“We need to hire each other and give each other advice and lift each other up and buy each other’s products and all of that…that is the path to building the matriarchal system and a system that works for us and anyone who is an “other,” who was not contemplated in the constitution. It’s the way we are going to change things.”
Jennifer Justice, CEO and founder of The Justice Department
Despite advances worth celebrating, women still face unique obstacles in the workplace. These include pay inequities, barriers to career advancement, difficulty accessing capital and high-potential networking opportunities, balancing work and family responsibilities, microaggressions, and other biases that prevent them from reaching their maximum potential in business. Despite these challenges, however, women are continuously overcoming and are more empowered than ever! Through seeking out coaches, mentors, role models, and business partnerships who focus on advancing women in leadership, women are advocating for themselves and their businesses, and becoming more vocal about the value they bring to the workplace.
In this episode, we’re joined by Jennifer Justice, CEO and founder of The Justice Department, a female focused advisory, consulting and law firm advocating for female founders, talent, execs and brands. JJ is also a champion for gender equality and DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion) in the workplace. Tune in for insight on how women can take a greater stand for the business success and quality of life that they want to experience.
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Andrea Palten: Hi, I’m today’s host Andrea Palten and I’m super excited for today’s guest. Her impressive resume is so long I don’t even know where to start. So, I just tried to condense as much as I could. So, we have with us Jennifer Justice, she’s the CEO and founder of The Justice Department, a consulting firm, helping women build their businesses. We love that around here. Before that, she was the EVP and general counsel at Roc Nation for those of you that might know that’s Jay-Z and so she’s represented artists like Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Outcast, Slipknot, and many, many more. She also has a podcast called Taking Care of Lady Business which I’ve been listening to for the last two days nonstop. I highly recommend it. It’s called Taking Care of Lady Business. So, JJ, welcome. Can you please give the listeners your own introduction and tell us what you’re currently doing and working on?
Jennifer Justice: Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here and thank you for that amazing introduction. Sometimes I listen to it and I’m like, who is that person she’s talking about? So yes, I’m Jennifer Justice. I have a company called The Justice Department. I spent my career on the business side of creative endeavors, for the most part, marrying art and commerce and in the music industry predominantly. The unique thing about the music industry is that artists, the team that they create around them are a manager, a business manager or somebody who handles their money basically and a lawyer and an agent, but an agent what their main priority is their life experience. So, they really don’t have anything to do with the recorded music side of it. So, the lawyer and manager end up doing a majority of the business for musicians and artists.
I just happened to start my career at the same time Jay-Z was starting his, and we grew up in the business together and so I learned from very young in my career age how to build businesses because he was so forward-thinking in that. In fact, he never had an agent his entire career. He liked to be the person controlling his business versus building somebody else’s and so that’s how I grew up as a lawyer, as an executive, as a businessperson is figuring out to take somebody’s core competencies and partner with somebody in order to build a business out of it and real enterprise value versus just doing sponsorships, endorsements for other people and building their businesses. That didn’t necessarily mean in the areas that you would think of like clothing or beauty, which were some. But, alcohol, tech, how to partner with people which wasn’t so obvious in areas where they wanted certain people’s communities or expertise.
So, as thought leaders, as on the board, as a consultant in strategy and so all of my background comes from that area and the business side, thinking from strategy, business development, corporate development, legal, all the kind of actual scaffolding that you really need in order to then hire people like marketing, publicity, social media. Do you know what I mean? Then I also had a massive passion for gender equality because I was representing some executives in the music industry and I would do a deal for a guy, and then I would do one for a woman in equal, or the woman getting a higher position in the same company and the man who’s getting paid far more than the woman.
Andrea Palten: That’s infuriating.
Jennifer Justice: Yeah, and so what I did was marry those two passions and so I saw what women were lacking, which was people who would advocate for them that understood who they were. In other words, other women when they walked into a room from a business perspective, which is the most important thing to have a solid foundation in before you go and hire all these other people to help you with your business. So, that’s what The Justice Department is and that’s a very long-winded way of saying that. So, it’s three parts. You can hire us as a law firm under The Justice Firm and we do general work entertainment, partnerships, sponsorships, general vendor stuff and then we also have Lady Business which is where Taking Care of Lady Business came from which is where you hire us for like a statement of work or if you’re an individual wanting to grow into a business themselves or a business that needs help in growing and don’t really have the income for hiring people of my level. So, you can hire us as a consultant to get to a certain level more in the area of strategy, business development, partnerships, joint ventures, ways that you can strategically build your company without spending marketing dollars on it. So, advising companies and as they grow and build and raise money. Then we have a company where we invest in some female-founded companies and sit on the advisory board and on the board of certain companies as well. So…
Andrea Palten: Wow! That’s a lot.
Jennifer Justice: Well, it’s a lot but it’s all kind of doing the same thing really, and that is really helping women in their business side of things…
Andrea Palten: Yeah.
Jennifer Justice: …and after three years of doing this and working exclusively for women, I can see how daunting it is. If you come in and you start your own PR company and you’re like, okay, I don’t even know how to do it. We’re like, okay, we can help you. We can set you all up. Then it’s like, okay, well, who does what part? What does a lawyer do versus an accountant versus whoever it is? A business development person versus a revenue officer versus… There are many different things of those that we can do but I know what we don’t do ad you do need them. It might suck to have to pay lawyers and accountants, but you need them. You need them there to give you solid advice and what’s worse is when you have when you’re forced to hire one because it’s usually too late and you’re losing much money. So, it’s like, we help put those found foundational things together for women to really build their business.
Andrea Palten: And for that middle part, for the lady business part, what kind of companies are you helping? What are these women, what are they finding? What kind of companies?
Jennifer Justice: Well, it’s usually women who have a core business and are looking to figure out how to build out that business. They might be known as doing a wellness endeavor like in yoga or fitness and then they’re starting to do some like sponsorship endorsement things. But it’s like, okay, again, you’re building somebody else’s business. How do we evaluate what we turn it into? How do we partner with the right people? How do we know who to partner with? How do we structure those deals? Then it’s female-founded businesses that are already off the ground and have some momentum, but they’re so deep in their day to day, they can’t think about vision. So, we help them think about the vision, how they can grow, where they can grow, what kind of people to hire. We even help them hire their own attorneys that don’t have to be us. It’s how do you know if you need a trademark attorney or when you need one or a corporate attorney? What kind of corporate attorney? What level of corporate attorney? Do I need to raise money? Why, and when? We help them answer those kinds of questions and then when you do raise it from a who, and how to structure that and how to hire those people around you to do that. Because so many people go to the names that they know, but those people charge a lot of money unnecessarily so and you can hire people for a 10th of the price, literally.
Andrea Palten: Yeah.
Jennifer Justice: And you’d rather have your money going to all areas of the business that you need growth in, not just one. So, yeah.
Andrea Palten: So, when you were working for a company and then you became your own founder and you started this, what were some of the biggest struggles that you saw as a woman being a founder of your company?
Jennifer Justice: I mean, it wasn’t about building the business because I knew how to do it. That was the easy part. That’s what’s paralyzing for a lot of people. So, that was easy, and it was not that hard to get clients because I’m known for representing clients anyway. In fact, I knew that this was necessary because so many women were like, how do I find somebody who’s just like you and na-na-na. So, that part was fine. What I struggled with most is the fact that I was really representing only women and seeing how many women didn’t realize that they needed the services. That they thought it’s like, well, I’m spending money towards social media or I’m spending my money toward PR or I’m spending my money toward like marketing. It’s like, okay, but if you don’t have a proper entity or you don’t know how to grow or the right people in place then it’s all going to fall apart. I think you’ve got to be ready for that.
There are some building blocks that have to be done and the cost was daunting when they would turn around and spend $2,500 on a bag but not on a lawyer and it’s like, oh my God! So, it’s that kind of stuff. So, it’s an internal thing that women have about whether or not they deserve to have these kinds of services. We represent executives, doing executive deals and helping them analyze where they should be, how much they should ask for and we negotiate all that for them. How many women in such a large C-suite have never had attorneys negotiate their deals and just sign a contract and you’re like, oh my God, this is for your family. This is the place where you walk away from them and you’re not going to negotiate for yourself or let somebody negotiate for you or hire somebody. It’s insane to me because it’s way beyond just your salary or your title. What if you get fired? What do you get? What’s your severance? What happens if you die?
Andrea Palten: Yeah.
Jennifer Justice: Do you get insurance? If you have stocks, what happens to those with your family? How do they invest? Then from an external view, the company’s going to look at you and go, she doesn’t even negotiate for herself what’s she going to do for me?
Andrea Palten: Exactly. I love that. I learned that early on when I was interviewing for a job. I had a guy friend tell me like, okay, what did they offer you? I’m like more than I thought and he’s like, so what did you counteroffer? I’m like, I didn’t, I was so excited. He’s like, no, you always counteroffer, no matter how excited you are about the job and the salary, and I didn’t know. Nobody has ever told me that either and none of my girlfriends have ever told me that and I was younger at the time too. So, I love that you’re doing that in business especially because it’s still a man’s world. I mean, we just did some research recently about how few CEOs are out there, how few female founders are out there. So, I want to talk about that a little bit. Why do you think that is? Why are there such few women taking that step to become their own CEO or become a founder of a company?
Jennifer Justice: I mean first of all it’s scary. We’re not considered for those. We have our own internal doubts and things that we need to overcome on a daily basis and we’re often the ones running the household etc. and focusing on ourselves and trying to break down those internal barriers and limiting beliefs. It’s very difficult and that’s our internal and then all the external on top of it. Being told that we’re not good enough and all the statistics where a woman is hired on experience, a man on potential and if you can see it, you can be it. If we go somewhere and there’s only one office, then why would we think that we could go anywhere else? The list goes on and on for them. Ageism with women, not for men. The peak of our career is meant to be in our forties where men it’s fifties and sixties and even the seventies as we see all the new presidents coming in office. God forbid a woman is in her seventies. If she’s younger, oh, she has her period, what is she going to do? When she’s older it’s like she’s old.
Andrea Palten: Yeah, she’s menopausal so we can’t hire her.
Jennifer Justice: Yeah, and I think it has to do with what we were just talking about too. It’s daunting. Women traditionally have gravitated toward more creative and social careers, so business is very daunting for them, and they get a lot of bad advice. I mean, I had a client that was told by an accounting platform, you know you have these platforms It’s like, oh, you don’t need your attorney we have forms. Oh my God, what! Okay, what if I just said, you don’t need a tax person, you can just use H&R Block.
Andrea Palten: I know. Then the advice is just taken without asking.
Jennifer Justice: They think oh, we’re going to save some money and it’s like, okay, you go save that money, see what happens Then they come to me when things go wrong and it’s too late. It’s too late. Just put upside a budget, save the money, hire the right people and that’s the cost of doing business.
Andrea Palten: So, for any of the women that are listening to you right now, and they’re on the fence. They have this idea of this great business they want to start but they’re on the fence. They don’t know if they want to do it or not. What’s the number one advice that you have for them?
Jennifer Justice: Well, I say look at yourself in five years from now. What are the things you’re going to regret that you didn’t do and why you didn’t do it, what held you back? If that’s just fear you’re going to regret that. I mean, it’s hard. Look, I’m a single mom. It’s just me. I had my kids by myself, so there is nobody and no family money. We grew up with nothing to fall back on, so it is really scary. I make all these decisions and quit jobs when I had no backup. It’s insane but it’s also very freeing because as a woman it’s like the whole patriarchal work system was set up so men didn’t have to be bothered with children during the day and childcare and all these things. I got to set up my life how I want to now on my terms…
Andrea Palten: Yeah.
Jennifer Justice: …but it is scary. If you don’t have backup money if you haven’t saved money. I mean, I know it personally and it’s really scary. I still get scared all the time, but I have to believe in myself, and I know that this is what I’m doing and it’s doing something with purpose and passion. It’s really helping women. I know it is and I know that even the message of how we need to hire each other and give each other advice and lift each other up and buy each other’s products and all of that, I know that that is the path to building the matriarchal system and a system that worked for us and anyone who is an other, who was not contemplated in the constitution. It’s the way we are going to change things and it’s only going to change when the mass of us believe it is and operate in that way which can be sooner than the 200 years than what we have to stop the gender pay gap in the US alone. 200 years, it’s going to be.
Andrea Palten: It’s absolutely crazy and I think that women like you that are like paving the path for other women that do want to do that. I think speaking out like this is just so amazing. We’re just so happy that you are here, and I want to talk a little bit. You mentioned your children. So, you have twins, right?
Jennifer Justice: Yeah.
Andrea Palten: Was it Nico and Jack?
Jennifer Justice: Yeah. Nico and Jack. Nico’s a girl, boy, girl twins. Yeah. They’re eight.
Andrea Palten: Love it. Love it.
Jennifer Justice: In the third grade. Yeah.
Andrea Palten: At Talking Talent, we coach working women, working parents, working dads, and everybody that’s a caregiver. I would love to hear from you how your career trajectory changed or did not change once you had your children.
Jennifer Justice: Oh, it changed. It did a total 180. I just realized that I was working for someone else. Even though I would put up with ridiculous demands or toxic work environments and just really horrible bosses. Once I had kids, I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. I’m a really good advocate and a really good lawyer but women we’re not good advocates for ourselves for the most part, including me but now I wasn’t. My clients were Jack and Nico, and I was their lawyer. So, the whole reason if anybody was mistreating me, they were mistreating them. If they were underpaying me, they were underpaying them because every time I walked out that door, it was to go get underestimated, underpaid, undervalued and I was like, I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not working in this horrible work environment, under a horrible female boss. I was just like, no, I’m not doing it. I was like, I need to do something with purpose and passion and turned it around and decided to leave without anything to fall back on.
Andrea Palten: So, you just took the leap, you just went for it.
Jennifer Justice: Yeah.
Andrea Palten: Yeah. You just went for it. Okay, I love it.
Jennifer Justice: Yeah. I was like, you know what, I’m going to put up with that anymore because when they’re non-communicative beings, but they can sense your energy if you’re in a horrible mood. So, you always want to put on your happy face, and you always want to especially when they’re really young. You want them to have this great safe environment and it wasn’t going to be where I was. So, it’s like, what can I do to change that and what do I really want in life? I started working more efficiently. I think I had a lot more empathy especially for people with kids. But in general, just for people in their life and what they wanted, and yeah, I just really cared much more about quality versus quantity and what worked for me versus what was an outside perception.
Andrea Palten: Yeah. Oh, I love that. So, I want to talk a little bit about the Great Resignation. So, we have made strides. More women leaders, more women on the board. Unfortunately, with the Great Resignation, we’re looking at who is quitting and who’s leaving the entire workforce. The majority are women. A lot of the women are women of color. So, I want to ask you a little bit about that. With so many women leaving the workforce what do you think is going to happen to it in the future? Are we going to go back to the Stone Age where all men rule? What are you foreseeing?
Jennifer Justice: What I foresee is more of them instead of dealing with what I was dealing with where we’re supposed to pretend like we don’t have kids and they don’t get sick and that the workday works for everyone which it does not, or the school day works for everyone, which it does not or the fact that you can only do your job during the day when it’s not true. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, you can trust people to get it done. I think that they’re going to start finding businesses and starting businesses that work for them. I don’t think people quit just to sit at home. It’s not possible. They still have to work but they’re just not putting up with it anymore. Look, some of these women it’s because their husbands make more than them and it wasn’t going to help at all to hire people or they couldn’t because of COVID. So, I think there are a lot of different scenarios. I wasn’t one scenario, but I think we heard a lot from, especially the younger generation who walked into these businesses and was like, why did you put up with this kind of work environment? It’s fucking awful. Sorry, can I say that on this? Anyway…
Andrea Palten: Yes, you can.
Jennifer Justice: It’s super toxic. It’s super misogynous and it doesn’t care about people’s lifestyles. I think that’s one reason. I think another is the financial reason and another is that it just showed people that this is a time of regeneration and to do things that you really wanted to do.
Andrea Palten: Yeah. I love that new generation coming in. I myself have five nieces and just hearing them talk and it’s so different. It is so different, and they just assume it’s going to be equal.
Jennifer Justice: Oh, yeah.
Andrea Palten: They’re not going in there. They’re just like, why don’t I get this? They talk very openly about their salaries. I come from the generation where you didn’t talk about your salaries to somebody else and they’re just blurting it out. How much do you get paid? I get this much for the same job, and it’s been very interesting to see the difference. So, I love that, and with all these women that are starting their own businesses have you seen an influx in the last couple of years, especially with COVID in your own business with more women founders coming to you?
Jennifer Justice: I don’t think anymore because I only represent women, so I don’t have a barometer. I actually see more men coming to me now, the same reasons women do because they never really fit into that traditional kind of thing. They’re like, you know what, I just really want more diversity around me. So, I find that more men come to me, not versus women, but in general. I’m very honest with them. This is who I am, be forewarned. People will look me up and say, oh, you’re… but I don’t care. I’m virtually unemployable by a man anymore so I’m used to it.
Andrea Palten: That’s really awesome that the men are coming to you because again, we’re opening up to their understanding of how important it is, and their understanding of how powerful women are and can get them to the next level. I love it. So, what’s the future, you and your business. Actually, I want to split those up. What’s the future for your business? What are you foreseeing in five, 10 years? Then I also want to talk about your future, because it sounds like you do so much there’s going to be a lot more that you’re going to be doing.
Jennifer Justice: Well. I think the future of our business is continue on this path but we’re watching, you know, companies that we started with a couple of years ago now doing their series A and B growing with them and we have equity in it. Then get the reputation of being an arbiter of good taste and good business and more people coming to us and where that pivots or grows. I’m just open. I don’t try to pivot us into one thing. It’s really about getting that message out there and knowing and showing women that there are other women that want to help you and that have been there and that’s why I started with the podcast. All these women need this advice, and they need to understand this. This is a way for them to do it in a more entertaining way instead of saying I’m going to log on to some class. These are real women who’ve gone through it who tell you when to raise money, how to raise money, how to gain confidence, what kind of businesses they started. Why?
They listen to their own instincts. It doesn’t matter what somebody else told them, they still went the road less traveled and made it and did it and built it on their own. We’re so inundated with the 20-year-old who started a tech company and is a billionaire by 30 and its 200 times exit. There are many ways to be successful and that doesn’t mean that they’re happy. It does not mean that they’re good people. It does not mean that they’re making the world a better place. I think we’ve all seen most of these men and ones who are young and have not made the world a better place and in fact, are doing the opposite. Even if they’ve done great things the bad is really what we’re saying, starting to outweigh them and only women with money are going to change that. While at gender payout, we might make at most 80% of what white men do down to 40%.
Our bonuses are even more dismal but our actual collective wealth, us individually without our husband’s money without our father’s money is probably 10 to 20% of what men’s wealth is and that’s really scary to me. If women just did an assessment and said, if I don’t have any money from my father, any money from my husband, any money from my brother. If you have money from your mother, great, count that because that’s, do you know what I mean? But if you did that assessment and how your lifestyle would be different it’s probably pretty dismal. So, if you think it’s too late for you or whatever depending on what your age is, would you want your daughter to have that?
Andrea Palten: Yeah.
Jennifer Justice: And if that doesn’t light a fire up your ass, I do not know what is. Do you know what I mean? Then you are a Trump voter. It’s just true. It’s got to be inspiring and scary for you at the same time. It’s got to do something to make you want to make some changes.
Andrea Palten: Yeah. My mom was a homemaker and her one advice to me always was to have your own job, keep your own job, have your own money. I’m so glad that she did that because I could have easily gone on her path, and I would’ve been relying on a man to have money in the bank. So, I’m really glad.
Jennifer Justice: It’s not just that though. It’s like having your own job but making sure you’re getting paid and still fighting for that. Not just going, oh, it’s okay because he makes so much more money. I can do the lifestyle. Okay. Could you continue on in your lifestyle without his money?
Andrea Palten: Yeah.
Jennifer Justice: So, fight for that. Even though you’re fine making the $200,000 a year and you just don’t want to go ask for more because it’s like, oh, I don’t need to, you’re not doing anything for the woman who’s coming up behind you who maybe doesn’t want to get married. I never wanted to get married. You’re not doing anything for even the men or gender non-conforming or people of color, anybody, who is an other. You’re not helping them by doing that and you deserve it.
Andrea Palten: Yeah.
Jennifer Justice: Why not?
Andrea Palten: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. I have a question for you. You mentioned something earlier about wellbeing which is something that we’re obviously as a coaching company, very interested in that. When you’re working and you’re rising up the ranks like you’ve been doing what do you do for self-care and taking care of yourself and just being healthy while you were doing all the stuff that you do?
Jennifer Justice: So, it’s a hard one for me. I’m so not a good person to ask for this. I set limits on times when I’m not going to work. I don’t answer people’s texts and emails over the weekend. It’s really hard for me but I don’t. For the most part, I try not to work because I also know with kids, they don’t need quantity as much as they want quality and I try to really be there. I mean, they’re always like you’re just obsessed with your phone, and I was like, oh my God such a bad example. But I just try to take that downtime and unapologetically for it and try to get rest. I love to sleep. So, just try to make sure that I have that time. That’s the minimum I can do, and I do think that taking those breaks and vacation is so important and I do try to do that and say, I am not working. I am not, you’re going to have to deal with it.
Andrea Palten: Yeah. Good. Good for you. So, when people want to find out more about you or they want to find you online, where can they go?
Jennifer Justice: Our website is the justice department, but D E P T.com, J U S T I C E D E P T.com. Find us on instagram@thejustice.dept.com and I’m @jenniferjusticel on Instagram as well and then the podcast Taking Care of Lady Business, it’s on Apple, Spotify anywhere you can find a podcast. So, download, subscribe, listen, please. Yeah, that’s where they can find me.
Andrea Palten: Awesome. I’ll put all the links in the show notes so everybody can find you. Thank you so much, JJ, for being here. Keep kicking ass. We love to see what you’re doing and thank you for us women that you’re doing this.
Jennifer Justice: Thank you. Thanks.
