Harold Park lived the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle before he ever thought about becoming a lawyer.
The music journalist turned general counsel said working at indie labels through his early career was fun. Traveling to new places, listening to bands he loved and working to spread music were the good parts. The low wages were a struggle, though, and he felt he could do more.
“I’m the child of immigrants. My parents did not come to America so that I could be mediocre,” Park said. “So I really just made a rash decision during a lunch break when I was working at one of the labels and just told my friends, ‘I’ve got to change my life, and I’m going to go to law school.’”
Park attended Whittier Law School and spent a few years in law firms and private practice before making his first jump into the in-house world at Kuapay Technologies Inc., a now-defunct mobile payment technology startup.
His most recent job change brought him to Lucky Day Entertainment Inc., which runs mobile gaming apps Lucky Day, Lucky Night and Lucky Day Blackjack. Users can win real money on the free-to-play games such as slots and scratchers. In a recent interview, Park discussed how the company is moving forward into the financial technology space, offering micro-loans in addition to further developing their gaming apps. The following transcript has been edited.
Daily Journal: How did the company decide to make the jump from free-to-play mobile gaming to entering the world of micro-loans?
Harold Park: We started development last year, and we’ve seen the competitors that are more established that have launched a couple of years ago — Dave, Bridget even Albert — they’ve successfully managed to show that there is a market for the smaller loans and users are looking for that. They’re not looking for a $5,000 loan at a bank. They’re looking for literally $100. We decided, ‘Hey, we have what they don’t have, which is the huge network of users that we can automatically advertise to and build this ecosystem.’ ... We believe that we can accelerate our growth and success in that space given what we have.
DJ: Do you have experience in financial technology?
Park: Fintech is a very broad word. The first tech startup that I worked at was a mobile payment startup. That involved a lot of regulatory compliance because we were moving money and that required state licensing and federal regulations to comply with. That was the breadth of my experience. I take that and then I work with a great outside counsel, James Kim and Kim Phan from Ballard Spahr on the East Coast, and they’ve been really the subject matter experts. We’ve been working very collaboratively to really build out the legal infrastructure for that project.
The way I approach the legal matters here is I put them in different buckets. One bucket is just operations level matters. Then I just put each app in a different bucket. Five total apps, two of which have yet to launch. We’ll launch this year. With just the operational side, there’s contracts, there’s IP, there’s all kinds of legal matters. Everything is just kind of in a microcosm in and of itself. It’s just a full 360 of any possible legal matters that come up for each of those buckets.
DJ: What else do you use outside counsel for?
Park: I use them for more or less for the standard reasons: litigation, more in-depth intellectual property matters. I can do a trademark search. I can do the more elementary type of IP work, but when it comes to trademark registrations, I have outside counsel working on that. If we get a demand letter from someone saying that we’re infringing on the IP, most of the time I’m able to just handle that in house. Outside of that, privacy, our terms of use, also all our investment in equity type of work, I have outside counsel working on.
I use Jon Yonemitsu at Littler Mendelson PC for litigation on the employment side and then use Lindsay Hulley, Michael Hellbusch and Brandon Silvia at Rutan & Tucker for IP, privacy, terms of use. On the corporate side I use Ross Burlingham at Gunderson Dettmer.
DJ: Does the nature of your app lead to a lot of regulation compliance?
Park: For us the beauty of the Lucky Day app and that business model that also extends to Lucky Night and Lucky Day Black Jack is we’re approaching it as a sweepstakes. The app itself is a sweepstakes, and you’re entering our sweepstakes for a chance to win. On the spectrum of compliance, that’s probably on the very minor end.
Then you have loaning people money on the extreme other end because money’s the most regulated thing on the planet. It’s an interesting dichotomy. On the regulatory compliance side for the gaming apps, it’s very light. I think most of the challenges will present itself as we create new versions that have more in-depth features, something like in-app purchases and those kinds of levels of game play, which requires more thought and a lot more cooperation and planning with finance and accounting.
A lot of times Google Play or the App Store will view us as a gambling app or a casino type of app. Oftentimes you have to engage in a dialogue with them and be like, ‘No, if you look closer, that’s not what our app is, and that’s not how winners participate and how they win.’ ... There’s just not a lot of legal issues that come into play outside of that because it’s just very clean in that way.
DJ: Are you keeping your eye on California’s “loot box” bill and other similar legislation that could change the amount of regulation you have or the nature of the business model?
Park: Just from what we’re looking at for the models for our apps for now,it’s not a huge concern but it’s something that I have to keep my eye on. We may want to go full blown to be like a traditional video game studio, and the apps will no longer be merely a mobile gaming app. It’ll be a full-blown video game that you could just actually play on your phone. I think once we decide we’re going to go in that direction, I think that’s where we take these things a lot more seriously and get more involved with other companies in this space to look at things like loot boxes and other things like that and participants who are under age and those types of matters.
DJ: What’s it like being in a smaller environment versus something like Mazda with a large legal team and corporate structure?
Park: With Mazda, I worked for their official ad agency, so there were two people, me and a colleague, handling all the legal compliance on the ad side. We definitely interacted with Mazda on a corporate level with their legal department. They have certain guidelines that we can’t deviate from. ... In that way, you obviously don’t have full autonomy and decisions that they made and structure has been put in place before you get there. Whereas when you contrast it with my in-house roles, I’m almost always the first person in on the legal side of things, so I really build a structure from day one. I really enjoy either being alone in house or having a very small team, whether it’s a paralegal or having another attorney with me. I take pride in taking on a wide breadth of responsibilities.
For my career I don’t want to become compartmentalized, as you just do transactional work or you just do IP or you just do litigation. I really like to be the true generalist in that way. ... That challenge on a day-to-day basis, on a quarter-to-quarter basis, on a year-to-year basis, it’s just really fulfilling intellectually. I come in no matter how exhausted I am with that same motivation and fire to just really prove that I can do this and I can do it well.