Making In-House Counsel Accessible to SMBs

Intro  0:04 

Welcome to The Future Is Borderless podcast with David Nilssen. We feature top entrepreneurs and thought leaders from around the world, those who bring a global mindset and a unique perspective to their life and business. Now, let’s get started with the show.

David Nilssen  0:23 

Hey, David Nilssen here I am the host of this podcast on The Future Is Borderless, we connect with business leaders from around the world who have what I like to refer to as a borderless mindset and that the purpose of the podcast was to share new innovations, some best practices, things that would help us a power growth both in our personal professional life so that we can as business leaders, thrive in a rapidly changing world. Now this episode is brought to you by Doxa Talent. Doxa Talent helps businesses to source full-time highly skilled workers from all over the world. And as a result, these companies can scale faster increase margin and improve culture. They provide everything from accountants, sales development reps, virtual assistants, and even software engineers to publicly traded companies and local small businesses. If you want to learn how to grow your business with offshore talent, simply visit doxatalent.com. All right, well, I’m actually really excited for today’s show. My guest is Michelle Bomberger, and she’s the CEO and Managing Partner at Equinox Business Law Group. Michelle’s desire to work with small business and entrepreneurs began at Northwestern University while she was pursuing dual graduate degrees in law and business, so a total underachiever and then in addition to the JD from Northwestern, where she graduated (cum laude), she also got an MBA out of Kellogg, graduate school for management. She also holds a BS in business pursuing in finance and computer applications from the University of Notre Dame. So highly educated. I mean, this might be actually some of the most I think the most educated individual if you look at sheer number of degrees and spectrum of education we’ve ever had on the show. But Michelle did go from there to found Equinox in 2005, after working for Ernst and Young and Cingular Wireless. And since then, she has been honored as one of the top 40 entrepreneurs under 40. This happened in 2012 from the Puget Sound Business Journal. And then, in addition to that, she was awarded the King County executives woman’s Small Business of the Year in 2013. So, this is going to be an interesting show on really disrupting an industry and taking something that’s, everyone knows the old model of law, and she’s really trying to turn that industry on her head. So Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle Bomberger  2:43 

Thanks, David. Appreciate it. Yes, I am the over-educated one in the firm, but not necessarily in the family. My husband has the same number of degrees. We are almost competing.

David Nilssen  2:53 

Wow. It’s funny. I actually as I was prepping for this podcast, I was reading through your bio. And I had to go back and check again. Because I was thinking, is that right. did I get that right. And so but congratulations. That’s pretty impressive.

Michelle Bomberger  3:08 

Yeah. Big fan of lifelong learning.

David Nilssen  3:12 

Yeah, I am, as well. Well, there’s nothing sexier than law. So I’d love to understand why you chose to go into that profession. I mean, given your educational background, it looks like you might have been pursuing another path at one point, but how did you land on law as a profession?

Michelle Bomberger  3:30 

Great question. I actually put laws at the bottom of the things that I consider myself as a professional and funny enough, I saw an item from my high school yearbook that was where are you going to be in 20 years, and it said something like, corporate lawyer making the big bucks. So maybe there was a little bit of foresight there. Except that I’m an entrepreneur, so the big bucks Carter’s, if you’d like to but when I was at Ernst and Young, I was in there IT consulting practice. And that work was mostly implementing major ERP systems to really large companies. And I had one client that was a department within the city of Albuquerque, small group, people, about 15, people kind of struggled with putting a system in place for years. And we’re so grateful that we were there to help them do this, and implement this and get it done. And that was kind of my aha moment on I really enjoy the sort of small business world. So I decided to go back to school to get my MBA. And as I was looking at opportunities and different programs, the joint MBA law degree really struck me and it struck me because I wanted to be able to provide sort of different levels of experience and stories and advice. And I thought having that law degree in the back pocket as a differentiator as a way to sort of tell a different story to be valuable. So I always intended to go and do the business consulting side. And as I was leaving my graduate program with both degrees, it was during the.com, boom. And there were a number of law firms, primarily based in Silicon Valley and here in Seattle, that were focused on high-tech startups, and they were looking for people with business experience. And so that’s kind of how I ended up starting down the path of law. That imploded, and I ended up at Cingular Wireless in their internal audit group. And that was really all about business process, and getting tons of experience in business.

David Nilssen  5:37 

Yeah, it’s so funny, most of lawyers that I’ve dealt with really went to school to become a lawyer. And they’re really great at that. But sometimes, legal professionals can be slightly disconnected from what it’s like to actually own and operate and run a business. So I love the fact that you’ve spent time in IT and business process, you’ve got an MBA, and you’re a lawyer. And I know that that adds tremendous value to the way that you look at the problems that you’re helping them solve. But I want to follow that story that you were just telling us a little bit further. So you were working at Ernst and Young, you went to Cingular Wireless, but eventually you chose to open up your own private practice. Was that the goal all along after you decided to sort of go after the business law degree? Or was that something that happened as a result of the experience that you’d accumulated at that point?

Michelle Bomberger  6:26 

Yeah, I think as many of our entrepreneurial stories are happenstance, right. So I was at 18 T wireless, Cingular acquired them. And it just really wasn’t clear what things I was going to do. Were they going to move everything to Atlanta, I had a one-year-old at home, and I worked for this amazing vice president would give me tons of flexibility. And I’ve been talking about this idea of a law firm that was truly business focused and you like it, why not do it? The timing was right, just did the transition of the business that I was in wanting the flexibility of being home with kids. And so I did what a lot of us do kind of kick it off as a hobby. And let’s see if it sticks. And that was in 2005. And we’ve shifted gears a few times, and ultimately built this really unique model that is different than the traditional experience that folks have in working with lawyers.

David Nilssen  7:30 

Yeah, in fact, on your site, you talk about Equinox says that law as a competitive advantage, I think is what I read, right? Which is interesting, because I think of the way that most people and I’m even guilty of this at times have thought about law is more like insurance. You use it when you need it. Or like when you know you need it, which is often too late. So I mean, I’d love to hear, what does it mean to you to use law as a competitive advantage?

Michelle Bomberger  8:01 

Yeah, I mean, I usually start with, if we think about why a large company has a chief legal officer, or they have a general counsel, it’s not to fix things. Yes, they do that, that’s probably a big part of their job. But the reason that role exists, is at the sea level, the executive level, in a strategic role. And most models is don’t have the ability to need the access to that. So how do we help them be more proactive, and build what I call legal infrastructure for the future that the general counsel or chief legal officer does for larger companies? So when you think about, you know, again, what do we need to have a competitive advantage in the market as a small business, need to be proactively building for the future looking forward, having that one, three, five, 10-year plan, and understanding what you need as a business to get there. And most companies just don’t, they don’t have that, because they’re focused on things that they know, but not necessarily the things that they don’t. And so legal ends up being this expense that should be minimized at all costs. And that’s really not where it should sit in your organization.

David Nilssen  9:22 

Now, I’m assuming you’ve got a lawyer that understands the business side as well. Right. I mean, many of the lawyers out there litigators aside, they’re used to taking sort of orders and drafting documents, and so on and so forth. But really the strategic legal side of this is what you’re talking about. And that is something that most of small businesses under invest in. That’s clear. So how have you guys sort of changed the model on what problem are you solving for Equinox customers?

Michelle Bomberger  9:53 

Yeah, so the models are at its core, is a managed services subscription type model for legal. So you’ve seen this really commonly and it, you might see it in HR, marketing, finance, the outsourced CFO. And we’ve done it in a way that is not about ours, it’s about almost like a partial salary professional. And the reason for that is that, again, most businesses are looking at the experience that they’ve had, which is very expensive, often not very responsive, and often not even receiving what they think is valuable from that experience, again, because of that disconnect between the business and the legal. So if they know that they have somewhat, they can throw things over the fence to without worrying about the, is it worth it to call this time? Because that’s typically what they do? Because is it worth it to call this time, oh, we can figure it out, we’ll just Google it, we’ll figure it out. We just completely normal, given the incentives. But this model gives them the freedom to call and ask them, hey, can you go check me on this? Or, hey, we just got this nasty letter? Can you look at it, in addition to tackling those big strategic projects that are, hey, we’re hiring in multiple states now, can you make sure we’ve got this all set, or we’re bringing on a business partner, or we’re thinking about making an acquisition to get to the strategic in kind of a forefront? And then all of what I call the blocking and tackling in the day-to-day tactics behind the scenes all at a fixed price. So they have the freedom to call without worrying about that $500 bill or $5,000 bill? Because that’s the experience that most of us have had?

David Nilssen  11:39 

Yeah. Do you find it’s hard to change people’s perspective to sort of move you up in terms of the decision-making or sort of early thinking within the business? Because I again, as we’ve talked about it before, most people try to minimize their legal expenses. But if it’s fixed price, then you got to change behavior to try and sort of get them to think about your earlier.

Michelle Bomberger  12:01 

Yeah, a couple of really good points there. One is, our customers are folks who use lawyers, like the folks who are like, I’ve been in business for 25 years and never needed a lawyer. They’re never going to hire us. Our folks are the folks who are like, I have one or more lawyers. And I know I need them, as you mentioned, sometimes, but it’s not a relationship. And it’s always a bit painful to engage. So starting with the folks who know they need it is kind of a big piece of big step in that education process. And then we still often get, I don’t need that much legal. Right? When we kind of positioned, here’s, here’s what a solution would look like for you given that strategic and given that tactical, I don’t know, I’ve just never needed that much legal. So the education is really around how legal fits into all these different parts of business. So how does legal sit in sales and marketing? How does real sit in HR? How does legal sit in your product offering so rather than it being contracts and employment and big privacy? It’s like, how does it sit within what you know, what you believe what you need to do? And how does it sit there? How does it help you elevate the business? That is the big piece? That is the education that we have to provide?

David Nilssen  13:25 

Yeah, I love it. It’s funny, there’s so many things in business where you have this idea, you’re excited about exploring it, but you understand that there are legal ramifications to it. But until it is absolutely certain that you want to pursue this with rigor, we typically don’t explore it from a legal perspective, because you don’t want to brainstorm on the clock per se. Right. So I love this. But I guess I’m curious why there aren’t more law firms that are sort of shifting towards this model. I mean, I know it’s a little bit unusual. But like, what is keeping people from more law firms from going down this path? It’s hard. What’s hard about it? Like, what are the major challenges?

Michelle Bomberger  14:04 

I mean, I think, you know, you think about the average, the average lawyer, right? Think, I mean, there’s so much business that happens in this business, right? So a big part of scaling this model is that project management and data behind it. So when you think about the, we talk with the client, we talk about what their needs are, and we create an expectation around typically a six-month arrangement that says, hey, here’s what we’re going to tackle in six months, and we’re going to revisit it. We have to, once that really good expectations with clients around what does that mean? Right? Something major comes in that shifts all the assumptions we need to be able to shift. But even on the day-to-day, looking at any given client, are we tackling the projects timely? Are we communicating with them appropriately? Four new things came in, are we getting those out the door and we’ve got 25 or 50 of these clients that want agents do project management and data management behind the scenes is really, really heavy lifting. And just even the revenue model, it’s a very different thing. And one of the big challenges is finding lawyers who can kind of work in this as well. Most of them are really excited about what we’re doing. They’re excited about one not having to do the other, we do use the clock thing. It’s not the minimum billable hours model. And so they’re excited about engaging with clients in a different way. But all this sort of managing the back end, we’re trying to balance what’s appropriate for the legal team and what is appropriate for the project management team. And it’s definitely still a work in progress. We’ve made a ton of strides, but it’s a work in progress.

David Nilssen  15:45 

Yeah, I could see why that would be challenging to figure out how to load balance, because you never know when that work is going to come into the system, right. And I could see a situation where, even I think about my own business, I tried to estimate what our needs are going to be for the next three to six months. But ultimately, once you write a business plan, it’s wrong. And you got to adapt. Right? And so it’s really hard to do these fixed engagements, because you’re at the risk of overbidding or underbidding based on what is demonstrated, so I can see why that’d be a real challenge. Obviously, we can’t be everything to everyone. And you talked a little bit about who your client was, but like, what type of business is not good for your services? Like, is there somebody out there that you say, that’s actually just not what we do or who we work with?

Michelle Bomberger  16:29 

Yeah. So I mentioned the mindset, the growth mindset, wanting to build a smart company. Right. So folks who use lawyers, folks who use outsourced CFOs, they know that they need to surround themselves with other folks. And that’s first and foremost, the most valuable characteristic and a target client for us. The second piece is they have to have enough what I call moving parts, there’s got to be enough going on that risk is shifting, risk is changing, opportunities are coming up, and they wind up checking the new document, they need something happening. So that usually looks like multiple contracts coming in on a regular basis, or multiple employees in one or more jurisdictions, multiple owners just enough, like sticky stuff happening, that they know that there’s movement and change. And they often again, are looking forward and wanting that planning that strategic planning, as well. Industry-wise, it’s fairly agnostic. But again, the more happening, the more likely we’re a good fit, the model is entirely tailored to the business. So if there is that, single member LLC, planning to hire a couple of people that they really have that need for the gut check the thinking, we can certainly tailor solution to that, they’re just not the typical.

David Nilssen  16:31

Yeah, I have to imagine the services are pretty sticky. Because I think, there’s a point when, as a young business where you say, I’m going to use a managed service provider, because I am not at the size and scale, or I should bring that in-house. And similarly, as you brought up earlier, the chief HR officer, there’s a lot of fractional HR officer-type businesses out there. But there are generally points at which people get to a certain size, and they got to bring that competency in-house. I have to imagine though the super majority of businesses are never going to get to a size where they’re going to bring on a chief legal officer. And so I have to imagine that that relationship is pretty sticky. but correct me if I’m wrong there.

Michelle Bomberger  18:35

Absolutely. One of the things that we have found, that really supports the scalability of this is that once folks are in the door, they’re in the door. And they really value it. And even in recent months, when folks are feeling a bit of recessionary pressure or cashflow pressure, they’re not turning it off. They’re scaling it back. And so I think really, the idea that we are tailoring this to what your needs are at any given point in time is a huge selling point. And once they have us as a toolset, they really love having that toolset. And again, I think it’s a testament to the fact that this is a thing, and it’s super exciting to grow it.

David Nilssen  19:18 

Yeah. You made a comment a few minutes ago about attorneys and people get excited about the fact that they could serve their clients a little bit differently, right. I just had an opportunity to speak at the Boise startup week about the future of workspace. And it was really interesting to hear people’s perspective. There was also a woman there that was all speaking who’s from a publicly traded company who was all in-house like everybody’s got to be there. There was a company that kind of like a we workspace called kiln, or they talked about the hybrid environment being important and I was there as the full remote individual because both of my businesses are fully remote. Where do you stand on the whole office remote hybrid debate and how has this shift impacted your ability to hire or acquire talent?

Michelle Bomberger  20:10 

Yeah, so in July of 2021, a release came up for renewal. So we’ve learned that, and again, we’re in a business where it’s pretty easy to get your laptop, go home and do work, right. And we had always had a few people who had flex schedules where they came in and some of the week, so it was really easy for us to sort of shift that. I am a big believer in collaboration. And I do think that being in person enhances that. So we kept the office for a number of reasons. One is because we serve as a Registered Agent for clients, and there has to be a physical place for delivery. So that was sort of like the core like we can’t really get rid of it entirely. But almost everyone said they wanted a hybrid solution, everybody will be pulled them sat down. And we now have a few folks who come in two to three days a week, a few folks who come in one day a week, and people are still entirely remote. And we’re good with that. We have also grown the firm, a little bit outside of Washington, which is new for us, we have one attorney in Oregon, and then we have an overseas team as well to support that project management administrative work with Doxa. And it has been, I think, such a great avenue for us to look at how do we scale? Because there is such a high administrative impact in this business and cost in this business? How do we do that in a sustainable way without having to really bump up the cost to clients, when they they’re already, part of what we’re trying to start with something that is more approachable. And so the ability to become eye-opening, we don’t all have to be person definitely gave us a different set of tools. And so that’s what we’ve done. And I think that’s what we’ll continue to do.

David Nilssen  22:04 

Yeah, I love that it sort of opened you up to new geographies, it sounds like you’ve moved a little bit south of Washington, and then of course offshore. Talk to me a little bit how that’s changed your culture? And how have you guys sort of adjusted the way that you work? Given that you’ve got people that will just never be there or unlikely to be there in proximity?

Michelle Bomberger  22:25 

Yeah, I think, obviously, the overseas team is a little bit different than the US team. And I read an article two months ago might have been HBR. But about if you’re going to have people come in, have people come in for a purpose, because if they’re simply coming in to do the same thing they could do at home, they’re sitting there doing zoom meetings, they’re sitting there doing emails, then why come in. And so we are doing more formal activities that are encouraging people to come in person, ideally, we’ll get to kind of a mandatory regular, maybe once a month, or once a quarter. But right now, it’s encouraging people by bringing in guest speakers of having team lunches to lunch and learns, and really sort of building the reasoning to come in. And we have a comfortable and team. They’re so relational that they just think they live for that. And I think when everybody gets around those people, there’s a lot more just that community building. And that’s really I think the core purpose of getting people together is so that they can connect in a more personal way, which I have difficulty with honors in my team’s environment.

David Nilssen  23:41 

Yeah, I love that. I just wrote that down, have people come in for a purpose? I think there’s this, in general, there’s a lot of people that are really comfortable managing by sight. And so they like to see people in the office, they like to have sort of that visual validation, I guess that people actually doing their work. I don’t think it’s necessary. I work from home, it’s very easy to do, but I love the idea of have people come in for a purpose. We say we’re remote first, not remote only. And that sort of gives us permission to create that space for collaboration and or whatever purpose it is. That is so I love that anecdote. Since we’re talking about, you’re on the border list. The Future Is Borderless podcast, we’re talking about borderless talent. But one thing that I read about you is that you grew up in Panama. And so I’m just curious how you grew up in Panama, like I’d love to hear sort of the story there. And then is there anything from that experience is sort of framed who you are as an entrepreneur today?

Michelle Bomberger  24:45 

Yeah, so my parents met there. My dad was originally stationed in Panama with the Army retired there and work for Smithsonian managing one of their Tropical Research islands down there, and all kinds of pretty interesting stories about you know, the flora and fauna and bringing some of that to the National Zoo in Washington. Like there’s actually seen some pretty cool, pretty cool stuff there. And then, my mom, the story is that she and her best friend from nursing school had just broken up with her boyfriend saw this job opportunity that the US hospital in Panama and was picked up and picked up and went. So that’s how they ended up there individually and then met and married and I was born there. I lived there all the way through high school. So that to me, is home. And as far as how it’s how it’s framed me. I think the one thing that really stands out is there was so much diversity in the community. And I would say that from you have the what’s called the zonians the folks who were three or four generations of Americans that went down to build a canal and stage and manage the canal to not active duty military work for the US government that through the Canal Zone administration.

David Nilssen  26:05 

And I’m sorry, you call them what? 

Michelle Bomberger  26:07 

Zonians, dying breed. There are no more of us. And then you had US military families, because there were about eight military bases down there. So those folks kind of came in permitted out and moved as those families come to. And then you had the local Panamanians typically have Hispanic heritage, a lot of people who came from the Caribbean to build the canal. And then you have the huge finance and banking environment there. And so a lot of international folks from the recent Malaysia who were making so it was just an experience that put me in rooms with different kinds of people from a very young age, and being able to see how different folks approach communities approach each other based on those life experiences. And I think I’ve carried that forward with sort of an awareness of how people show up based on where they come from.

David Nilssen  27:08 

Yeah, it’s interesting, I have a goal to travel to 100 countries before I die. Panama is not one of the places I’ve been thus far. But I’ve heard amazing things. And I can see why, given it seems to be sort of a melting pot of culture, that would be a really unique experience, especially as a young individual. I want to talk about the other side of entrepreneurship for just a second. Obviously, you own your business, but you are a wife and a mother of two. And I certainly know owning a business requires a lot of time and energy. How do you balance all of that, so that you can give the best of yourself to each of those areas?

Michelle Bomberger  27:50 

Perfect question, right? Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, part of why I jumped in when I jumped in was for the flexibility of being a young mother at time. And one of the reasons why I hired my first employee was so that I could or first administrative employee was so that I could pick my kids up at three o’clock, and still have someone answering the phone and answering emails. So this idea of having an impression services is tough despite because clients are demanding. And so they want stuff and they want to answer the phone, or they want to respond to their emails. And so picking the kids up after school at three o’clock was a boundary that I put in place, that’s something I want to do. I love making dinner for my family. So I come home with three, get everybody settled, make dinner. And then if I need to work in the evenings, I went to meetings. And there’s so many times in this journey that I could have done things that are differently scaled more quickly build processes sooner to taking care of people better. And through some of those learnings and some of those challenging times, I’ve had to work a ton get pulled back into business. And you got to find the time to take care of all of it. I still set the priorities, picking up the kids. I was always like I said my thing making dinner and then my husband probably had the hardest battle there was because that’s probably the one that sacrifice happen the most was the evenings where it’s like, well, we’re going to work till two in the morning. But that’s a journey. Right? I mean, you figure out what is really important and hold that and work around it and then build the team to support that and I think something that we’ve done really well and I’ve learned from my younger employees because I’m Gen X. So we just sort of keep powering through. That’s what we do. And my younger employees that are like, wait a minute, it doesn’t have to be like that. It doesn’t. And so we’ve really tried to build an environment that is unique not only in how we live clients to clients, but also the expectations of folks in our business, but we’re out looking at 60 80 hour work weeks, that’s not how we operate. And so we can offer that to them in our world.

David Nilssen  30:31 

Yeah. I know we’re getting close to the end here. Just a couple of quick questions for you. One I want to talk about, you made a comment about being a lifelong learner. And I say this about myself all the time, clearly, you’ve got the educational pedigree. What are you learning about today? What is it that you’re trying to sort of improve and or expand about yourself?

Michelle Bomberger  30:49 

So I’m taking my EO forum to Panama, for our forum retreat in a couple of months. And people say, well, of course, you’re bilingual, you grew up in Panama, like, I’m not bilingual, I grew up with higher health, my mother never thought to have them speak Spanish to us for some unknown reason. So English was always a second language, always I can communicate, I can get by, but I’m not bilingual. And I finally found a podcast that is focused on that intermediate level. And I’m really kind of working on trying to build some of that more challenging language skills before I go, now. That’s one area. And then another area is really around the business and just being more focused on what my job is. And that’s something that I’ve always struggled with is they’re getting pulled back into all these other things. How do I elevate myself to the things that I need to be doing? And I don’t have a toolset necessarily, but more a mindset that I’m really trying to give myself some discipline in that area as well.

David Nilssen  32:07 

Great. So, earlier in the podcast, we were talking about the model that you’ve sort of introduced, going away from billable hours per se to more of a fixed fee and trying to shift from legal as an expense to legal strategic legal as a competitive advantage for businesses that wouldn’t otherwise have a chief legal officer. If you do this, and you’re wildly while you are doing this, but if you’re wildly successful, what does success look like for you? How do you know when you’ve sort of met your goal for this business?

Michelle Bomberger  32:39 

Yeah, I have to put a lot of thought into that. And for me, getting the business to a place that can scale is kind of the endgame. We are in a place where we have proven the concept we have enough clients that we know it’s sticky, we know that we’re doing things right. But how do we get from 25 or 30 clients to 150 clients on this model? What does that look like? And my job, my legacy can be building it so that if someone wants to take it to Idaho, or California or Arizona or anywhere else, it’s seamless to be able to do so. And then I can get out?

David Nilssen  33:27 

Okay, I hear you loud and clear. And well, I think we’ll leave it there. We’ve been listening to Michelle Bomberger, the CEO and managing attorney of Equinox Business Law Group. Michelle, if people want to learn more about your model, where can they go?

Michelle Bomberger  33:42 

Yeah, our website is equinox.law. That’s where all of the details around our approach our model and how to get in touch with us for business health assessment, or otherwise.

David Nilssen  33:54 

Awesome, and we’ll put that link in the show notes and allow people to contact you if they have any questions about that. But thanks again for being on the show today.

Michelle Bomberger  34:03 

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Outro  34:07 

Thank you for listening to The Future Is Borderless podcast with David Nilssen. Be sure to click subscribe to future episodes so you can hear from more top entrepreneurs and thought leaders, and we’ll see you again next time.