What we talked about
Matthew Fornaro shares how he became a business law attorney, starting with childhood curiosity sparked by The People’s Court, and why the real practice of law was a major learning curve after law school. Matthew explains why business law often lives in the “gray,” how juries and human judgment can create unexpected outcomes, and why appeals exist to help the system correct itself over time.
Show notes
Matthew Fornaro left two AmLaw 200 firms, and turned down a third, even larger one, to open his own practice in the suburbs of South Florida in 2015, with no business experience and a deliberate goal to serve founders who he felt were being ignored by both big city law and general practice attorneys. Twenty-three years into litigation, he still says things surprise him every day.
What we covered
- Matthew traces his interest in law to watching The People’s Court at his grandparents’ house in elementary school. By high school, he had already decided on law school, a straight line that led through two large AmLaw 200 firms before he stepped back and asked himself whether cycling through big firms was really the career he wanted.
- The biggest reality check in his first years of practice wasn’t the case complexity, it was that law is not black and white. Juries bring emotion, misunderstanding, and gut instinct into decisions that are supposed to follow legal logic, which is why appellate courts exist: not just to review facts, but to correct misapplications of the law over time.
- The most common call he gets from business owners traces back to how they started: no written governing documents, no proper paperwork, no planning. When things go wrong, whether the business is succeeding or failing, they discover they have no contracts to fall back on and must default to whatever the law provides, which is rarely what they wanted.
- On intellectual property, Matthew is direct: founders need to protect IP from inception, not later. He compares it to buying a house and waiting a year to put a lock on the door. By the time most startups get around to it, someone else has already appropriated the idea.
- Matthew went through both the Kauffman Foundation FastTrack program and the Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship at Florida State University as a student, and now teaches the business law component of both programs. He says his value as an instructor comes from having sat in the same chair as the founders he teaches.
- On AI and intellectual property, Matthew noted that all IP law is built around human creators, so when a machine produces something, ownership becomes genuinely unsettled. He predicted that IP law for AI could take until the turn of the century to stabilize, just as internet law after 30 years remains unresolved in many areas.
About Matthew
Matthew Fornaro is a South Florida business law attorney and founder of Matthew Fornaro PA, a firm he launched in 2015 to serve small and mid-sized businesses with litigation, contracts, construction matters, and intellectual property. He is also a qualified arbitrator for the state of Florida, FINRA, the National Futures Association, and NAMM.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewfornaro
- Website: https://fornarolegal.com
Episode 104 of the PreVetted Podcast.