Solving Problems and Thinking Outside the Box

Don’t bet against Bijan Ghom. 

The entrepreneur-turned-lawyer knows a thing or two about gambling, having founded software companies for the gaming-inclined. Jockbrokers, for example, was the first asset-based sports investing platform, using trading cards as financial instruments. 

ShakeONit was another of Ghom’s ideas for a legal betting platform, “with a work-around,” he explains. “If you lose a bet, you don’t have to pay. But you could be dinged with negative ratings—sort of an eBay model.” That site was built out but never launched. There were too many legal gray areas.

“Gambling under South Carolina law has three elements: prize, chance and consideration. If you can eliminate one of those elements, you get around the gambling thing,” Ghom says. “If you didn’t have to pay your bet, there wouldn’t be any consideration and, arguably, no prize. But there’s other old laws about listing wagers—the act of taking the bets. There were some old laws on the books that worried anybody in that space at that time.”

Those hazy legalities were precisely what led Ghom, a Boston native who studied business at University of South Carolina, to pursue law. But not before he put his entrepreneurial management major to work. 

While juniors in college, Ghom and his roommate dabbled in software as a service startups, “but neither of us were expert coders,” he says. So, instead, they created a web development company, contracting with the software developers who had the skills they needed. They bid on projects, with Ghom doing the pitching and sales, then scaled those models, funneling the revenue into more startups. 

They also had success as early dabblers and investors in Bitcoin. “We just wanted to be rich at the time, like most college kids, and the concept seemed cool and innovative,” says Ghom, who went on to earn his MBA at the College of Charleston. But his get-rich-quick plan had a hitch. 

“Once we had some resources and the ability to create things online, I realized most of the ventures I wanted to do involved hiring lawyers, which was very expensive,” he says. 

Ever watchful of the bottom line, Ghom reasoned that, “if I can become a lawyer, then I can do the legal work myself.” Or maybe he could approach 10 or 15 startups that intrigued him and offer to be their general counsel—“trading my services for equity,” he says. 

In other words, studying law was more about having another inroad for reaching his business goals—“something else to offer the startup world,” he says—and less about mastering the legal practice.

Ghom’s perspective soon changed, though. Even during his undergraduate and graduate business studies, driven though he was, Ghom had not enjoyed school. His older sister, now a physician, had always been the high-achieving top student, while he was satisfied with getting by. But in law school, he says, “the competitive nature kicked in and got me going.” 

Once in practice, first with Rosen Hagood and now as senior counsel in the Charleston office of Saxton & Stump, Ghom discovered that law scratched an itch in the same way that startups did. 

“I didn’t realize how much creativity is involved in practicing,” he says. “When I figured out that it’s really a lot like being an entrepreneur, having to solve problems and occasionally think outside the box, then I had fun tapping into that same part of my brain.” 

Ghom’s clients include businesses with litigation issues and those with concerns related to protecting or monetizing intellectual property assets. He also is a strategist with Palq IP, an IP strategy firm and partner of Saxton & Stump. That forward-thinking aspect of the firm—driven by Jim Saxton, whom Ghom says he and others think of as “the Steve Jobs of law”—appealed to Ghom. 

“I think I share a closer mindset to my business clients than many lawyers might,” Ghom says. “I like looking at things and seeing how we might be able to do it better. Lawyers are good at seeing what not to do, and identifying what the risks are. And while entrepreneurs may not view it that way, that’s really what they’re doing, too. Just managing risk, and hoping the benefit outweighs the risk.”