. I forget, I'll forget the price, I'll get it wrong, but it's about $50 per registration. You can do that yourself. It's not complicated. But you're not going to go and register every blog post you put out. You're not going to go and register every podcast episode you put out. And part of that is would you ever sue someone if someone stole it? And the answer on those is almost certainly not, because it wouldn't be worth it.

unknown: 10:11

Right.

Bobby: 10:12

But you would copyright and you would register, think about registering more substantial works. If you have a course, for example, that's a significant part of your business, you might think about registering a copyright in that. If you write a book, you should register a copyright in that. Uh, and and it's pretty simple, you just have to uh give a copy, or you know, now it would be electronic copies for most of these things. You basically give one or two copies and fill out a form and do that and get protection. So that's content. Let me point out one little caveat that is important now, which is AI generated content is not copyrightable. Um, this kind of came to a head when when Chat GPT was coming out and and some of those things were were starting. Uh, and it was first the the copyright office addressed the question. Someone had generated a graphic novel, including all of the artwork, using generative AI. And the copyright office said, hey, no, generative AI is not copyrightable because there has to be a human author for something to be subject to copyright. And so um, because of that, they didn't. Now, the actual output of AI is not copyrightable, but if you take that content and change it and tweak it and organize it in certain ways, the way you put it together can be copyrighted. So, in that example of the graphic novel, what they found was that although the individual images could not be copyrighted, the way that the author had put them together and organized them was copyrightable. And so that's kind of a caveat. And courts have basically come out and said the same thing. So I always have to point that out nowadays that I know a lot of people are using AI to generate content. Just understand that may not be subject to copyright. And if you go to register a work with the copyright office and there's anything that you've generated with AI, you have to tell them about it. So that you're basically saying this is not copyrightable, but the other parts are. So that's your content. So if you think about it, when you when you mentioned your digital products, that will be the primary line of protection for your digital products. The other piece is trademarks. And this is kind of the example I talked about at the beginning, which is um your names for products, your brand name. Trademark protects names, logos, slogans. It can actually it can be used to protect um sounds. So, for example, I think the Netflix sound that comes on when you first load Netflix is a copyrighted or sorry, a trademark sound. The NBC chimes are trademarked. Sounds won't generally apply to us, it'll generally be names, um, is where you're gonna think about it here. You can do logos. Generally, it's not worth it because is someone gonna steal your logo? Probably not. Um, but with trademark, it's a bit different because you don't, I mean, you get some level of protection automatically without doing anything, but it's limited. You get what are called common law rights, and these are geographically limited. In the old days, non-online world, that was usually enough. If you were starting a brick and mortar store in, you know, any town USA, you really only cared about having protection in that area, right? Because I mean, people weren't going to confuse you with someone, some other store 3,000 miles away. But in the online world, obviously now we theoretically are competing with everybody, nationwide, worldwide, et cetera. But the law doesn't grant you protection just because you're marketing to people all over. And it's not really clear how much protection you get. Is it because you make a sale? Is one sale in an area enough? And it's not clear how big of an area that would be. So if you really want to lock down rights, you have to register a trademark for the name, whether it's a brand name or a product name. That process is a bit more complicated. Um, it will cost $350 in government filing fees. Plus, generally, you're going to want to use some kind of filing service, either, you know, there are inexpensive ones if it's simple, or if you want to go with a full-blown uh law firm, it will cost you more to do that. So there's things there, and I always tell people, and I use courses as the example just because I can think of it. You shouldn't go out and and register a trademark for a course right at the beginning. Validate it first. Whatever it is, make sure your brand has legs, make sure you're going to be using that name for a period because it's going to take you about 18 months to get protection or to get a registered mark. And so you want to make sure, hey, this is this is important. And I say that as someone who owns, um, I don't know the exact number, but probably 10 trademarks for things that we no longer use. And I'm like, you know, that's that's money I wish I hadn't spent because by the time they were actually issued, we weren't even using the brands anymore. And so um I always like to tell people from a business perspective, don't rush out and do that, but do make sure you run the search first. Because again, the first thing is make sure no one else already has a trademark. Because if they do, that'll cause you problems.

Jenny: 15:17

Okay. Nope. That makes total sense. And I appreciate that explanation. So if we were to then look at, with the focus being so much now on email marketing, what are the legal requirements around email list building and communication? Because I think that that's something we talk about a ton on the podcast is the importance of your list. Don't go to social and just expect to be able to get immediate gratification. It's not actually going to convert. How can we use our email list? So, what are some of the legal requirements that we should be concerned with when it comes to email and communication?

Bobby: 15:54

So, I'm first going to talk about what you probably expect me to talk about, which are rules about collecting and privacy. But then I'm going to talk about some other things that people don't talk about, like using memes and gifts in emails. I've got to talk about that because it's an important thing for people to realize. But let's start on the other piece: building a list, privacy issues, et cetera. Um, in the United States, if you're a United States business and we're only collecting and emailing people in the United States, it is the wild, wild west. Effectively, there is no law. Uh, there is a law, it's called CANSPAM. But as long as you're not uh spoofing and faking an email address or doing something like that, you will be in compliance as long as you allow people to unsubscribe. So as long as you allow unsubscribes, you meet the US requirement. But there are other rules in play. The GDPR in Europe is the most prominent one that people may have heard of. It was the big thing when I was first about a year after I first entered the online space, it became a big thing. Um, effectively, it requires you to get an affirmative consent from someone to add them to your email list. In other words, you have to get permission for anything, anytime you are going to process their private information. And that includes sending them an email. Now, when it first came out, quite honestly, all the lawyers worth their assault looked at it and said, said the way this was written, you could not require people to give you that consent as a requirement of downloading a freebie, for example, a lead magnet. Decisions have come out and said since then that have said, well, actually, if that's the entire notion of the transaction, you're giving them something in exchange, that is okay. Um, but a couple key things. You can't automatically do it, you have to have a checkbox and they have to manually check it. It needs to be unchecked when they're first signing up. So that is the key to meeting it. And by the way, if you meet that standard, you're gonna meet the standards pretty much everywhere because the GDPR kind of set this consent bar that most people uh who've passed laws since then will follow. Um, a couple of nuances there to think through. Um, when you're doing this, a lot of people ask me, do I need double opt-in? From a legal perspective, double opt-in is not required and doesn't help you. You you either get consent up front or not. And again, the way that traditionally double opt-in worked, uh, that most people were using it, it wasn't gonna help because it wasn't gonna overcome an issue because if you had to get consent from them, you could just get it on the front end. And when us lawyers thought you couldn't require consent to get a freebie, everybody was requiring you to click that double opt-in to get the freebie. So it wasn't gonna help you anyway. That being said, double opt-in, it, you know, every email service provider says it's a good idea. Um, I've toyed with it different ways. Um, that's more of a business decision rather than a legal decision. So anybody who kind of says that, just understand that that is a business thing to think about, not a legal thing. Separately, I want to point out people may have heard about some other state privacy laws that have been passed in the last five years or so. The first one people would have heard about was in California, the C CPA, which was then modified. Um, and then there have been others since then. I like to tell people you almost certainly don't have to follow those laws. Not because it's good to flat laws, but because those laws are targeted at bigger businesses. Um, all of them will have some kind of threshold requirement. Most of them are structured that you're subject to the law if either you collect private information from a certain number of people within a state in a year or make a certain amount of revenue. Those revenue numbers, like the California one, for example, it's $25 million a year or collecting personal information from 100,000 California residents in a year. I like to tell people if you're subject to that kind of law, you really shouldn't be listening to a podcast to understand your legal stuff. You should have a lawyer and you know, you should probably have a privacy lawyer on speed dial who can answer those questions. And other states have different thresholds, but it tends to be those same kind of orders of magnitude because maybe, for example, and and I'm gonna pick one, a state that I don't think that has one, but like Montana, for example, might have it and it says 10,000 Montana residents. Well, 10,000 residents in Montana will likely be kind of the same order of magnitude as 100,000 California residents. So you're probably not gonna have to follow any of those. So effectively get consent on the front end and allow people to unsubscribe, and you will be complying with that part of Lee or Heart. The other thing, and again, I tell people this, they don't like hearing it, but I have to say it. Um, putting a GIF or putting a meme or putting an image um in an email is very risky. GIFs and memes are protected by copyright law. Remember, we talked about how anything I create is automatically protected. Guess what? Anything they create is also automatically protected. And and um meme or gifts can be actually the worst because oftentimes the gifts themselves are infringing the copyright of a movie because they're taking a movie clip, for example, or something like that. And so I tell people if you include that in your email, you are almost certainly infringing someone's copyright. Now, there are services, gify, etc. If you if you go through those and do it legitimately and make sure the license is appropriate, it can it can work. But I just tell people, be very careful. And I like as someone who loves email, who wrote a book about email marketing, who loves to amuse people with email, I'll tell you, I get it. I understand why people want to include it, but I will tell you I've never included a GIF in any email I've sent other than gifts of me that we created of myself because I've just decided it's not worth the risk. And and this was not in an email, but there was a case of people who were running a Facebook group and uh not a group, I guess it was a um, I guess it would have been on their page. They posted a meme that it was levels, like levels you would use in building that had uh tape on it with wrong written on it. So wrong on many levels. This was a meme that someone else had created. He sued them because their post went viral. And so he sued them and was seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages because it was a copyright infringement. And so I just tell people be careful about that stuff and think twice. Anytime something is created by someone else, probably don't use it as the safest bet.

Jenny: 22:45

Yes, I think that's great guidance. I often tax my people we want to keep emails short and simple and sweet and get to the point with them. People don't have time, especially on most people are reading everything on their phone, anyways, nowadays. And if you're over 40, your phones are ginormous with the text. So it takes you 33 times just to scroll through a three-sentence email, anyways. So, yes, I love that. That is excellent, excellent. Um, so what would you say are the most common legal blind spots online entrepreneurs actually over the book?

Bobby: 23:17

So, what I would say is the thing that is most likely to get you in trouble, um, at least from discussions I've had with people, is what I call the right-click save as problem. It comes back to copyright. It's you're you're scrolling around the internet on something you like, you know, oh, I'm gonna right-click save as this, you know, this image, save it to my computer somewhere. Again, it's a copyright problem. And early on when I first entered the online space, I started going on podcasts. I think this was back in, I think I started in 2016 before I even had an offer. And it seemed like every single show I went on, the hosts would either tell me a story of themselves getting a Getty Images letter or someone they know getting a Getty Images letter. And if you guys don't know who Getty Images is, it is one of the companies that owns the copyrights on a ton of images online. And if you accidentally use one of their images without a license, they don't write you a letter saying take it down. They say they write you a letter saying, I mean, it it's not doesn't exactly say this, well, but it says, Well, thank you for using our image. Uh, the licensing fee for that image will be $5,000, pay it now, or we will take legal action. And so they will come after you and people ask me, Well, what do I do? I said, Well, you can negotiate with them with them, but you infringe their copyright. So either you're gonna pay it or you're gonna do it. And you also have to be careful, even with images that maybe you're getting from uh from a website somewhere, you have to make sure you understand the the terms of the license. First of all, do they allow for commercial use? Because anything you're doing in your business is a commercial use. So if you're using an image that, for example, and you're on a free plan, this will tend to happen sometimes. If you're on a free plan with software, maybe you can only use it for personal use, not for commercial use and use it in your business. You're in violation of the license, that means you're infringing their copyright. Some, there are some people who are um, I would say less than above board. And what I mean by that is they own the copyrights to certain images and they put them places saying you can use these for free. But in the fine print, it says, but you must provide attribution to the artist or to us or to someone else. And if you don't, again, that's an infringement and they will come after you. Again, these are people who literally have gotten in the business of buying up copyrights just so they can sue people. So just understand that's something that happens. Um, and you you need to be careful about it. So that's kind of the thing that I see most frequently. And then the other is not getting agreements in writing. And it's especially it's it's a friend, it's a family member, it's someone I trust. Those are famous last words. Um, I am of a certain age. Um, one of the movies that I loved was Jerry Maguire. And if anyone has seen that movie, he just does a handshake deal with someone to become their agent and then gets left at the aisle effectively on the night before the NFL draft by the person who's supposed to be the number one draft pick because he didn't have it in writing. And that's the kind of thing that happens. And I like to tell people oftentimes when you have a disagreement with someone that you don't have a written agreement with, it's not actually that either side is intentionally being bad. It's that we human beings are not nearly as good at remembering things as we think we are. And so what tends to happen is if two people have an agreement, over time, each side is going to remember the agreement as favoring them more than it actually did, just because we humans tend to make ourselves the heroes of our stories. And so as a result, after a period of time, maybe you just both people have an honest disagreement about what the agreement was. And if there's no written document anywhere, where do you go to figure out what that was? And so the act of putting an agreement in writing will first of all force you to work out all those details, but also will give you something where, hey, if six months from now there's a question, we just look back at the agreement. What does the agreement say? And then neither party feels like they're kind of getting the short end of the sticks like, well, that's what we agreed to. And um, so that solves it. So that's kind of the other big thing I tell people is anything where there is a relationship where if it went bad, it would hurt your business. You need ever written agreement. Period, full stop. Now, there's levels of good. Um, you know, I would say, you know, if nothing else, write it out, just plain English, you know, each side agree to it. And, you know, that's better than nothing, or you can kind of work your way up from that. And obviously, the best option is if you have a lawyer who knows your business in and out and who knows this area of law and drafts it from scratch for you. But most times you you won't be able to afford that because that'd be thousands of dollars for a single agreement. So, you know, you'll kind of normally use something in between, but just make sure you have some kind of written agreement for all of those relationships that matter in your business. Yes.

Jenny: 28:16

So I have to ask a question that I know my listeners are going, oh, if you don't ask it, I'm gonna be annoyed. So you talked about um images being copyrighted and using software, Canva. I know that's what they're all thinking. So what kind of agreement, which one do I need to have? Can I get away with free using an image? Or do I have to have the professional one where I'm paying 12 bucks a month for it?

Bobby: 28:39

The good news is Canva will only give you the license or the images that you're allowed to use. So yes, Canva, you're good uh because Canva is really built to be used this way. Um again, if if you're gonna use uh, and I have it's been a while since I've had a free Canva account, um, but I think if you have the free Canva account, you don't get access to as many of the images that they have in their library. And you can pay, I think it was a dollar or two dollars each, but if you pay for it, it's licensed and you're good. So with Canva, you are in good shape. Don't worry about it. Uh Canva's licensing terms are good. They know who their audience is.

Jenny: 29:11

Okay. I just wanted to be sure because I know that they were all thinking it and I had to make sure I asked that question. So now tell me about your legal manager. And we're gonna link to it in the show notes as well as in the description of the video so that we can make sure people go and check it out. But tell us what they can expect to find there.

Bobby: 29:28

Yeah. So I mentioned that now my business is software, it's plainly legal. And effectively, I've known for a long time before this, I was selling legal templates, was what we were doing. And um, I knew legal templates were always an okay solution. I mean, they solved a single problem getting agreements in writing. But there were other problems. And so I had the idea for this software back soon after ChatGPT came out. I said, huh, we could actually do some stuff using, you know, harnessing the power of AI. And As it turns out, the the legal manager is not. But the legal manager was built to solve a very particular problem. And it is the biggest stumbling block, the biggest pain point that I hear from nearly every online business owner who I talk to, which is, I don't know what I don't know about the legal stuff. Literally, when we do market research, we get that exact quote multiple times. And even when we don't get that exact quote, when you read between the lines, it's like, well, I wish I knew what I needed to do. So I know that's a problem. And quite honestly, I also know that entrepreneurs don't want to take a course to learn about the legal stuff. It's like, I don't want to learn it. Just tell me what to do so I can solve these problems. And so we built the legal manager to do that. When someone first signs up for our software, they go through an audit and basically it asks you questions about your business, asks you about your offers. Do you have an LLC? And kind of we ask a bunch of different questions. And from that, there's logic that this actually isn't built by AI at all. It's from my brain. I built all the business logic behind it. It creates a list of legal tasks for you to complete and it prioritizes those. It's kind of a mix of risk, but also how easy it is to uh perform. So obviously, the riskier it is, the higher it'll be. And the less work, the less money involved, the higher it'll be because let's go ahead and knock out those things. And we did that. And part of it was like from my experience, I know, and this I guess maybe is kind of a misconception. Big businesses, they don't say we have to deal with 100% of our legal stuff today. No, they say we have a budget of however much it is this year. What are the most important legal things for us to take care of this year? And so it kind of works through that way. And so we built this as a way really for you to triage and understand it. Now, each one of those tasks, you click on it, it's gonna have a description. Um, if there's resources, sometimes uh there's there's tools that we recommend to people to use. Sometimes it's you know, they need an agreement, which our software can do. And and we do we give the legal manager away for free because I have this weird view that businesses shouldn't have to pay to understand what they need to do on the legal stuff. They should be able to get that information for free. And then we have tools that are part of our paid plan if people want our help actually solving it. But we we give the actual legal manager away for free. And then once you've done it, I mean you're in it. It's a it's built like a task manager. You're able to track status of different um tasks. You're able to say, no, dismiss it. I'm not gonna deal with it if you just decide it's it's a risk you're willing to take. So, for example, I mean, there's something in there about memes and gifts, but it allows people to make the decision of how they want to handle it and then just move on from there.

Jenny: 32:49

Okay. Yes. Yeah, I was checking it out myself and kind of playing with it to see how it worked. I loved it. It just is very interactive, allows you, like you said, to kind of pick and choose what works best for you. Um, but yes, appreciate that. We're gonna make sure that that, like I said, is in the show notes. And for all those that are listening, make sure that you go and check it out. It is free to go through and take a look and see what you need. And that way, as well, if you do decide that there's something else, now you have a great resource. It obviously is very knowledgeable that you can then use the software that Bobby has. Will you tell us a little bit about that software, real quick, Bobby?

Bobby: 33:24

Yeah, so right now there's two other main features other than the legal manager. One is the the agreement generator, which is think of it as templates, but you know, souped up and much more powerful. Instead of you having to fill in, it asks you questions. And the first series of questions are effectively uh figuring out which clauses to include and exclude based upon the things. As again, an example. If you say, I have a group coaching program, it's gonna say, okay, well, it's included. And you're gonna check off, well, there's a training portal, there's a community, there's this, there's one-on-one sessions, et cetera. So you do that, and then it'll put clauses in and build it that way. Then the second set of questions, once it's figured out, hey, what clauses do we have to fill in? It then you you fill it out and literally on the right side you're seeing the agreement, and on the left side, you're typing in and you'll see it filling in the blanks in real time. So you can kind of see and do it. So that's uh the first piece we are um uh currently um well, it's not currently. We've had this out for a long time. I think there's 30 some odd templates to start with, and then there's editing functionality. So once you've completed the agreement, you can edit anything, you can delete a clause. There's there's each clause in there, will have a kind of you can see what is it, what does it mean, and then you can choose to delete it and it will give you a warning. It'll tell you, hey, here's the risk of deleting this, but you can also edit it yourself. Um, that's as part of it. As we're recording this, I'm working on adding e-sign e-signature functionality. So you can just send these documents out for e-signature if you're doing a one-on-one agreement. Um, and by the time this episode goes live, I suspect, uh, that functionality will be fully deployed. So that's part of it. Just kind of think of it as get your agreements done. Um, the other thing that we introduced most recently is chat legal. This is powered by AI, but at a very deep level. Think of it as a very smart legal chat bot that can answer your questions about the legal stuff. I sourced thousands of questions from my beta users and we put them together and we figured out, hey, there's a lot of these that are actually the same question, worried in different ways, et cetera. And there's still some that that are, I want to say off the wall, but a bit different that I haven't put answers into the database yet on because I'm not sure how frequently they'll be asked. But we have approaching 700 answers, unique answers in the database that I put my uh my eyes on. I either wrote them or reviewed answers um and approved, approved them after editing. And the system uses those. If there's an exact answer, it's exact max to your question. It's just going to return that. It's going to tell you, hey, this is directly from our database, so you can trust it. If it doesn't have high confidence, which means 95% sure that it's the same question as a question our data set, it sends it out to an AI tool with a very long prompt that I have tweaked and built over time, as well as sending the five closest questions and answers as context. It returns it. We have a way to score it to say how confident are we that the answer, um, you can kind of rely on it based upon the context we sent it. And then for those, it'll also let you at the bottom, it'll show you the questions that were sent as context. And you can click on those and see the actual answer from our database. So it may be that you ask a question and then you look down and you say, Oh, yeah, this question, yeah, that's exactly what I'm asking. You can literally click that and then you will see the Bobby approved answer. And so you can say, hey, this isn't AI, this is Bobby's approved answer. So we're doing that and building that out. Um, that that was our newest big feature. We've got some other things we're going to be working on, um, including some some AI-powered agreement editing, because right now I like to say that our the agreement piece, you know, it covers 80% cases, but it it can't, we can't possibly cover every use case for every type of agreement. Like, you know, every time I talk to a coach, it's funny because different coaches seem to have different things that they assume is the standard practice in the industry because it's what they know. And so um I it's funny. I always say they'll say, Well, this is how everybody does. And I'm like, well, that's strange because I talked to a bunch of coaches who never once said this is how they do it, but there are always those edge cases. And so we want to build a system that is smart and has the ability to help you do that full customization. Um, so that that's kind of the next big thing that we've got on the horizon to get out there as well.

Jenny: 37:52

Okay, excellent. Well, we are going to make sure that we link to that as well. Bobby, I appreciate you so much for taking the time to speak with me and sharing your knowledge with my audience.