Vivek Jayaram is the founder of Jayaram Law, an IP and business firm he’s run for 17 years. He represents artists, musicians, fashion brands, and tech founders. He teaches at the University of Miami Law School. And in 2026 his firm was named to Fashion Law’s list of the top US firms for fashion and retail, the youngest firm to make it by about half a century. Here’s our conversation. Morgan: You do tons of work with creative people, and the firm carries your name. How have you thought about your brand, both as an executive and as a firm, over 17 years? Vivek: I appreciate the question, and I’ll try to answer it with as much humility as possible, because it might sound like I’m full of myself. From the beginning, one of my aspirations with Jayaram was to build the first real brand in legal. If you look across our industry, there are firms a lot of us know. Kirkland and Ellis, Skadden, the big ones. But I bet if you stopped people on the street anywhere in the country, from New York to Cleveland to the middle of Nebraska, and asked them to name five law firms, very few could do it. I don’t think that’s a failure exactly, but law firms have gotten very big and very profitable while never really focusing on their brand. And you saw where that leads recently, with the capitulation to the current administration. If you’re a brand with values, those values guide your decisions. A lot of firms realized they didn’t really live by any values or mission. They were just service providers doing whatever was best for the bottom line. So from the first couple of months, I wanted to model everything, the identity, the website, how we talked, how we showed up, not after other law firms, but after all the great brands I loved. If you’re in the service business, maybe your clients would appreciate you connecting with them and presenting yourself as relatable, rather than looking exactly like every one of your peers. That was the big-picture philosophy, and over 17 years it’s shown up in everything, from the way we dress to the way the offices look. Morgan: Who were the brands you looked to when you were building that early identity? Vivek: It may sound cliche, but I’m still inspired by the Steve Jobs era of Apple. I’m 48, so I was a teenager and a young adult in the 90s and early 2000s. I was a computer kid. I researched all of it, the Gateways, the Dells, the IBMs, the Apple IIGS. And Apple was delivering the same product everyone else was. A hard drive, a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse. Functionally, nothing different. But when you opened the Apple packaging, or saw the ad, or heard Steve Jobs talk about the product, it made you feel something completely different than opening the box of the cheap laptop I had my first year of law school. Jobs showed us that design and aesthetics make a material, substantive difference in both products and services. So everything we do is intentional in that same spirit. The identity, the newspaper we send out, the sneakers we make for the team every year, the holiday gifts, the objects in the office, the events. We’re confined by the same bar rules as every other lawyer. We’re still lawyers. But the way we deliver it, and who we deliver it for, I hope makes our clients and our community feel differently. Morgan: For anyone who hasn’t seen your videos, you’ve got giant cracks in your office walls, chairs coming out of the walls. Where did these ideas come from? Did you design it all as you went? Vivek: This is really the origin story. I’ve played music my whole life and loved all the arts as long as I can remember. Visual art, music, fashion, film, poetry, books, all of it. When I graduated law school, my first job was a clerkship for a great federal judge, which I loved. Then I went into big law, met a lot of great people, got good training. But the culture was completely foreign to me. It didn’t fit who I was. After a few years of long hours, I realized I was getting detached from the creative community I’d spent my first 25 to 30 years in. That was the spark for Jayaram. I was 29 and I had much more confusion than clarity, but the one nugget of clarity I had was that I wanted to work with creative people. That was it. And I cast a very broad definition of creative. My first clients were friends. People starting a fashion brand, a couple of musicians, sculptors, visual artists, a few tech founders. People forget that back then, up through about 2013 or 2014, the tech world and the creative world were in the same rooms. Somewhere between the financial crisis and the pandemic, tech went from Soho to Wall Street and lost some of that luster. But back then, that’s how our tech practice developed, because those founders were in the same rooms as the artists and designers. I didn’t want to draw the hard, bright lines lawyers tend to draw around the attorney-client relationship. If you’d asked 100 creative people in 2010 their impression of lawyers, 99 would have said stiff, inaccessible, speaking a language we don’t understand, so we just don’t use them. So from the beginning we had almost a co-op feel. Yes, we did the legal work, but if a client needed an investor to get a project off the ground, we used our network. If they needed a downtown space for an exhibition or a pop-up, we helped find it. A few weeks ago we helped put together a deal between two of our clients, KidSuper and Inter Miami. One comes to me looking for a soccer arena to do a fashion runway show, and I think, I’ve got a guy. That spirit is what birthed a lot of this, and it’s why we’ve done everything we’ve done for Daniel Arsham over the years, including producing our own shows of his work during Art Basel Miami Beach. So when you ask why there are eroded sculptures in the office, for us it feels natural. It just feels like being ourselves. And if I’ve learned one thing in 20 years, it’s that being yourself is always the right answer. It’s also one of the hardest things to figure out. That “for real, be real” is what got me out of big law. An office with mahogany and cubicles and a library, that’s not us. This feels right for us. Morgan: You’ve said that to advise an industry, you have to be inside it. You’re at the fashion weeks, the exhibitions, the openings. How do you give honest, balanced counsel while wearing so many hats? Vivek: At the end of the day my job is simple. I’m a problem solver. Given my expertise it’s usually a legal problem, but often it starts legal and morphs into a business problem. One thing I’ve never understood is lawyers who say, “I’m going to stay silent, that’s a business question.” Then what are we here for? You’re advising the business. If your legal advice isn’t tied to the business reality, it’s probably not the most valuable advice you could give. I’m not saying we substitute ourselves in as CEO. But to solve the problem, you have to place the solution squarely within the best interest of the business. Last week someone said they were looking for an early-stage investor for their CPG brand. Not a legal question. But I represent a VC on the West Coast who only invests in CPG. So I get them on a call and introduce them. Once you’re providing solutions and value, it compounds. You build your network, you get introduced to more people with more problems. That’s a big part of the game. Morgan: A lot of people think of attorneys, especially in IP, as being about restriction. What you can’t do. Your firm’s positioning is the opposite. Talk about that. Vivek: We literally have a written mission, and everyone who joins signs off that they understand it. The mission is to enable original ideas. And that’s consistent with something the founding fathers put in the Constitution 250 years ago. A lot of people are surprised to learn intellectual property is in the Constitution. It’s not there to stop people or as a restriction. It says right there in the document that it exists to incentivize Americans to make things, to be creative. I think that’s beautiful, because I believe most human beings, left to ourselves, would be pursuing something creative. We’re a creative species. So IP law isn’t there to restrict people, it’s there to incentivize them to make cool stuff. Sometimes we do that by creating IP, sometimes by licensing it, and believe it or not, sometimes by enforcing it. You stop someone else from using your IP not because that’s the point of existing, but because protecting it incentivizes the creation. Through the whole two-party system over hundreds of years, our IP system has worked pretty well. There are inequities, and you see some now with streaming and Ticketmaster in music. But by and large it works. Morgan: You represent MSCHF whose whole thing is toeing the line. For anyone who hasn’t heard of the Cease and Desist Grand Prix, brands were practically racing to sue them. Tell us about that. Vivek: MSCHF is a client, and their GC, John Belcaster, is one of the smartest lawyers I’ve ever worked with. They create artworks and products that toe the line between infringement and non-infringement. The Cease and Desist Grand Prix jersey was a bicycle racing jersey covered in the logos of about 20 of the most prominent US trademarks. Subway, McDonald’s, Burger King, Google, others. And here’s the interesting part. They never got sued. Subway actually joined in and had some fun with it on Twitter. Each of their projects plays with parody, satire, the First Amendment, infringement. John and I both teach at the University of Miami, and there’s a line of his that always gets a laugh but contains real wisdom. When MSCHF’s artists come to him with an idea, his answer is always yes, unless it’s criminally illegal. That gets the laugh, but honestly that’s how I advise everyone. Because if it’s not criminally illegal, then it’s just a matter of risk. Civil lawyering i
