Jennifer Copus is a Co-founder and Senior Partner at Copus & Copus, P.A., representing Florida clients located along the Emerald Coast in civil, real estate, contract, and family law matters. With over 21 years of legal experience, Jennifer brings depth of legal knowledge and dedication to clients that sets her firm apart from other law firms in the Okaloosa County area. When launching her firm, Jennifer made it her mission to offer her clients the dedicated and tailored legal guidance that only a boutique firm can provide.
She graduated from the University of Alabama and received her Juris Doctor from Loyola University New Orleans School of Law.
Please tell us a little bit about your company.
My firm does only civil litigation, nothing criminal. We do real estate and contract litigation, as well as probate and estate planning. We also prepare policies for some of our institutional clients. We don’t do any personal injury, workers comp, or anything like that. It’s what we call a boutique law firm that does a little bit of everything.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company.
I graduated from law school in 2000 and moved to the Gulf Coast of Florida. For the first six years of my practice, I was first a public defender and then I switched sides to became a prosecutor. After that, I started in private practice with a large local firm where my husband and I both worked. On April 1, 2009, we decided to leave and start our practice, and have been there ever since.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- First, you need some degree of fearlessness, must be willing to take some risks, and have some level of understanding that you may fail, but go ahead and take the leap anyway!
- I also believe to be successful in business, you need to have good communication skills with your clients, staff, and the public at large.
- Finally, it’s important to have a business strategy mapped out before you start. You need to think long and hard about how you want your business to operate and how to distinguish your business from thousands of others that are doing the same thing as you.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
Being proactive is important in this area as well as paying close attention to what is changing and what is staying the same in the field of law. When you pay attention to those things, it can assist in anticipating certain shifts or pivots that may be necessary to make over the years. Since the pandemic, my firm has shifted focus from being primarily devoted to contract and real estate litigation to estate planning, because there was a significant need.
Also, keeping up with changes in technology is important. We have now transitioned from having in-person hearings to mostly virtual court hearings for civil matters. That is why choosing the right technology to facilitate this is very important
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
The way we run our firm is exactly the way we were taught to run a firm by another. We worked for a midsize firm that was prestigious in the area and did things well. We do things exactly the way we did there and it has always worked for us. We’re also more casual about things. That helps people to see you as a real person they can relate to, rather than being in a stuffy three-piece suit environment and huge conference room. We try to stay away from that to have authentic relationships with our clients.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- The first biggest mistake we made (which a lot of new business owners do) is to try to save money and wear multiple different hats. This means trying to be an office manager, do some accounting, and do paralegal work. For me, it didn’t work out well and the biggest lesson was investing in the right kind of people to help you with those things. That is always money well spent.
- The next mistake we made for the first few years was neglecting online or internet marketing. We had a basic website and didn’t do much else with it for a few years, but eventually turned our attention to it. We started to do upgrades to our website, making sure we were listed on other legal sites to attract business. As a result, we saw a significant uptick in business related to that.
- Finally, we didn’t value our time appropriately and were essentially charging a lower rate to ensure we could get business in the door. We initially undervalued our services but learned that sticking to your value is important to managing time and ensuring your business can run.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
We’ve gotten really good results from our website. I believe a majority of people look for a lawyer using the internet. We also have postings on legal sites such as Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo, Lawyers.com, and Nolo.com. You can make an inquiry on those sites about a particular matter that you have and we do see significant business from that. We also have a billboard in town in a high-traffic area and we receive a lot of calls from people who have seen our billboard.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I wish I had been more aware of how extraordinarily expensive it is to run a business. We had some insight with our prior firm, but you don’t get the full magnitude of it until you start your own business and add all that up every month. It’s quite extraordinary when you think about it and changes your perspective of how you run that business.
Can you recommend one book, one podcast, and one online course for entrepreneurs and authors?
- Atomic Habits (book)
- NPR How I Built This (podcast)
- Coursera has hundreds of courses on business and finance from the best universities in the world.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I would allocate that money to a marketing consultancy. I believe that would be very helpful to any new business owner. As lawyers, we deal with legal matters. That’s not our specialty and we don’t deal with marketing, PR, and things like that. So, hiring the right people to take care of that right at the beginning would have taken a lot of stress off of us.
What is your favorite quote?
“Walk your own path.”
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Be willing to take risks. In the end, you’ll find it’s worth it being your own boss. It’s very empowering and freeing especially for women in highly competitive fields like law.
How can we get in touch with you?
You can contact me via email jennifer @ copuslaw.com or by visiting my company website www.copuslaw.com
