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Branding and business strategy from a trademark attorney and founder.

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About the Jewish Lawyer

Jeremy with somebody else's dog.

 

Jeremy Peter Green Eche is a branding attorney and the founder of JPG Legal and Communer, a marketplace for registered trademarks. He is the attorney of record for over 3,000 U.S. trademark registrations. In 2019, JPG Legal was ranked the #16 law firm in the United States by number of federal trademark applications filed. Eche graduated from Northwestern University School of Law on a full scholarship. Thomson Reuters selected him as a Super Lawyers Rising Star in Intellectual Property for 2021.

 

Eche has been profiled on USA Today, CNBC, CNN Money, NPR's Morning Edition, WIRED, MSNBC, Forbes, the New York Daily News, HLN, CNN Politics, DCist, ABA Journal, Vox.com, CNET, Mic.com, NBC News, Refinery29, the Globe and Mail, and several other news sources. Before becoming a trademark attorney, he was known for owning ClintonKaine.com and hosting his comics there during the 2016 election, before selling the domain.

 

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Eche is based in Brooklyn in New York City. He formerly served as in-house General Counsel for Teamsters Local 922 in Washington, DC. Eche is married to Stephanie Eche, an artist and creative consultant who co-founded Communer with him. He has moderate Tourette syndrome.

 

You can contact him at info@jpglegal.com.

The Future of the Trademark Business Model


The Trademark Industry Is a Racket

Sometimes people ask me how my business model is profitable, or what my edge is. I find it hard to answer them without making it sound like I’m cutting corners, but the truth is that JPG Legal’s edge is simply that we’re cheaper than all of the good services and better than all of the cheap services. We’re an actual law firm that performs actual legal work while still charging as little as or less than the online “legal services” factories like LegalZoom.
 
The two primary trademarking models — both the traditional law firm model and the online “legal services provider” model — are rackets.
 
Conventional lawyers are bad at client acquisition, so they tend to exploit the clients they do manage to get, billing as many hours to their clients as they can. In reality, it simply doesn’t take much time to perform due diligence on trademarks, or to file trademark applications.
 
However, on the other end, there are also all of these cheap, no-frills online service providers who don’t seem to be bound by any ethical obligations and who mislead people about their likelihood of success or the hidden back-end costs of their trademark applications. I’m trying to bridge that gap with my firm.
 

JPG Legal’s Growth, Margins, and Profitability

(Note: This post is from mid-2017. See our mid-2018 growth update here.)
 
My growth in the past few months has been phenomenal, and I’m going to need to start hiring help soon. However, it’s very important to me that JPG Legal stay an actual law firm and not become a corporate middleperson like LegalZoom. I believe that the margins are high enough at my price point to keep giving professional-level service to clients and avoid selling out; I’m going to make sure that my clients’ cases are handled by actual, knowledgeable attorneys who are employees of JPG Legal (as opposed to independent contractors).
 

My financials for the past few months.
Monthly profits earnings before taxes in U.S. dollars since launching Google ads in April 2017.

 
The screenshot of my accounting spreadsheet above shows my recent monthly profits (correction: earnings before taxes (EBT)) in U.S. dollars since I first finished building out my website and launched Google ads in April. This is after accounting for advertising costs ($10,000 in May, $4,500 in June, and $3,500 in July), office expenses ($1,123 in July, the month I moved into my current office), and filing fees ($5,500 in May, $7,250 in June, and $18,000 in July).
 
Last month, I filed about 70 trademark applications, and I’m at maybe 30% capacity. Once I reach 70% or 80% capacity, I’ll hire an associate attorney for my firm. My model is very scalable; it’s profitable enough that I could keep hiring attorneys and give them good salaries and benefits ad infinitum.
 
Most of my income now comes from repeat clients and referrals, so the growth is going to keep compounding. The jump from $4,500 in June to $12,000 in July, in particular, was stunning. I now find myself in the enviable position of figuring out how to scale my firm sooner than I had expected.


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