Tell Me A Story

TELL ME A STORY By: Haseeb Qureshi

CEO and Founder, Forthlaw PLLC

MY NONLINEAR PRACTICE OF LAW

I’m an odd attorney, in that I didn’t start my legal career by practicing law. No, I first threw myself into entrepreneurship and to business making. I’m a self-taught coder, and I’ve launched several projects over the past twenty years. Now, I practice business law at my own firm, Forthlaw PLLC, in addition to teaching entrepreneurship at the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee.

While starting a law firm sounds traditional, Forthlaw has been everything but traditional. My tech and entrepreneurial background have (and continue to) open more opportunities in transforming how I practice law and how my clients harness the power of quality legal counsel. That very background and that process are so quintessential to my approach with Forthlaw and my attitude towards the norms in our legal industry.

I had been coding and programming since 2000. More relevant to this chapter of my life, I started a music technology startup called Audiohand back in 2014. Some readers may even remember this company. The entire concept was to crowdsource and combine audio recorded from the audience’s smartphones, to create a new class of energetic and immersive audio. The tech was challenging, but we figured it out and successfully patented the technology (many thanks to my good friend, Stephen Adams). Even more challenging than the technology was the business making; we were ahead of customer behavior, and I was inexperienced in creating and running a startup, even as an energetic and outgoing technical founder who coded most of the technology. I couldn’t seem to break the right walls to move it forward at that time.

Quickly, I realized that I needed a breather from my entrepreneurial journey. Audiohand had a team of 8, excluding myself, and we couldn’t figure out how to launch the revenue generating version of the technology. Ultimately, I wasn’t growing the company (or myself, professionally) and something needed to change. I decided to move my personal life forward; I proposed to my wife (then girlfriend of 7 years) in 2016, and we married in 2017. I then decided to practice startup law, taking with me all of my entrepreneurial experiences and putting them to good use.

I started with David Morehous at his firm, newly hired as a parttime Entrepreneur in Residence. (I would be full-time later in 2017.) The entire concept of my position was to be the bridge between entrepreneurs and lawyers. This concept wasn’t without issues; the legal team wasn’t large and often, I needed to draft documents to meet deadlines. Other than retaining legal services for my own technology startup, I didn’t have direct and applicable experience in providing those legal services to entrepreneurs and startups. Meaning, I was still learning as I was promising deliverables.

More I reflect on that time, I was essentially entering into a new chapter of my life. This was a great opportunity to learn the detailed mechanics of startup and entrepreneurial law; I was thirsting for that hard knowledge and experience. On top of it all, David was so fantastic at entrepreneurial law, I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor. Soon after, I had my sights on growing the firm and to reach and help more entrepreneurs.

About 3 years into the firm, there were indicators that I wasn’t going to reach that goal. Nearly 5 years into the firm, I realized that I needed to venture on my own. At the end of the day, what I wanted to actualize required a full (and radical) transformation of the firm’s business model and its daily activities: To completely eradicate the billable hour; To discourage ad-hoc marketing, lunches, and events, that all too often create marketing black-boxes for growing any firm’s client base; To reach underserved swaths of entrepreneurs and businesses, many of which need straightforward communication and “handholding” so they can better understand what they’re buying and how to deploy the best legal counsel. I started Forthlaw PLLC this past May of 2022. A brainchild of sorts, it’s my response to correcting the misaligned incentives that fraught the attorney-client relationship. Not as an alternative legal service provider (or ALSP, for short), but actually as a firm licensed to practice law. (Quick commentary on retail ALSPs: LegalZoom, Rocketlawyer, and other ALSPs are valuable in certain contexts, but are highly misleading to customers due to limited lawyer networks, inherent structural flaws of those networks, and no available business model incentives to encourage improvements to customer experiences.)

As a member of this prestigious profession, I feel that we have a duty to bring more improvements to our respective areas of law: to bridge more gaps and to increase access wherever possible.

I often talk with students on how some of the best and most enriching parts of our careers are nonlinear. Often, students are thinking about the next step in their life — and they should — but often fail to ignore the beauty in the twists and turns. Hardship and rewards are forever intertwined.

For this chapter of my life, I’m driven to innovate the business of law and redefine what it means to buy — and deploy — legal services. It is incredibly hard, challenging, and riddled with doubtful moments (that have shattered even the highest of my self-confidence at times).

I believe the best way forward is to leverage our nonlinear past and paths, to call on our eclectic perspectives and strengths. I’ll forge my path forward by heavily leveraging my skills and technological and entrepreneurial perspectives to unlock that client innovation. For me, it’s worth the wait and its lengthy process.

It’s a great pleasure to contribute to this column. Continue to be as great as you can be, to create value for others, and to do more good that is out there right now.

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Bench-Bar Celebration

On Wednesday, September 7, the KBA membership gathered to honor our local judiciary at the Bench-Bar Celebration. The reception was a triumphant celebration of our bench and bar, with well over 200 attorneys and judges in attendance. Everyone who attended took full advantage of the opportunity to enthusiastically fellowship with friends and colleagues. Photos were provided by Shooting the Bar more pictures are available in the photo gallery at www.knoxbar.org