Adam Torres and Joseph Ori discuss Joseph’s upcoming book.
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What does it take to run a fully integrated multi-state commercial cannabis company? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Joseph Ori, Co Founder & Chief Development Officer at Six Labs, Founder & Partner of the Ori Law Group, LLC. Explore Six Labs and Joseph’s upcoming book that he will be releasing with Mission Matters.
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About Joseph Ori
Joseph Ori is a highly respected trial attorney and the founder of Ori Law Group, LLC, located in Chicago, Illinois. With more than 25 years of legal experience, he has committed his career to advocating for victims of severe personal injury and wrongful death. His impressive record includes securing numerous multimillion-dollar settlements and verdicts, along with significant six-figure awards for both adult and child clients. His persistent efforts aim to maximize compensation for those injured, ensuring they receive the justice they deserve.
His broad legal practice encompasses a diverse range of tort law matters, including accidents involving automobiles, motorcycles, and trucks; construction negligence; medical and pharmaceutical malpractice; train and boating accidents; defective products; premises injuries; and workplace incidents. Ori Law Group is dedicated to delivering personalized care, treating every client with the same respect and attention as family.
Joseph earned his Juris Doctor from Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1996 and also holds a degree from Columbia University in New York. He furthered his education at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he was honorably discharged. An active member of several distinguished legal organizations, he participates in the American Association for Justice, the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association—serving on its Board of Managers for over a decade—and the National Brain Injury Society. Additionally, he is a member of the Federal Trial Bar and is licensed to practice in both Illinois and Arizona, where the firm also maintains a satellite office.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I want to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Joseph Ori on the line. He is co founder and chief development officer over at Six Labs, and he’s also a founder and partner over at Ori Law Group.
Joe, welcome to the show. Adam. Awesome. Thanks for having me. All right, man. I finally got you here. I feel like I’ve been trying to get you on the show for like a year, year and a half, something like that, man. I’m, I’m glad to finally connect. We’re in 2025. And we got a lot to catch up on. I of course want to get into what you’re doing at six labs.
We’ll get into the Ori law group. And then as. As a little birdie told me I understand you have a new project that you’re launching with some of your attorney partners called legal illuminate, where you’re going to be integrating some AI. I won’t speak too far on that yet. We’ll get into it and you can explain further to me what it is.
And then of course, we got the book coming out where we’re doing this. We’re recording this in Okay. February of 2025. The book should be out by March. So we got a book coming out that we’ve been putting together for the last year as well that we’re working on together. So Joe, let’s let’s get this party started, man.
Lots of cover here today. We’ll start with what we like to call our Mission Matters Minute. So, Joe, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives and experts. That’s what we do. Joe, what mission matters to you? Well, Adam, I’ve got a lot of things going as usual.
You know, we, you know, I, I’ve been an attorney for 27 years now, so I guess I’m aging myself. And litigation based law firm that I founded, you know, while I was studying for the bar exam actually. And we are, we, we’re still going strong. I, I rely a lot on my wife now, who is also a trial attorney to.
carry a lot of that burden because of my multiple ventures, but I’m being more selective about the cases I take. And, and you know, we’re still, we’re still going strong at the office. But again, like I said, most of the weights on her these days I founded a cannabis company about six years ago with a couple of other partners.
And we are based in Michigan. And we’ve had, you know, our trials and tribulations up there in Michigan. There’s a lot going on in the space up there, and we recently launched in Illinois. We have a manufacturing and processing entity of that in Illinois. And I’m actually Moving to try and open to dispensary’s so that we can have some vertically vertical integration as well for our manufacturing facilities.
But you know, then we obviously have the you know, this new project that you had mentioned earlier, which is a super exciting venture. I have three attorneys, one from New York, one from Los Angeles, another one from Chicago. And we kind of came up with the idea of, you know, taking what is happening in our society now with A.
I. And you know, embracing it. And so we’re we’re looking to move into the space with a streamlined law firm that is mostly transactional, and there’s going to be a consulting branch to it. And we’re going to embrace AI and we’re going to try to be, you know provide a cheaper alternative to businesses and individuals to who need, you know, to get their legal transactional documentation done.
We are focusing mostly in the cannabis space and in cryptocurrencies, but we obviously are available for all areas of business because my partners are highly, highly skilled transactional attorneys and IP attorneys. And so. A lot of places, a lot of spaces that are opening up for, for this type, for those types of industries.
So Joe, I want to, I want to back up a bit here and go, and, and first off, would you describe yourself as a serial entrepreneur? Because in another venture, like what, what, what term would you say for the entrepreneur side of what you do? Obviously you’re an attorney, but for the entrepreneur side? Yeah, yeah, I think I, I would have to say that I’m a serial entrepreneur.
I mean, listen, Adam, I, I’ve told people this story. I was in law school and I was studying for the bar exam and I read a book called how to start your own law firm and not miss a meal. And so I read the whole book and I’m like, I’m getting to the final chapter and I’m like, man, I could do this. I’m like, I can do this.
The final chapter says. Well, now that you’ve got five to seven years of experience, you can go off and start your own law firm. And I’m like, wait a minute. I don’t have five to seven years of experience. But I, I, I, I applied the guts of it and hit it. And I, you know, I just learned on the go, to be honest with you.
And so I started my own law practice and ever since then. You know, I’ve, I’ve started a lot of businesses. I’ve raised a lot of money, you know, listen, some wins, some lose. I’m not going to say anybody who stands there, any entrepreneur says I they’re batting a thousand is only did one business and hit it.
Cause you know, you, you, you have to, I say, if you. If you can bet 350, 400, make the hall of fame, you know, four out of 10, doing really well. So, you know, that’s, but yeah, it’s a, it’s a serial problem at this point, I guess. A serial problem. Come on, man. Were you also like earlier, even before law school, were you, were you an entrepreneurial type like growing up or what?
Or did it start like with that book? I’m curious. No, I, I would say that I had that urge since I was in high school. Obviously, you know, we didn’t have the kind of opportunity, I would say, you know, availability. You know, nowadays, I like that. I’m going to, I’m going to throw it out there back in my day. All right.
Continue. Listen, I’m going to tell you this, I mean, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m in my fifties and you know, we didn’t really have, we certainly didn’t have the internet. We certainly didn’t have. The information that was available to you when you were 18, 19 years old that you do now. I mean, if I did, I can tell you for sure I would be, you know, have my own YouTube channel and I would have been one of those people, but we didn’t have that luxury.
But yes, I did. I did have a business in college that we, we launched and, you know, it paid the bills for, for me during college. And then, like I said, when I got out, I was like in law school saying, listen, I’m going to start my own law practice. And if I fail at that, if I fail at it, I’m going to try something else.
And luckily, you know, I, you know, I, I say luckily for better or worse, it, it worked and you know, that’s been my, that’s been my, my, my trunk, you know, sort of my life, having, having the law firm, having that always available. But yeah, I graduated law school, started my own practice. It became an NFL agent with chasing down athletes, you know, trying to do that.
And then. You got stories on stories. We know each other a couple of years now. I didn’t know the NFL agent story. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I chased that down. Got licensed and, you know, started recruiting athletes tonight. I had a, I signed a guy and I don’t want to mention his name because you know, he’s, he’s off the grid these days, but you know, he got, he blew his shoulder out, you know, right before the combine.
And I was like, I’d spent so much time chasing this kid down. And in, in, in living room after living room with parents saying, you know, you don’t have any clients, why should I trust you? And I said, well, if you don’t give me my first client, you know, you have to be my first one because I’m being asked that everywhere.
Yeah. Finally got my first client and I’d spent about six months chasing this kid down and he, he ended up getting injured. And I said, man, this is, is this really. You know, I want to do, you know, because especially football players, right? Because the average life expectancy of an NFL player in the league to play is, you know, about three and a half years.
So you’re like, you know, there, it was a lot, a lot to it. And I said, you know, maybe I’ll, I’ll veer off and do some other things. And I’ve been doing, I’ve had, I’ve owned restaurants. I have, I have a restaurant company down in Arizona that, you know, is. Is made it through Covid. We, we are a large catering entity.
We had a big tech contract to provide food, breakfast and lunches to, to Uber, and then everything was taking off and Covid virus hit, everybody moved out. So we pivoted and now we’re, you know, appealing applying for RFPs in mm-hmm . In Arizona and Phoenix. And my, you know, my two partners are the, you know, operators and owners.
They’re, they’re fantastic. You know, you mm-hmm . I’ve learned one thing, Adam, is that you’re only as strong as the people who you venture into business with as partner. And, you know because especially for me, I can’t do everything, you know, possible, right? And you have to You know, find the place where you fit into the project that you start mm-hmm
And you have to surround yourself with people who are, you know, who are vested as well, and who Yeah. Who, you know, everybody pulling on the same side of the rope, you know? Mm-hmm . So otherwise it, they, you can’t do any of this alone. You, you have to have people around you who are part of the team and. Yeah.
To get that, you know, that successful three or four out of 10 or whatever the, whatever the number is, right? What do you think are some of the things that helped you, you know, veer towards the success versus, you know, some things that maybe didn’t work out? Like what are some general themes that, that made a difference to you?
Oh, geez. I’m going to, give you some personal information here. Try to avoid. going into business with family, I would say, you know and friends can be difficult as well. And I would say that, you know, you need to know most importantly, you know, and I, and this is the, in my opinion, this is the biggest challenge for any entrepreneur is that in order to succeed.
You hear these stories of all these entrepreneurs who, you know, had five or seven different business cards in their hand, in their, in their pocket. They were, you know, they were the VP of sales. They were the, you know, the operations manager, they were the CFO and there’s a lot of truth to that. But at some point in time, you, you do need to know when you need to cut bait, so to speak, and you know, that’s very complicated to, to, to say, because, you know, it’s, Also, the question is whether you’re using your own money or not.
You know, you start to bring, I mean, I had one project where, I’ll tell you a story, Adam gained me a ton of credibility. I had a young man came to me and said, Listen, you know, I need you to help me launch my business. I’ve got an incredible platform. It’s a new dating site. And it, and I looked at it. I was like, this is, this is right.
And. And it was probably what about 20 about 2015. So still, you know, there, there was a lot of, a lot of movement in these dating sites and I raised six or 700, 000 for, for this, for this young man in a matter of like two months, everybody in the platform, people were. We’re dying to invest. Yeah. I met his partner and his partner was, this was his lifelong friend.
So when I heard, I heard he was in a lifelong friend. I was like, this is great. Right. Yeah. Right. Thought, well, I went to some meetings with these two guys and they could not get along at all. And so before a single dollar of that money that I raised was deployed into this project, serious, I took back, I said, guys here, we’re cutting ties.
And I took all the money back. Give it all back to the investors and said, guys, they were like, no, we, we want to do this. This is, this is, I said, no, you don’t understand. I’m not going to oversee this every day. I’m going to be part of this. And even if I did oversee this every day, I am not going to be dealing with these two guys.
And so, you know, that’s just one example of entrepreneurship, especially if you know, and that’s after, that’s after like a lot of experience maybe in your earlier days, Would you have saw that coming? I would have just saw the project. Yeah. It would have been like rose colored eyeglasses or however they say it.
I don’t know how they say that. I can’t say it. Yeah. Well, there’s another thing about entrepreneurship too. That’s key is like, who was, who are the entrepreneurs in that scenario? Are the those two men who create this platform? Yes. They’re definitely going out there. They’re trying to find a partner to raise money.
I didn’t create the platform, but I’m just as much of an entrepreneur on that project as they are. But here’s the difference. Is that I’m the choke point because I raised all that money, these guys, you know, so when, so are you an entrepreneur just because you come up with a new idea and you put people together and who’s, who’s the choke point.
And so, you know, I’ve had that conversation recently with my, with my partners you know, in cannabis, I said, you know, we’re all in on this together, but the guy who brings in, you know, a whale investor. You know, say somebody who’s going to be, who’s going to represent 60, 70 percent or even 50 percent of your cap table, that you’re, you’re that person’s choke point.
That person is investing in you. And that’s, you know, that’s the thing about entrepreneurship that you, especially in the very early stages that you have that any entrepreneur has to understand that you get the best idea in the world. And the vast majority of people who are going to be investing in that will be investing for two reasons.
One, for the idea. Two, because they’re investing in you. And so I think that, you know, one of the biggest, I think, you know, feathers in my cap, as I say, is that I have always been of the opinion that if you’re investing in the project that I’m in, I know you’re investing in me. And I’m going to, to do whatever I can in my power to make sure that your investment is protected as if it was my own money.
Yeah. You know, that’s, that’s, you know, for better or worse, because I know a lot of entrepreneurs who are willing to take people’s money. They think they’ve got a great idea. They never pay attention to the investor. They never respond to them. And, you know, they, they, behind closed circles, behind closed doors, rather they say, Hey, listen, it’s not my money.
You know, this guy would, you know, he, everybody knew the risk, everybody. And there was certain, a certain extent that’s true. You have to, you have to take it. With a lot of, of, of integrity and diligence because you know, people are ultimately, in my opinion, investing in you. Hmm. That’s great. Joe, speaking of, I mean, it’s been a bit since we talked, give me some updates on, on six labs.
What’s going on over there? So, you know, six labs, we, we, we entered Michigan back in, as you know, Adam, I think we met, I did a podcast with you guys. Back then. That’s how we met. Oh yeah. You know, we, we were launching in the price of a wholesale pound of cannabis, you know was 3000 a pound. And we, you know, told our investors and we invested our own money too, you know, so we were all very high on it.
The margins were amazing. Well, within 16, 18 months, that price in Michigan, the wholesale pound went from 3000 to sub 1000 and, you know many hundreds of businesses have gone out in Michigan. We’re still there. We’re starting to see the tide change a little bit. We’ve been five years into it now fighting fight and along the way in order to grow, in order to stay alive in cannabis, you got to grow.
So we, we raised more money. We launched in Illinois. And just to give you an example, Michigan has hundreds and hundreds of cultivators. Illinois has less than 50. Less than four and they’ve got almost double, you know, almost double the population. So the wholesale pound of cannabis in Michigan, Illinois.
One, one state over is well over, you know, 2000 a pound, 2, 500 a pound gain that price. So you, you, you are dealing with economies that are like different countries. So I hope and pray every day that Michigan continues to do the right thing and, and, you know, start to tackle a lot of the gray market and black market sales that have, you know, really hurt the industry in addition to the over licensing.
cultivators. And in Illinois, you know, we, we really positive about Illinois. And you know, we, we all, we are not in the retail space in Illinois. So we all kind of said, Hey, if we can get some retails up and open on our own, I invested in acquired with another partner, we acquired two dispensary licenses.
In Illinois, and I’m working on a really big one right now that’s, you know, close to a baseball field. Come on man. I got something written down. I’m not allowed to say, but I’ll just be quiet. . Yeah, no, I, outta the back. There’s a lot of big baseball fields that, that aren’t famous there. Right? Well put it this way.
It’s not, it’s not, it’s not the one where the team finished with the worst record in league last year. Okay, got it. It’s the, it’s the other team, but yeah, we’re, we’re right in that, in that location. Wrigleyville and mm-hmm . You know, we’re pushing it hard to get zoning and approval. And you know, we’re going to locate, I think, two other stores.
The goal there is to get to five to seven stores. Underneath it’s, they’re separate, but they have an arm alliance relationship with six labs because obviously, you know, looking down the road, if you want someone to, you know, potentially acquire you, you’re a lot stronger. If you have, you know, dispensaries as an arm to the manufacturing, then you would be either one of those standing along.
So, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re moving along and a cannabis is a, is the wild west still, you know, I mean, when I, when I met you, Adam. I would have thought to myself, cannabis would you know, be, be legal by now in, under federal law and, or at least rescheduled. We’re still fighting that fight. It’s hard to believe the cannabis is not rescheduled yet because the defining thing to be, to be, to move off of the schedule it’s at is that it has to have some medical purpose.
So all, all the scheduled narcotics that cannabis falls under are, have no known medical. purpose. But yet now we’re in 35 37 states now medical program. So how does the federal government still designate this as something that shows no medical use when when the vast majority of the states a, have a, have a, a, a legalized it for medical purposes.
So it’s really, it’s, it’s really unbelievable to me, but you know, we’re still fighting in the fight and I can’t believe that we’re still at the same place where it’s still on the same schedule. I want to, I want to circle back and and get further into legal illuminate. Tell, tell me more about your vision for this one.
Let’s go a little bit deeper. So yeah, legal illuminate. I’m really excited about it. Cause you know, Ori law group is litigation firm. We do. You know, mostly catastrophic injury, medical malpractice, construction accidents, serious auto accidents, things of that nature. And over the last five years, Adam, I’ve, I’ve been, you know, I’ve served multiple hats for six labs.
One of them was as general counsel. So I have. sort of had a learn on th to transactions. And now of transactional law, le the vast majority of
then. We’ve also had a regulatory aspect of it. And I’ve leaned on regulatory attorney. So our regulatory attorney in Illinois is an incredibly talented young lawyer. And he approached me and said, listen, we’ve got an idea and we’re going to create chat bots, legal chat box for your business. So that when you have questions, you don’t have to call us.
You don’t have to spend money on us hourly. You pay a service fee to use the chatbot and it’s to answer the vast majority of your questions for your tailored business. Yeah. You know, and you know, it’s also going to be project based largely. So, you know, you may pay for an attorney to write an operating agreement for you hourly and that, you know, that’s a very involved operating agreement.
That could take you, that could take the attorney 20 25 hours. It costs you 15 20 thousand dollars. Mm hmm. We’re going to use AI generated, you know legal formulas to create documents at an extraordinarily faster pace at a much cheaper rate for businesses. And I think, you know, listen, I’ve got a son who’s, who’s, who’s in law school right now, you know, at an Ivy League law school.
And he’s looking at one of these big jobs that all these kids want. Yeah. Yeah. I was worried when he started. That job might not be available to him because, you know, a lot of the larger law firms, the larger national world renowned law firms, they rely on this. They rely on building out young associates for, you know, 2500 hours a year, and they’re building those associates out at five or 600 an hour, and their own these are making about 150 of that.
That’s how they make profit. And I was very concerned because I said, you know, once a I hits for real, how are those large, you know, international law firms going to justify the numerous hours that these young associates spend research writing when nowadays, I mean, even at the very beginning of this. You know, I can put together a document that is well over 50 percent done just by putting, implementing information that of the deal into a chat, into a AI generated form.
And then I spend half the time tailoring it. So where is that technology going to be in five years, you know, you know, where you could literally just take the information, plug it in and get a document that’s 90 percent finished. is not only spending about 10 percent of the time on it that they would have.
So we, we’re, we’re, we’re doing it in cannabis because we already have client base for it and attorney out in LA, who’s a, who’s very knowledgeable in crypto. So we’re going to bring in crypto and, you know, cutting edge type of law, but we’re also, you know, I just got approached recently for a different transactional deal.
But what I’m really excited about more than anything, Adam, is the other branch of this. We’re doing a consulting branch of this. where we’re doing deal mediation and all kinds. We’re doing dispute resolution mediation as well. But deal mediation and we saw that there is a huge need for that type of work among partners among in among businesses.
So rather than You know, especially in cannabis, there’s so much infighting with partnerships and guys who have, because there’s so many different cap tables in the different businesses. If you have a cap, a cannabis company in Illinois, and now you’re moving to Michigan, it’s not like a normal business.
It’s, it doesn’t integrate because you can’t sell products over state mines. So that business has its own cap table, its own set of investors, its own regulatory. And there ends up being a lot of infighting with founders and people who started the company. So rather than them going to litigation. We’re saying, Hey, listen, we all know that, you know, how this works and let us take a look at it and let’s see if we could just resolve it for you internally rather than have it become something that ends up in court or ends up where your business suffers as And then I have an attorney out in New York who is an extremely talented IP attorney.
So that element brings a whole new, you know opens a whole new bastion of business for us because cannabis, again, not federally legal. So, so what does it look like for all of these companies? Adam, no one ever, Thinks about this and maybe maybe I’ll enlighten you all the brands that you see the big leading brand protection because Protection because that you’re selling that you’re selling
and trademarked in the state Having to do it is to protect your brand, is you create a clothing line for your cannabis brand so that at least you protect the brand name as it relates to clothing and mm-hmm . Later on when it becomes ly legal. What’s going to end up happening is all of these cannabis companies, all of these brands are going to be racing for IP attorneys to get their cannabis legalized copyrighted trademark under federal law.
Yeah. You know, it’s a kind of starting to think ahead of things, you know, that’s really awesome. Man. Wealth of knowledge. You never stand still. These ideas come up. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how you run it down. And then for everybody listening, by the way, we’re not going to talk too much about the book today.
And that’s intentional because Joe is going to be coming back on the show once the book is out and live and we’ll do a deep dive into his chapter and into his and into his work. But for now, Joe, if somebody is listening or watching to this and they want to follow up, they want to connect with you and your team.
How do they do that? You can contact me at joe at ori law group joe at six lab. I’m going to, I’m going to sound like a crazy man, joe at six labs. com and then go at legal luminate. And, you know, I have you know, Facebook, Instagram you know jewelry law at Instagram. And I don’t even remember what my Facebook handle is off hand.
All good, man. The Instagram is where it’s at anyway. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put, we’ll put some of the, that information in the show notes, so you can just click on it and head right on over and speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet.
Hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Joe, man, I appreciate all you do, and I’m looking forward to this book launch.
Thanks again. Thanks. Thank you, Adam. Take care.