Phil Crowley spent 30 years in the Johnson & Johnson Law Department, about seven of them as chief FDA regulatory counsel for J&J’s biotech and high-technology products, before he started Crowley Law for life sciences and technology founders. He was a research physicist first: Stevens Institute, then the PhD program in experimental physics at Harvard, working on superconductivity.

He opens with the client who wanted to save money and pulled an operating agreement off the internet for his LLC. It was not an operating agreement. His partner was supposed to run the distilling side of a new vodka brand and instead got, in Phil’s words, a little bit too fond of the juice and slept at the plant. There was no legal way to remove him, the partner sued first, and the client nearly lost the $50,000 he had put in.

What Phil covers

• The co-founder conversation nobody wants to have. Vision, commitment, time horizon, and the hard one: if we part ways, how does that look? A founders’ agreement is a prenup, and people in agreement do not want to think about it.
• Write the business plan anyway. It will be wrong. The planning process is what forces you to answer who does what and where the money comes from.
• How to spot the wrong lawyer in one call. If they get hostile or cannot be bothered to talk to you, that is your answer. Phil also points founders at technology accelerators. He sits on the board at Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
• Lead response. Jeremy reads him the numbers from the Ignitvio Lead Response Study and asks where his firm actually falls. Phil answers honestly: a 24-hour target today, staged email flights in Lawmatics, and a plan to have a receptionist call web sign-ins inside five to ten minutes.
• Regulation designed in, not bolted on. FDA work at J&J across pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and devices. Recognise the regime early and you build for it instead of redesigning after the fact.
• AI in law firms. The firms that embrace it will be looking at the ones that forbid it in the rear view mirror, and the lawyers filing hallucinated case citations are getting sanctioned for it. Phil has his staff use private mode and play.
• The Credo. Robert Wood Johnson wrote it in 1943 as the majority stockholder and put stockholders last, after doctors and nurses and patients, suppliers, employees and communities. Enron had a beautiful statement of principles too. Nobody enforced it.
• Pi and the Ace of Diamonds. The five values Phil’s own team picked together: Professionalism and Integrity, then Accountability, Communication, and Effectiveness/Efficiency.

His book is Avoid Startup Failure: Learn the Top Ten Causes of Failure for Technology Startups and How to Turn Them to Your Advantage, on Amazon in softcover, Kindle, Audible, and Spanish softcover. The Amazon link is an affiliate link.

More from Phil on the business divorce problem and on handling a partnership dispute, and there is more on scaling without losing your core over at SEO Arcade.

Connect with Phil Crowley

• Crowley Law: crowleylawllc.com
• LinkedIn: Phil Crowley
• His book, Avoid Startup Failure (affiliate link), and the book page on his own site
• His podcast, From Lab to Patient, Garage to Market
• The Johnson & Johnson Credo

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More interviews with small business owners at Unscripted Small Business.