A free live hour with Chad Sonkin, Partner at Conscious Counsel, on the legal foundations every yoga teacher, healer, and wellness entrepreneur needs.
For years I ran local and international retreats on a one-page waiver I inherited from a studio.
I didn't write it. I'm not sure who did. I changed the name at the top and kept using it, even in a country where I don't speak the legal language and don't own the property.
Fortunately, nothing ever happened and I assumed the document was doing its job.
This summer I finally had a lawyer look at it, and the answer was straightforward: it wasn’t enough to be fully protected.
I’m lucky, not smart.
As yoga teachers and trainers, we pride ourselves on being meticulous. We take the extra module. We go back for the advanced certification. We read the source texts. We care enormously about doing the work well.
And then most of us run the business side on a document we borrowed from a friend, a contractor arrangement nobody ever wrote down, and a hope that the people we love won't ever have a reason to come after us.
Chad Sonkin works with yogis, coaches, gym owners, retreat leaders, and other wellness entrepreneurs to help them build businesses with the right legal protections in place. And when something does go wrong, one of the first questions is often remarkably simple:
Send us a copy of the signed contract.
That's the moment—the moment someone asks for the paperwork and you are confronted with whether or not you’re protected.
WHAT WE’LL COVER
I asked Chad to help us: teachers or in-person, one-on-one, and live group classes, retreat leaders, teacher trainers, and anyone running programs they built themselves.
Why borrowed documents fail. Not whether they hold up in theory—the specific reasons courts set them aside, and what has to be named in a waiver for it to do anything at all. If your waiver doesn't mention an activity, that activity isn't covered.
What changes when you leave the studio. Retreats, outdoor sessions, offsite workshops, online offerings, and recorded content each carry different risk, and most documents were written for one setting.
The contractor question. Whether the people who assist you, sub for you, or teach in your training are contractors or employees, and what it costs when that classification is wrong.
Where your scope ends. The clearest and most painful story Chad tells is about a licensed therapist offering coaching outside their license, with no documents separating the two. A complaint was filed. Their career is now in question. This is the exact territory a lot of us live in—trained in one thing, offering something adjacent, having never written down where the line sits.
AI, copyright, and your training materials. This is the newest one and I think it matters most to this group. If your manual, your sequences, or your program was written by AI rather than by you, it may not be protected by copyright—which means you may not be able to stop anyone from taking it and selling it. Chad walked through a case of exactly this happening. He also has a practical answer, and it isn't "stop using AI."
Trademarks. What your business name is and isn't protected against, and why the worst version of this is receiving a letter about a name you've used for fifteen years.
THE Q&A IS INDISPENSIBLE
We'll teach for about forty-five minutes. Then we open it up for questions. But get this …
The Q&A is not recorded. The teaching portion goes out to everyone who registers. The questions do not. This is to encourage honesty and preserve confidentiality
Send your questions in advance! You can ask anonymously. Submit your question when you register, or send it anonymously in the room, and I'll read it aloud. Nobody needs to see or hear your name, including me if you'd rather I didn't.
Many of the questions that need asking here are the ones people are embarrassed to ask—I've never had a contract with my assistants, I've been paying my subs as contractors and I'm not sure that's right, something happened at a retreat last year and I don't know what I'm exposed to. Those don't get asked in a recorded room.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Teachers leading classes, retreats, domestic or international
Anyone running a teacher training or certification program
Practitioners working across more than one modality or license
Studio and business owners with subs, assistants, or contractors
Anyone building program materials with AI
Anyone who has been meaning to look at their waiver for a while now
If you've never signed a legal document in your business beyond a lease, you're exactly who this is for.
ABOUT CHAD
Chad Sonkin is Partner at Conscious Counsel, helping wellness entrepreneurs build legally protected, sustainable businesses.
Drawing from his background with high-growth startups including Bird, Cloud Kitchens, and Edge Theory Labs, Chad brings strategy, clarity, and real-world experience to founders who want to grow without unnecessary risk.
Known for his relationship-driven approach, he supports yogis, coaches, gym owners, and retreat leaders in getting the right agreements, trademarks, and systems in place so they can scale with confidence.
Chad’s mission is simple: make legal support accessible, practical, and actually empowering.
THE DETAILS
Wednesday, September 23 11:00 AM MT / 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET 60 minutes. Free.
Register below and the Zoom link arrives in your inbox right away. The teaching portion is recorded and goes to everyone who registers, so sign up even if you can't be there live.
This session is general legal education, not legal advice, and attending does not create an attorney-client relationship. Chad can tell you the shape of the risk and whether you should be paying attention to it. He can't resolve your specific situation in an hour, and he'll tell you when you've reached that line.