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On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Shivani Honwad – founder of her own law firm, who specializes in immigration and business law for the creative industries. Shivani is a business and immigration lawyer, and trailblazer in supporting the Freelance and Free Act, as well as a professor at NYU LA campus teaching Entrepreneurship for creatives. “I could not keep hearing it and not do anything about it” Shivani says, speaking about immigration as a major issue for freelance fashion workers. Shivani set out to get smarter. Ten 10 years later, The Law Firm of Shivani Honwad, LLC, focuses primarily on immigration and business law for companies in the fashion, tech, beauty and entertainment realms. You can find out more about Shivani at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shivani-honwad- http://www.shivanilaw.com Find some of my guest’s content here : Laws “the freelance and free act” https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/freelance-isnt-free-act.page Transcript: 00:04 Hi, I'm pleased to announce something very special to me, a new subscription-based service through Next Act Advisors that allows members exclusive access to personal industry insights and bespoke 00:32 corporate governance knowledge. This comes in the form of blogs, personal book recommendations, and early access to the founder's sandbox podcast episodes before they released to the public. If you want more white glove information on building your startup with information like what was in today's episode, sign up with the link in the show notes to enjoy being a special member of Next Act Advisors. 01:01 As a thank you to Founders Sandbox listeners, you can use code SANDBOX25 at checkout to enjoy 25% off your membership costs. Thank you. 01:18 Welcome back to the Founder's Sandbox. I am Brenda McCabe, your host. This is a monthly podcast in which I reach entrepreneurs, business owners, who are going to learn about building resilient, purpose-driven, and sustainable businesses with great corporate governance. 01:38 I like to assist the entrepreneurs in building these scalable, well-governed and resilient business. And what I do with my guests is they tell their origin story about how they've built their own practices. And we'll get to the origin story of my guest this month, Shivani Honwad. Shivani and I have known each other for many years. She was bi-coastal in New York and Los Angeles. We met actually in the Los Angeles. 02:06 Los Angeles Venture Association, LAVA. It has a women affinity group. And she was eagerly contributing to some of the material and programs that we put on for women business owners, actually startups in the LA ecosystem. So I wanna thank you Shivani for joining me this month and the founder Sandbox. Thank you, Brenda. Thank you. So. 02:35 You own your own law firm, the law firm of Shivani Honwad. And it was originally based in New York. I don't know whether you operate nationally, but I'd love you to kind of repeat your origin story when I met you the first time in one of the women in lava. It was a small gathering. And it struck me your story was fascinating, because you were 03:04 working for a law firm in New York, but it was in your social life. You were, you know, out for drinks in the evenings and you would often be approached by women who were in the fashion industry, so models, and inevitably over a drink or maybe not a drink, they would end up using some of your free services. What was that? What were they asking your advice on, Shivani? And with that, we're going to get started on your origin story. 03:32 Thank you. Yeah, sure. So, you know, I was in my twenties in New York City and as one does in New York City, I would often go out. So I, at the time, was working in criminal law with a firm and civil litigation. But so I would go out with my friends. You know, I went to NYU, so I had a lot of friends in the city. And, you know, these models kept approaching me and they were like, hey, I heard you're a lawyer. I need help. 04:00 And I was like, oh, did you get arrested or did something happen like that? And they were like, no. And I kept hearing stories of how they were working for these modeling agencies. Most of the people that approached me were international models and their passports or their visas or something like their paperwork was being withheld so that they didn't really have freedom to travel and then not only that, they wouldn't be paid out. So. 04:25 they would model for days, weeks, sometimes months at a time, and be paid $0. And the agencies were just, there was just a lot of abuse in the industry. And so they kept asking for help. And at the time, I didn't really understand enough about the industry to know how pervasive this was. But I started looking into it because it wasn't just one model approaching me. It was like dozens of models over the course of a few weeks, if not maybe a few months. 04:54 that kept asking me for help. And it got to a point. I ...