Legal Pitfalls That Could Destroy Your Practice & How to Avoid Them

In many ways, the legal side of functional medicine can feel like the Wild West—uncertain, unregulated, and full of risks. The reality is, we all want to have our practices legally buttoned up, but navigating the legal landscape can feel overwhelming—and expensive. What Scott Rattigan, creator of Functional Lawyer, shares in this episode is a real game-changer. He not only breaks down the complexities of the legal side of things but also offers real solutions for us—solutions that can make sure we’re covered without the stress and uncertainty that often comes with it. Whether you’re just starting out or growing your established practice, you’re going to get actionable insights on how to avoid common legal pitfalls, protect your practice, and actually move forward with confidence. It’s a topic that’s been an unmet need for so long, and I’m so excited to bring this to you. ~DrKF

In this episode of New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, Dr. Scott Rattigan, founder of Functional Lawyer, provides essential insights into the legal complexities of running a functional medicine practice. He discusses the legal challenges around telehealth, scope of practice, and the high costs of quality legal support. With practical legal advice on staying compliant, avoiding common pitfalls, and navigating all too common gray areas, this episode of New Frontiers is a valuable resource for practitioners at any stage of their practice, whether just starting out or expanding. Learn how to protect your practice and gain peace of mind in a legally challenging environment.

In this episode of New Frontiers, learn about:

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine and of course today is no exception. I’m thrilled to be talking to a lawyer. Believe it or not, you guys, this is the first time on New Frontiers in Functional Medicine we’re talking to a lawyer. Let me introduce you to him. Scott Rattigan is the nation’s premier functional and integrative medicine attorney. He is the founder of Functional Lawyer, through which he has been helping functional and integrative medicine providers nationwide protect themselves and their practices for nearly a decade.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: He also lends his expertise to Origins Incubator, which is the most comprehensive practitioner business and clinical mentorship program available today. He’s the bestselling author of The Practice of Telemedicine, a complete legal guide for licensed healthcare professionals, and he is the co-founder of the new practice success software, ReveliaDx. Scott, welcome to New Frontiers.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Hey, I’m so happy to be here.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: As I said in my intro, you’re the first attorney that we’ve interviewed and I’m somewhat amazed that I haven’t done this sooner or that nobody’s reached out to me to have this conversation because as I was saying to you off record, there’s not a day that goes by that there isn’t either a legal conversation, or a legal email, or I have a thought in my mind, am I doing what I should be doing. For any of us practicing medicine, for any of us in the functional world, where often our medical practice spills into our platform and there’s something sort of beyond just the state that we’re in, is happening. Functional medicine businesses look different. So you’re the first attorney who’s really kind of focused on bringing us the tools that we need. And you see this as an incredibly important time for us independent, functional, and integrative practitioners. So why is this an important time for us and just give me some background on how you came to be in this space.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, absolutely. It’s obviously an important time because this industry, integrative, functional, personalized—- I think there’s a new word for it every couple of months— but individual medicine is growing and statistics are showing it’s going to grow by leaps and bounds over the next 10 or 15 years. And I hear almost every day that it’s the Wild West out there and it really isn’t. People just hear what they want to hear or they just don’t know because they haven’t consulted with an attorney yet. And that’s where Functional Lawyer comes in. When my wife, whose name is Linda Mattioli, when she started her practice in Orlando in 2015, I was working in litigation at a top 100 law firm in Orlando, so we went two floors up to the healthcare partner and said, ‘Hey, can you help out my wife? She’s starting a practice.’ And so we paid him $2,500, which felt like a million at the time, only for him to say, I don’t know how to help you.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And so we had to go find another firm and luckily I had some attorney contacts. So we found a firm in Tampa and they helped us out to the tune of $28,000 in 2015 dollars, and that was just for setup. If we had questions along the way, I think at the time it was like 500 bucks an hour. So that stunk, but we did it because we wanted to do it the right way. And then fast forward two years later, I’m kind of burnt out, trying to look for an entrepreneurship legal firm that would help me help entrepreneurs. Because I had clients like Chase and other banks that are just kind of faceless, nameless entities and I wanted to really help people.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So I took a flyer and took a job selling a marketing course for functional medicine docs, but I wasn’t very good at that. But I got to talk to doctors all day and what they would tell me, once they found out I was an attorney, was can you look at this? Can you look at that? Or what’s happening here? And I was like, ‘I don’t know, that’s not what I do.’ But after hearing that for almost two years, I was like, all right, I have to be the solution because I found that what we experienced was not unique. People did both of those things. They either went to somebody, paid them a bunch of money and said, I can’t help you, or they went to a firm and it was a couple of dozens of thousands of dollars and so that’s kind of cost prohibitive. So what a lot of these new entrepreneurs were doing was just kind of grabbing stuff off the internet. And this is pre-AI, so it was pretty bad.

Scott Rattigan, JD: AI is still pretty bad, but sometimes it was a paragraph from this document and a paragraph from that document, whatever looked good to them, and sometimes in different fonts. So initially I set out to just have high quality legal documents that you know are good and that apply to functional and integrative medicine. We tried to just have that as an option, kind of like a Legal Zoom where we’d just sell a template. But then over the years, it was clear that people needed to know how to use these tools. They’re just tools after all and so how do you use them? Or what happens when something else happens and how do we deal with Medicare and all this stuff? So we now have a library of educational concepts that are helping doctors, physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs, and chiropractors to stay in compliance, protect themselves, and prevent lawsuits before they happen. Not unlike a functional or integrative medicine doctor would prevent issues before they occur downstream.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Let me just say first of all, that’s awesome that you turned your attention to it. So if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re actually training to leave law altogether and move into doing like functional medicine coaching or something of that… Did I hear that?

Scott Rattigan, JD: Well, I was trying to just get another legal job at a smaller law firm so I could help individuals or entrepreneurs starting their businesses. But I took a straight left turn and started working for a company that sold a marketing course. It was like a $3,000 course and I was straight commission. So I went from white shoe law firm salary before I got golden handcuffs. I was like, this is the time and I can always fall back on it. Right? But I jumped with both feet and did this non-legal job for a little bit and as I was shaking hands going around the firm saying goodbyes, there was a mix of— and you guys might experience this too as physicians— there was a mix of you’re totally crazy to leave this amazing job. And then half of them, I could see it in their eyes, some of them said it out loud, we’re like, good for you getting out now while you still can. Because on the legal side we say golden handcuffs. You work so hard and then you make so much money that you can’t go back down or take a lower job. So I wanted to get out before that happened because I was killing myself and I was very skinny, on coffee all day and adrenaline. And so yeah, I took that left turn, like, what’s the worst that can happen? I can always get another legal job, right?

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s amazing. Good for you because in that it sounds like you’re really landing your calling and it’s such an unmet need. Just listening to you talk about that clinician who’s trying to kind of parse together answers or get some of the answers from an attorney that they’ve hired, but not all. And there’s these ongoing questions and we are such a unique niche market. I mean there’s just no doubt in my mind, since this podcast is primarily listened to by other clinicians, or patients who will go and tell their providers, this is the stuff that definitely occupies our brain.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: But it’s true that it’s difficult for us to figure this out. So here you are. That’s amazing. You take this left turn into almost a random career move. It probably isn’t as random as it sounds, but it just introduced you to your calling and you stepped up to it and you took it on. Good for you. So what do we do? Like, how do we get started in making sure that we’ve got a sound practice? Especially looking through your lens, because to your previous point, it’s a good solid five figures for us if we really want to make sure we’re buttoned up. And all of us want to, by the way, Scott. But we’re all not married to lawyers right?

Scott Rattigan, JD: Right.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So we all want to but it is expensive and it is exhausting and there are often more questions than you can get answered. So I know this is just a challenge that so many of us sit in, but because your wife was married to lawyer, you guys really took this to the end and answered all those questions and now you’re providing this to others. So yeah, go ahead and speak to how we need to be thinking about the legal end.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, there are a lot of people that I serve as clients that have a spouse or close relative that is an attorney, just not a healthcare attorney and not a functional medicine, integrative medicine healthcare attorney. So there is that and recognizing that as clinicians, you all know that somebody that’s doing dermatology is probably not also doing brain surgery in the same week. So there’s different skill sets and different areas of practice for both attorneys and clinicians. So some people are like, ‘Oh, can you do this and can you do that and can you do that?’ I’m like, ‘I can give you lots of general, but some of these things are just, that’s an entire job. Like an employment lawyer, that’s his job or that’s her job, right? I can give you what I can.’

Scott Rattigan, JD: But yeah, getting started, as you mentioned, questions that come up over and over again, like I’m a client of attorneys too. And I both charged billable rates at the time I was working for a firm and I now pay billable rates, which I always hate. And so, the whole goal of Functional Lawyer is to bring high quality, both education and documents and access to an attorney, for a flat rate. So it’s a flat rate. There’s three payment plans for our major program. But getting started is just as easy as interviewing attorneys. It doesn’t have to be me. We do free discovery calls. Most firms will too. But a lot of my clients come in at two different stages. One is that I’m the first person they talk to so they have no frame of reference. They didn’t go through those pain points. And I love that. I love to get in front of people who before they go and make some couple thousand dollar mistakes at least chat with me first.

Scott Rattigan, JD: But secondly, a lot of people come and they say— Well, there are two subsets of the second group. One is, ‘I’ve been in practice for seven or 10 years, but I never really actually talked to an attorney. I just kind of winged it. So now I need to kind of make sure everything’s buttoned up because my practice is taking off and I’m more of a target.’ Right? Or even just, ‘It’s now time. I have some money.’ The other group did go to an attorney at the traditional billing model. Just like we have conventional models that aren’t great for long-term health, kind of similarly, the transactional side of law, which this is, as opposed to litigation, which really needs bespoke written documents at litigation. But for transactional, it doesn’t need to be so bespoke every single time. Particularly, HIPAA is very standard across the whole country and many, many others too.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And so they’ll come to me and say, ‘I talked to an attorney, they asked me for a retainer and then after my $5,000 retainer was dried up, they asked for more.’ And I said, ‘Before I give you more money, what have you done so far?’ And the answer is just like, three documents that are almost done. And it just snowballs, right? Good healthcare attorneys now are over $600 – $700 an hour, sometimes more. And I didn’t want that and that’s kind of where we are. So again, flat rate. And somebody just gave me feedback this week. There are lessons in there on how to actually get an LLC started. Or do you need a professional corporation? These are questions that people don’t even think to ask. They just spin up an LLC and then they have to go change it later. So my whole goal is to protect you and prevent lawsuits. And not just you, but the whole industry, really.

Scott Rattigan, JD: It’s growing but there’s still, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s still a lot of critics of integrative, personalized, functional medicine. In particular functional because it’s less known. But there’s still critics out there. It’s usually not your patient that brings a complaint or does a lawsuit. It’s their spouse who was never really fully on board in the beginning, or their adult children if they’re elderly, or their uncle, or sometimes their estate. So even though you have a good rapport with your patients, that’s not always a good rock-solid defense to anything.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, that’s interesting. Right, just thinking about, you know, I have a good friend who went through that experience of a lawsuit and it’s profoundly traumatizing.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, even if you win, it’s two years or more of your life of stress and worry. And hopefully they pay for your attorney’s fees, but how about all that time and stress and time taken away from your practice, your family, your life that you can avoid, ideally.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. I mean I would really term it as a traumatizing experience, just incredibly painful. Because it’s something… Those of us who’ve come into medicine do so, for the majority of us, for pretty heart-centered reasons and so to have that called into question in that kind of an arena is brutal.

Scott Rattigan, JD: It’s so scary if you’re not used to it. You probably get subpoenas for medical records all the time and opening that, my heart still drops when I get a subpoena for my wife’s practice because I’ve got to read all that mail. And I’m like, ‘Okay… what is this? Oh, it’s just a records request.’ Right? But it’s pretty scary if you don’t know.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, and to your point, there was a time when perhaps we were flying more under the radar than we are today as well. And the whole landscape has really changed pretty profoundly post-COVID. I think in some ways we thought it might be a little easier. So now I’m talking about not just practicing medicine within your state, but across state lines. Doing some form of tele-education or whatever structure it is. Not practicing, but engaging in some kind of an activity across state lines. It’s a whole other suite of questions and I think many of us are involved in things of that nature.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It seems to me that you’ve learned a lot. And one of the ways that you’ve realized is that you could make some of what we need to do kind of turnkey. That they don’t need to be new, bespoke documents, that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again at thousands and thousands of dollars. And so you’ve created this program where a lot of that entry level content that is overwhelming to us, because to your point earlier, I’m not a brain surgeon, I’m an naturopathic physician by training. So I have no idea what these documents are about. I’m not a lawyer, but they’re turnkey and we can just get in there and we can access them. So speak to that. Speak to what you created. And you’ve also put energy through your own experience into really bringing the branch down and to making looking at the legal piece, as far as our practice goes, much less intimidating. So talk about.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, absolutely. So, practicing across state lines, you kind of mentioned, and then the second part about making it a little bit easier to digest. So there’s two parts to that. First, on the foundational kind of concepts, most functional doctors on their websites somewhere, at least early on, will say, doctor is from the Latin for teacher and so we’re doing a lot of teaching. Attorneys also are called counselors, right? And so to your point, for some of these more foundational concepts that are just me describing the difference between an LLC and an S-corp or me describing the difference between a PLLC and a PC, I don’t have to do that one-on-one to you. I could. I could start a law firm and I could charge you $700 an hour to just teach you these concepts, but I’d rather not. I’d rather you save your money. Go use it for your EMR. Go use it for your marketing. Go out in the community and reach out to change the lives of your patients. Because it isn’t brain surgery, and it’s not that difficult to use the work of others or stand on the shoulders of others.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So yeah, we make it super easy. We’re incorporating some AI now so you don’t even have to really change all the variables in the documents. You can just fill out a form and they’re all done. You should still read them and change them where they need to be changed, but I’m trying to make it as easy as possible, save you time, save you money all the time. Now practicing across state lines, we have a whole section in there, it kind of parallels my book, The Practice of Telemedicine, which goes over a lot of the myths that still persist to this day, five years after COVID, which I’ll touch on in a second. But going through some of these myths and then just doing that once, whenever you want on your time instead of me describing it to you, again for hourly rates, will answer so many questions that if you just Google or ask ChatGPT, we’ll get conflicting information.

Scott Rattigan, JD: If I had a dollar for every time somebody came to me and they said, ‘Well, I’m in this coaching program and they said if I just call myself a consultant I can practice all over the country.’ And so I’m always the bad guy. I’m like, ‘You could do that. It’s illegal, but you could, right?’ So that’s a big mind shift because that’s what they’ve been taught by some of these programs and I have to be the guy that says you can’t do that. So one is, the foundations really are easy to me, probably just like starting somebody on an elimination diet would be for all of you and your listeners. Like, okay, I know exactly what to do by talking to you for 10 minutes, right? Or at least where to start you off. And so that, and then just the foundation. So anybody from nothing, like ‘I don’t have a name yet.’ We talk about just distinguishing the name of your practice, not just from a trademark law, which is kind of how I attack it, but trademark is really just marketing.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So you probably shouldn’t name your practice nourish or flourish anything, because there’s 50 of both of those, right? So you want to also be kind of like the only one with that name somewhere so that if somebody Googles you, they would find you and not 10 of your competitors. So that too. So everybody from the zero to again, 10 years in practice, let me just shore everything up, are kind of easy for me. I don’t want to say easy, but you guys have developed a level of expertise and I have too. So some of these more foundational concepts are sometimes easier for me to just record a 10 minute video or a five minute video and then point you towards that.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s awesome. And the functional medicine legal services that you’re offering is this program. So there’s access to this pre-recorded content… I mean, tell me about it. And then there’s access to you in certain structures.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, it’s developed over time. It’s almost a decade, as you said at the beginning. I initially just wanted to have documents and sell those and not talk to anybody and sit on a beach and people would just buy documents 24/7. Right? That’s every entrepreneur’s, like… I’ll just start this business and it’ll be automated. Right.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You’re endgame.

Scott Rattigan, JD: But ultimately I realized that people needed more. And so I started the library and that was just going to be a course and they got discounts on the documents and then people were like, ‘We want them included.’ I was like, ‘All right, awesome.’ So we’ll do that and raise the price of it and then that was it. And then they’re like, ‘Well, you know, I want to talk to you still.’ And so then we added office hours. And so now as it stands today, it’s all of the documents we have currently, which is now— Don’t get overwhelmed because you don’t need all of these— but it’s over 80 documents right now. Most of those you won’t need— plus a library. And I say library, not course, because it’s not always compounding learning.

Scott Rattigan, JD: You don’t need to do lesson one or module one before you do module two most of the time. It’s a library of topics that are quick, easy to understand, to the point. I talk in regular English language, not legalese most of the time. It’s just what you need to know but nothing more essentially. Because I could bore you with all of the history of trademark law and all the history of why we have corporate practice in medicine, but you don’t care. You just want to be able to be safe and have peace of mind and be clear and not worry about it as you’re trying to fall asleep every night. So all the documents, a big lesson library, weekly office hours that are recorded with me, so there’s plenty of time to get to everybody on the call. We have a good number of clients, but not everybody has questions every week. So, a handful show up and we can talk to everybody.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And then people get an onboarding call with me or one of my teammates and then, a one hour deep dive call with me just to make sure everything is looking good. Or that agenda could be set by the client. I could take the agenda and run it, or they can run it if they have boiling questions or something that’s really pressing on top of their mind. And that’s all a flat rate because I don’t want you to put off asking a question. And this is what I do, and I know it’s what some of you guys do, is you don’t ask the lawyer a question because if it’s 600 bucks an hour, that’s $60 every six minutes. That’s how lawyers do math, in tenths of an hour. So every six minutes, if I open the email, that clock starts ticking. If I respond to the email and I’m a slow typer, then you’re going to be paying more. So we don’t do that, because I hesitate to ask my attorney questions because she’s billable hour, and I just don’t ask her questions until they become big or too much of a problem. So I wanted to do away with that, and that’s why we have office hours. So no question too big or too small.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And then we also lend some kind of business questions in there too. It’s not really a business coaching program, but I’ve helped my wife and now more than 150 doctors over at Incubator. But I’ve also seen my clients at Functional Lawyer and what they struggle with, what they don’t struggle with. I talked to a new person today and she’s like, ‘Oh, this website company quoted me $10,000.’ I said, ‘Don’t pay that. Please don’t pay that. We made that mistake. You know, do it for free if you can, if not, don’t pay more than $2,000.’ So, I’m always trying to balance a little bit of business consulting, counseling, essentially, and then the legal too. Because there are some areas where there’s a tension. So there’s business opportunity, but it may not be 100% the safest way to do it and so there’s a risk continuum too. So we talk about all that.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So one could work with you and enter into the relationship just by accessing your legal documents. I need a contract for X and so I can look here and find it. Like, I just need a contract within my clinic practice. But then if you want to explore further, like I’m going to launch some sort of an interstate… Well, I mean, I know you work with people who actually who want to practice medicine interstate, but then also people who want to do education and not practice medicine. And I’m sure that there’s plenty of content around distinguishing the difference and how one would do that legally. So you’ve got a rich library of turnkey content. Well, actually not quite turnkey because you can individualize it, as you said, and you’re using AI. Well, that’s awesome. That’s incredible.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Not to write the documents, just to fill in the blanks for you, right?

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, that’s great. But then you’ve got all the videos that you’ve recorded on the myriad conversations that we could access. And then you also have office hours, which sounds awesome. And we can go there with whatever question, no question too small, no question too big, and be able to dialogue with you, access you directly within that arena. Am I understanding that?

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, and I can’t guarantee I’ll have the answer, just like most of you may not have every single answer. I might say, “All right, now is a good time to go talk to an employment lawyer in your state.’ So that sometimes happens. Or, let me get back to you, and we add a new lesson if it’s appropriate, or we add a new document if it’s appropriate and it’s requested. So yeah, that’s what we’re doing all the time. And if you have a flyer question that’s kind of fringe, you’ll have the baseline knowledge to not ask the questions that are already answered. I don’t get mad if you do that, but you know as you mentioned there is a whole area there, specifically, telemedicine is the most watched area inside.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, no great surprise there.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, everybody wants it because it’s cheaper to do, number one, which is not a bad way to start your practice with lower overhead. But ultimately, there’s just continues to be such misinformation out there, intentional or not, both from “experts” and from well-intentioned people who just don’t understand.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, and as you said, just kind of clearing the smoke of COVID when things really kind of transformed for a while. Well, maybe they still are, I guess.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, and my approach is, I’ll teach you what the laws say and then after that I’m not going to stand in your way. So go ahead. I don’t condone doing illegal things, but you should know what they are. But like you said, practicing across state lines, there are now 21 or 22 states that have a special purpose telemedicine only license that is cheaper, faster, and doesn’t come with CE requirements. By state, it varies on which licenses are eligible or not, but that’s one of the lessons in there is how to go get those step by step for each of those states. They’re usually cheaper. And there’s another option with these licensing compacts where you can go get full licenses, just an expedited application process. But other than that, those are kind of the main ways.

Scott Rattigan, JD: We do have a section on educational products, like courses, like paid webinars, or books, or summits, or whatever you want to do, that’s non-clinical and not the practice of medicine. Go wild there, but know where the lines are. And then health coaching is a stickier one. Most licensed providers, once they learn the limits of a health coach, usually don’t want to do it. It’s a pretty limited scope. I’ve written about it extensively publicly on the internet and talked to the leaders of Functional Medicine Coaching Academy and others that kind of confirm it’s not just me, I’m not the bad guy, this is the scope of a health coach. But if that’s what you want to do, this is how you do it. So I kind of touch all bases.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You’ve said that the law is grayer for providers such as myself. I’m a naturopathic physician by training. It’s very gray or it’s non-existent in some cases, but you’ve gleaned what you can and I know you’ve got advice for us, and chiropractors, and other credentials.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, I mean at this point it’s pretty quick to go check and I would say this: even if you don’t work with me, if you’re going to consider a coaching program that’s promising to make your practice easier or faster, more money, before you go do that, go to your Google machine and type in scope of practice, your license, and then your state. And then hit enter and read the first thing that comes up, which is probably the state legislature or a variation of it. Click on it and read the definition. Because there are times where I get a pharmacist on my discovery call or sometimes a naturopath or a chiropractor who, from state to state, have wildly different practice laws. And so I’ll say, I don’t think you’re fit to work with me.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And the pharmacist one broke my heart. She paid this coaching program in Mississippi and she lived in Mississippi where the scope was basically take pills from the bigger bottles and put them in the smaller bottles and that was it. And so she’s like, ‘What do do now?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know but I’m not a good fit to work with you. I’d rather not help you because you probably can’t do it.’ So yeah, it doesn’t take much to go find out that scope. I just gave you the tools on how to do it. But I work with all types if they can practice in their state.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What are some of the most common blind spots? Like what are the things that we’re not looking at as carefully as we should be?

Scott Rattigan, JD: I’d say most people have modality specific consent forms. They know to ask for those. They may not have one for the general practice of functional, integrative, personalized medicine and so part of that is kind of setting expectations. And that’s, in my opinion, the most important document you could use. So everybody that walks in the door understands that there are critics of this style of medicine. Some people say it’s not evidence-based. We’re not replacing your conventional team, we’re working in conjunction with them and you can always revoke your consent to work with us. Like, no problem. You are in charge. So laying all that out, plus a few more things in there, that’s probably number one the most important thing you could do, and it’s document number one in my library.

Scott Rattigan, JD: A lot of people understand HIPAA’s notice of privacy practices but that’s where they stop at HIPAA and they don’t do the rest of the iceberg there. That’s a big one. And then Medicare is usually a big area where people are have misconceptions, which is how do I stay in Medicare and then charge cash in my side practice, which is a sticky question because there’s a lot of regulations there. Those three are the big ones and then practicing across the country is probably the next most popular topic that I see people getting wrong.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Awesome. Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s important. It’s really important for all of us. God, I have to say, you know, if my team, if we were all participating in this podcast with you, yeah, we would be inundating you with all sorts of questions. It’s funny, as you’re talking, I’m trying to visualize the various forms that we have people sign upon entering into the practice and wondering if we’ve got some of those elements in there. So knowing that this is an incredibly deep, deep need all over the place, this is what you’ve learned in your own work and just all the way back from when you took that first corner into this marketing class when everybody decided to pick your brain for legal stuff. I can so imagine that if I had been talking to you, I would be like, by the way, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. It’s funny. So you created and you’re a participant in the Origins Incubator. I want to hear about that. I want you to tell us all about that because this is another tool that we can have access to as providers.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And then the ReveliaDx products that you’ve created as well. So tell me about what Origins Incubator is. And by the way, folks, all of this that we’re talking about and mentioning, we’ll link to in the show notes so you have access. We’ll link to Scott and how you can access him and access a discovery call with him and his team and the promo code and so on and so forth. It will all be at the show notes. But for now, Scott, tell me about Origins Incubator and Revelia and how we might be using these in our practice. And what stage in our practice we might want to use these tools.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Sure, absolutely. So, Incubator, as you mentioned at the top, is more of a practice management consulting business and it grew out of Functional Lawyer. Our businesses kind of leapfrog on solving problems. So, my wife started her practice, and then I started Functional Lawyer a couple years later. And then a couple years later, during office hours at Functional Lawyer, some of my clients, two of them separately in the same month, randomly, were like, ‘We’ve heard kind of drips and drabs about your wife being really successful. Will you be my business coach?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’ And so I signed him up for business consulting one hour a week. But in between, I was like, ‘Hey Linda, what do we do for this? They’re about to ask me this question.’ I didn’t know, she did all the hard work making her practice successful. So she said, ‘You know, instead of one hour a week, if it was me, I would want to just go for the weekend, have everything laid out and then go back home and implement.’

Scott Rattigan, JD: And so we started doing that once a quarter, two or three practices at a time, just teaching them the methods. And she was working 14 patient contact hours a week, bringing home $20,000 after taxes each month, so pretty good. Right? And we just didn’t realize how unique that was. So we started doing that once a quarter for a couple of years, and then COVID hit and we had two people coming on April 14th or something, in 2020, so we were like, standby. And so we put it all online as a DIY course. A year or two into that, people weren’t moving forward, they weren’t successful. So we were asking, what’s holding you back? Because we don’t want to put out a crappy course and just sell a bunch of them and not have people be successful. The answers that we got were, I feel isolated clinically, I don’t know what I’m doing legally, I don’t have any accountability, and I’ve been working on my website now for six months. It’s like, oh… Okay. So these are all issues that are preventing you from launching. All right.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So Linda and I sat down one weekend and we just kind of like laid out all the problems that people have and came up with potential solutions that we could do and how we could deliver those. And so it shifted from a DIY course that was like $5,000, to now we added legal to it, it wasn’t originally connected. So all of the Functional Lawyer stuff we’ve just been talking about is inside of Origins Incubator as well. And then we added a whole clinical wing to it as well, because even if you’re in practice 20 years, you may just want to curbside somebody or run something past a colleague that knows what they’re doing. And so we partnered with Cheryl Burdette, who’s a naturopath and has been teaching across the country, across the world, really, for the past 20 years. And so she put together a really great curriculum for clinical and there’s case studies each week with her and that’s now 35 CME credits that are included here for that.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And so that’s kind of how it’s taken shape and now it’s a cohort method where each year we launch two cohorts. We never wanted to be like, there’s 500 people in this group. We wanted it to still be personal accountability, so it comes with some individual coaching calls as well. But each week there’s legal with me on Mondays, clinical case studies and teachings on Tuesdays. Wednesday we have some expert speakers come in once in a while. It’s often free. Thursdays we do more practice creation, which is what we call our practice management, coaching, and teaching and Linda spearheads that one. And then Friday we do some more like tactical implementation workshops once in a while. So it’s like, okay, we can teach you the theory behind it, but if we all want to sit down together and do it click by click, like how to build a webinar funnel in your thing, or how to use your calendar or connect things, tech is often the new constraint in a lot of these businesses, and so sometimes we just do hands-on, let’s all do it together workshops for that.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So that’s Incubator. It’s kind of like just trying to solve problems, which is where Functional Lawyer came from, which is now where Incubator came from. And this tech issue is kind of what’s leading into ReveliaDx.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, interesting.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So yeah, we were sending our students, our first cohort ever, we were getting ready to launch them in September, and this was maybe 2022 or 2021. And Living Matrix came out, which was who we recommended as a software tool. And they were like, ‘We are not taking on any new practices.’ We now know they were getting acquired, but we’re like, ‘Well, what do we do?’ And so we started brainstorming and eventually started to work on our own solution that would replace that and improve upon it and not just be for functional, but could be open to integrative and conventional docs too. And so that’s where Revelia is coming to. It’s pretty early on right now as we record this, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Some of our Incubator clients are beta testing it and giving us constant feedback loops to improve it, but we’re not backed by private equity, so it’s going a little slower than some of these faster tech companies.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Is this ultimately going to be an EMR? Is that the end game?

Scott Rattigan, JD:Yeah, The original concept was like Living Matrix but it would integrate, because that was a big shortfall.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Sure, it was a huge limitation of Living Matrix.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah. And so that was our main goal. But then still, people don’t want to have many more logins or have to connect it and the connection breaks. Over its lifetime so far, which software kind of goes through multiple lifetimes before you ever see it, it’s now developing into more of an EMR solution too. Plus a CRM (customer relationship management) with emailing an outside list of potential patients, or customers if your health coach, and your current patients as well. So it’s adding HIPAA compliance to all of that stack. It should be an all in one solution.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow. So, you’ve got the Functional Lawyer, Origins Incubator, and then Revelia. Wow, that’s pretty extraordinary what you’re doing over there. And your wife still is in her practice?

Scott Rattigan, JD: No. There’s only so much time in the day, right? So yeah, if she could, she’d be superwoman. But no, that kind of came from me. She wanted to keep some of favorite patients, because as you mentioned, you’re all kind of caregivers or want to help. But Incubator kind of lit her up a little bit more. And I was like, ‘Which one do you like to do more?’ And she was like, ‘I like to do the coaching a little bit more.’ And I said, ‘Great, because your malpractice and EMR fees, that’s all killing us. So let’s shut it down, right?’

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s funny.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So to keep those 10 patients was costing us money. So I was like, all right, and then we can do full-time focus here. So yeah, she stepped away, at least temporarily, from her practice about a year ago.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And you guys are all in with these other entities, but they’re just serving such a huge need. I’m excited to be talking to you to support getting the word out there. So for those of us who just really want to zero in on legal, we could go to Functional Lawyer. And is that like a monthly membership to get in the program?

Scott Rattigan, JD: You can. I say it’s just a flat rate, but if you don’t have that money laying around, then you can make payment plans. If you do that, it is a 12 month commitment because you get everything day one. Which that happened to me a couple of years back. My own terms and conditions weren’t locked, i’s dotted, t’s crossed. So somebody paid me the monthly fee for the first month and still to this day is the only person who’s watched every video in the library, because they don’t always apply to you. She watched them all and then obviously downloaded the documents and then was like, ‘I’m good, I’m going to cancel.’ And I was like, ‘No, you still have 11 more payments. You’ve only paid me 17% or whatever.’ And so I read through my terms and I couldn’t fight her. So I had to update the terms, let her go for one twelfth of the price and then just kind of learn that lesson the hard way. So long way of saying, there’s a couple of monthly payment options, but if you opt for that, it’s an installment plan, not a subscription, so to speak. Yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Sure. Okay, got it. Got it. That’s awesome. I can tell I’m talking to a lawyer. But really, lesson learned. But then if we want more complete support, you have Origins Incubator and Cheryl Burdette is a decades long, really good friend of mine. From my first day graduating school I’ve known Cheryl, so yeah, I know she’s a badass. She’s a great teacher.

Scott Rattigan, JD: She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I feel dumb whenever I talk to her. So yeah, she’s great. Yeah, Incubator, we’re kind of re-imagining it now too for anybody that’s like day one, no name for nothing or nothing in your practice, you can have that. Or if you’re like in practice and just barely making it, trying to make the bills work and you need kind of like a shot in the arm, a group that’ll help with accountability, help a little bit with pricing, business model stuff, that kind of comes back pretty quickly for those people too. So no matter what stage you’re in, it’s at least worth a look. We’re not a fit for everybody, and we can’t take everybody, again, smaller groups, but for those that fit, we like to think we’re doing a pretty good job.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s so cool. Yeah, and I could see a lot of entry levels. You know, again, I’m listening to this and trying it on through the lens of my practice and can see all sorts of useful components that you’re suggesting.That you guys are offering. And then of course, heading into EMR land, I’m not a huge fan of ours. You probably haven’t met a lot of people who are.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah. Nobody likes their EMR. I mean, some people like it, or say it’s the best worst option, I guess. But tell me more. You don’t like yours?

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s probably the best you’d ever hear from someone, right? It’s the best worst option. I mean, I guess all of us can see where our needs are not met. And I would imagine, you guys seem like you’re incredibly motivated and you’re going to set out to really bring something different, and you say you want to create this for any provider, be they in the functional integrative medicine space or not. If your foundation was Living Matrix, you’re bringing in some of the functional medicine language, I would imagine, or some of the functional medicine model to it. Is that correct?

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, so we’ll bring the same approach to it. Something like Timeline— I had never heard of and I still don’t hear about when I talk to other providers in other industries. So doing the patient history with Timeline, and because Linda used it, she knew its limitations to Living Matrix (which is what I’m talking about now.) So she was like, ‘Well, I wish it would do this, I wish it would do that.’ So we’re kind of adding all of that into it. At the end of the day, no matter how good we believe it to be, even if we have thousands of raving fans, it won’t be perfect for everybody because you didn’t design it for you. So you might be like, ‘I don’t like this one either.’ And that’s okay. But we’re getting constant feedback, both from Linda’s experience and now the people that are using it in practice. They’re like, ‘Well, I would love it if it did this.’ And so that’s what we’re doing.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So we’re always making it with prep provider first and at the end of the day, that Living Matrix tool. I’ve been told that you guys don’t really need it, but it is great to convey complex information to the patient, get buy-in, get them on board, get them to actually make the lifestyle changes and understand where you’re coming from, that you’re not just making this up out of thin air. And so we’re building it for practitioners, but also to facilitate the relationship with their patients, which I think is sort of a unique angle. Because that’s really it at the end of the day.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, yeah, that is it. Now, the typical provider that you work with, I mean, I think you’ve laid it out at least somewhat. It could be almost any of us. We’ve got lots of experience, but we want some refinement. We’ve got lots of experience, but now we want to take a breath and make sure our legal ducks are in a row. We’re brand new or early on in our career, and we just want to define who we are. It seems to me like many entry points would benefit from your tools. Is that right?

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, I think when the software is pretty much ready, which should be later in 2025 for wider distribution, that is going to be great for anybody of all stripes. Functional Lawyer, my main program, is really for licensed providers, so PAs up, NPs, chiropractors, NDs, and physicians, and then the MD, DO physicians. Incubator is kind of limited because there’s a little bit more nuance. So if you’re not an MD, DO or ND in a licensed state, you can still apply, but we may not accept you at Incubator just because legally and clinically there’s some differences there. But at Functional Lawyer, as I said, anybody can use that. And then I do have a course that is coming out. It’s live now, there’s some beta testers in it, but it’s really for health coaching or educational consultants who want to kind of get into more publishing or one-on-one health coaching.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh interesting.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Because that’s the biggest kind of “gray zone” that I hear from people. It’s like, ‘It’s sort of a gray zone.’ Like, ‘No, it’s not. It’s very clear. ‘So if you’re giving individualized clinical advice to a person based on what they’ve told you, you can assume, if you have a license behind your name, that’s the practice of medicine.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What about for those of us who aren’t ready to kind of jump in, to be all in in these committed programs that you’re offering. Is there free stuff? I mean, do you have stuff that we can access for free? What’s the landscape there for people who just want to start looking at the questions, maybe get some beginning answers? Speak to that.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, so we have a bunch of free downloads at Functional Lawyer and some at Origins Incubator. I would say that’s a good place to kind of get some baseline knowledge. Come over to my YouTube channel and look at some of the stuff that I put out because it’s free, number one, but it’s from an attorney. So you know, instead of that Facebook person that you’ve never met who is like, ‘So long as you do this, then you’re okay.’ Just verify that with somebody.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And so I mentioned Health Coach Scope, that video is now four years old, but the content is still the same. So there’s tons of free stuff that you can try to piece together on your own at the moment because the program is the program. But there’s entry level price points as far as more lower monthly payments at Functional Lawyer. But I found over the years that people that try to do a little bit here, a little bit there to get started are introducing more risk than they ought to. And especially somebody who’s brand new. As I mentioned, there’s a lesson on how to come up with a name, so I think people who are brand new and don’t have anything yet have the most value to receive from the Practice Protection Program because those lessons will apply to them. And often I can help them with something like, you don’t need to register a trademark. Keep your $1,500 or more and just start going. As long as nobody else has that name, you’ll be okay. And so coming through that and then helping with some of the money saving options is a good option. I just talked to somebody today and she’s like, ‘I’m just starting out and I don’t know…’ I’m like, ‘I promise, you’ll get more value then you pay.’

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, the other thing is that early on is when we actually have time. There’s going to come a time when time is… And some of the people who are new may be cursing me right now, but you know, you do have time. You have time to research your patient cases and that’s how you should be using your time. But you also have time to put energy into building your practice and so forth. I have to say, on my journey… I mean, we do early on.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, and this person, they’re like, ‘I’ve been wanting to do this for six years.’ And so was like, ‘What’s held you back?’ Well, a lot of things, but fear of legal stuff holds a lot of people back. And so if that’s you, then… You know, I had one lady who was renting an office space in downtown Detroit for two years and had never seen a patient yet. And she came to me and was like, ‘I’ve been dragging my feet for two years and I’ve been paying money out…’ That’s like the most extreme example I’ve seen, but a lot of people drag their feet searching on the internet for hours and hours and hours for something that I can help them with in five minutes. And so how much is that time worth to you?

Scott Rattigan, JD: And to be clear, you get a year of access, but most people don’t need that. That’s just for as you grow, as you evolve, I’m there still to answer questions. It’s all included. But to get everything up and running, you could do it over a day or maybe two days if you’ve got other stuff happening in your life. Yeah. So you can do most, you know, 80/20— You can do the 20 that helps the 80 in a day for sure.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And then just to circle back to Origins, if you want that community. Your wife had a wildly successful practice. It sounds like together, the both of you figured something extraordinary out. And so together, you’ve created Origins Incubator to kind of train people in what it is that you did then, but also you’ve taken it well beyond that. And then you brought in Cheryl Burdette to help with the clinical piece of it, so that sounds like a community evolves in each of the cohorts. Probably a community that’s self-sustaining and lasts long past the time that you’re in the formal Origins structure. But you’re bringing in all sorts of awesome and essential content and training pieces and soup to nuts running a clinic. And then you’ve got over here, your EMR. Yeah, go ahead.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, and we’re always evolving the Incubator program too. So it’s not just what was successful back in 2018. Which I’ve been in programs like that myself for other business purposes, not necessarily functional medicine, but I’ve seen those kinds of things. We’re always innovating and kind of responding. Part of the beauty of the cohort and all the office hours that we do is they’ll give us feedback and they don’t hold back. They’re like, ‘This isn’t working. I need something else.’ And so we’re always kind of adapting and adjusting.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I’d love to actually take a look at it. And I want to take a look at Revelia and what you’re doing as well over there. It just sounds like you’re up to some good work. And I know having Cheryl on board in Origins lends a stamp of credibility really automatically.

Scott Rattigan, JD:  Oh yeah, I mean, some people are like, I just joined for Cheryl.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, Cheryl time.

Scott Rattigan, JD: She’s been doing this for, like you mentioned, decades and decades. So we really got fortunate that we were looking for a clinician and she was looking for a kind of a role like this and so it was really cool when we got to bring her in. Yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Cool, yeah. She’s got a huge breadth of experience, So, just in our final minutes here, give me a couple of cases. Just give me a couple of real world examples who’ve benefited from either using Functional Lawyer or using Incubator. Maybe one from both if you have it. Somebody who successfully launched their practice, somebody who got out of a legal quagmire.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Oh yeah. It’s easier to kind of talk about success stories from Incubator perspective, because at Functional Lawyer, if I don’t hear anything, that is a success story, right?

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, that’s funny. Right. Of course.

Scott Rattigan, JD: So we’re preventing upstream. Although one guy called me he’s like, ‘Hey, I had a HIPPA a breach. I need to join and figure out what to do.’ And so we got, we got him in, we kind of figured it out and then he had all the paperwork ready when the HHS inspection office came in—- I think it’s OIC, but I might be getting my acronyms mixed up here late in the day. So that was a good one. What I described earlier was that person who gave $5,000 to a law firm and had three half-completed documents. That’s a real story from one of my long-term clients. She was like, ‘Ah, I wish I knew about you sooner.’

Scott Rattigan, JD: So ideally, knowing about it first is the success story because then you don’t waste your time or money. There’s a time and place for using law firms in your state, but it doesn’t need to be at this setup stage. But for Incubator, yeah, lots of great successes over there. A few ER docs that are like, ‘Man, I never would have got my practice off the ground. I got it all set up in about four months, and now I have about 30 members in it in just the four months working two thirds of my time in the ER.’ One of our providers actually left her job in November of a particular year, and then she spent 90 days really digging through the whole program, like almost full time. And then 90 days later, so six full months, she was 50 members in to her practice, which we’re only really shooting for a hundred members, honestly. So within six months, she had gotten all her ROI back plus more, and then had all the systems in place to kind of have that ROI keep sustaining itself.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And for those that don’t know, because my wife didn’t know early, ROI is return on investment. So she got that back. That was probably the fastest. Six months to half full. Pretty cool. But a lot of people get there and our goal, we’re always trying to make it a little bit faster to get their ROI back within three to four months. And then from there, it’s all just pure profit and just now you have systems to scale and you go from there.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow, it just sounds awesome. Well, anything we missed, anything that you wanted to touch on that we didn’t?

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, you mentioned the book, it’s The Practice of Telemedicine, it’s on Amazon. It’s now about two years old, and for telemedicine, that is decades ago. Most law evolves really slowly. You guys like to quote that clinical studies take 17 years to get to the family PCP practice usually. It’s similar for most legal kind of adjustments. Not telemedicine though. So a new book is coming out later this year, and there’s no title yet, but if you follow me at Functional Lawyer or YouTube or wherever you want to follow me, there will be announcements for that. Which I mentioned, there’s 22 states with that new telemedicine only license. Two years ago, my book came out and there was only 16. And so more states are coming to that.

Scott Rattigan, JD: And I do just want to mention for telemedicine, people want to practice across the country. You can do it. It just takes paperwork and money and that’s it. It’s not a ‘No’, it’s a ‘Yes, and here’s how.’ People get disappointed. They want to just have their cake and eat it too. Just like your patients probably want to lose weight, get well, but not have to do anything, not have to change their lifestyle, right? Similarly, you can do what you want, but you just have to do it in a structured way.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay. Well, thanks again, Scott. I really look forward to just really helping you get the message out of the work that you’re doing because it’s essential. It’s incredibly important. And to your point early on and what we were talking about offline, it’s really desperately needed. This conversation isn’t something that we have in functional medicine often enough. So thanks for joining me on New Frontiers today.

Scott Rattigan, JD: Yeah, I hope everybody shares it with their friends and really shares your whole show coming up on 10 years. So really cool for you.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Thanks

Scott Rattigan, JD, is the founder of Functional Lawyer, which introduces a new paradigm to help practitioners protect their licenses and confidently grow their businesses. From health coaches to medical doctors and all practitioners, Functional Lawyer provides high-quality legal options with flat-rate, transparent (and reasonable) pricing. Scott was inspired to help the medical community after helping his wife (Linda Matteoli, D.O.) build her functional medicine practice, and watching her colleagues searching but not finding solid legal and business foundations to reduce unnecessary risks. Scott is an attorney, an internationally recognized speaker, host of the award-winning podcast The Junto with Scott Rattigan, JD:, bestselling author of the book The Practice of Telemedicine, and a co-founder of the practice success software, ReveliaDx.

Additional Resources from Functional Lawyer:

Florida Telemedicine License Free Step-By-Step Guide: https://www.functionallawyer.com/florida

23-Pt Checklist for Starting a Functional or Integrative Medicine Practice: https://www.functionallawyer.com/resource-downloads

The Practice of Telemedicine, by Scott Rattigan, J.D.

Book your free Discovery Call here: https://www.functionallawyer.com/discovery-call

Learn more about Origins Incubator here.

DrKF Clinic: Patient consults with DrKF physicians including Younger You Concierge

Bio Age Self Assessment Quiz

Younger You book

Better Broths and Healing Tonics book