Sporting her signature square-end tie, Buddy Holly specs, and Pickle Bottom boxy backpack, Davis is a brand unto herself — a natty and neighborly legal trailblazer. KM Davis is an attorney and founder of Davis Law Office, a firm specializing in business and intellectual property law for a clientele of entrepreneurial small business owners. Davis Law Office is the first certified GLBT law firm in Minnesota. Last week I caught up with Davis over a couple of sangrias, and we discussed co-working, her practice, and a lifelong dream of cradling a chimpanzee.

See Davis interviewed live at “Unlikely Entrepreneurs” on Monday, June 23 at CoCo.

Taylor Baldry: Could you introduce yourself? What are your official, unofficial, professional and non-professional titles?

Davis: My name is Davis. That’s actually my last name but it’s what everyone calls me. I’m an attorney. Business owner. I have owned my own firm for four and a half years. Before that I was an attorney for a bigger firm for four years. I’m a parent. My kids call me “Baba”. That’s their word for me, which my five-year-old describes as something between a mom and a dad. I do a lot of stuff but a lot of it relates back to work. I’m also a huge co-working advocate. 

TB: Why are you a co-working advocate?

Davis: Being at CoCo has fused every part of our business. From the moment that I started at CoCo, I felt like everyone wanted to be there. Everyone is working on something that they’re really passionate about. You get this phenomenal energy. Our practice could easily have its own campsite or our own office, but I just really like having other people around who aren’t just attorneys. I’m a CoCo evangelist.

TB: What are some of the obstacles that you faced when starting your own business?

Davis: The biggest hurdle is, as an attorney, they don’t teach you to be entrepreneurial. I had never thought about ever owning my own business. There’s no support. It’s just you figuring out what you’re doing. So I didn’t ever want to start my own business. I just sort of fell into it by default. I just felt that the clients that I wanted to work with couldn’t afford my rates as I moved up the chain at my old firm and the clients that I liked to work with weren’t going to a downtown law firm anyway.

The huge thing was overcoming the thoughts of “is this what I should be doing? Should I just go back and work at a firm? It’s so much safer, it’s so much easier?” I feel like that obstacle became negated when I moved into CoCo … The hardest thing about being a small business owner is that it’s really isolating and really lonely and you can feel like “I’m the only person dumb enough to do this because all of my friends have real jobs — real jobs where someone else writes the paycheck,” and I’m like “I am an idiot for doing this.” The nice thing about CoCo is that when you’re having that day where you’re like “I’ll never have a client again, I should just go get a job,” someone else is having their biggest, most wonderful day.

I always tell people that it’s going to be a while before you start finding business from inside CoCo because everyone has to get to know you and figure you out. But like I said, just the support and seeing other people who were doing this kind of work took that doubt away. I always tell people who are starting a business that you are either in this or you are out of this [pull quote?] but you can’t kind of ride the line between “yeah I’m going to have my own business, I’m going to do this on my own and maybe I’ll still keep looking for a job.” You gotta be in or out.

TB: How did you get to where you are now professionally?

Davis: It’s kind of weird because I started law school for, like, two days in California in Pepperdine, directly after college, but it was really religious. I was coming out at the time. I had gone to Catholic school all of my life and didn’t feel like I was ready to continue. I went back went back to Pittsburgh to work at a law firm and verified that, yeah, I do still want to be a lawyer. I moved to New York and went to New York Law School. The president of the American Civil Liberties Union at the time, Nadine Strossen, was a professor at our school and she was hiring research assistants, so I started working for her and I absolutely loved the work that I was doing.

Davis: I think it helps you think outside of the box a little more. Now that we have marriage equality in this state, I feel like there’s a ton to consider. There are tons of couples who have been together for a long time who are now possibly going to get married. I feel like a lot of people are reticent to say to those people, “Maybe you should get a pre-nup.” But these couples have set up their entire lives as if they couldn’t get married. The biggest part for a lot of them is their business.

I served on a committee where the bar association put together a bunch of attorneys from different fields and they asked them to basically identify places in the Minnesota statutes where same sex couples were treated differently, assuming unfairly, than married couples. I was like, “I hate to tell you guys this, but it’s actually advantageous from a small business owner’s standpoint that their partner is not considered their family because they could transfer their business to their unmarried partner who is a legal stranger, and it wouldn’t be negated for purposes.” I don’t know if a lot of business attorneys dug in and thought about a lot of those issues, but I did because I had a lot of clients where that was the case because their estate plan and their business plan went hand-in-hand. I feel like it has informed my thinking about legal strategy and what you can and can’t do. 

TB: Since the beginning of your career, how have GLBT rights changed and how much of that is changes in social perspectives versus legal changes?

Davis: I feel like the interesting thing is that businesses as a whole have been ten years ahead. You know, when I was a radical little baby liberal, I thought that corporations are bad and that businesses are bad. But when you look at it, particularly here in Minnesota, a lot of the big companies that are headquartered here have had domestic partner benefits for 10, 15, 20 years. They’ve treated same-sex couples as married as they could. I found the business world to be particularly ahead of the law because businesses realize as younger generations come up they want to hire those people and they want to retain them. 

I’ve been shocked at how quickly marriage laws have changed here. It’s really amazing to me. We went from having a potential constitutional amendment to a year and half later having the freedom to marry. It was shocking. 

TB: You identify as gender-nonconformist, how do you navigate that in an industry that’s so based in semantics?

Davis: Since I was a kid I’ve been gender-nonconforming. I introduce myself as “Davis” but people will ask, “Oh, is that your real name?” In response, I think, “That’s the name I’m telling you and that’s the name you should call me.” 

It is interesting because I feel that the legal field is so misogynistic. I think I am at an advantage sometimes because I go by my first two initials, KM Davis. When I deal with other attorneys via email and if they don’t know that I’m a woman, they will sometimes address as me as “Mr. Davis.” I don’t correct them because if they’re a misogynistic asshole, then we will get a lot further if they think that I’m a man. So it is an advantage sometimes. 

I’m in a lot of spaces where people are like, “What are your preferred pronouns?” I acknowledge that for some people it’s very important that you acknowledge and use the pronouns that someone prefers. I have groups of friends that use female pronouns for me but I have groups of friends who use male pronouns and it doesn’t bother me. It’s not off-putting. When my son was like two or three, he would just switch back and forth depending on what I was wearing or what parts of me you could see. I found that kind of refreshing. So I tell people, “I don’t really care. You use whatever pronouns feel the most comfortable for you for me. It’s not a huge issue for me.” 

It’s also definitely set me apart. I sometimes feel that it’s helpful to me because if I go to a women lawyers event or a women in business event, I’m one of the only few or sometimes only person in a tie. I feel like it’s been a good thing for me because people can just say, “You know Davis — that lawyer who doesn’t look like a girl?” And they can be like, “Oh yes! I know that lawyer.” It’s like a brand! It’s been kind of helpful.

TB: Can you talk a little bit about how Sexquire developed? What dynamics made you aware of advocacy in the adult industry?

Davis: My son’s mom, my ex, owns the Smitten Kitten and I met her when the Smitten Kitten was a year old. I feel like I have insider knowledge about businesses because I kind of lived through a small business. I saw her deal with trying to find a good accountant, a good web developer, a good this or that. It was a struggle. When she was trying to open up a bank account, a teller at Wells Fargo told her, “No, we don’t do business with your kind of people,” and that’s totally legit. Through her I met educators and other business owners in the industry. A lot of them are female, minority, or LGBT. They would come through the store and notice, “Oh, you have contracts and your trademark is registered. Who do you use to do these things?” So I got a fair amount of referrals and I realized that there were all of these people out there doing really good work in an area that’s unregulated by the government but they need support. It can be the sleaziest industry in the world, but it affects a lot of people and they are not being served well at all. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.