 Weekly Community Digest June 9, 2026 | ⚡ This Week in 30 Seconds| → 24 new client opportunities posted this week. Fintech gaming payments/regulatory counsel, healthcare IP for a Midwest VC, emergency employment representation for a NY wage dispute, and more. See all Members | | → A community member open-sourced a legal AI architecture this week. The repo is live on GitHub and the post is an invitation for other builders to fork, extend, and experiment. It's the latest signal that this community is increasingly building legal AI tools, not just buying them. See the Community Spotlight for the broader pattern. See the post Members | | → Should lawyers charge for initial consultations? A member who'd never charged for consults in over a decade asked the community after noticing others charging up to $500. The thread covered filtering tire-kickers, crediting the fee on first retention, and how different intake models compare. Read the thread Members | | → Hotshot dropped a new Agentic AI course for HeyCounsel members. Covers how agentic systems differ from GenAI chatbots, where they're being applied in legal practice, verification challenges, and professional responsibility best practices. Available with an active Hotshot account. Check it out |
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🔥 Community SpotlightMembers Are Building the ToolsA community member open-sourced a legal AI architecture this week. The repo is live on GitHub. The post is an invitation for other builders to experiment, fork, and extend. It's a small thing on its own, but it fits a pattern members have been tracking for months -- including a recent open-source release of a Harvey/Legora-style platform that another member surfaced. The technical bar to building legal AI primitives keeps dropping. The result is that this community looks less like a buyer's club for legal tech and more like a network of practitioner-builders trading infrastructure. If you're shipping anything in this space, this is the room to share it. See the post → Members |
💬 Threads of the WeekShould Lawyers Charge for Initial Consultations? → A member who'd offered free consults for over a decade noticed more peers charging -- some up to $500 per meeting. The thread surfaced a range of models: free for referrals but paid for cold-contact strategy sessions, charging as a filter for unserious inquiries, and crediting the fee against the first invoice if the prospect retains within 30 days. Several practitioners shared why they made the switch and whether it changed how clients showed up. Members |
When Clients Show Up with AI-Drafted Templates → How should we treat clients who use AI to draft their own "templates" and ask us to review them? The thread surfaced different angles -- drafting fees versus review fees, when AI output is rough enough that starting over is faster, how to set expectations up front, and what kind of policy to put in writing. Members |
SAFEs with SPA-Level Terms: Is This a Thing Now? → Members confirmed they're seeing it too, largely from accelerators drafting their own documents. The consensus: these provisions make no legal or practical sense in a pre-money note, and advising clients on how to push back is part of the job now. Members |
Trademark Strategy When an Application Is Stuck in Suspension → When a trademark application is suspended due to a prior-filed 1(b), the options are narrower than they look. Learn when opposition is viable, whether raising third-party common law use actually works as grounds, and why alerting the prior applicant to your client's mark can backfire in ways that are hard to undo. Members |
All threads above are members only. |
📢 Member Programs & PerksVirtual Coffee Chats Want to meet someone new this month? Join the #virtual-coffee-chats channel to get matched 1-on-1 with another member. If you link up with someone locally, HeyCounsel will cover the coffee. Members | Weekly Meditation & Mindfulness A member facilitates a 30-minute guided community sit every Thursday at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern. Beginner friendly, no minimum commitment -- drop in as you please. Join the #meditation_mindfulness channel to be added to the recurring session. Members |
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👋 Welcome to the PackA couple of the newest members who introduced themselves this week. Say hello in #02-introductions. Members Lindsay Vogel · Remote Founder of Gamut Privacy. After 15 years in in-house privacy and product counseling roles, she launched a practice focused on growth-stage companies in data-rich and regulated industries -- typically Series A-D -- building or scaling their privacy function. Her work covers AI governance and product counseling, M&A privacy due diligence, and privacy program development. | Kent Frazer · Jupiter, FL Founder of The Frazer Firm, a boutique serving businesses and their owners throughout Palm Beach County and South Florida. His practice covers business litigation (contract disputes, non-competes, partnership and business divorce), transactions (M&A, partner buyouts), and fractional and outside general counsel work. He spent a significant portion of his career litigating commercial disputes and now brings that experience to his transactional and GC work -- he knows where the documents tend to fail. |
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🚀 New Client OpportunitiesA small sample of this week's opportunities -- members get access to the full list, plus the ability to submit proposals directly. See all opportunities → Members |
📅 Upcoming Events | Build Your Firm Website with Claude Code A hands-on session on building and launching a professional firm website using Claude Code. No prior coding experience required. Register → |
| Biz Dev Q&A with Megan Senese A focused Q&A on business development strategies for independent practitioners -- what's working, what's changed, and how to build a sustainable client pipeline. Register → |
| HeyCounsel Book Club: Incorruptible Monthly book club on Eric Ries' latest -- a look at how institutions can be rebuilt to serve people rather than protect themselves. Register → |
| Weekly Meditation & Mindfulness -- 9am PT / 12pm ET A member facilitates a 30-minute guided sit every Thursday. Beginner friendly, drop in whenever. Join #meditation_mindfulness to be added to the recurring session. |
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👥 Join HeyCounselHeyCounsel is a private community for independent attorneys and small law firm owners. If you're building or running a practice on your own terms, here's what you get as a member: | • New client opportunities and member referrals -- like the 24 posted just this week | | • Best practices for building AI-native firms -- from lawyers who are actually doing it | | • A private Slack community with practitioners across every area of law | | • Exclusive discounts on legal AI tools and services, including contract drafting and research platforms | | • Hundreds of member-contributed templates across every practice area | | • Free CLEs, educational programming, and mastermind groups | | • Private demos, hackathons, and in-person events when the pack gets together |
If you're an independent attorney or running a small firm, this is the room you've been looking for. |
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