The ALPS In Brief Podcast

ALPS In Brief - Episode 70: Don’t Let These Coverage Concerns Surprise You

Ready to grow or start a law practice? Let's cover a few common situations where a lack of insurance coverage will come into play. 

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Transcript:

Hello. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the risk manager here at Alps. Welcome to another episode of Alps In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. Today, it's just me. We're going to talk about concerns with growing a practice, developing a practice, and looking at four situations where lawyers are again, just taking steps to build or grow a practice. Sometimes they're not always thinking through the ramifications of decisions being made. I'm not here to try to convince you not to do any of these things. Some are far more common than one or two of the other things. I'm all in on trying to grow and develop a practice, building just from the very beginning. There are all kinds of situations where we want to perhaps make some changes. I want to again, explore the ramifications.

What we're going to talk about are contract lawyers. We're going to talk about ancillary services. We're going to talk about what I call the licensed rental problem. Then an interesting thing that I've seen a little bit more of, of late is creating different names for a firm. We'll get into that at the end. Let's jump right in. Contract lawyering has been around for quite a while. Again, it can be very, very appropriate, it can be very beneficial, can be a great way to start some things, at least to bring some money in. There are some things that you need to be aware of if you're ever thinking about becoming a contract lawyer.

I want to talk about three specific situations. The first is going to be, and I think this is relatively common, you're going to be engaged full-time by one firm and held out to the general public as being exclusively associated with this firm. You're a full-time contract lawyer. I want you to think about coverage, because if you want to be insured, you need to be added to the policy of this firm. Sometimes the firm will refuse to do so, or for some crazy reason, is unable to do so, and then they turn around and say, "Well, we expect you to purchase your own policy." Does that solve the problem of coverage? It actually doesn't. We need to understand how coverage works. Basically, you are not insured for everything you do as a lawyer under a malpractice policy.

When we talk about attorney-client relationships and just professional services, let's narrow this a little bit here. Coverage is predicated upon you being in an attorney-client relationship providing the legal services, professional services to a client of the named insured and the name insured is going to be the firm. If you go out and buy your own policy, the name insured is you, assuming you're a solo here, or the name of your solo firm. When you're in a full-time contract situation, you're never providing legal services for your clients. You're always providing legal services for clients of this firm. It's a false sense of comfort. They think, "You don't know. You don't care." You don't have coverage in most instances. There may be some exceptions, but you really need to look at the language of your policy, make sure you understand just what's covered and what's not covered.

Purchasing coverage here isn't going to, in most situations, give you any coverage. Again, I would personally only step into this situation if I know I'm going to be added to their policy and I'm just going to share, this is me, I'm a risk guy. While trust is a good thing when it comes to this, I would want the firm to provide documentation that I've actually been added to their policy. Suffice it to say that I've seen a couple of situations over the year of they say one thing, but what actually happened was something entirely different. I'll leave it to that. A second thing you'll see sometimes is, and this is relatively common in the contract lawyering space, is the contract lawyer will be temporarily engaged by one and sometimes two or three firms, but never held out by any of these firms as being associated with the firms.

The general public just simply isn't aware of your presence. Now, again, if you want coverage for this, the firm or firms should you reach out to their carrier and provide notice, take care of any premium that may be due and you're all good. Sometimes again, they'll say they're unable or unwilling and suggest you get your own coverage just as in the other situation when you are held up full time and all of that. If you get your own coverage, you're not going to be covered if any of these clients sue you. I've also shared that these clients really don't know you're there. The exposure would come, well, does this firm sue you? If we have pretty good documentation that this firm has retained you, you have an engagement letter with them to provide legal services to them, et cetera, et cetera. We can document, this is a client of yours. Your coverage, your policy should be in play for when the firm sues you.

Because that's the only person, the only entity that really knows you're involved. That said, here's an interesting question, is coverage really necessary in this situation? Now, again, I am not advising, I am not recommending, you got to make your own judgment calls on this one. Here's something to think about. Again, assuming there's zero client contact of any kind with clients of the firm or firms you're working as a contract lawyer with. Clients are never made aware of your involvement on any matter. The firm or firms accept full accountability and responsibility for your work product and all of this is commonplace in this type of business relationship. The risk of having to deal with a malpractice claim is really going to be extremely low, even from the firm. Instead of assuming they're just going to fire you if it turns out you don't know what you're doing.

I'll let you make your own judgment call on that, but it's some food for thought. The final situation I'll talk about with contract lawyers is you're engaged part-time by a firm and held out to the general public is being associated with that firm. While also trying to establish or you're still involved in running your own practice and you're doing this for a little extra revenue, whatever might be going on here. How does this play? Well, in this situation you're going to be working for two firms. The firm you're contracting with and your own solo practice. Thinking about again, coverage only covers you for work done an attorney-client relationship on behalf of a client and the named insured. There's two firms, so you really need to be on two policies. The firm policy or your contract lawyer with, because again, you're being held out as associated, the public is aware. Then your own policy for work you do on behalf of your own clients. Now, we're good to go.

Except sometimes again, the firm your contract with refuses or is unable to add you to their policy. What do we do here? Well here, there's an interesting, if you will, work around. You might consider working with this firm not in a contract relationship but in a co-counsel relationship. Now, you need to do this in accordance with the rules of professional conduct. We have to make sure the clients are aware of the fee split and documentation to retaining two discrete firms. I document for the client roles and responsibilities of yourself and your co-counsel who's doing what. That can work. We have documentation here now that all of the work you're doing is done on behalf of clients of your firm. That can work in some situations. I can't speak for what these other firms are going to do, how much work, but that can be very beneficial.

My one caution is prior to stepping into a co-counsel relationship, because in essence, you're going to be creating a partnership, if you will, for every joint matter that you're working on. I want to make sure that if this firm, particularly if they are in the lead, if you will, during the majority of the work, I want to make sure they're insured for their own missteps. Because if they happen to be bare and there's a malpractice misstep that they've even made, you're going to be brought in because you've created this partnership in this matter and your policy is in play. If there's a loss, you're the one that might take the financial hits, so to speak, and have to deal with the fact of it, that there's a claim and deal with surcharges and all that. Well, they just say, thank you very much for the coverage and go on. This really does happen.

It's not extraordinarily common, but I've seen this very situation multiple times in my 25 years with Alps. I would want to document before I enter any kind of co-counsel relationship that the firm I'm about to co-counsel with has an adequate level of coverage for the matters that we're taking on jointly. How about we talk about ancillary services now? I get innovation, I get how markets change and what consumers want and that drives a lot of this, and I'm good with that. Hey, reinventing ourselves is how you stay in business over the long term. If you can't grow and change with the needs and the wants and the desires of the market, that's going to be a problem. There are some issues, and again, we're going to talk a bit about this and primarily it's about coverage. Ancillary service says is one thing lawyers will turn to in terms of trying to reinvent themselves.

Let me give you some examples. Often, it's about wanting to offer both legal and non-legal services under the banner of your law firm or under the banner of the practice. I will see things like a practice that does regulatory compliance and consulting in the cybersecurity sector. You might see this in employment law, in consulting or investigation services as the ancillary piece. Business formation and consulting in the business sector. You might see lawyers and non-lawyers setting up several businesses. The plan is to offer legal services and investment advice, perhaps insurance sales all under the banner of a common trade name. All of these things that I'm talking about are real examples that I've seen or been involved in over the years. It might be a lawyer planning to team up with a local CPA to offer legal and non-legal services under one roof.

It could be as simple as deciding to offer, do it yourself legal forms from your law firm's website. Perhaps under a subscription practice model, which makes it even more interesting. There's lots of ideas, but what's the problem? Remember, I shared at the beginning just because you have a professional liability policy, a lawyer's professional liability policy, that doesn't mean you're covered for anything and everything that you do in the role of a lawyer. Malpractice policies cover you for allegations of negligence in the performance of professional services. Now, policies are going to differ. It's worth looking at the policy that you have, what is covered under the definition of professional services? Often, it's rather broad. Mediator, arbitrator, executive, conservative, guardian, trustee. I mean there's all kinds of things. As an example, many of these policies also, because you got to look at exclusions, aren't going to cover you for financial advice given.

Even though you're in an attorney-client relationship, you give financial advice to your client. That's not covered. Consulting is not a professional service that falls under this definition of professional services if you're limited to consulting only. Sometimes you're in the role of a lawyer in these settings. Sometimes you're in the role of consultant and sometimes you're in the role of both. If you're just in the role of consultant, there is no attorney-client relationship, the policies aren't going to respond. Can you start to appreciate, we need to think through some of the coverage concerns. Now, the question that I'll get, "Well, Mark, so what do I do? How do I move forward? What are my options?" This gets a little difficult folks, and I'll be honest with you. If you ever want to call in chat, doesn't cost anything. Call in chat, I'm happy to try to issue spot and try to work through.

The best answer I can give you is it depends, and the specifics of what you're looking at or trying to do will dictate. If we take some simple kinds of things, the lawyer/consultant, let's use the cybersecurity space example. We have legal and non-legal services, but they're going to be offered for the purpose of this example under the banner of one and entity. It's the same desk, that kind of thing. A lot of malpractice insurers are not going to be comfortable with this and may just be unwilling to write. You may be able to go out and get a general errors and omissions policy that would cover both professional roles. Now, when it comes to the legal professional liability, this general policy solution is not going to offer as in-depth coverage, if you will, that you might see from a standalone professional liability policy exclusive to lawyers. That can work.

Other times you might want to say, well, let's break this out and have separate websites for the professional services and for the consulting, for the lawyer hat and the consulting hat, for the lawyer hat and the financial services hat, whatever it might be, separate business cards. Put esquire on your business cards. For the non-lawyer stuff, separate phone numbers. It's even easier if you have separate locations and sometimes, you'll see that. If you start to create some distance between these two roles and make it clear to clients, if you have joint clients in this situation, I've got my lawyer hat on, but I have a separate contract with you for these non-legal services. You may need to remind them now and again if there's some confusion, and I would tend to document some of this. You can get your legal practice insured then through a standalone lawyers' professional liability policy.

Then you can get a separate E&O policy for the non-lawyer stuff that you're doing. There's some general things there to think about. My big message here again is, as you look at models, start to think through, how's this going to play both ethically? I'm not doing a whole lot of ethics here today on this, but this particular topic in particular in terms of ancillary services, but I would definitely look into that. Coverage can also drive. Is this going to be viable, is this a model, is this going to work? Let's jump now to licensed rental. You'll see this more in the solo and small firm space. How I start to get clued in? Somebody calls in, "I got this great offer and I'm going to make lots of money. This is an opportunity and I just want to run by and make sure I'm not missing anything." Typically, it's an opportunity to affiliate with an out-of-state law firm and sometimes even an out-of-state or in-state non-lawyer owned company.

Both are wanting to direct matters to the lawyers they're contracting with as a way to offer services, legal services in jurisdictions where the lawyers aren't licensed to practice or again, the unauthorized practice law because they're non-lawyers wanting to do this, but they want to create this affiliation. It may be structured as contract lawyers, it may be structured as counsel. You're going to be promised some portion of any earned fee coupled with an understanding that the amount of work you're going to do is minimal. Now, these should be warning signs. I'm going to make money for very little work, it's out of state. Start to think through the rules here on this one. Practice areas that you often see. This will be debt settlement, mortgage, foreclosures, estate planning, traffic violations, criminal expungements. Those are common areas. I'll leave it at that.

Let's talk about some of the obvious things. Here, we can talk a little bit about ethics. If it's a non-lawyer owned company, if you sign on and participate here, there's a strong possibility you may be assisting a lay entity in the unauthorized practice of law. I have seen lawyers sanctioned for this to include loss of license. If it's an out-of-state law firm, that may still be a problem, because they're not licensed in your state. That's why they want you. Here's the problem. You're going to be contractually required to, in essence, essentially relinquish control of all matters to the out-of-state firm. They're not going to turn these clients over to you. At times, they're not even doing the work. They're assigning it to non-lawyer assistants, they're not properly supervised. All they want is some local lawyer to sign off and just say, "Oh, this looks good."

I start to think about assisting non-lawyers to non-authorized practice law. It also, many of these models, for lack of a better word, are marketing one size fits all solutions to their legal problems. Again, they just want your blessing. If you get involved here and well, how do I want to say this? They don't want you to get involved and talk to the client about various legal options. Really look at the true needs of the client. They just want you to market and sign off on this. Again, one size fits all solution. This is going to be a violation. Professional independence of a lawyer. You are not allowed to have any. You're agreeing to this. There's all kinds of issues that can come up in improper fee splits. Again, preventing clients from having a chance to meaningfully consult with their local lawyer. Unreasonable limitations on scope and it just goes on and on.

I would really, really caution you about this particular model. Now, let's get back to, again what we've been talking about with all of these situations, I have yet, well, actually I'm going to back off on that. I used to say I have yet to hear of a situation where the out-of-state firm or non-lawyer owned company provided malpractice insurance for the local lawyers. I will share that's still very, very common. I have now come across two situations where they in fact do. The only reason I will share that is I'm not here to bash the licensed rental. Well, I am bashing the licensed rental model. There have been situations where a company really is done by lawyers. The model is set up in compliance with the ethical rules and they're really looking to expand and create a more nationwide or regional presence using local lawyers.

The local lawyers are allowed to be involved. The fee split model is a bit different. They are advising the clients, and it can be done in a very professional and responsible way. I'm going to tell you that is very much an exception to the norm. I'm trying to really clue you in to what the unethical ones start to look like. Again, they don't offer insurance and they are going to require every local lawyer who signs on that you have documentation of your own malpractice. Again, it's to try to make you believe that they're being very responsible and they're hoping you assume, well, that means because they're asking, and these guys know what they're doing, they're a bigger company. They know your policy is going to protect you. It's not. They don't care about you. They really don't.

They have no intention of letting you get involved with their clients. Meaning, make them your clients. They're going to place severe limitations on what you can and can't do. You're simply being asked to sign off on work done by others. Let's get back to coverage. Are you in an attorney-client relationship delivering legal services on behalf of your own clients? The answer is no. You are not. You're simply renting your license to somebody else. Not a good idea. It can be very, very problematic. You're not covered for any of that. A little heads-up. A little heads-up there. The final one that I'm going to talk about is I sat out here about multiple firm names and stuff. This has been interesting. I've come across this once or twice and I don't know, the last five, eight years, something like that. I got what was going on, made a lot of sense to me.

Now it seems like this is going more into the solo small firm space. Whether it's a trend, I think it's way too early to tell, but here's the gist of it. A lawyer or a small firm wants to grow and develop and create a market presence as specializing. We know what we're doing in divorce law, we know what we're doing in criminal defense or whatever it might be. We're the go-to lawyers. We want to create a business name and sometimes lawyers are starting to even create separate entities for the various practice using my name, Bassingthwaighte Bankruptcy Law LLC, or Bassingthwaighte Divorce Law LLC. I'll create these entities and I want to market myself as, I'm the go-to guy. Again, I may even have separate accounts, in terms of trust accounts, bank accounts. To me, I started sitting and my head hurts about how complicated this can be. I understand why lawyers want to do this, and I am absolutely not adverse to it.

I just encourage you to think through, creating multiple entities that are just you. Even if it's you, an associate and two staff, but it's the same desk, the same address, the same phone number, everything the same. Then trying to get four policies for each of these things, you're going to have exclusions, anti-stacking language. It just becomes a headache. One to ensure, and the more complicated you make this, the more complicated or difficult it's going to be to find somebody willing to ensure all these entities. Think about the administrative headache of all of this. I sit here, I'm just not seeing the benefits of it. They're alternatives. You could do a DBA. I try to get one policy and put the DBAs as additional insureds. You might be able to get one policy with all the entities and put the entities on as additional insureds, because there's only going to be one named insured.

It's going to be cheaper to ensure one firm with some additional insured names as opposed to four policies on four firms. You're going to be spending all kinds of money that you don't, and it's just a mess. A little caution there. I'll tell you, in my mind, it's even easier. I'm not even going to mess with DBAs. Well, I mean you could. I sit and say, let's just have one firm and I'm going to call my firm the Bassingthwaighte Law firm. Run with me on my crazy mind and how I look at this. Bassingthwaighte Law is going to be the mothership, if you will, and that is going to be the named insured. Now, I'm going to create some websites and it might be Bassingthwaighte Bankruptcy or I might not even put bankruptcy, or I'm sorry, Bassingthwaighte there. I might have some little fancy marketing name for divorce and for bankruptcy, these different areas that I want to look like an expert on.

I have these separate websites and separate marketing, but these are just names for marketing. I'm trying to build a feeder network. On each of the sites they'll say, "This is a service of Bassingthwaighte Law. This is a service." You'll see that on the divorce page. You'll see that on the bankruptcy page. You can call it whatever you want. In other words, there is no entity. It's a marketing campaign. Then anytime a client comes in from the bankruptcy website, the divorce website or even Bassingthwaighte Law website, all contracts are signed with Bassingthwaighte Law because that's the named insured. We all are employed. If I have other staff, associates, whatever it might be, we're all under this banner of Bassingthwaighte Law. That's the mothership. Everybody, I'm very open about this. It's just using it as a marketing tool. I think that can really make life a lot simpler.

I want to shut down the Bassingthwaighte, or I'm sorry, the bankruptcy practice at some point, all I got to do is turn off the website. I don't have to wind-ups this separate entity because I don't want to do bankruptcy work anymore. You see? I'm thinking long term here too. I'm trying to wrap up here now. In terms of takeaways, there really are ways and things that you can do. There are pros and cons to all this stuff. Obviously, the licensed rental model I got a little issue with. There are some situations out there that can work that are ethically sound. We need to look, we need to do some investigation on all this to understand the ramifications. The time to do it is before you've committed and set up the four law firms and go, "Oh my gosh. Now I'm trying to cover this. I didn't realize I was creating such a headache. Maybe I should've called you guys sooner." Real conversation as an aside, just happened. There it is. I hope you found something of value with today's little pontification on growing and building practices.

I'm all in, I'm all for. There's lots of things that can be done. Obviously, there's all kinds of marketing things and all sorts of ways to build a practice. I did want to share a couple of things where lawyers get trapped and they get too far down the road and haven't thought through. I'm just trying to get you ahead of the curve. I have zero issues doing, heck, you want to go with contract lawyering? Hey, God bless, I hope it works out. That's really exciting. You want to go down the ancillary road? God bless. Subscription, which we really didn't get into, but the ancillary model overlaps there a bit. God bless. I'm all in. Just think through the ramifications. That's it. Please, don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions or concerns about the things that we've just talked about and want to discuss further. It doesn't cost anything to chat with me or send an email. My email is mbass@alpsinsurance.com. I'm happy to do anything I can. Hey, good talking to you. Stay safe out there. We'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.

 

ALPS In Brief - Episode 69: Let it Go

We all carry baggage in our personal and professional lives as lawyers. If the baggage isn't addressed, we get depressed. In this episode, Mark offers some wisdom, tactics, and examples of how to let it go.

 

Transcript:

Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the Risk Manager here at ALPS, and welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I had some things happen this week that got me thinking, and so I want to tell some stories and share some insights or just responses, I guess, to things that have been going on. I want to start out with a story that goes back a few years. Sometime ago my wife and I attended a weekend family get-together out in California, beautiful home that could put up a whole bunch of us, and then some others stayed in nearby hotels, but it was a lot of fun. It really was a lot of fun.

One evening, the extended family was all gathered around a huge table and the other people outside in hot tub and people on the beach, walking, things, but there was a nice group around this big table, and one of the young grandchildren there was quite a fan of Frozen, and she just was so proud of herself. We all got to talking and she had memorized the song, and I'm sure many of you are aware of the song or have heard of it, called Let It Go. She wanted to sing for all of us, and everybody's all excited. She climbs up and is standing on the sort of the center of this table, and she just starts belting out, Let It Go. She gets through the first verse and we're all just hooting and hollering kind of, "This is great," and she just says, "Well, stop, stop, stop. I'm not done yet," and she just launches into the next verse, and we're all kind of looking around and she just keeps going.

She's going to sing the whole darn song. I see near the end, it becomes abundantly clear there are more than a few people that are very impatient, ready for this to be over, "Oh my gosh, it's almost painful," and I'm thinking to myself and sort of smiling. I see people really aren't listening to what she's saying. I think there's some wisdom here. Let it go. It's a little girl, enjoying, trying to entertain and just so proud of herself.

We all can certainly get through a few more minutes of listening to her sing and just have a nice, wonderful evening in spite of that. So that was just a fun memory, but it's relevant to some other things that have happened and get just things I've been thinking about. I also recently listened to a presentation on forgiveness, and I must say it was one of the more, powerful is the word that comes to mind, but it just, a presentation that really struck home for me in a variety of ways. One of the things that I very much appreciated and thought was just, "Well done." The presenter was talking about that people are at times wronged by others. People are sometimes betrayed by others, hurt by others, and he wanted to sort of give a visual to this in terms of how this impacts us individually when we hold on to these types of feelings, feelings of betrayal, hurt, all of that, and so he had two people come up.

He put them together, handcuffed them together, and he says, "You know, so you have a bad relationship. One person will be the person that was perhaps betrayed in the relationship and the other person, handcuffed is, together here, is the person who betrayed the first person." So you say, "Okay, I'm going to exit the relationship and move on, get a divorce," whatever it might be, but as the person walks away from the relationship, they're still handcuffed together. Now, obviously, the person that truly betrayed doesn't come along everything, but the baggage, if you will, is still there. There's still this attachment because there's been no forgiveness.

You might be in a situation, perhaps an associate has a problem with a partner and has been wronged or is constantly hurt and belittled. There's just a very unhealthy relationship, and an associate just, "I've had enough. I'm quitting. I'm out of here," and you go and you start another job at another firm, and you're all excited, but there's some behaviors with a new partner that remind you of things your partner has done, and you start to immediately have all of this, sort of baggage can back up, because the handcuffs are still there. We're still bound. You want to release those handcuffs.

You want to take them off, and that can be done through forgiveness. Now, I can appreciate that some might say, "Well, that forgiveness doesn't always work for me as a term." Let it go. Just let it go. We need to move past these kinds of things.

Why do I want to raise this and talk about this? Well, for one, it's a wellness issue for me. We do need to learn how to deal with problems that come up in life with situations where we've been wronged. These can be obviously personal relationships, and let's talk about that for a second. Well, what does it matter if ...

What's this got to do with risk management in the practice of law? Come on, guys, think about it. If something is way out of whack and not right in your personal life, unless you are extraordinarily good at walling all of that off, it's going to impact all the other aspects of your life, and I don't think anybody is truly really good at walling things off. That's why some people drink. That's why some people abuse prescription medications.

We can get depressed. If we don't deal with the baggage in our personal lives, and obviously in our professional lives as well as lawyers, we're going to have wellness issues because we are unwell. The baggage has not been addressed, right? So I see this. Let's start to wrap our heads around this a little bit.

It's, what types of relationships ... So again, it can be a spouse, a betrayal, somebody has an affair. It could be things aren't working well with a child. All kinds of things are being said. It's just very, very nasty.

It can be a partner. It can be a client, opposing counsel, a judge. We can't help but be in relationship with others because we are human, and then when we're working and providing professional services and working as a lawyer, there's going to be all kinds of relationships that we're involved in. So I really want to share, if you find yourself focusing, holding on to the consequences of problematic relationships, I strongly encourage you to look at the possibility of forgiving as a way to move on. At times, you will find some people say, "Well, I don't want to let this go. I've been wronged," and if there's all sorts of things that can go on here, we can kind of hang on to it.

Honestly, I think at times it's almost, we want to be a victim, and we sit and say, "You carry this," and you sit and say, "Well, put it this way. Do you honestly think day in and day out, year after year, the person who wronged you, for lack of a better description, is spending all their time thinking about you? Come on. They're not." It's you that is hanging onto all of this, and why in the world would you give someone else that kind of power to impact your life? Oh, my gosh, that's crazy.

So I encourage you to think about taking off those handcuffs, okay? Again, the failure to do so can lead to depression, addiction, or any alcoholism. I mean, the list just goes on and on and on here. So there's this wellness piece. Let me also share, for those of you that have listened to some of my other podcasts, it's been, oh boy, year and a quarter now, maybe a little more, coming up in a year and a half, that we have moved to Florida, and love it down here.

Really, really do. Well, last night I was out playing tennis and driving home, and it was a very busy six-lane road, three in each direction, that is sort of a center thoroughfare to get back to the house from the tennis facility, and it was at a dead standstill. Long story short, the entire road in both directions was closed, ended up being closed for hours due to a very, very serious crash. Two helicopters actually had to come in and land and for a life flight. I mean, this really was not good, and I'm sitting here thinking to, and I would just say, this has been my experience and a lot of others that moved down here, could talk about, "Boy, there's some crazy drivers here in Florida," and there really are.

You see a lot of road rage. It's another example of ... Why do people experience road rage? I think of a lot of it, it comes on very fast, "I've been wronged, and I got to get even, and that son of a gun cut me off," and we just get ... Life is too short.

I saw the helicopters go up, and by the time ... You just kind of have to work your way through. It took me two and a half hours to go less than a mile to get to where the accident was still being investigated and whatnot, and they, just so much traffic and they're trying to get around. It's a long story. I won't bug you with all that, but at one entire car, the entire roof was cut off with tools.

I mean, they had to remove the entire roof of the car to get three victims out of the car. It was that bad. One, I've since learned, has died overnight. Life is too short. It's hard at times.

I will readily admit that, boy, I can at times, when somebody cuts me off and I'm in a hurry or whatever it is, you just want to tailgate or do, just play games, but I also don't want to be the guy that's dead because of it, so I'm learning, and I've been doing this for a while down here, learning to let it go, learning to make a different decision, and I think that's a very, very positive thing. Now, we could also take this a little bit further and talk about civility in the practice of law. I've talked about this, written about it off and on over the years, and for me, it's a tough topic to talk about. You could sit here and say, "Was there this ethical duty? Do we all have to be civil?," and honestly, I think the answer to that is no.

It's certainly something that we should all strive to be and to do, or to practice. It can be very, very difficult, but again, I start to think, "I had an interesting call actually just today," where a lawyer who has done a lot of guardian ad litem work and was involved in a divorce situation and representing a child here, and had to make a very difficult decision. "Where does this child go in terms of mom or dad?," and a good decision was made. I accept that at face value, but what happened here is the parent that ended up not getting the child is an extraordinarily aggressive and apparently has a lot of time on his hands person, and is really just doing everything in his power to destroy the professional reputation of this particular lawyer, a lot of online negative reviews, making all kinds of things up, but unfortunately, too very well-spoken, and there's just a lot of stuff, and this is hurting. This is hurting, okay?

I understand that. Talking to the lawyer, the lawyer just absolutely wants to defend herself. This is not right, and she's right. It is not right, but as we talk, one of the things ... They're all the confidentiality rules, and I get, "Are we in an attorney-client relationship here?," and that's a conversation for another day, but I sit and I look at this and I say, "You know, there are some things that you can do here," but one of my cautions to you is to not engage, to not be pulled into this, to not allow someone else to have this kind of power over you.

You are not going to win in a public battle. All you're going to do is elevate and create a much larger viewing audience, if you will, of this public debate. You need to take a higher road. Now, there's certainly things you can do, reputation management services, just as an example, but I would not get into the battle. Let it go, forgive.

I honestly believe that that mindset, that change in mindset in and of itself will enable a perspective, a different perspective that will allow different types of responses, more effective types of responses to come into play, or, if nothing else, to at least come into your vision. You can think about that. Be civil, because other people are going to judge, are going to make their own conclusions, prospective clients, based on how you respond to this. They're looking to say, "This lawyer can't take a little heat. Oh my gosh, I don't want to hire her."

As you can see, we have to look at the bigger picture. Think about situations where depositions, opposing counsel, for lack of a better description, is using all kinds of vulgarities and insulting you, and going on and on. It can be tempting to go into this road rage kind of thing, if you will, as an analogy, but if it happens over and over again, or a particular judge just doesn't work, after a while, it can really start to eat at you and really get kind of rough. It's tempting to either just feel sorry about yourself and go into this sort of victimization kind of mindset and just, "What do I do about it? I don't know. This is just too much," et cetera, and we run, but again, you're going to take the baggage with you.

You're going to take the baggage. Another option is, and you'll see this at times, and how do I put this nicely, the decision is made to get into a pointless dispute. It's just, "Well, if you're going to swear at me, I'm going to swear at you," and we get into that contest. You know where I'm going with that one, but what are clients thinking? How is anyone in terms of their matter? How does that help?

It doesn't. It just elevates. It deteriorates. It does all kinds of things to relationships, and most importantly, to you. Learn to forgive. Learn to let it go.

Be a professional. I truly believe deep in my heart that these kinds of choices are extraordinarily powerful choices, and I believe that because it's something I have tried to practice and learn, and have been working on, oh my gosh, for years and years. I mean, decades. Am I perfect at it? Absolutely not.

I don't know that anybody ever will be, but I do believe in the value of it. The older I get, I don't want to keep pressure, if you will, stress on my heart. I have a healthy heart, I go play tennis, I ride bike, I'd eat, ride, and do things, but stress isn't good, and we live in a 55 plus community down here, honestly. Absolutely love it. Best decision we have ever made.

Lots of friends. Just, it's been a good decision, but I also see there is a, what I would call a minority group here, and I suspect this is not unique to communities of sort of more retirement communities, as you're going to see it a bit more, of people that are constantly under high stress, refuse, or perhaps are incapable. I think that's by choice, but over time, maybe it gets to be a habit of letting things go. These folks are some of the most miserable, unhealthy people I've seen, and it's crazy. So I'm going to sort of close and just say, I don't want that for me and I don't want that for you.

Life is too short. Learn to forgive. Learn as this wonderful, sweet, young, little girl, standing on a table, sang and belted out so beautifully. Learn to let it go. You'll be better for it, and so will the relationships you have, both professionally and personally. So that's it for me.

I hope you found something of value in today's episode. Stay safe out there, folks, and if you have any questions, concerns on this topic or any other topic, please don't hesitate to reach out anytime. I'm not a risk manager for ALPS. I am your Risk Manager. I'm hired by ALPS to manage the risk of our profession at large.

It doesn't cost a dime to talk with me, so feel free. My email address is mbass@alpsinsurance.com

That is all. Bye bye.

ALPS In Brief - Episode 68: The Unnecessary Burdens of Growing Up in the Witness Protection Program

Jackee Taylor was put into the Federal Witness Protection program as a 7-year-old after her father, Clarence Crouch, a convicted killer and infamous member of the Hells Angels, turned and became a government informant. Mark interviews Jackee about the realities and consequences the children of WITSEC face and what we can learn from them. 

—

Transcript:

 

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte. I'm the risk manager here at ALPS. And welcome to the latest episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. And boy, do I have an interesting guest today that I just, the more I learn and get to visit with her, it's just, wow. My guest today is Jackee Taylor, and where I first heard about Jackee and learned a bit about her story is from a very, very interesting podcast and Jackie Time, it's C 30. What's the platform?

Jackee Taylor:

C 13.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

C 13. Thank you. Yes. C 13. But the podcast series, and it's about the 10 episodes, roughly what, nine, 10 hours, I guess, called relative unknown. We're not going to sit here and talk about everything that's in this podcast, but I will tell you folks, it is worth a listen. So if you have some time and you're driving to the office or taking a plane somewhere just out for a run, I strongly encourage you to take a listen to this. So Jackie, welcome. It's such a pleasure.

Jackee Taylor:

Thank you.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Could you take just a couple of minutes and share for our audience a little bit about you? What is important from your perspective that you think these folks would want to know?

Jackee Taylor:

Basically, my name, I'm Jackie Taylor. I was put into the Federal Witness Protection Program at seven years old in 1982. My father was a Hell's Angel, and he turned on the club and he turned informant and helped them prosecute a few individuals that were guilty of some crimes back in the seventies and eighties. Now I am basically an advocate of grown children of witness protection that are struggling with their identification issues, mental health, things like that. In a nutshell, I can't... Because my documentation has never been rectified from the US Marshals, I cannot leave the country. I cannot buy a house. I cannot go to college. There's a lot of things that I cannot do. However, I am okay, I will be okay. I've been okay for almost 50 years, but these things still are not right. I am not the only person that is struggling with identification issues that is an adult that was put on witness protection as a kid. I am not the only person. I've had a lot of people reach out to me now, and now I'm advocating for them as well.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

I think that's awesome.

Jackee Taylor:

Thank you.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

It is an overwhelming task, I imagine. You're fighting a system, but somebody needs to do it.

Jackee Taylor:

I am. Thank you.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Taking the mantle on is God bless. Good for you.

Jackee Taylor:

Thank you.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Let's back up on this story. So you're in this Witness protection program, and I don't want to spoil too much of... But you don't have a relationship with your father.

Jackee Taylor:

Correct.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

I don't want to tell the whole story about your father, again, I just want them to listen to the podcast.

Jackee Taylor:

You have to listen to the podcast.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

It really is worth it, folks. But you are obviously gone public. You were no... You've outed yourself, if you will.

Jackee Taylor:

Yes.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

And am I remembering correctly, this occurred around the age of 19?

Jackee Taylor:

No, actually it occurred in 2008 and 2009 is when-

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Oh,.

Jackee Taylor:

The first article went out. Yes.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

What brought you to that point?

Jackee Taylor:

I've struggled with issues with my identification actually, since I was a little girl getting... My mom couldn't get us into softball. She had to beg and plead. I tried to get a marriage license back in '96 and I was denied because I don't have a birth certificate. Getting into college was a struggle, thank God I knew somebody on the admissions board that I babysat for, and the Patriot Act wasn't in effect yet because that was in '95. So I've struggled with things over the years, but I was at a place where I was okay. And then my children's healthcare got canceled. They were on Medicaid.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah.

Jackee Taylor:

My children's healthcare got canceled because I could not produce a birth certificate that the marshals would... I was never given a birth certificate, so I don't have one. There's not a way that they could get me one. The judge refused to sign off on my family getting individual birth certificates.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

So it-

Jackee Taylor:

It started affecting my children.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Okay. And so it's a point of just saying I've had enough.

Jackee Taylor:

Absolutely.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

The inefficiencies, all the things in terms of the federal marshals and-

Jackee Taylor:

Trying to call and, okay, call this number. We call this number, okay, write a letter to this. Make sure that you send it certified or registered mail. It has to be signed for that so that you can prove that it got there. I can't tell you how many letters I sent. Can't tell you how many calls I've made. And there's just been no help. Nobody seems to care. So when these people, and it's me, my sister, and my brother, we've all had these issues. But then when it starts affecting our children, and now I have other people reaching out to me because I just went public. Hey, I'm having the same issues too. Of course, I have to vet these people out and make sure that they're legit. So I make them tell me what transpired, what city was it out of, and then I verify, okay, this did happen. So tell me your story. So these other people are reaching out and they're having these problems too. So I'm not the only person, my family's not the only people out there that are struggling.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

And just to make sure everyone in the listening audience here is fully aware of where these struggles come from. I understand, folks, when you entered witness protection, Jackie Taylor was not born Jackie Taylor. That's her name after going into witness protection and all the family, I think brothers, you have a brother, sister.

Jackee Taylor:

I have a brother and a sister.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Mother and everybody's name was changed. And no one is given sort of solid, consistent identification things that all of us take for granted. It's got the original birth certificate, we've got the social security card, the passport, and all the spellings that you were sharing in a present presentation here that, I think you said a Wisconsin-

Jackee Taylor:

Wisconsin social security number.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

It's just-

Jackee Taylor:

Yeah, on my passport, it states I was born in Cleveland, so that red flags certain, if I want to go get a home loan, that's a red flag. Well, why do you have a Wisconsin Social security number? But it says you're... I'm throwing flags. And that's not a good thing.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

I can't imagine.

Jackee Taylor:

I've been stopped at TSA, and how do you explain this stuff? I got pulled over once and they couldn't find me in their system at all. I was arrested a couple of times. I know I'm in the system, but they couldn't find me. And they asked me who I really was. So that's happened to a couple of other folks that I've talked to as well. Right now, I no longer exist. This is something I didn't talk about. I no longer exist with the Social Security Department. Oh, wow. I just recently found that out.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Oh my gosh.

Jackee Taylor:

So now what?

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah.

Jackee Taylor:

I mean, there's certain things. Am I going to die? No. Does my life suck? No. Because I make sure that it doesn't, even with all of these roadblocks, but does it impede my civil rights? I've worked since 1989 when I was 14 years old. I've paid my taxes. I've worked for 35 years now. I've paid my taxes.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah. And you deserve this.

Jackee Taylor:

I deserve my-

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Oh, absolutely.

Jackee Taylor:

Basic rights as an American citizen.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah.

Jackee Taylor:

That's all we're asking for.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah. My mind, boy, that's not a lot to ask for.

Jackee Taylor:

It really isn't.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

It's something you guys are all owed and deserve.

Jackee Taylor:

Entitled to. And especially that we were-

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yes. I honestly, I agree with-

Jackee Taylor:

Yeah, we were born into this. We didn't ask for it, nor did we even ask to be born, period. But we were. We were put into witness protection as children. And that's just to make it clear, that's the only people I'm really advocating for. Were grown children of WITSEC. If you're an adult and you're put into WITSEC, you made your bed, you can lie in it. Do I think that they need to be looked after too, just like my father needed to be looked after? Yes.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

But when you made this decision so out of frustration and your initial step was...

Jackee Taylor:

Call the newspaper.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Call the newspaper, because you were not getting any responses anywhere else. And so that really goes public. And there's been a lot of traction since that time in terms of your story, not the least of which is against this podcast, but there's lots of other things that have happened and are in the works even now. But when you reached that point, was there... It's just frustration alone and you just got to do something? Or was that balance of I would think just even some concerns about coming out of witness protection, except just safety and things. Did that factor-

Jackee Taylor:

I didn't feel in danger back then.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Okay.

Jackee Taylor:

No. I had ran into some Hell's Angels back in, I believe it was '94 or '95, and I was told that I was not in danger. It was just a random event, random occurrence that we ended up at the same social gathering. And I was told that I was not in danger. So was I nervous about the Hell's Angels fight? No. I wasn't worried for my security and my safety. But where you said, was it out of pure frustration? It was out of pure frustration. Absolute. I spent that entire day when I got the letter from the state of Montana saying that they were canceling my kids' Medicaid.

I spent all day on the phone talking, calling different congressmen, calling different senators, calling different people, politicians in the city of Billings. And the buck was passed, the buck was passed, the buck was passed. John Tester's office is the only office I ever had any luck with, and I thank you for that, John Tester. We need to get back in touch. But nobody else wanted to do anything. And our current governor at the time couldn't do anything. I was just passing the buck. So right out of frustration that night, I called the Gazette.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

So this is happening. It's been a little, what, 14 years? 12, 14 years since initially. It's one thing again, to make this decision out of anger, out of frustration, and gosh darn it, you're going to do something about it. You haven't run out of steam.

Jackee Taylor:

No.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

What is driving you?

Jackee Taylor:

Every couple of months I get a new person or a case that reaches out to me that's struggling. Just a few weeks, well, a couple months ago, I had somebody reach out, a brother and sister that were put... I call them the kids because they're 26, and almost 30. They're not kids, but they were born children into witness protection. They're currently being threatened with, if you don't follow the rules, if you talk out of... If you tell anybody, if you gripe about the program, we're going to deport you back to your country and you will be killed. So that's not a way that it needs to be handled.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Well, that's not right.

Jackee Taylor:

It's not right. I'm worried about these kids. Like I said, am I going to die because I don't have a birth certificate? I don't have my passport current? No.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

But these kids could.

Jackee Taylor:

These kids are afraid of their shadows. I just got a text from the sister today saying, "I have never felt safe in my life." That brings me to tears a little bit because nobody should feel like that.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah, I can't imagine.

Jackee Taylor:

And she's just a kid. And she was born into this because of what her parents did before she was born and afters. And none of those children do. None of us deserve to be swept under the rug and be told that we need to behave and obey or we're going to be killed. Who can speak for this girl now? Because she's afraid of the marshals. I'm not. But I'm not going away. Do I want to work with the marshals now? Yes. I would like to figure out something that we can do together. I have answers. I have solutions. I genuinely care about these people in witness protection. And I cannot say the same for the marshals. And nobody deserves to feel like that. And are we a limited few? Yes. There's only about 10,000 children on WITSEC or grown children like myself. But that's 10,000 people in the United States that are being swept under the rug and have to live a secret scary life where we don't have normal rights as anybody else. Just because we were born to our parents.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

I don't need to take anything away, I think. Is there an element here of healing or making peace with all the crazy things that have happened in your life? Is it trying to add a purpose?

Jackee Taylor:

No. No. I would say this is just more of a mission that I'm the only one who can conquer.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

You can do it. Yeah.

Jackee Taylor:

I had a health scare last month and my kidneys started not functioning properly because of my antidepressant. You know what happens. So you got to switch it around. But I had a very dark couple of days thinking, oh my God, I'm going to die. Oh my God. What if this happens? I got to write out my will. Oh my God. Who are going to... There's nobody else. There's nobody out there that can help these WITSEC kids. What about the WITSEC kids? Oh my God, if I die, who's going to take care of... There's nobody. So I wouldn't call it a burden at all, but I'd like to get on with my fricking life someday. And I can't, until this is all rectified and they start listening, and I'm not going away. I'm using every platform I possibly can. Every person that's willing to, thank you, interview me for their podcast.

Thank you very much, that this is helping.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah.

Jackee Taylor:

Because we're spreading awareness.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Absolutely.

Jackee Taylor:

People had no idea about how we live as people in witness protection. You do not get a new house, you do not get a new car, you do not get a briefcase full of money. You don't even get proper identification. If you listen to the podcast, you'll find out where we are actually put in Billings, Montana. And it was the most nasty hotel that you can possibly imagine. And I always say, I'm no princess. I'll stay at a second rate motel to save money, but I would not stay, I wouldn't put my worst enemy in the hotel that they put us in. It was horrible. And we didn't deserve that. Maybe my father did, but my mother and my brother and sister didn't deserve that.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah. Well you're the-

Jackee Taylor:

We're second class citizens.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

But also just victims that I'm not sure what the right... You're innocent victims, if that makes any sense.

Jackee Taylor:

Collateral damage.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yes. Maybe that's such a shame. May I share, and if there are a lot of lawyers that listened to this, obviously, if anyone had some thoughts or just wanted to become involved, may they reach out to you? I should meet-

Jackee Taylor:

Absolutely, yes.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

If you would like to share some contact information or how they can reach, please feel free. If you want to have them contact us and pass something along, whatever's best for you.

Jackee Taylor:

I mean, anybody can reach me at any time. I'm Jackie Taylor, J-A-C-K-E-E. Taylor. My podcast is Relative Unknown. I have an email, jthood74@hotmail.com. But yeah, I actually need to know what to do with these two kids. I didn't get into it too much, but there's a lot of other people on my agenda that I'm trying to get help for. But these two kids stand out to me because they were issued two year work visa.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

The clock's ticking.

Jackee Taylor:

The clock's ticking on this. And they're constantly being threatened today. Today she was receiving texts from the Marshalls. Well, things are changing with your two year work visas. And that's what she said. She's never felt safe a day in her life. But I need to know, what can we do for these kids? How do we get them their citizenship? Can we claim political asylum? These are the two that I'm focusing on right now. If anybody's out listening that is interested in getting involved or thinks that they might have an answer to my solution or a solution to my problem, or maybe just a suggestion, please reach out to me. Anything. I answer, everybody, I look at every email, I look at every message on Instagram, Facebook, it doesn't matter who it is, I answer everybody. But I really appreciate this opportunity to talk and tell my story.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Well, and you're welcome.

Jackee Taylor:

Our story.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Folks, this is a very sort of different focus for the podcast. And we'd like to shake things up around here and go in different directions, but I encourage you to listen to the podcast. It is just an interesting, crazy story. But I also think at times, I can't go out, at least I feel and and I think a lot of us feel this. We can't go out and necessarily change the world. This is one crazy messed up world right now. We've got the war in Ukraine and at times, these kinds of things seem so overwhelming. And the temptation is just to spur our head a bit, get comfortable, and just move along. I like, and what I've tried to do in my own life personally, I may not be able to change the world, but I can change a little piece of it.

Jackee Taylor:

Yes. That's exactly how I feel.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

The small steps. And I just wanted to share, and I think it's an important... I never knew any of this. I always, I know that Hollywood-

Jackee Taylor:

Oh, those lucky guys got a new house.

Oh they're on WITSEC? Those lucky guys. No.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

[inaudible 00:19:59]. And yeah, that's just not reality. So if any of you out there care and have the time, or some expertise or some insights in how...

Jackee Taylor:

Or if you're bored at three o'clock in the morning,

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

There you go.

Jackee Taylor:

Here's a good subject. Dig into this a little bit.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah. So it's an opportunity to make the world a little bit better, to make a difference in small ways in terms of what you may be able to contribute. But the outcome here can be life changing literally, when we talk about these two kids. So folks, I hope you found something of value and I appreciate your listening in. Again, I encourage you Relative Unknown. I've just enjoyed it. I've been sharing it with friends and family and we're all having just like, wow. Wake up moments. But all right, I'll let you get back to the office. Get back to your day. Have a good one. Thank you. And oh yes, Washington, Jackee. Thank you.

Jackee Taylor:

Oh yes.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

No, thank you for having me.

Jackee Taylor:

You are most welcome.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

And thank you Paul Zuckerman. I love you.

Jackee Taylor:

Bye-Bye all.

 

ALPS In Brief - Episode 67: Going ”Solo” in the Wilderness with Callie Russell

What does herding goats, surviving 3 months in the Canadian tundra, and eating porcupines have to do with practicing law? In this episode, Mark sits down with Callie Russell, star of Alone and Alone Frozen on Netflix, to discuss finding your inner strength and how to find happiness and warmth when everything seems dire. 

Transcript: 

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the risk manager here at ALPS. And welcome to the latest episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. And yes, this is another one where I am back in the mothership, the main office, and it actually is just another gorgeous day here.

I just feel so privileged and excited about our guest today. It's Callie Russell. And Callie was a participant in season seven of Alone. And just had, again, an opportunity to hear her story. And it's just, oh my God, it's just an extraordinary story of what she experienced. And I would also like to say Callie, just an exciting, you're such an authentic person. And just it's an honor and pleasure to be in your presence. You bring such just authenticity to being, I don't know, human or something, to me. So it's again, a pleasure to have you here.

So before we jump in, can you just take a few minutes and share a little bit about yourself with our audience?

Callie Russell:

Sure, of course. Thanks for having me, Mark.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

You're welcome.

Callie Russell:

And I just have to start to say I do have roots in Montana. My father and grandparents and great-grandparents are all from the Flathead Valley. But unfortunately, I went to school down in Arizona, or maybe not unfortunately, it just is-

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

It is what it is.

Callie Russell:

It is what it is. But I would've liked to spend the time in the mountains. I always loved coming up here as a kid. And so growing up, we would go back and forth from Arizona to Montana quite a bit. And growing up down in Phoenix, I didn't have the connection to the food in the land that I was really yearning for as a young person. And I made this pact to myself when I was a teenager. I said, "I'm not going to eat meat until I figure out how to hunt or fish or raise farm animals." And so that led me to be a vegetarian for over a decade. But then it pushed me into the skills that I do now. So I practice ancestral skills, and I teach ancestral skills to children, teenagers, adults. And it all started with me wanting to seek that connection to food, that connection to land.

And so now, for over a dozen years, I've been practicing these skills and I've spent a lot of time out in the wilderness, sometimes by myself, sometimes with teenagers I've worked with and sometimes with my herd of goats. And so now I live, I move around, I'm nomadic a little bit, right? But I'm based up in the Flathead Valley up in Kalispell, and I have a herd of goats and I live off grid there. And my goats are milk goats and pack goats. So they're trained to carry packs. They just allow me to get out into the mountains and disappear out there.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Very cool. And how did you end up on Alone of all things? I'm thinking, and I know the answer to this a little bit already, but this is not something that you were pursuing and just, "Oh, I got to go out and do this." So share, how how'd we get here?

Callie Russell:

Yeah, that's right. I wasn't have any intention to go on a television show. In fact, I was sort of avoiding things like that. I wanted just to live out in the wilderness. That's what I wanted to do. So I was trying to gain the skills that would allow me to stay out in the wilderness for longer and longer periods of time. And I was just out there and I became quite feral really. The casting agent for Alone reached out to me. They found me through a friend of mine who, his name's Jim Knapp, he's a Canadian trapper. And he applied for the show, but then they didn't take him on the show, but they started asking him, "Well, who do you know? Who do you know? And what women do you know?" They were really looking for women because the casting agents were really struggling to find women that had the skills to be a part of a competition like this.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Right. I've seen some episodes of the show, I'd have to be honest to say, not a whole lot. And in part, my wife and I are cord cutters, so we have to be very intentional about what we want to watch. And we've been doing that for many, many years. But the premise of the show, for those of you, you're really placed out in some very rugged uninhabited spaces. And the whole point is to see who can survive how long, and the person that goes the longest, I guess, wins that season.

The stories that you shared today and this whole experience, it really is about survival. And I'd love just to share and have a little conversation about the things that enabled you to survive, the learnings. I loved you shared some things about... How do I want to say this? Some people early on as I sort walked away from all of this, were making lots of mistakes and to where you're tapping out because they're ill, they're sick, and can take them out as well if need be. You went, I won't spoil anything if people want to watch this. But you went a long time. How did you do that? How can you survive? Well, you explain where you were and of the environment you were in. But I loved taking care of your feet, as an example, those kinds of things.

Callie Russell:

Yeah. So we were all dropped... So the season I was on, season seven, took place in the Northwest Territories up in northern Canada. And that's technically the subarctic right there. We're just below the Arctic Circle. And we were dropped in late September, so going into winter, and should we do a spoiler alert here.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

That's okay, we can do a spoiler alert.

Callie Russell:

Spoiler alert. I was out there for 89 days and I got to spend that time really going deep with that land because we don't have any food and there's no camera crew. So everything that we're doing out there, we're self-documenting. And we're dropped very far. There's nine other participants, and we're dropped far out from each other. So we don't see each other, we don't hear each other, we're way far away. So we're out there alone surviving and living off of the land. Anything we want to eat, we have to find it ourselves. And we're self-documenting the whole time. And for me, the reason I think I was able to stay so long was the mindset that I went in there with. And I feel like no matter where you are in life, whether you're in the wilderness or you're in town, whatever, you're doing so much about, life is about mindset and the skills are important. All the skills that we hold and the survival skills that I had in my pocket were important. But I feel like the mindset piece is, there's so much power in that.

And I really went into that experience knowing that the wilderness isn't a place that's out to get me, that's out to hurt me or take advantage of me. I went out there knowing that the wilderness is there to hold me and it's where I come from. It's where humans have lived for much longer than how we're living today. So I knew that I was going back home in a sense. I was going to live and rediscover how humans have lived for so long.

And so I went into this experience with this really open mindset and willing to just let the experience be what it's going to be, and also let the land care for me in a way and know that everything I need is there. And going into the experience with an abundance mindset, not a scarcity mindset that, "Oh, there's not going to be enough and winter's coming and I have to hurry." And I did, I did have to hurry. I had to do a lot before that snow set in. But my mindset was abundance that I know it's going to work out. I know the land will take care of me.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

I love that. It ties into where I want to go to when you were talking about control. And if it were me, now, I obviously don't have the same kind of skills, but I can choose how to look at a situation like this and you can sit and say, "Oh my gosh, winter's coming. I don't have a hot shower. How am I going to get through?" Versus, "I can figure this out." And it's sort of a half glass empty, half glass full kind of approach at the outset.

Callie Russell:

Exactly.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

So let's explore this a little bit in terms of control. You had shared some stories and some insights and I love what you had to say about that.

Callie Russell:

Yeah. That's one of the things, because Alone wasn't my first time spending a large stretch of time alone and the wilderness. I had been spending time in the wilderness, but in places that I knew and was more familiar with the resources and the weather and all that. This definitely was a challenge that pushed me out of my comfort zone in many ways. But the wilderness has taught me, time and time again, that I'm not in control. And getting hit with a hard storm, it showed me how insignificant I am. I do not have any control over the weather. And there's so many big things that I literally have no control over. But I always have a choice. Even though I have no control over most things in life, I always have control over one thing, and that's my personal choice. What lens do I want to look things through?

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yes.

Callie Russell:

How do I want to react? And for me, it's always looking for those doorways instead of walls, looking for how is this glass full, as you say, looking for the silver lining. And so for me, going out there, I was going out there trusting that it was going to work out how it needed to work out and that everything I needed was going to be there. And you also wanted to talk about the self care thing too.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Sure, let's go for it.

Callie Russell:

Okay. So also the wilderness has also showed me that being in the wilderness, a lot of people think that it's this thing, you just have to suffer through it. It's going to be uncomfortable, you're going to be cold, hungry, there's going to be bugs biting you, there's scary bears, it's this miserable sort of thing. And I had learned over the years how to really thrive in the wilderness and it not be the suffer fest be very enjoyable. And I learned how to take care of myself out there. I learned the right clothes to wear, where to camp that's a better place to camp and just things that make it a more enjoyable experience. And I learned that even in the wilderness, having good self care is very important, having good hygiene is important. Making sure you're hydrated all these things. And so I took that knowledge with me on Alone and knowing if I don't take care of myself and do those little self care things every day, that's something that could take me out of this competition.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Right. Am I correct in saying you prioritized the self care over even some of the major tasks that need to be done? Why would you do that?

Callie Russell:

Well, because in my experience, those little things that's in the wilderness, a little cut, you're like, "Oh, it's just a little cut. No worries. I don't need to worry about that." But little cuts can get infected really easily. And then you have this big festering infected wound that actually, now I can't use that hand. I can't hold an ax in that hand anymore because it's swollen. But if I would've just slowed down and taken care of that cut, soaked it in an herbal tea, found some wild yarrow or something, and soaked it in there and took care of that cut right away, it would be no problem. And so it's like that saying, a stitch in time saves nine. If you take care of something right away, you're saving yourself a much bigger problem.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

And let me comment on that just for a minute. Wellbeing is an extremely hot topic and a very, very important topic, particularly in the legal profession. Folks, when we think about the rate of various types of impairments and mental illness and burnout, I think the Callie's story really just underscores the significance, the value of saying, "Okay, I need to make sure that I am putting in, even if it's just a little time every day to take care of myself, to perhaps nurture," you're alone here in this, but nurture support systems, do whatever. Because if you don't focus on yourself at times and do these basics, you are going to end up... It may not be a swollen wrist in the wilderness, but it may be, I don't have the internal strength anymore to deal with all the craziness going on in my professional life and I'm burning out.

So I just want to underscore these little things, even if it's just take a break and have a cup of coffee, take a little time to enjoy the sunrise, the thunderstorms in the area, roll down the window, breathe the air in and listen to that lightning and rain. It's just gorgeous if you ask me. So I want to underscore that point. You had talked too about a time where you really were struggling and you had a moment that... Can we talk about that just briefly?

Callie Russell:

Sure. Yeah. There's a moment out there I had where I was struggling to find food that had fat in it. And I knew if I didn't do that, I would have to leave. And I really didn't want to leave. And it broke me down. I had ,so far up to that point, had been feeling like I was in a pretty positive mindset. Challenges would come up, struggles would come up, but I was okay. I just kept going and could just keep going with it. But this sort of broke me down and I was so sad to think that I would have to leave and it not be my choice to leave. And I had this sort of awakening a moment or a moment, some people might call it a moment of enlightenment or something like that. It was pretty profound. And it's hard to really capture the whole moment in words and be able to retell.

But I was standing on this cliff above this porcupine den that I was really hoping to catch this porcupine. And I kept being very unsuccessful with it. And I realized I was worrying so much about what could happen in the future, something that was out of my control if I was going to be pulled from this competition or not and that I was so sad about that because I wanted to stay. I wanted to keep being out there. And I realized in that moment, I'm so caught up in thinking about what may or may not happen in the future that I was missing out on what I actually wanted, which was just to be present and absorbed in this wilderness experience.

And this lesson I've been taught many times in the wilderness, I'm not in control. But this time it hit me in a whole new way and that, it hit me, I'm not in control. And I actually surrendered to it. Instead of just in my mind being like, okay, I logically understand I'm not in control. But it hit me and I actually surrendered. I let go. I let go of all the things that I'm not in control of. And it just opened so much up for me. It created all this space within myself. And I was actually sort of freed from my own mind and able to be present in that moment and see and experience life in a way I never had before.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

I love that. Why that spoke to me, I'm not a person that sort of believes in predestined fate and all this stuff, but I do believe that life, there are different ways to describe this, but things happen for a purpose. Things happen for a reason. We need to learn to listen to them and be open to where life is taking this and all this. And my point to all this is people have said to me at times, "Mark, you need to learn how to be present in the moment." And there's the mindfulness movement and I've never really gotten that. But what you explained when I was listening to it during your presentation and here now again, you really do a very good job. Just the light went on. That's what it means to be present in the moment, just to experience this now. No agendas, no worries, and just be in the grace, just enjoy. This is here and now. So I thank you for that. For one, it's just like, okay, little light went on there.

Callie Russell:

Yeah, it's amazing. I just realized I was the only thing in the way of what I wanted in that moment. What I wanted was to be really immersed in this wilderness experience. And I was there, but I was preventing myself from being fully immersed because I was worrying about the future. And when I realized that and was actually able to just let go of what may or may not happen in the future, I was actually able to get the exact thing which that I wanted, which was be there. And it's just so profound to realize I was the one... We always sort look elsewhere to blame circumstances and for what's going on and why things aren't working out. But just to realize every single day, I am the only one that gets to choose if I have a good day or not. I'm the one who gets to choose if I'm enjoying myself. And it doesn't matter the circumstances, all the circumstances, I'm not in control of all that. The only thing I get to choose is I still get to choose if I'm going to enjoy my day.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

And again, the circumstance of being in Alone and doing all this, I mean, what an extraordinary experience. But I think these kinds of lessons, learnings are applicable to all of us. I don't need to be alone pushing boundaries like you did in such an extraordinary way. But we all have our challenges every single day and there's a lot of things we can't control. Even as simple as just like, "Gosh, there's just too much traffic and I'm late to get to the hearing," or whatever it might be. But we can control how we respond to that, what we do with it. And to me that's very empowering because it keeps the world in perspective.

What would you say, wrapping some things up here, what are the takeaways? The growth, we've talked about some of this, but when you sit and say, okay, this was an extraordinary experience, 10, 20, 30 years from now, when you look back on this, how did you change? What growth was there for you? What's truly important out of all of this?

Callie Russell:

Well, one thing is I was started this path of learning these ancestral skills because I wanted freedom. I wanted the freedom to be able to go out into the mountains and be able to find food and take care of myself and live how our ancestors used to live. I wanted that sense of freedom. But practicing all this stuff, I realize true freedom is actually within myself, it's within my mind. And it doesn't matter how many skills I have, it depends on the thoughts that I'm thinking. The thoughts that I'm thinking are what allowed me to feel free or not free.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Got it, got it.

Callie Russell:

Yeah, the essence of true freedom.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah.

Callie Russell:

And another thing with working with these skills, spending time in the wilderness and working with these skills is that it's really easy to feel alone in our world. And a lot of people ask me, "Oh, when you were on the show called Alone and you were all alone in the wilderness and it was negative 40 and you only had rabbits to eat, weren't you so lonely? How did you deal with the loneliness?" And I said, "I actually didn't feel lonely out there at all. I felt way more lonely when I was a teenager surrounded by people. I felt way more lonely when I was in college trying to get through college." And I was around people all the time. I was extremely lonely because I didn't have the sense of connection that I wanted, sense of connection with community, with other people, but also with other species.

There's a term that's been coined by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she's an author, called species loneliness. And that we as humans experience species loneliness because our culture, we're sort of brought up not really knowing about the natural world as much. So we don't know the different names, the different species of birds and the different species of trees, even the ones we're around all the time. And once you start making those connections with the natural world, you start to realize we're all connected and we're all a part of things. And working with this stuff is allowed me that sense of connection and time on the show has allowed me that sense of connection. And I think that it's just the web that we're all a part of and realizing we're not alone. We're not alone on our little island. We're all together, we're on the same island, we're in the same boat. And just opening up to that is, I think, so powerful and it feels so good and I'm so happy to be experiencing that and I'm so happy to be sharing that connection with other people.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Folks, one of the things that, because this is an audio podcast, there's lots of things you can't see, but during the presentation that Callie just gave here, we got to see a lot of screenshots and things from the TV show and some slides and things. Trust me when I say that this environment is beyond extreme. Just crazy, snow, cold. She's wrapped up on all kinds of stuff. But at the same time, she showed some photos of the space that she made that eventually even using her word, became home. And it's extraordinary. Rocks, they're flat rocks and she found some clay. I'm thinking mud. And builds a fireplace. And this space is gorgeous.

Now still, it can get 40 below. This is not glamping. But the thing that struck me throughout the entire presentation are these wonderful just glowing smiles and the ability to find the connection and to celebrate and appreciate all that's going on. I never heard you say... Life threw a lot of challenges at you. But as you said, "I'm not looking at the walls, I'm looking for the exits, the doors to keep moving forward." And to me it gets back to just, you are a living, breathing model for me in terms of saying you listen to your life at a level I think most people will never get to. And I just think that's awesome.

But I want you listening to us, folks... I can get emotional about this. She spoke to me in a very deep way. The ability to just see the beauty, appreciate the moment in the face of what so many of us would say is just adversity we could never even manage. But she also stepped in, she took the time to learn the skills. I'm rambling here a little bit. But to me, I guess I'd say it's a message of hope, it's a message of reminding us who really is in control. It's life. And other people can throw all kinds of things at us and we can't control that, but we can control how we respond. And ultimately, that's true control. So I hope you found something of value ina all of this stuff. But Callie, thank you so much for taking a little time to visit with us. Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share? Anything?

Callie Russell:

Well, just another thing on what you're saying, the resilience of the human spirit.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Okay. Yes.

Callie Russell:

And we all have that. Some people think, "Oh, I would never be able to do that." But I think we all surprise ourselves when we're actually thrown into a challenging situation that we all have a resilient human spirit. And when we are thrown into a thing that we think we can't do and we try to do it anyway, there's so much joy and empowerment coming through that other side. And so to embrace. Embrace that discomfort, embrace getting out of the comfort zone and knowing that we are all stronger than we think we are. And I know me going through that experience when I started, I didn't think it was something that I'd be able to do. It felt like it was too big for me. But I went through anyway and I came out the other end feeling very empowered and realizing I'm stronger than I thought I was.

And I think it's the case for everybody. And so I think that's an important piece. And I think sometimes too knowing, when the life I was living before I started following that pull. I kind of felt this tug on my heart or my soul or something that was like, you need to be doing something else. Before I started listening to that, that I could have kept struggling through the job that I had, or the work that I was doing. But I knew there's a kind of difference between having a hard situation and overcoming it and keeping yourself in a hard... You're creating that hard situation that you know isn't good for you too. And having that courage to say, "Hey, this isn't the kind of struggle that I need in my life. What can I do to change it? How can I change my life so it feels better for me?" And I think that ties into the self care piece.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I appreciate that. Wow. Again, so much stuff. Again, wrapping all this up, to me, Callie's story and experiences is truly at the end of a day, a message of hope that when any of us are facing challenging times, get overwhelmed with work, struggling with whatever our personal demons are, take it one step at a time. Understand you are in control of you, how you respond. Look for the exits or look for the doors.

Callie Russell:

Doorways.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Because that's how you grow. And I do, I love this message and you found this, discovered it yourself in very awesome meaningful ways. We all have strengths in us and we just don't know. So have a little faith. Put that smile on, put your feet in the grass, just start moving and good things will come. So again, folks, thanks for listening. I hope you have a good one. And I look forward to listening with you next time on ALPS In Brief.

Callie Russell:

And get outside.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

And get outside. I love it. Thanks, Callie. Okay folks, bye-bye.

 

ALPS In Brief – Episode 65: Saying ”Hell Yes” with Megan Hottman

In this episode of ALPS in Brief, Mark sits down with Megan Hottman, the Cyclist Lawyer. At the age of 29, she did what people told her was not possible — she hung her own shingle and formed Hottman Law Office (HLO), aka "TheCyclist-Lawyer.com." This practice, she says, "is the perfect combination of passion and profession — love of cycling and legal education culminated in this practice; I'm doing what I was meant to do." Hear how Megan blazed her own trail, what's next, and how to know when to say "hell yes."

Transcript:

MARK BASSINGTHWAIGHTE:

Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the Risk Manager here at ALPS, and welcome to the latest episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. For those of you that have listened to my various stories and podcasts over the years, I had a short series called, Listening to Your Life. And that was telling some stories about cycling. I've done a fair amount of cycling over the years and it's a way I stay in shape and so enjoyed it, particularly in 2020 when we had the shutdown. And boy, that's how I dealt with cycling, or the shutdown, just getting out and putting on a lot of miles. That summer I put in, I think it was over 2,200 miles. So that was quite a summer.

I also have an interest in niche practices. Years ago, I spent many, many years doing some consulting work and have worked with over 1200 firms all over the country. And one of my favorite practices was a niche practice of guy up in Alaska that specialized in dog sled law. And I actually pulled up to the firm in the summertime and there was maybe two parking spaces, but there are about 15 spaces for dog sled teams. It was just an interesting, interesting story, or I should say, interesting experience.

So all of that kind of plays into my guest and conversation we're going to have today. I'm so pleased to be able to welcome Megan Hottman. She is an attorney in Colorado, but I really want you folks to have the opportunity to hear and enjoy listening to Megan. So Megan, please welcome to the podcast and if you want to take a couple of moments and just share anything and everything about yourself. What do people need to know?

MEGAN HOTTMAN:

Well, thank you for having me. What do the people need to know? Well, everyone wants to know how I became The Cyclist Lawyer. And the truth is that I was a cyclist and a lawyer and I became someone who wanted to represent cyclists in my law practice. So that unfolded really just a confluence of events, you might say. I was a baby lawyer, kind of fresh out of law school and I was also an aspiring bike racer chasing the professional bike racing dream. And I wasn't sure how to put the two together because both are very time demanding and energy demanding. And long story short, people that I raced bikes with and against at events knew I was an attorney but had no idea what area of law I practiced in. But a few of them would ask me at events, "Hey, I was hit by a car while I was training. I have no idea what kind of law you do, but is that something you could help me with?"

And I realized that working for people that shared this passion of mine for two wheels, life on two wheels, was very compelling and interesting to me and helping them try to get back in the saddle after having been involved in a collision with motorists. That really is how the practice unfolded back in 2010. And I was scared to death, of course, to start my own practice. I was 29, I'd been out of law school for five years and people said, "Well, you can't start a practice of your own that soon. That's not how this works." And I just felt that to do it the way I wanted to do it and to simultaneously be able to chase my bike racing dreams, I really couldn't work for someone else and be on someone else's schedule, I needed to be on my own schedule. So that's how this whole adventure began. And here we are, 12 and a half years later.

MARK:

That's really interesting because again, I was referring to this dog sled lawyer and a fascinating guy, but it was the same kind of thing. He was a racer, passion, enjoyed it. And other people, he got to know that the circuits and well, I have this problem or that problem in racing. And it's just this kind of organic evolution. And I love that. Folks, this is obviously an audio podcast here and I've had the pleasure of meeting Megan in Missoula at a corporate event earlier this year, but I am so struck by the joy and the passion that you see in her face when she talks about what has happened and her life.

And why I think that's important, I like that you were taking risks and really wanted to go this way. But when I hear your story and interact, I'm trying to remember the name of that, there's a Disney movie where a guy goes out and plays baseball. It's a true story, Disney eyes, but he's a high school coach down in Texas and he ends up trying out for the majors and makes it. But as he's in the minors working up to the majors, he just talks about, "I can't believe. Guess what I get to do today? I get to play baseball." And I see that in you. It seems to me you very much enjoy what you're doing and have found. The one thing I want to say folks is Megan took some risks, but they were so calculated and good risks to take because of the interest and the passion. And I just want you to hear, because I believe niche practices can be very, very successful. Not only financially, but in terms of the lifestyle, the wellness. Would you tend to agree with that, Megan?

MEGAN:

Yeah. I don't even know so much that it's a niche practice conclusion so much as it is doing something that really lights you up more than just the billable hour or the money in the bank. And that's true for everyone, whether they're an attorney or someone else. And even if your job doesn't light you up, having hobbies outside of your job that light you up. I think it's critical more than ever now these days, more than ever. And I'm a big fan of Dan Buettner's work, the Blue Zones, and he talks about what some of the common factors are among people that live to the age of 100 and are in good health. And one of the big ones, in addition to healthy diet, daily movement, a community of people that you are close to, is having a sense of purpose.

And so we can all go to work and punch a paycheck, a pay clock, and work our nine to five or whatever, and that's important. Sure, we need to pay for our homes and our meals and support our families.

MARK:

Absolutely.

MEGAN:

And I felt the calling to it needed to be more than that for me to be successful. In this profession, it needed to be really compelling and important to me. And in addition to serving these cyclists all these years it, I think, understandably grew into a desire to make cycling safer and really within a couple years getting that clarity that my ultimate goal is to put myself out of business. And if we've made cycling so safe that cyclists aren't hit anymore and don't need lawyers like me, that would be the biggest win and the biggest victory ever.

MARK:

Yes.

MEGAN:

And like you, a lot of people came to the bike or came back to the bike during COVID. We really saw this massive bike boom. Actually worked part-time at a bike shop in 2020 just to help one of our local shops out. And the lines of customers were around the block on both sides of the building.

MARK:

Wow.

MEGAN:

Couldn't believe it.

MARK:

Yeah.

MEGAN:

And we had hoped that COVID was going to be the rebirth of cycling for the US and a re-appreciation for how it can be not just a tool for fitness and recreation, but for transportation. And it gave us a lot of hope. And instead, we've unfortunately seen a real change in motorist behavior and everyone is sensing it. There's just an increase of rage and frenzy and anxiety. People are driving fast and reckless and maliciously and we've actually seen a huge uptick really since 2021 in this area, unfortunately.

MARK:

Yeah, that's sad. It doesn't surprise me. My wife and I were in Montana for many, many years and just within the past year we've moved down to central Florida and I still try to ride and I get out, but I will tell you... And I've talked to, we found a physician down here, a really nice guy, and he bikes a little bit, saying, "This is a very, very dangerous area to bike," and for this very reason. The drivers are just crazy. And I see some folks out going, "They need to take a course from Megan because this is not where you want to ride." Just, oh my gosh.

Well that's, talk a little more about the evolution of your practice.

MEGAN:

Yeah.

MARK:

You have these two passions and there's this organic kind of start. How did you though really finesse that to move from, this is an idea, this is a passion? And I think I know the answer based on some of the things you've just been sharing. But it's one thing to have people say, "Can you help out a little bit and do all that?" and turn that in to a full-time practice where you can pay the bills and where you can... I assume you have some staff or others that you work with. Are you solo?

MEGAN:

Yep. Nope, I did have a team. I'm in the process of scaling down, but we did have a team. I was the only attorney, but support staff. Yes.

MARK:

Okay, so how do you get there?

MEGAN:

Well, whether you're in a niche practice or a niche profession or not, one thing I quickly realized was you still want to be really intentional about who you're serving. And early on in our startup, as anyone is in startup mode of any business, you take whatever comes in the door and you're just thrilled that people want to hire you. And so you're a bit of a basket case, you're responding to everything and it's, "Oh, you want me to jump? How high?" kind of mentality. And that's fine for the first couple years. It's not sustainable, but that's part of any startup. And then at least for me, I started to get some clarity on, okay, yes, I want to represent cyclists. But within that group of people there's a subset, there's a specific type of case or a specific type of client that we really want to represent.

For example, I don't find certain types of bike injury cases compelling because I'm so focused on changing motorist behavior that I tend to be less interested, let's say in a cyclist on cyclist collision, on a bike path. That can still be very bad and still someone's at fault, but that is less interesting to me because I'm really more concerned with how do we change the motoring public's perception of cycling. Or if someone rides their bike into wet concrete in a construction zone for example. There's definitely a claim there and someone probably made a mistake. I don't find that interesting because again, I started to get clear on what are the bigger changes and impacts I wanted to have.

And even drilling down within that subset and saying, is there an opportunity here to mobilize the media for the greater good? Does this case lend itself to us going to the legislature and asking for some new laws on this particular topic or in this type of instance? Does this lend itself to us leveraging state or city financial resources to put in new infrastructure to prevent this type of thing happening again? And so just getting really clear on, yes, this particular client certainly deserves their compensation for this horrible thing that has happened to them, but can we make the impact broader than just that client?

And then all along the way, sort of taking stock of, okay, have I let myself now get so spun up and so caught up in the business frenzy that I'm no longer living the life that I want to live myself. And that's easy to do too. I don't care how passionate you are about the subject matter, you can take the entrepreneurial mindset and you can let it get totally out of hand and then it can consume you. And suddenly, you wake up and you say, "Whose life is this that I'm living?" I'm making more money than I ever thought I'd make. I've reached all my goals. This is exciting and amazing and oh my goodness, this is so exhilarating, and yet I'm not riding my bike suddenly. Or my health isn't good, my sleep is breaking down, I'm not managing my own stress very well. What's going on here? So I think it's important to ask those questions too.

MARK:

And I agree. Wellness is a big issue for me in terms of what I do and what I've seen. So many people, attorneys and non attorneys alike, when we talk about malpractice, they want to know, "What are the big mistakes?" And those are important things to look at, but it's not the right question. I'm more interested in why the mistakes occur. And that gets into wellness. There are so much of the malpractice and even the disciplinary issues that are out there have some, more often than not, have some impairment component.

MEGAN:

Yes.

MARK:

Whether it's dementia, stress, burnout, addictions, all kinds of things. That's why the clients might have got neglected. I struggle with depression and on and on, and all these different things. So how did you balance all that? Were there things, as you start to ask yourselves these questions, am I still living the dream or is this getting a little cloudy?

MEGAN:

Great question.

MARK:

What did you do? What was your response?

MEGAN:

There's a couple prongs that I'd like to respond to in that. One is I noticed I was drinking too much. Nothing that affected my work, thankfully, but more than I wanted to be drinking myself. It certainly was affecting my ability to perform as an athlete. Even if you just go to social events and you have a couple glasses of wine, it totally makes your sleep garbage. And then you're just a dull down version of yourself the next day. So just noticing that I was less sharp than I wanted to be, I was less of an athlete than I wanted to be. I just really realized, my goodness, I am diminishing my own capacity with this thing that is such a central pillar of this profession. Between lawyers and entrepreneurs, everything is alcohol centric it seems.

And just decided I wasn't going to engage in that kryptonite for myself anymore because I live a pretty clean, healthy life otherwise. And especially with my focus on getting good sleep, which I do believe is the foundation for a good human existence and experience, here I am undermining even my own sleep with this socialization around alcohol.

So I quit drinking in the end of 2017, very much on purpose with those things in mind. And no surprise, 2018 was an exceptional year business wise, bottom line sword, I rode 10,000 miles on my bike that year.

MARK:

Wow.

MEGAN:

I competed in numerous big bike events, a lot of them on a single speed, 150, 200 mile gravel bike events. And everything went exceptionally well that year. And I thought, wow, this is what it's like when I'm actually firing on all cylinders. This is really great. And I still don't drink. And I preach the sort of alcohol free life. Not in a sense that I think alcohol is bad per se, or I'm not trying to be the fun police, I just do think it's important for us to call into question why we are so socially accepting of something that is so damaging. And in this particular profession, that 2016 Betty Ford study, that's been many years now already, that's six years old, one in three lawyers is a problem drinker. That is terrifying. And yet, when I am at legal events, I have to tell you, I conclude the same thing in my observations.

MARK:

I absolutely agree. Yeah, it's been my experience too in a lot of the things, you get involved around the country, the annual conventions, bar conventions and whatnot, you bet.

MEGAN:

You see it. So on that note, really where your question I think was going was how do you stay in alignment?

MARK:

Right.

MEGAN:

And for me, I personally, I'm not a psychologist, I am not a substance abuse professional or expert, but I personally believe that the reason our substance abuse is so high in this profession is because there's a lot of things that we are not acknowledging and addressing as lawyers and as a profession that inherently drives people to numb out because it is so overwhelming and it is so hard to face. One thing I've really become keen on observing and noticing and learning more about is secondary trauma because I work in the personal injury space. We observe people's trauma in these horrific situations. We don't just cut them on the emergency table, stitch them up, and then go on to the next patient. We live with these clients and their stories for years and we have to convey it effectively as a storyteller at trial.

And so we take on, whether we mean to or not, a lot of that trauma ourselves, vicarious trauma, secondary trauma. And no one's teaching us this and no one's even telling us, here are the warning signs that you're getting too much of that in your life, in your practice. So it does not surprise me that a lot of lawyers turn to substance to try and just numb out for a little bit.

And I'll finish this thought by just by saying I pride myself as being someone who doesn't really numb out, especially once I quit drinking. It was like I'd rather confront stuff head on and say, "What's really going on here?" And as my practice unfolded into year seven, year eight, a lot of that trauma started to catch up with me. A couple cyclists that I knew very well were hit and killed, and I'm involved in their cases. And then that became really overwhelming. And I thought, "What's wrong with me? Why are other lawyers seemingly managing this far better than I am?" And it really started to knock me down pretty hard core. I was planning to take sabbatical at the beginning of 2020, but that's right when COVID started. It was supposed to be March of 2020. And I knew that I needed to punch out for a little bit because I could tell that things weren't okay. That was before I knew about secondary trauma.

And what I've come to realize since, because I was hit by a car this June 5th and very badly injured, was in a wheelchair and relegated to a walker, there were no walks, there were no bike rides, there were no yoga classes, there was no van adventuring, all the things that I really love to do that light me up worked, it's full stop. And I realized in part that those things are a bit of a numbing behavior for me. That is kind of how I escape the stresses of this work.

And so when you strip all those numbing agents away and you really are forced to confront the discomfort. What I've concluded is most of us will go to great lengths to avoid that. It's very uncomfortable. We will look to anything else, whether it's shopping or what have you, as a distraction. And so my advice for lawyers would be to start honoring those nudges because there is something in us that knows when something's not right. And if you're tempted to say, "Oh my God, I really need some wine, I've had a horrible day," or "I can't wait to take the edge off" or what have you, you can still go do that if you feel called to that. But first, ask the question why, what's going on inside me that's got me stolen knots, and pay attention to that.

MARK:

Yeah, yeah. Well said. And I absolutely agree. You had talked too a bit about getting involved in education and trying to do some things to change laws. And I believe there's been some charity work you've been involved at too. Was that intentional, in terms of even if just an organic involvement? I'm not sure else to describe it, but it was that part of the growth of the practice process? Was that part of just a desire to give back? Was that part of trying to keep things, and I really don't like the word balance, but to try to maintain sense of purpose and well-being? How did all that come about?

MEGAN:

Sure. Early on, when I started my practice and started to realize some success, it's incredibly exhilarating to make great money. We're not going to candy coat that. That's why we went to law school, most of us. We'd like to live the lawyer lifestyle. And when you start cashing in on big cases, that's incredibly exhilarating and affirming and it's quite a rush. And for me, that was really great for a few years of just saying, "Wow, this is cool." This has this capacity and I got really involved in real estate and I'm super passionate about real estate stuff. That didn't last very long for me. Yes, you still need to earn money and pay the bills for sure. But then I started to say, well I've now had 20 or 30 or 40 clients hit in bike lanes. What the hell's the point of having a bike lane if we're not going to offer any legal protection for people in bike lanes as one example.

And that really climaxed when I got hit myself in a bike lane in 2019 and I thought, well we've gone to all the trouble to put this on the road and paint the lane and paint it white. And yet, I still got hit here in broad daylight. We need some legal protection. So that prompted myself to partner with one of our legislators to write a bike lane bill here in Colorado, which says that motorists must yield to cyclists in bike lanes. So duh, but the law didn't exist before that. Similarly, with some of my other clients, just starting to observe, we're not being treated fairly by the district attorneys. There's no real prosecution happening of these drivers. No one's losing a driver's license, no one's getting any real punishment, there's no lesson being learned. These drivers aren't suffering whatsoever for the carnage that they're leaving in their wake.

And so started getting more and more involved in the criminal and the traffic cases of my clients, even though that's not part of my civil representation, that I'm not being paid for that part. But as far as the greater good, if there's no prosecution of drivers who harm cyclists, what are we doing here? For me to just move money from insurance companies into client's pockets, yes, that's part of the process, but it needed to be more than that for me.

So started to get involved in educating law enforcement, teaching them what the rules say. Whether they agree with it or not, this is what our legislature has decided. And taking that into teaching bike shops and bike teams what their obligations are so that we can be following the laws as cyclists, talk to several driving schools to teach driving instructors what the laws require as they're teaching our youth how to drive, trying to approach it from all angles of let's make safer cyclists, let's make safer motorists, let's make safer roads. And the truth is that there's advocacy organizations whose entire purpose in all day, every day is focused on lobbying and getting money for the infrastructure in our cities. And so that's the lane that they swim in. I don't need to be in that lane. That's what they do. So I decided to focus on the legal side of things and either writing the laws or dealing with the punishment in the criminal cases because that's of course more uniquely suited to my skillset.

MARK:

Well, as a guy out there on the road at times and enjoying as a fellow cyclist, nowhere near your level, but there's just something about riding.

MEGAN:

Amen.

MARK:

It's a quiet place. And when you're out, really just riding. Around here, I'm still learning and I'm going to have to get a bike rack till some other trails get built. What's coming is going to be awesome, but we're a few years away yet.

MEGAN:

Gotcha.

MARK:

But also thank you for the work that you do. I've always said to even our kids, we can't necessarily change the world, but boy, we can do something in our little corner of it. And if enough of us work on our little corner of it, we can accomplish some great things at a larger level.

MEGAN:

That's exactly right.

MARK:

So that's awesome. Well, you had talked a little bit about slowing down a bit. May I ask, what's next? Where are you going?

MEGAN:

Yeah, great question. I remain open to what the universe directs me towards. It's really cool how just being open, it does open doors to things. I think it's really fun too to just say, why not be curious? Rather than immediately disregard things that seem impractical, why not just see what comes in and what I can call in for myself. I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with a lawyer out on the East Coast that wants to hire me as a bike expert in his case. And I love doing that work, helping other lawyers improve their case for the cyclists that they represent. And adding my unique expertise as an expert for them has been great.

So I'm doing some of that work. And I'm also coaching other lawyers, specifically those who have formed their own firms, to really help them try to get clarity on what their ideal life and how they want this to look and how they want this firm to serve them in the hopes that I can help them avoid some of the pitfalls that I've mentioned for myself, where we get so spun up in it, we kind of forget why we started. So I'm coaching a handful of lawyers and I really enjoy that.

And as you mentioned, I got to speak at the event for you guys in July. I really enjoy doing keynote speaking and those things seem to pop up once or twice a quarter and that's really fun. I do still have my current caseload that I am still in the process of finishing up, and whether I fully withdraw or retreat or not is not clear to me just yet. But I have felt really called here in the front range of Colorado, just the summer specifically, to take on a few cases pro bono, some really heinous hit and run cases.

MARK:

Oh my gosh.

MEGAN:

Two very serious injury cases and one a death case where we have drivers hitting cyclists and leaving the scene, which is just so appalling. I can't even conceive of that. And unfortunately, does often involve impairment of these drivers. So they're not in their right minds, but that's not an excuse. So trying to help those families through the process has been really rewarding for me as I've been recovering from my own collision.

MARK:

And is cycling still in your future? You're going to come back and get back on the bike and keep going?

MEGAN:

Absolutely. Yeah. You probably have to cut my bikes up into little tiny pieces to keep me off of them. One of my favorite things in life is to bike commute. I've really designed a life for myself here in Golden, which is a little subset of Denver. It's a little kind of small town feel, home of Coors and the School of Mines. It's a great place to live if you want to ride your bike everywhere. And so I really, within a 10 mile radius, can do basically everything that I need to do in my life. And that's been one of the things I've missed the most from this collision and these injuries. And I don't know what that looks like going forward because commuting does involve quite a bit of being on the road. I've grown to just love my e-bike for commuting. My car sits in the garage.

Like you mentioned, being on the bike is just such a special time. And then to be able to pair that with a trip that you need to make anyway is just so fulfilling for me. Right now, I am cleared to do a little bit of e-bike rehab. So I've just been doing that on the bike paths, just to keep the knee continuing to come back full strength.

MARK:

Good.

MEGAN:

And that's great for me right now because there's no cars and I can enjoy that. But the truth is that bike paths don't usually get us most places that we need to go and want to go. So it's more of a joy ride.

MARK:

Yeah, I get that. Well, I really appreciate your taking a little time out of your day to visit with us. I will give you a chance, if you have any additional final thought in terms of wisdom you'd like to pass along, you want to share any information about your book, contact info. Whatever you feel comfortable sharing, you've got the last word.

MEGAN:

Okay, cool. Well, my Instagram is where I put out most of my content. And so if people are interested in following along, my Instagram handle is, @cyclist_lawyer, or my website is meganhottman.com. Megan, M-E-G-A-N, Hottman, H-O-T-T-M-A-N.com. Those are great places to find me and contact me if something I've said is calling to you.

As far as words of wisdom, I think I would say yes, we go to law school to be lawyers. That's usually the outcome, that's the objective. But if someone in this profession feels that it's no longer serving them, I would encourage them to give themselves permission to say it's totally okay to pivot. And everything that we learn in law school and everything that we learn in this profession is so beneficial in so many other lines of work.

We've really moved past being a population that picks the one thing and sticks with it for 50 years and then retires. We're really not that anymore. And I don't think lawyers need to expect that's the way either. So if you're sensing that something's not right and it's getting louder and louder, I think what I would also say is that the universe will get your attention. And if you choose not to listen, usually the outcome can be quite drastic. And so it's important to listen to those nudges when they're the size of little pebbles or little rocks before they grow into boulders and meteors. There's something in you that's trying to get your attention and it typically doesn't go away until you acknowledge it and face it full on.

MARK:

And you're a perfect example of the success that can come in so many ways, choosing to listen to your life. And that's how I have said it over the years. But that's wonderful. Well, I wish you all the best in your recovery and whatever the coming chapters in your life hold. I look forward to hearing in future how this all evolves.

MEGAN:

I can't wait to find out too.

MARK:

I get that. All right. Well folks, thank you for listening. I hope you found something of value and I encourage you to check out Megan on Instagram or her website. There's just a lot of really good information on her website, I'll tell you that too, as a risk guy. So that's it, thanks for listening. Megan, it's been a pleasure.

MEGAN:

Same with you. Thank you.

MARK:

Bye all.

 

ALPS In Brief — Episode 65: Cybersecurity Services for Solo and Small Law Firms

In this episode of ALPS In Brief, Mark and the founders of Sensei Enterprises discuss cybersecurity options and support for solo and small law firms. Somebody's got to take care of you and that's just what they do.

Transcript:

MARK BASSINGTHWAIGHTE:

Hello, I am Mark Bassingthwaighte, the risk manager here at ALPS, and welcome to ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I am back from a trip into the home office in Missoula, and back in the satellite office here in Florida, and have with me two folks that I've just had the joy and pleasure of getting to know over the years, and the privilege to work with a few times over the years at various ABA events, and it's just been a lot of fun.

MARK:

Please help me in welcoming Sharon Nelson and John Simek. Sharon and John are President and Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, which is really the heart of the topic we're going to talk about today. Before we jump into some of the questions and things I'd like us to visit about Sharon and John, may I have each of you take a couple of minutes and share whatever you'd like to share about yourselves? What would help our listeners get to know you a bit better?

SHARON NELSON:

I'll start, and then I'll turn it over to John. What we do at Sensei Enterprise is managed information technology, managed cybersecurity services, and digital forensics. We have three branches, and that means we're running a fire station without a Dalmatian here, so there's always emergencies. It gets very difficult to keep all the balls in the air. We are also married with six children and 10 grandchildren. We're together all day and all night too.

MARK:

I love it.

JOHN SIMEK:

You didn't tell [inaudible 00:01:53], you're a lawyer though.

SHARON:

Oh well.

JOHN:

Do they care?

SHARON:

Maybe. John is the veteran technologist and I am the lawyer, and that's why we decided to work together when we started the company some 25 years ago, more than that now, just a little bit. John was the talent and I was the lawyer/marketer who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, so that worked out really well for us both.

JOHN:

I'm not a lawyer, as you can probably tell. I'm an engineer by degree, and been involved in technology informally even before the internet. I remember that presidential candidate that was trying to create [inaudible 00:02:40]. Whatever, but back in the days of the modems and all that stuff. But I have a lot of technical certifications, formal training as well. I guess a lot of people think that I should be wearing a pocket protector and have a propeller head. But yeah, as Sharon said, I do the technology stuff, testifying expert as well, because of the forensics and all that. I just got done with a deposition a couple weeks ago that was really entertaining, at least to me, but not for the other attorney.

SHARON:

That's how it's always supposed to turn out. I forgot to say Mark, that I was the President of the Virginia State Bar a few years ago. That was [inaudible 00:03:25].

JOHN:

That's how we ended up in Montana one year.

SHARON:

Yeah, that's how we ended up coming to see you folks out in Montana.

MARK:

Indeed. That's right. That was a good time.

SHARON:

It was a wonderful time.

JOHN:

I did go fishing when we were out there.

MARK:

There we go. Boy, there's no place better. You want to talk about some quiet country time on the river with a fly? A lot of fun. One of the things that I've never really visited with you guys about, I'm genuinely very interested. Sharon, you've talked, years ago, you've been a lawyer for quite some time. How did you make this jump? Was that always the plan to go into this Sensei Enterprise type business, the alternative practice, a non-traditional track if you will? How did this all come about?

SHARON:

Life is full of accidents. As I was a young [inaudible 00:04:22].

JOHN:

We're experts at that.

SHARON:

Oh yeah. When my first child was born, her condition required me to stay home through several surgeries and several years. She's fine, but I ended up working from home as a lawyer. And then, later on after I had been a lawyer and been seriously involved in the Bar Association, I had this very nice man who taught technology to anyone at colleges, and he was helping me computerize my law practice back in the '80s. I was pretty wired up for a solo. But then, he got relocated because of his job, and I said, "What am I going to do without you?" And he said, "Well, I've got this friend down the street, and he's really brilliant, but he's a pain in the butt." And he said, "But I'll set up a lunch, and if you can stand him, then he could do a better job even than me."

SHARON:

I met him for lunch, I could stand him, and so, we started out with him helping me with my law practice technology. Ultimately, he had always wanted his own company, and he just looked at me one day and said, "You know, I could be the talent of a company, and you're a lawyer, and you can sell anybody anything, so why don't we hook up and form a company?" And that's how we got started.

MARK:

Wow. That's awesome. I love that. I love that. Oh my. Can you tell me a little bit about the types of services? You can a little highlight or overview, but can we dig in a little bit in terms of the types of services that you offer? I'm also interested, how would you describe your typical client? I know that you do a lot of work I think with businesses that are not just... You're not limiting your services in other words to law firms. Is what you have to offer, would it be useful, beneficial to solo small firm lawyers around the country?

SHARON:

We actually are devoted to solo small firm lawyers, not that they are an exclusive client roster. We have a client that has over a thousand people.

JOHN:

Not a legal entity.

SHARON:

No, not a legal entity. But in any event, we do all sizes. But we have a special feeling in our hearts for the needs of the solo small, because most companies are not interested in them. They don't really want them, because they can't get much of a profit out of them.

JOHN:

They might have some minimum. Unless you've got 10 bodies or more, they're not interested to even talk to you.

SHARON:

And so, somebody has got to take care of these people, so we really specialize in finding cost-effective things that they can use to do what they need to do. That's been something that we've been celebrated for, is that we do take care of solo and smalls along with the bigger firms. It's been a mix, Mark, and I really feel strongly about that because I was a solo myself, and I know how hard it was to get competent help and to get things that you could afford. And now that cybersecurity is so important, it's really critical that the solo and small firms have people to guide them in a way that's budget-friendly, because this stuff can be really expensive.

MARK:

Yeah, I'm well aware. What types of services can you help? If I'm just a solo stuck here in Florida, or Montana, or Iowa, what can you do for me?

JOHN:

Basically, we do an assessment, an initial assessment, come in there to see what you've got going, and is it appropriate? Should we forklift some things? Are you in the Cloud even? Because today, it's so much more affordable and flexible to be in the Cloud.

SHARON:

And secure, more secure.

JOHN:

Maybe you should be considering that. We do have some clients that are remote, up in Massachusetts as well as down the coast, and we can do a lot of things remotely. Sometimes though, you do have to have boots on the ground, and some folks might have a local person if they need hands-on to something. But generally no, we can get equipment, we can figure it, we can ship it, do all that. But essentially, get you in a position where you're a heck of a lot more secure with your technology.

SHARON:

And you're getting good recommendations from us about what [inaudible 00:09:08].

JOHN:

Stability, backup.

SHARON:

Practice management systems, document management. We can help them work with the companies who have appropriate pricing for solo and small. That's really our niche, is to be able to do that for those people. The solo and smalls are really neglected.

JOHN:

But it really is a unique thing though, because there's not a template. You can't go to the green drawer and pull out a system for a solo.

SHARON:

No. I mean, they all have different needs.

JOHN:

They've got different needs, different things that are important to them, different types of practice, their workflows are different. We really do try to, as Sharon said, customize and make sure that they do have a cost-effective solution. The other advantage I think we have is that we know a lot about the law, and a lot about what lawyers' responsibilities are, and what their-

SHARON:

And what's ethical. And what's ethical has changed, Mark. In today's world, you have to take reasonable measures to protect client data and confidential data. These days, we have gotten to the point where one reasonable measure is having two-factor authentication, because it's almost always free. It comes with Office 365, which so many solo smalls use. You just have to turn it on. That's where of course the problem comes.

JOHN:

That's got to be really hard.

SHARON:

It's the convenience factor, though. They want to get right in. They don't want to have to get a text on their phone, or push a button on their phone.

JOHN:

Type a code.

SHARON:

Type a code, and whatever it is. There's all kinds of two-factor authentication obviously, and you have to help them get past the I don't want the extra step to, I have to have the extra step, because ethics demands this of me, because multifactor authentication stops almost 100% of credential-based account attacks. You don't get us that much better than that.

JOHN:

Especially not when it's free.

SHARON:

Yes, especially when it's free to do. You just have to put up with one little annoying thing that you have to do.

JOHN:

You can trust devices too, so it's not every time. You don't have to do this 30 days, or whatever it is, whatever the period of time is. A lot of folks I don't think realize that. They think when they hear this, they go, "No, I'm not going to do this every darn time I connect." You don't have to.

SHARON:

You said, tell a story. Here's a story. We've been able to successfully convince most of our law firm clients that they must ethically do this. There were several who protested, and they dragged their feet, and they dragged their feet, and then one of them got hit by ransomware. That's what happens when you don't take some advice. First thing they said was, "Okay, we got hit. We were attacked. I guess you were right about that 2FA thing, so could you come back and fix that for us now?"

MARK:

Hard lesson learned, but boy is it a good lesson once they understand it. I'm hearing you can do lots of advising and guidance on terms of how to become secure, taking into consideration regulations we're subject to, the ethical rules, et cetera. I just had somebody call me up yesterday about, they were talking about some other things, and a side question came out. It's a solo setting up her own firm, and she's interested, are there services and people out there that can help monitor the systems to give you a heads up? Her question was, how do I know if I'm breached? Can you help them answer that, or help them deal with that risk?

SHARON:

You have today an ethical obligation to monitor for a breach. That's pretty much been established. Now that you know you have to monitor, that's one reason why we are a managed service provider, because we have all sorts of alarms, and alerts, and we check things like backups to make sure everything is going the way it should.

JOHN:

There's a lot of automation.

SHARON:

There's a lot of automation. The thing is, when something goes wrong, we'll get a notice, so the lawyer is protected by having the managed services and the alerts that will go to their provider. That way, they know right away, they can usually fix it right away, or if the power is out or something like that, they have to wait until power comes back obviously. But that's why you want someone watching over all of this for you, because the average lawyer has no idea what any of these alerts mean. These things go off, and they're clueless. You want that in the hands of a professional, and it's not very expensive to get it. And so, this idea of endpoint detection and response, this is another thing that we would say is reasonably required in order for you to monitor for those breaches.

JOHN:

It's not just monitoring, it's also-

SHARON:

React.

JOHN:

Yeah, it reacts to it. Artificial intelligence is a part of what the tool uses, in conjunction with human beings in a security operation center. If you get a ransomware attack as an example, or there's some rogue process that comes and starts and the system sees that, wait a minute, this is outside of baseline operation, and it can even automatically take the device off the wire, off the network. But they have, at least the solutions that we're implementing for our clients, it has a rollback capability. If it's got a problem, and you say, "Shoot, you know what? Let's go back to 30 minutes ago," and put your system back into a state before this happened, and we've got that ability.

SHARON:

It's really kind of magic to lawyers. As much as we try to explain it, and John did in fairly simple terms, they really don't get it. They just get that the magic works.

MARK:

Right. That's okay. They don't need to get it. If they have somebody like you behind the scenes taking care of it, they just need to make sure these kinds of things are in play or in place. May I also assume that if I have, I do stupid on my laptop, and I get hit with something that we talk about ransomware as a classic example, are you also offering services to help me address and deal with these kinds of breaches?

SHARON:

Absolutely. That's what you do.

JOHN:

I do want to point out though Mark, all the technology and things that we do do, you cannot fix a human being.

MARK:

Right. Oh boy.

SHARON:

Who clicks on a phishing email or a phishing text?

JOHN:

Sharon talked about a story. We had a story from... What's today? Thursday. I think it was either Friday, or it was no longer than a week ago. We've got all these things in place, the software, [inaudible 00:16:33], whatever, and yet we've got a lawyer that gets this message, and then he actually initiates a phone call-

SHARON:

To the bad guys.

JOHN:

To the bad guys, and then is carrying on this conversation, and under his own ID, he's opening up his machine to this caller, and I'm going, "I can't stop that."

SHARON:

They finally asked him to enter some bank information-

JOHN:

And he got suspicious.

SHARON:

Then he finally got suspicious and severed the connection.

JOHN:

He called us and we said, "Whoa, hold on."

SHARON:

But that kind of thing happens a whole lot. People do stupid stuff, and of course now everybody is on their phone a lot, and so the phishing via text has become a big deal. They call that smishing. People will fall for that. They'll get something that says, "You just made a purchase for $500, and if you didn't make this purchase, you've got to do this, or call there."

JOHN:

Click here or whatever.

SHARON:

Whatever. Don't click. Don't call. People are not thinking.

MARK:

I'm hearing we have full service, which I'm not surprised, but I just want to underscore all of this. John, you raised a very, very good point. I'm often writing and lecturing about some similar things. Regardless of what IT does, we still have to deal with the reality of the human factor. You can't patch that. You can't. We have to do some training here. Is that something you guys do as well? Are there any training resources available for solo small firms?

SHARON:

The best training resource I know of is somebody who is not in your own company, in your own law firm. It's somebody from the outside who carries a bigger bat and has a reputation. That's why we started out long ago doing cybersecurity awareness training for law firm employees, and we do it remotely, which of course people have gotten used to that now. We have a PowerPoint, and we talk through the PowerPoint. We only charge $500 for an hour. Trust me, they can't absorb more than one hour, because this stuff is complicated, and they have to pay attention. An hour is about right. You might want to do it more than once a year. You might want to do it twice a year. At $500, most law firms can afford that, even the solos and the small firms, because it's a whole firm price. We're there for an hour, and we answer questions as we go along, but we can show them the phishing emails and all the stuff. We talk about social engineering, and all the stupid stuff they do, like sharing and reusing passwords.

JOHN:

The latest attacks.

SHARON:

The latest attacks. We [inaudible 00:19:30] the latest information. Nonetheless, people forget. The stat that's most interesting to me, Mark, is that over 80% of successful attacks involve a human in some way or another.

MARK:

Right. Good stuff. One of the reasons I really was excited about visiting with the two of you again, is to try to find or create awareness about resources that are out there, because there are so many places where there is, if you will, nothing locally. When you talk about this preventative educational piece, just as an example, at $500 a pop, I sit here and say, as a risk guy, two or three times a year? That's chump change, and absolutely essential to do in my mind, when I compare the potential loss of time, worry, money, data, all kinds of things, if somebody just does something stupid and clicks on the wrong thing, and we get hit with ransomware, and it's all gone, locked up.

JOHN:

I think the other requirements you're going to have Mark too though, and what we're seeing a lot of, is that the cyberinsurance carriers are now in their renewals and in their applications, they want to know, are you getting training for your employees?

SHARON:

That's one of the questions, and they don't want to hear no, or they might charge you more, or they might offer you less coverage. We've seen it all. Cyberinsurance is driving the solo and small firms crazy.

MARK:

Here's one as a side comment following up on that, please folks, if you're filling out these applications, don't lie. If you say you're doing something, and a policy is issued based on those representations, it's just the same as malpractice insurance or anything else. If it turns out you aren't having these trainings and you don't do these other things that you say you are doing or have in place, that's going to jeopardize coverage. Just a little side note there, be very careful and honest about answering this. I don't want to keep you too much longer, and I really, really appreciate you taking some time today. Could we close maybe with some thoughts about what are the top two or three things that you think lawyers in this space need to be concerned about, focused on perhaps, and/or a tip or two to address these kinds of things? Just a quick wrap.

SHARON:

Are you talking about cybersecurity in particular, Mark?

MARK:

Yes.

JOHN:

I think Sharon has talked about the things that certainly are really high on my list, and that's the multifactor authentication, the EDR systems, endpoint detection response.

SHARON:

And an incident response plan, which only 36% of attorneys have an incident response plan, and it is so critical, because if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. That's an old chestnut of a line, but it's really true. You have got to have a plan, and you probably need somebody to consult with you a little bit, because there's no absolute template out there that fits everybody. You can start with one, but you really need to have somebody who knows what they're doing help you out with developing a plan. It's not all that hard, it's just that people don't do it. And then, if they do do it, then they leave it to molder, and of course nothing stays the same in this world, especially cybersecurity. In a year, if you haven't looked at it and done anything with it, some portion of it is probably quite obsolete.

JOHN:

But I think the critical foundation for that whole thing, before you even get down to saying, how am I going to respond, what does my IRP look like, is inventorying your assets and your data. If you don't know you have it, you can't protect it.

MARK:

That is an excellent point. Yes. That's absolutely an excellent point. I appreciate your time here. Before we wrap it up, I do want to give you a moment to share. If any of our listeners have a need and desire to reach out to you to discuss the kinds of things that you can help them out with, how can they get a hold of you guys?

SHARON:

Our phone number is 703-359-0700, and our website is senseient.com, or of course you could search Sensei Enterprises. We have all different kinds of folks in the office, and we'll funnel you to the right people. Very happy to do that, and always happy to have a no-cost consult if people have some questions they'd like to ask. We do a lot of that at the beginning, and then it turns out that they do in fact have a need, which is harmonious for us both. But if it doesn't work out, at least we've tried to help. And so, we would encourage that, Mark. I hope that's helpful.

MARK:

Yes, it is very much so. To those of you listening, I hope you found something of value out of today's podcast. My intent again today, I just am trying to find solutions. I get so many calls of, who do I turn to? This is a rough space at times, and lawyers just feel left out and unsure who to reach to. I assure you, these two and the business they have, these are good folk, and it's a great business. I would not hesitate reaching out at any time. John, Sharon, thank you very much for joining me today. John, good fishing, and hope you guys take care of those grandkids and kids. Boy, that's a busy, crazy life, but I'm sure it's exciting. That's just awesome. I'll let you get back to it, guys. Thank you for listening. Bye-bye, all.

SHARON:

Thank you very much.

JOHN:

Bye-bye.

MARK:

Bye-bye.

ALPS In Brief – Episode 64: Project Destination

Transcript: 

 

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte quick, the risk manager here at ALPS, and welcome to the latest episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm on the road today and out in South Dakota at a convention and have had the pleasure to meet Tamara Nash. And she is the director of experiential learning and a lecturer at the University of South Dakota School of Law. And first, I just want to say welcome.

Tamara Nash:
Thank you.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
It's a pleasure. Before we get into the topic that we're going to be discussing today. I would love to... Just to have you share a few things about yourself. Introduce yourself. What does the audience need to know and enjoy hearing about?

Tamara Nash:
Sure. Yeah. So I am a recent transfer to the law school, but I would say probably, more importantly, I'm a proud aunt, first-generation law student, and first-generation college student. I am a serial joiner. So bar junkie.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
I love it.

Tamara Nash:
Yes. I just... In the midst of joining clubs and organizations, I'm usually there. So really involved in the South Dakota State Bar, American Bar Association, and the Young Lawyers Division. I love to bake. I try to rival Betty Crocker cupcakes.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Oh, with kindred spirits there on some things. I can see that.

Tamara Nash:
Yes. It's my de-stressor. But yeah, just... I like to be with friends and family and fellowship and try to find time to watch a good show on Netflix here or there.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Oh yeah. Yeah. I get that too. Well, let me ask, what initially brought you into law? Where's the interest? How did that arise?

Tamara Nash:
So really interesting. I actually had a sixth-grade project that planted the whole seed and it's actually all tied into Project Destination. And I think we'll kind of have an interwoven conversation that ties into this question. So in sixth-grade, I had a teacher and we did a mini society project and we had our own country name. We made our own money. And at the end of the year, we had our own stations where we did our own thing. Some of us sold stationary. One of our classmates sold hot dogs, which is really questionable when you trust sixth graders to cook and sell you hot dogs. But we were doing our thing and one of the classmates who was selling hot dogs, his classmate fired him because he wasn't pulling his end of the weight and he was very upset about that.

Tamara Nash:
So my teacher said, "Hey, you can do something about that." So our class had a wrongful termination lawsuit and-

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Oh my gosh.

Tamara Nash:
... Some of us were jurors. We had a judge and I was his lawyer. And it was really fun. We had a really good time and we won. I don't know if fair practices happened. I don't know if we played by the rules, but my teacher, Mr. Summit, the best teacher I've ever had said, "I think you really enjoyed that." And he brought in three black women attorneys to come talk to me. We sat in the cafeteria and they told me what it was like to be a lawyer and what it meant, and just always stuck with me. Of course, I still had to go to high school. I still had to go to college. But then it became time to figure out what's next? And I took the LSAT and enrolled at the University of South Dakota.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
That is such a cool story. And what a creative teacher. You know just... We all have certain favorite... My favorite teacher was Miss Fleschmann from third grade. But we have these memories and it's fascinating in terms of the impact that they have long-term in your life.

Tamara Nash:
Absolutely.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
These seemingly small kinds of interesting things, but boy did they have big ramifications? We had brought up Project Destination, and that's really what I am interested in learning about myself and sharing with our listeners. So what is Project Destination? Maybe that's where we start.

Tamara Nash:
Absolutely, would love to tell you. So at its core, it's a pathway or pipeline program that goes into schools. We target students, anywhere from elementary school to high school. We have gone into post-secondary and really just plant the seed that, "Hey, have you considered the legal profession?" We're open to talking to any student, but we specifically target Native American students. In the South Dakota Bar, we have about 2,700 lawyers, but we have anecdotally, maybe 10 to 15 Native American attorneys. Our bar doesn't collect demographic details on ethnicity or race. So I say anecdotally because that's looking around the bar and kind of counting what we have. So that is our most underrepresented group of attorneys. So we want to find a way to reach that population. And it's quite profound to go into a school and speak to a group of individuals who don't see people who look like them and say, "Hey, have you thought about this? You can do this."

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Right. Yeah.

Tamara Nash:
And especially put forth an example that looks like them. And that was the experience I had in sixth grade. To see an example of myself, of someone who says, "Hey, I look like you. And this is what I do. And you can do it too." So Project Destination essentially goes into the school, does a moderated panel, and just chats with students about what it means to be a lawyer. The panelists who are all young lawyers, hopefully as diverse as we can make it. So a corporate attorney, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a general practice attorney, and explain what they do every day. Talk about law school, talk about the bar, and just let students know that this is an attainable goal. And the goal is essentially holding up a mirror to a student and letting them know that this idea is attainable, so.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
What I love about this too, just in terms of... And sharing with all of you. Listening to this, the smile, the authenticity of your story, investment, it just... I find it God bless kind of thing, but it seems to me you're paying it forward. You know you're continuing what this teacher did in very creative and meaningful ways. That's awesome. How old is this program?

Tamara Nash:
Yeah, so we're still new-ish. We were able to start the program in 2017. And then of course, COVID happened.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Oh, wow. Yes.

Tamara Nash:
We're all familiar with that caveat, right?

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Right.

Tamara Nash:
So we came out the gate running the year that we launched it. Our then Young Lawyer Section President, now Judge Abby Howard, launched with a strong start. We reached about 150 students. We had about 25 young lawyer volunteers. And then we pivoted to a virtual setting. So we are thrilled to get back into the schools in person this bar year.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Yeah. And would you say you're finding a lot of success with it and how are you measuring that right now? Because I assume nobody has gone off to law school quite yet. We haven't been there quite long enough, but.

Tamara Nash:
Yes. Yes. So I would say, yes. We have had success. And I would say we measure that in a couple of ways. So success in just a purely objective way, we've been recognized by the ABA Young Lawyers Division and the ABA broadly with two awards. In 2017, we received a grant from the Young Lawyers Division, it's the embracing diversity grant. And that seeks to recognize any pipeline pathway program that digs in and does the work. And so we submitted Project Destination in its first year and we won second place and received a thousand dollars to keep doing the work. So we continued. And then in 2020, the ABA recognized us with the partnership award, which essentially looks at any bar program doing DENI work, that says, "Hey, tell us what programs you're doing. How can we put forth a model so that other bars can replicate it?"

Tamara Nash:
And we were recognized with that award at the 2020 ABA Meeting. But I would say more importantly success in the context of the profession and pathway and pipeline programs is not necessarily measured by numbers. This work is measured by the ripple effect. Reaching one student is success. And if you go to a school and there's one student in the room that you reach, that is point blank, success. The effect that you have by touching one student's life impacts generations.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Oh, I agree.

Tamara Nash:
So you have... My teacher reached me and I came to law school and that pays dividends for me, my hopeful children to come in the future, and their children. And so that is success that's profound. So our goal is not to hit an X number of students per year. Our goal is to reach one child and to change their perspective of what they are capable of.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
It's the butterfly effect.

Tamara Nash:
Yes. Absolutely.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Yeah. Yeah. Is part of this too, to try to... I mean, South Dakota is not unique in terms of rural states and some of the problems we face. There are lots of unmet needs and I would anticipate... I'll be honest and say, I don't have firsthand knowledge. But I would anticipate there are probably a fairly significant portion of people on the reservations that do not have access in terms to legal services. Is part of the intention or desire of the program to meet that need as well?

Tamara Nash:
Yes.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Okay.

Tamara Nash:
Yeah. So I think part of the need... It's multifaceted. It's to change the perspective of the community to not just a negative perception, to create that exposure, to shift a dynamic and perception of a student's own capability, but also to meet those legal services needs. And there's that multidimensional need in the rural nature that a lot of our reservations have, but also in the demographic need that we do not have lawyers who look like the communities we're serving. And that is very problematic because it continues to... I think creates a lack of trust in our system and we should represent the people we're charged to serve. And so I think that is that dual issue that we're hoping to address and I think more broadly we have rural deserts that we want to serve. So Project Destination serves our broader community in rural schools where we have students who may not have an attorney for miles upon miles. So it's a win-win in all facets, but also gets students through the door who are underserved.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
So how do you see... We've come out of COVID and we're kind of finding our feet again and that's awesome. Where do you see the program? What does it look like in five years?

Tamara Nash:
Yeah. So-

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Where are we moving toward?

Tamara Nash:
Yeah. I hope that we move towards a more cohesive approach with our broader bar. And I'm really excited for our leadership. We have just immense support by our bar presidents, our bar commission, and our executive director. But to really be all on one page and all moving forward. So it's the full force of the South Dakota Bar and throwing all our efforts and all of our energy,. You kind of can't be a bar of jar marbles throwing on the ground, scattered in different directions. But I think playing the long game to decide what age groups we target and why that matters.

Tamara Nash:
A lot of the research shows that early intervention for pathway is actually more effective. And I think folding in broader strategies for pathway. Financial education, which folds into student debt research, which we know is the number one problem.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
That's a huge issue.

Tamara Nash:
Yes. I know that very intimately as a young lawyer. But folding in those strategies discussing access barriers to the profession and to law school. So I think just really having honest dialogues around the profession, around pathways, not just encouraging students to come, but really looking at why some folks have not been able to get into the profession and why they leave. Because retention and attrition are also issues.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Well, that's an excellent point. Yeah. I do a lot of education just on attorney wellness. And boy has COVID made those issues even far more significant and then you factor in these debt issues and all. So many things to-

Tamara Nash:
The onion.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly, right. You know I kind of want to ask an open-ended question. What about Project Destination and all of this... What do you really want to share? Just go wherever you want to go with it.

Tamara Nash:
Sure. So I think what I would love to share is that I think some folks don't know where their place is in this conversation. And it's all of our battles. We all have a place and a stake in this conversation and in the effort of pathway efforts. I think we would see our efforts move so much more quickly. The needle would move forward much more seamlessly if we all bought into that idea and into that notion. So I would just really like folks to know that. We're all part of this conversation. We all have ownership. And it's just a matter of understanding where we are in the conversation when we amplify the voices of others. When we step in as an ally it matters to our profession just immensely and we all owe it to our profession to pay it forward and be a part of enriching our profession and servicing our community.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Hmm. Yeah. I get where you're going with that. You know I talk about some similar issues at times. Again, in what I do in risk management and ethics and things, you hear a lot of lawyers complain about problems that bars face. And they never want to do anything about it. You know? If you want to complain, okay. I think it's... You should have the freedom and the ability to complain a little bit, but not if you're not willing to step up and try to do something about solving the problem. You know? That's so important. I love hearing the story and learning a bit more about Project Destination. You have obviously been very involved with this and I suspect have a great deal of intellectual capital in projects like this. Would you be open to having folks listening if anybody has some interest and just being a resource?

Tamara Nash:
Absolutely.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
May I have you share a little contact information with people so?

Tamara Nash:
Yes. So I would love to chat about how we can serve as a resource, share ideas, collaborate, and expand it beyond South Dakota. My email is probably one good resource. So that is T-A-M-A-R-A, P as in Paul, N-A-S-H, numeral one, @gmail.com. And then you can always reach out to me by phone and that's 712-301-9224. And I would love to see this grow and expand and see other bars incorporate it, make it better, and enrich it. I think that the beauty of bar service is we replicate and implement how it serves our members best.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
Well, I really have enjoyed visiting with you. The excitement is contagious. I love the story of how you got here and how you are using... As I see it, this childhood experience had such an impact, but you've played that out in spades in so many ways and are... I just think it what a fascinating story. So thank you for taking your time to sit down-

Tamara Nash:
Thank you for having me.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
... And visit with me. I will say. Do you have any final comments? Anything else you'd like to share?

Tamara Nash:
No, I would say take the program, make it better. We're excited to see what you do with it.

Mark Bassingthwaighte:
All right. All right. Well, sounds good. Well, folks, I hope you found something of value today and enjoyed hearing Tamara's story. I found it very, very interesting. Thanks for listening. And of course, if any of you have any thoughts on ideas, topics, and other things you'd like to hear on the podcast, please don't hesitate to reach out to myself as well. It's M bass, M-B-A-S-S, @ALPSinsurance.com. Thanks for listening again, all. Bye-bye. Have a good one.

ALPS In Brief – Episode 63: Relationships and First Impressions

Transcript:

Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the risk manager here at ALPS, and welcome to the latest episode of ALPS in Brief, of the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. Over the years, the more I do these podcasts, the more I've come to just enjoy telling stories. I've been telling stories for years and years in my writing, and in a lot of the [inaudible 00:00:39] presentations I have done over the years. I just enjoy a good story, and I think it's a great way to learn some things. So, today is another little, what I guess I come to call a mini-sode, where it's just me sharing some stories and an insight or two from them. What I want to talk about today, for those of you that have listened to some of these podcasts over the years, you know my wife and I are, are Disney Vacation Club Members, Disney people, if you will, and have been so blessed to be able to travel literally a number of places all over the world with Disney.

It's been a special thing for us. Well, we also are cruisers, and we recently returned from a long, extended cruise, had the privilege of being able to spend some time in Hawaiian Islands, and then sailing around the islands for a bit, and then crossing the Pacific, sailing from Hawaii up to Vancouver, which will be important here in a moment. But it was a really interesting trip, and I want to tell you two or three things that happened on this trip that sort of prompted this podcast topic. The first, I don't know if, for those of you that know nothing about Disney cruises, it is, at least when it first started, Disney came out with what they call rotational dining. So, they have several, if you will, featured signature restaurants on each ship, and you have an assigned table and a staff that will move with you throughout the cruise to the different restaurants. It's a lot of fun.

This particular trip, the first night you sit down, and you meet your staff that's going to take care of you, and it was an interesting experience. We enjoy getting to know the staff and oftentimes staff on these ships are from multiple countries. I think they were saying this time, there are 50 countries represented among the staff. So, you get to know them. My response to that first evening was not a disappointment, I mean, in terms of what happened, but it was a little bit different than what is sort of more typical on these cruises. In short, the gentleman that would be our sort of the lead waiter was an interesting fellow, and I would just say, I didn't hit it off immediately. We just didn't click. The first impression was not a good one, and in part, and what happened over the next two nights, it was more about him wanting everybody that was in his section, I guess, is the best way to put it, to know that he was struggling financially, and had had some problems.

Now, I don't want to minimize that. He certainly did have some challenging situations, but one does not start a relationship out by sharing just how rough life is, and how hard he's having to work, and how difficult, and the sacrifices being made and all that. Of course, over the course of a cruise, you get to know some of these people in the other tables, and these cruises aren't completely packed, because we're still coming out of the pandemic. So, in other words, just less people, and more opportunity to get to know all the people on the ship. All of us were really feeling like we were being played a little bit, sort of working the sympathy card, trying to just get large tips at the end of this cruise. It just struck me the wrong way, not how to enter a good relationship. That was sort of even further confirmed near the end of the cruise. I'm used to having people share the importance of feedback, and Disney, I assume they do this on other cruises and things.

But, you fill out these comment cards, and I understand the Disney model. You need to, I mean, if you really have a bad, bad experience, you should certainly share that, and I have, and would do so in a responsible way, but I don't want to just try to make it hard for somebody to earn a living. But at the very end, we were told, this is in terms of our, this gentleman, this waiter, this is my expectation of what you will do, so that I can continue on kind of stuff. I got to say that left a bad taste in my mouth. Now, that's one story, and it's kind of shortening some things here. The second thing that was sort of interesting, got me thinking about this all again, podcast topic. We got to Vancouver, and in the middle, and I'll readily admit, sort of my fault in terms of not thinking everything completely through, just running with an assumption.

Dis was very good about telling us, we have to hear are all the things we need to do to get on the ship, and here's what we need to do get into Canada terms of vaccine status, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and there were a ton of us on the ship that were all set to go, and just didn't think through the fact that we're in an international airport and flying into the United States internationally. I mean, you've been in Hawaii, and you got, and you can't get back into the United States via and international flight without a COVID test within 24 hours of boarding the plane. None of us had this. I should say, very few of us on the ship had this first off awareness, let alone any kind of arrangements being made. The odd thing, you can drive across the border. You can walk across the border. You can swim across the border. You can take a bus, a train everything. You don't need to prove any, but if you're in Vancouver or any other international airport, you need to have this COVID test.

So, a few days before we get there, we're talking to guest services, bringing all this out and short story is the Vancouver airport has more than ample facilities out there to handle even a large number of walk-ups. This is what we're being told. So, that's fine. We'll get off the ship, and go out to the airport, get tested and assuming all's good, fly home, and did turn out all was good. So, that's sort of a side note, but going through the process of COVID testing and trying to get that set up at the airport was just crazy. Talk about an exercise in futility and just, oh my gosh, very poorly, and this is not dissing, this is sort of the airport authority, I guess. I'm not sure who all setting this up, but very little explanations to how this works, and lines of people everywhere.

They had one gentleman who was really charged with trying to help everybody, and explain what to do. He would talk, he's masked up, because he still have masks here in Canada in public areas, transportation, buses, trains and all that. But, so it was a little hard to understand, a little bit of an accent, which you know, it is what it is, but it just made understanding him a little bit more difficult, but he would say, "You take a picture of this QR thing, and get started. Pick an appointment. Don't worry about the time. It might even be tomorrow, but you're in the system. You pay your bill, and you can get in line, and we'll get this taken care of. Well, and he would say, he'd stand there and say, "I'm going to help. I'm here," but he'd keep moving around and disappear. People just getting incredibly frustrated, and your whole response to this entire setup and system, and what's going to happen was being colored by this experience with the first contact.

One fellow traveler, I just had, kind of just watched him. God bless him, but it's just, oh my gosh, he was doing everything he could not to lose it, and as respectfully as he could, he gets in this guy's face, the guy's trying to help us all, and he just starts yelling. He says, "I can't understand you. Your words are muffled. You aren't speaking clearly, and when you say things to do this, you don't give us the instructions. You're not staying here. You're not following through. You say you'll help us from start to finish, and you point at the QR code and disappear, and the app isn't working." It wasn't working for a lot of us and he was correct. He just ends by saying, "You need to go back to school and get some good communication training. Your communication skills are horrible," and he was right.

What could have been a process of getting people through this whole system easily in an hour, turned out to be a good two and a half hours, if not more, for some folks. It was so messed up. A number of people actually missed flights out and just, it just didn't need to be that way. So, it's just two sort of stories, and what I got to thinking about was first impressions. I've written and talked over the years in some various presentations on the importance of first impressions in terms of establishing relationship. I have typically come at it from the perspective of, is your reception desk clean? Is the, do you have a professional presentation in terms of the space? Is the office tidied up? Does the website look all nice and pretty, et etcetera cetera? It's physical first impressions, and I don't want to minimize that. I think that is incredibly important, because it's, if you will, sort of some passive communication.

But I want to talk about personal first impressions. I can share my first impression with this waiter was not good, and I really was put off by being told what the expectations are, being played for as much money as he thought he could get out of me, those kinds of things, and it's very, very difficult to recover from that. We really, my wife and I were very intentional after the first night, saying, "Oh, this is ridiculous," but trying to really get to know him, trying to invest, because it's a long cruise. You want to have fun, and, and there were times where it worked, and we really did have a good time. I'm not trying to take anything away from, I mean, this guy is who he is, but did his job well, but there were these times where it just, it wasn't perhaps even authentic. Then you get to the airport situation, and the experience, the first impression that you have trying to get into the system, into the process.

So, [inaudible 00:12:28] translate this into your law office and working with you and your staff. If the first impression is really bad, that colored the entire rest of the experience with everybody else you work with, and I'm glad we got through it. It didn't really ruin or spoil anything for us, but it didn't have to be that way. So, I would encourage you to think about some first impression issues in terms of relationship. So, let me share some thoughts and kind of perhaps tips, if you will, things that I think are worth keeping in mind. When I think about it initially, trying to consider a lawyer, I'm obviously going to, in most instances, it's either referral or perhaps a website, and I'm looking, and I would hope we have that initial contact, at least on the web or mobile. It's very professional looking, et cetera, et cetera.

But that's go beyond that and say, now I'm reaching out to the firm to try to set up appointments, that initial consult or whatever it might be. That should be very, very easy on mobile or on a website. But if I call in, I really do expect to talk to someone in-person. I may have some questions or two. I just want to get a sense of are they welcoming? Are they professional, that kind of thing. Voicemail, doesn't cut it in my mind. These dial one if, and here's all the music and on and on and on. Make it easy for me to communicate with you. If you're true solo, and not always available, sometimes that can even be accomplished, oh, just with an answering service, some type of professional answering service.

I just think that's very, very worthwhile, but now let's really get to the heart of where I'm trying to go with all this, and talk about you. So, I'll be the perspective coming in. What kinds of things can you do or perhaps not do if [inaudible 00:14:55] are going to help establish the beginning relationship, in terms of setting the right impression, getting started on the right foot, because it's going to be a lot harder to correct something if this gets off on the wrong foot. Okay? So, some things that I think about, try to just be authentic. Don't put on airs. Don't, I encourage you, if authentic isn't, a lot of time, I work from home, et cetera, T-shirt and cutoffs and flip flops. Hey, that's fine, but at the office or meeting me downtown or wherever it might be, look a little bit professional, but be authentic in the communication.

"Hey, it's a pleasure to meet you Mark," and be authentic and sincere when you say that. Have a little chit-chat up front. We don't need to immediately get to why are you here outside of the cold calls. Hey, do you do divorce or something? I'm assuming we're past that, but have a little chit-chat, and it can be as simple as, How's the weather or what's [inaudible 00:16:10] a day. Did you see that ball game last night? But something to get some casual conversation going to allow the opportunity for a relationship to build, to just get established. I want to know that I'm working with a person that's again, genuine, real, authentic. Okay? So, some things to think about, but also understand at the same time, and I can appreciate this might be a little bit difficult, but you never know.

I think most people are going to have some questions or concerns about, I wonder what this is going to cost, and there's this, and we have to have that conversation. I mean, I really believe good lawyers have conversations about money up front, and thorough, and good conversations about money. But you might allow that conversation to be dictated or driven by the client. So something you could say early on is, "You're probably wondering what this will cost. Would you like to talk about that now? Would you like to talk about that at the end? I'm going to need a little information here," but try to get a sense, so you don't have somebody sitting visiting with you for half an hour, 45 minutes, wondering, "But can I even afford, is this worth my time?"

You can find ways to help them feel at ease about that money conversation by letting know you're thinking about it, letting know we'll have it, and they can dictate a little bit about when they'd like to have that conversation. But again, I would not jump there until you chat them up for a little bit. Make a connection. We need to begin to build a relationship. So, okay. One of the other things I wanted to talk about as we continue with this, in the context of a, this initial consultation, this initial meeting is, what other types of communication things can you do to help get this started on the right foot? So, in the context of the conversation, please don't multitask. I mean, how many times I, it drives me crazy, and I'll just never understand it.

I've watched time and again, and one situation, that's so struck me, I watched four couples come into a restaurant, a very nice restaurant that I happened to be dining with a friend at, [inaudible 00:18:53] at business actually. These four couples sat down and it was every other, guy, girl, guy, girl, guy, girl, all the way around the table. All four guys are on their phone the entire evening, not talking, just sitting, drinking their beer, occasional something. The women are all chatty, but clearly not really happy about all these guys just sitting here on their phone. I mean, how can you have a relationship or conversation? The messages you're giving, give the attention to this perspective client. They are considering retaining you. They are considering turning over their legal concern to your trusted hands. So, allow them to build that trust. Okay? So, don't multitask, no tax thing, no thinking about other matters, no working through your email.

Okay? Don't pontificate on things. The initial time is really to sit and try to learn as much as you can about whatever the situation is, so you ... I mean, the goal here is, can I help you in terms of what this is, what you're thinking? How do I best help you? How do I best serve you? What all can I do? This isn't a time to just pontificate on all sorts of things. It's time to get to learn who they are. Use open-ended questions. Can you tell me more about this? Don't assume you know what they want. They may be thinking about a divorce or something, but maybe divorce isn't really what should happen in this situation, and there's some other things you could assist them with or direct them toward.

I don't know. But I, running with assumptions is dangerous. Find out what the problem is. Ask questions> sort of go with the flow and see where it takes you. If you don't know something, honestly, say, no. I'd rather know that somebody doesn't have an answer. I don't know, but I could look it up. I don't know, but I've, I could make a referral here, whatever the situation calls for. But, if you don't know something, say so, and again, in my mind, honesty instills trust, and faking it fosters doubt. I mean, that seems clear to me. That's just a normal response. So, try to stay out of the weeds in these early meetings, in particular. If somebody is sharing some things, don't get into all the nitty-gritty of the legal stuff. Now's not the time. We're still relationship-building.

Okay? Learn to listen, truly listen. I remember, Steven Covey is known for saying most of us don't listen with the intent to understand. Most of us listen with the intent to reply. I'll be the first to admit, a little honesty here, folks. I am really good at listening with the intent to reply. I struggle with that problem day in and day out. You can just ask my wife. She'll say, "Amen, Hallelujah." But there are times when I really do try and focus and listen to her, and really listen, but I have to remind myself. I have to be very intentional about it. She is not asking for my advice here. She's just wanting to talk, and wanting to share, and perhaps work through something. I will listen, and when you really start to listen, then you can ask the questions to draw out, and you get a much, much better understanding, not only of the issues, but of the person you're interacting with.

You really get to know someone. My wife is so skilled at this. It's amazing. No matter where we are, in what community, she knows everybody. For many years in her practice, people would walk in, and she hasn't seen one of these patients for a year, and she'll say, "Well, how is your nephew? Wasn't your nephew going off to college?" Or, "How's your granddaughter, and Doctor, how do you remember all this? She just does. She is very, very good at that, because she listens more than, better than most people I've ever had in my life. So, it's a skill, and she practices it, and been practicing it for years. But I encourage you to do that. Just approach it from, I am trying to create an attorney-client relationship here that can be as effective and as positive as I can, moving forward.

I mean, that's the mindset I would try to enter these situations in. The better we are at doing that from the get-go, from the very first contact, setting that right impression, I think the better, more effective you'll be honestly as a lawyer, because we have a very, very good relationship established at the outset. Again, this, if I enter into a good relationship with you, my impression with you is positive from the get-go, we really get to a point where it's much easier for me to trust you. It's much easier for me to share things. I see this as honestly long-term, even risk reduction, because you're going to have a client, I think in most situations, you're going to establish a relationship with a client that will be a positive one, even if negative things happen.

If the outcome isn't necessarily what I expect, but if the relationship is positive, I don't walk away from that going "Well, man, I didn't see that coming. This guy's a complete idiot." No. Things happen, and I can hear and understand, well, sometimes a jury sees it a little bit differently. I don't know how these things play, but you get the point. So, okay. I've rambled on here long enough. I hope you found something of value with these little stories and a few thoughts on first impressions, and I look forward to visiting with you next time here on ALPS in Brief. Hey, that's it. Have a good one, folks. Bye, bye.

ALPS In Brief – Episode 62: When Life Winks

Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the risk manager with Alps and welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. Though, as some of you may know that listen to some of my podcasts or hear some of my, or read some of my writing, I no longer live in Montana, let alone Missoula. This past year, well officially it hadn't even been a year. So in short, I live now in St. Cloud Florida, and obviously still with Alps and hope to be for a number of years yet, but it's been an interesting experience. This whole move down, oh boy, from when we sold our house to, when we finally moved into the home that we were building. It had three different addresses and just crazy, crazy stuff.

 

Well, I'm going to do something a little different with this podcast, and this kind of Florida story is relevant in an odd way. I have done two other podcasts called listening to your life and they sort of dealt with a lot of writing that I do or was doing in Montana. Hope to get back into that in a more significant way here. The location of our home is such that there's not easy access to trails, although I'm doing a lot of indoor riding and getting the bike legs back.

 

But, I want to talk a little bit about listening to your life and experiencing life and just, it's a different topic. I'm not going to tie much of this into law. I'm not going to go into a lot of risk management and ethics and all that. I just want to share some stories, some things that have happened. Maybe, there's something to learn from it for you. Maybe, I don't know where this goes. But, I want to share. As I was saying, the move to Florida was the right decision and a good decision, but boy, it was not without its headaches.

 

Multiple addresses, a period of time just staying in a VRBO sort of at the last minute because of construction delays in this development here. And, oh, it just got crazy and it was not, based on that experience, I would never do an Airbnb or VRBO again, ever in my life. I, just was one of the worst experiences my wife and I've ever had. Just, ugh, I won't even bore you with all of that. But, it's busy. It's stressful to sell a house during a pandemic, to buy a house or to build a house during a pandemic, to make a move during a pandemic. You know, all of this is just very, very stressful. And then trying to get set up, and just moving in and unpacking and packing. It's been a high stress year. Some stress was very, very good, but, just because it's good stress doesn't mean it doesn't take a toll.

 

Another stress is kind of, kind of crazy. Well, one of the things, as we were sort of moving through this year, my wife and I are Disney Vacation Club members that have been Disney people for many, many years. Our kids have grown up Disney and had wonderful time and they have very, very good memories of it. All of us have with Disney. We've literally been over much of the world with Disney, but we decided to, just a few weeks ago, take a Disney cruise.

 

Particularly since we're down here, I don't have to fly all day to get on a cruise ship. It literally is like a 45 minute drive, which we're still getting used to. But, we wanted to take a cruise and just kind of relax. And this was to be with our best friends that we've traveled with for many years and just really, really good folk and enjoy their company immensely.

 

As we were getting closer to cruise time. So, it's, maybe two, two and a half months out, one of our best friends developed a health problem that at the time was concerning and really just unsure where this would go. But, you just, prayers and there's not a lot you can do to make, heart issues, you know, you can't, that's got to be dealt with. To make a longer story short, the issues that she was dealing with got progressively worse and really got to the point that our friends were unable to join us on the cruise for obviously very, very legitimate reasons.

 

And needed some medical attention that was supposed to be several months down the road. But due to some just happenstance kinds of things, and also just calling the surgeon, the doctors, the main doc here every day, just to see if there's cancellation things she managed to get in quite sooner. Which turned out to be a very, very real blessing to her. And in fact, here in just a few short days is going to have open heart surgery to have a valve repaired and to take care of some other issues. It's a scary time. It's you do all that you can to be supportive. Although we don't live near each other we, again, we vacation together, but they're more than a few states away. But you just do what you can to be supportive.

 

You also struggle a bit because we're all similar ages. You know, none of us are in our twenties anymore. We're all in our sixties and of the four I'm the youngest at 62. So, you start to worry about us, my wife and what's going to lie ahead for us. You try to take care of yourself and all this. Well, so that's sort of a background now to this cruise and you know, where there's this debate, do we go, do we not go?

 

And we struggled with that a little bit. And I honestly felt we need to go. And our friends were very concerned that we wouldn't, really wanted us to go. Just please enjoy it, enjoy it for all of us, that kind of a thing. And so we ended up going and you can't get on, I understand right now, we're seeing, oh, a cruise? You know, this was just two weeks. Well, in fact, no, we just got off the cruise last weekend. So it's not all that far back, and never seeing the CDC, you shouldn't be on cruises right now and all, okay. It's just so much stuff, but we really felt we needed to go and wanted to go. But you have to, the day that you get on you have to pass a test that can show you don't have COVID, you have to mask up on the ship unless you're in your room or up on deck and that kind of thing.

 

And you're just very nervous because all the time and money and it just, oh, do you pass these tests? And it turned out, quite a number of people, either to weather related events or positive tests, ended up not getting on the ship. I mean, it was pretty significant and Disney doesn't fill these ships up. Some of the other carriers have canceled ships, they were really filling them up, Disney just thankfully hasn't done that. So, they were able to sail and we ended up having a very interesting experience, which is what I want to share a little bit about what happened. So we managed to get on, felt great about that. You kind of settle in and right out of the bat, the very first day, so we haven't even left port yet, you kind of hang out in the ship till everybody boards, you have a nice evening, but a lot of the tech didn't work and there were all kinds of problems.

 

So on the onboard tech, just getting all the information you need, because it's all, there's no more paper anymore. Here's your tickets for your meals or here's, it's all on the mobile app and for some crazy reason that wasn't working. So all of us are trying to figure out what's up and it just, you're off to this start this like, okay, okay. And we sail out, beautiful evening, sailing out. And captain comes on and says, well, overnight the wind's going to pick up, next day we're going to get into some high seas and we're going to sail for two days. Well, we did sail for two days out, we were going out to the British Virgin islands.

 

And so, two days at sea and boy, some really high seas, a lot of wind, a lot of rocking. Even the staff, and these people are always on the ocean, are stumbling around trying to serve dinner, or just walk down, taking care of whatever they were doing, cleaning rooms and on and on. And everybody started talking about, the captain had a little too much tequila maybe, and just kind of trying to make light of it, but it was a rough sail. You know, now both my wife and I we've sailed a number of times over the years and I wouldn't say we have our sea legs, but neither of us were seasick or anything like that. But I would be lying, we didn't see it's not a little uncomfortable. You just don't feel quite right.

 

So that was kind of, wow, but it's an experience. And a lot of people were responding that experience like, oh, geez, this is no fun, this isn't going to... Complain, complain, complain. And you know, if you've heard some of my other podcasts, I'm not a complainer. It doesn't get you anywhere. You know, it's not like Disney controls mother nature and can just wave a little magic wand or throw some pixie dust and calm those seas. It is what it is. If you sail in the Caribbean in the middle of winter, this is not unexpected.

 

So, some other things that happened, after we got to Tortola, and there was some time to enjoy. We actually went over to the Baths on Virgin Gorda. That's just a very interesting, unique rock formation. Just awesome. Then we were to sail to St. Thomas. Well, on the way to St. Thomas, getting crazy seas, couldn't go into St. Thomas, partly because the COVID numbers in St. Thomas were too high and the Disney organization said we don't want to risk that with all of you, so, we're going to skip St Thomas and go straight to the Disney, private island, a place called Castaway. And again, some strong winds, but we get there and heck, got there overnight. We stay on the ship, but it was an interesting experience just to have this night on a private island, out in the middle of nowhere.

 

Well, that was actually in the Bahamas, but, it's a very, just an interesting experience. Again, lot of wind, lot of wind, they said actually had we gotten to Castaway Key, which is Disney's private island when we were supposed to, we wouldn't have been able to dock the wind was just too strong. So again, temperatures are cool, all of the, if you will, excursions that were to occur for everybody, us included on, guess we had to be canceled due to high winds and high seas. And course you're not out there lying on an 80 degree beach and enjoying the sun, having a Mai Tai or something, that's not what this experience was.

 

So again, kind of crazy. Now making matters worse, our first night we got into Castaway about a half a day before we were supposed to and so that evening, you could get out and spend a little time on the island, we went to dinner. And my wife had a gift that our best friend who was dealing with these heart issues had given her a number of years ago, and she thought she left it at the restaurant for dinner. And, we walked out we thought, get it the next night. Go back to dinner the next night, as an aside, and the sweater wasn't there. They'd never seen, so this sweater's gone. We are also on the island the next day, trying to enjoy it a little bit, the Disney private island. And, you go out with your ship and I take my cell phone, you have your driver's license, both of our driver's license in it, and, what they call these little cards, key cards, that they sort of get you on and off the ship. It's sort of the ship ID. And I lost my phone and both our driver's license and my documentation to get back on the ship and my glasses and all this stuff.

 

So I will share, are you getting the gist of what this trip was like? Lots of winds, strongs, this is not what you expect, you lose your driver's license, you lose a very expensive smartphone, some very good pair of glasses, a special sweater, on and on and on. And it's very tempting to sit here and say, man, this was a crazy bad trip. We shouldn't have gone, and all of that. Now I intentionally told you sort of the crazy stuff. Now I want to back up and tell you another side to this story.

 

When we got to Tortola earlier in this trip, you pull in, was beautiful, beautiful morning. Finally, we're in a little bit of calm sea, because partly you're just in the islands and you pull in a little, port area and immediately we're ready.

 

You get off, we're going to go on this excursion, get on another little boat and go over to the Virgin Gorda and see the Baths. And that really was a cool experience. But as soon as we step off the ship, it starts raining and it's just like, you got to be kidding me. And we were talking to a younger couple behind us who had a few children and they're very, very fun, pleasant family. And I looked up and there's a, right over the heart of downtown, you could not have done this more perfectly, there's a beautiful double rainbow. And the guy behind us, we're kind of putting this like, your kids can look at this, and truly an extraordinary moment. My wife would say, we should take a picture. I said, Nope, this is one there's not even enough time. You're never going to catch it, enjoy the moment. The guy behind says, how does Disney do it? It just was an incredible, incredible moment.

 

So then we went on and, stopped raining, by the time we got over to Virgin Gorda and we had, I had a nice time come back and get back on the ship and get back out in the heavy seas. And so, but there was that. So, the next day we're to go to, again, St. Thomas and they said, not going in, so we're just going to keep sailing and we're going to stay in some rough seas, but we'll have this day and hopefully we'll be able to get into Castaway, the Disney island. Rain, blowing wind, and I mean, some serious wind, all us throughout most of the trip, really crazy wind. My wife and I get up and we're up, sort of the front of the ship. And there's not a lot of people up there because it's cold, it's windy and people are trying to enjoy themselves at quieter parts of the ship.

 

Incredible rainbows, doubles and you could actually see the light coming toward us, almost touching the ship. I mean, it just looked, and you could see through and see the water and then it would go way back out and you could see through and see the horizon. I've never had an experience like that before, just seeing these rainbows. And it just, again, we've actually tried, you can't, to even try to take a photo of that would destroy it. You're never going to capture it. And this is a moment you just appreciate what's there.

 

So let me tell you, about the phone and the driver's license. I got to tell you, I tried to handle that pretty well. You know, I'm not one that just gets crazy and angry and frustrated. You do what you can do to try to find it, we couldn't find it. And thankfully in spite of not having my pass, if you will, to get back on the ship, we did have Cathy's and they can pull us up and basically we had to pull up some photos and verify it's us and all that. And we explained what happened and yeah.

 

So, I'm back on the ship anyway, I'm thinking, okay, so you go up and you just report this and maybe somebody will find it. Maybe, they won't. So, we report it and you go to dinner and we're also hoping to find Cathy's sweater that we thought we had left at dinner the night before, wasn't there, never saw it. So we're both, not feeling too happy about all this. And it's just, you enjoy your meal as much as you can. And afterwards we go down to guest services and it turns out somebody had turned in my phone, glasses, driver's license, everything's there.

 

And you know, I tell you that feels good. And we decided, well, let's just walk around. Now this entire day it had been raining off and on, lot of wind, et cetera. And we're up on the top of the ship, it's still drizzling, some good wind, but you know, this is the crazy things my wife and I do, get out and walk around and just try to get a little fresh air. And I walk by a nice sort of wooden thing on this ship, it's where they collect the garbage and things, and it has a top to it and there's this... And the light was very funky, just yellow lights and things. And there's just what appears to be white, something hanging over this thing. And I looked at that and I said, ah, what is this?

 

And I'm just, I truly was just curious about it. And my wife, and I sort of pick it up and I'm like, what is this? And she just goes, oh my God, that's my sweater. And it was dry, but it was sitting outside. You know, whether somebody just put it there, or we think, probably she sat it down the night before because we were watching some fireworks on the ship. And, but again, it couldn't have sat out all day, first off, the wind, it never would, night and day, it wouldn't have stayed there, and it rained heavily most of the night and off and on throughout the day. So, what happened to this sweater? And there it is in perfect condition, ever so slightly damp. Because it was just sitting, I don't know how long, and you sit and say, this is just crazy. This is just crazy.

 

So what is my point to all of this? Well, we could choose to focus on all that was going wrong. All that wasn't picture perfect. Or we could choose to roll with the sea, roll with the punches and just make the best of it. I can replace a sweater, I don't like the hassle, but I could replace our driver's license and a phone's just a phone.

 

I'm not going in to have my heart valve repaired, in a couple of days. Life's pretty good. So, we came back from this cruise and shared some of the stories, the good, the bad, and some other things I haven't even shared, it just was a wild time. And our friend that is going into surgery just got such a kick out of hearing about this. It brought her such joy and such pleasure. And she says, you know what happened to you two? And I said, well, I don't know what? She says, you experienced several God winks. And I love that language, that struck a chord with me. It kind of helped put all this in perspective, you know, and this isn't about, being deeply religious or anything you could just as easily say life has winked. And it's just a way to focus, to draw the focus of the experience, to the right thing.

 

My wife and I will forever remember what it felt like to see these two extraordinary rainbow events. And I've seen rainbows off and on my whole life, I'll tell you, I've seen some really awesome things. These two, nothing like it. It was just, you just have to stop and catch your breath for a minute. It's a God wink. It's a life wink. So, that's kind of my story, the takeaway and I think the reason I wanted to share all this is things happen in life. Some things are small, like losing a phone with some driver's license, and some things are big, life changing, like having to go in and have your heart, your chest opened up and a valve, hopefully repaired. And you know, this is, wow.

 

So, I try to keep perspective. And I think when things happen, we need to think about how significant is this and what does it really mean? And, life's too short, life's too precious. So I want to say to all of you, first off when bad things or stressful things and crazy things and unexpected things happen, try to keep it in perspective and understand life's short, but also look for the God winks. I truly believe more and more, and just the older I get that they're there. We just got to look for them. We need to listen to our life. And maybe that's a way to keep having the energy to move forward, to keep taking the next step. Maybe it's also a way to appreciate what we have, what we're blessed with, but also, I encourage you to say, even though, hey it's been a long, crazy year and all sorts of things, and there's all kinds of reasons not to take a trip, not to prioritize yourself, not to have a little time with a support system that is so important in your life.

 

So, I'm referring obviously to my wife in my situation, even in the middle of winter, when it can be crazy, it's really worth, wow, prioritizing yourself and taking a little time to seek nourishment, to do something to take this break from work and all these other routines. Yeah. It may be crazy. Yeah. I don't know what happens, but I'm open to the experience. And again, just, I can't tell you how important this is to me.

 

This was such a major event in terms of, and I just loved her language, it's a God wink. Looking for those, and recognizing the real value. So, that's my story. It's a different situation you're in and there's nothing risk management here other than, you, again, prioritizing taking care of yourself. That's always an issue and a topic for me, but I hope you found something of value with this tale of mine. And I hope maybe it might enable you at times to be more open, to looking for those winks now and again, and that that may be meaningful for you as well. So, that's it. Thanks for listening. Have a good one all.

ALPS In Brief – Episode 61: A Dirty Little Secret About Conflict Resolution Claims

ALPS Risk Manager Mark Bassingthwaighte shares the illuminating story of a law firm, their longstanding wealthy client who couldn’t close the deal on a massive project that would have netted the law firm millions in billables, and the unfortunate circumstances that followed when the firm moved the project forward with a different client to secure the payout.

Transcript:

Mark Bassingthwaighte:

Hello, I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte and welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I have had a couple of calls of late and they are not out of the ordinary in terms of the topics that are being discussed but it got me to thinking. And I wanted to share a claim story that goes back quite a few years but it's one of my favorite stories for a number of reasons. A lot of the calls that I take have to do with conflicts of interest and just exploring. Sometimes it's not clear who the client is and you work through that and you can figure out the conflict issue and resolve some things. Sometimes it's just a lawyer looking at a matter wanting to stay in or wondering if he or she can even take a case.

So it's fun and at times just crazy in terms of how complex certain situations can get trying to work through all the issues. But I wanted to share a conflict story again because I've had a number of calls. And of late, the issue really has been, what rule are we in? Is it a current client matter in terms of 1.7 or is it a past client situation rule 1.9? And it's interesting because 1.7 is a bit more restrictive. And 1.9, if we can get there is a little more permissive in terms of allowing attorneys some additional options in terms of whether they can stay in or can take a new matter on, that kind of thing.

So let me get to my story. There's just some interesting learnings out of it. The gist of it is there's a larger firm that had a senior partner, I would call this individual rainmaker, and had a very good long-standing client. And this client was a developer. And this developer had an option on a significant amount of land. And the firm wanted to help this individual close the deal. And if they managed to have the client get all this land, the firm stands to make a great deal of money in terms of billables over the years as this project would evolve and be developed. And we are talking about real money here. I mean, it's way into the seven digits.

So what happened is the client was unable to get sufficient funds together to exercise his option and he lost out. This wasn't the first deal to go south and probably won't be the last. And regardless, this individual is an individual of real wealth. The firm, however, looking at how much money could be made if they get involved in this project, didn't want to walk away. Another partner at the firm had another client who was also an individual of means and was very interested in this project and was able to put the deal together and the firm got involved in terms of all the follow-up work and everybody's happy, right? Well, not so much. It turns out the project as it went forward with the second client was successful. There was a lot of news coverage, the individual was just getting some attention and whatnot and the original client that lost that on the deal, I guess, got a little put out about all that "just likes, it should have been me" kind of a thing.

So he ended up suing for malpractice based on a conflict of interest. And suffice it to say, at the end of the day, there was a substantial loss paid out. And one little side comment here, a dirty little secret with conflict claims, a law firm or an attorney can't benefit financially from something they should never have been involved in the first place. So discouragement of fees was also on the table and I assure you that the firm in the situation paid some real money to get out of this claim and finally have it resolved.

So that's sort of the down and dirty of this claim. But I want to talk about some learnings with it, some interesting things. The first thing I want to talk about is this difference, are we in rule 1.7 or 1.9? Arguably, had this individual, the first developer that lost out on April exercise the option, had this individual been a past client, this may have turned out a little bit differently.

Well, what happened? Why didn't it play this way? Well, first off, the law firm looking at all this as they wanted to analyze, do a little conflict resolution, if you will, look at this setting and say, well, what's interesting? We have a bright line. This client was unable to perform on the option and so our involvement here is done. That bright line transitioned this individual from a present client to past client. Now we have all kinds of bright lines here in the practice of law. The deeds had been delivered, the judge signed the final order, the proceeds had been dispersed, the settlement check has been sent out, whatever. There are all kinds of bright lines here. And then the other thing that they started to think through was to say, well, we have some passage of time.

In their case, it was a few weeks. And that passage of time also transitioned someone from a present client to a past client. And that was the rationalization. Well, read the rule in your jurisdiction or the two rules in your jurisdiction. I've looked at them in every state and even the model rules, and I've never come across any language that says, a bright line or the passage of time is somehow determinative on this issue. It really isn't. I've not come across any ethics opinions that say this. So what does... Well, before I get to what gets us there, I want to talk about this passage of time just a little bit more in-depth too because lawyers will say, okay, in this story, it was a couple of weeks we all agree that was a bad call.

Well, and sometimes, again, money drives ethics. Remember there's a lot of money on the table and you want to find a way to not walk away from that. But you'll hear other lawyers say, well, but maybe two years, something like that. What is it? You now say two weeks, two months, two years, five years, 10 years. And there really isn't an answer to this. I can share over the years in my work here at ALPS, I've come across some cases around the country where judges have even said, I don't know how long it is, but 15 years isn't long enough. And it's just like, okay, you got to take note of that.

So the passage of time and these bright lines are not determinative. What is determinative? And it's interesting. If you talk to juries on the issue, what you hear is, look lawyers, all that you do in terms of your business model, your marketing is to encourage your clients to look at you as, you're my lawyer, this is my firm, that kind of thing speaking as a client. You want clients to say, we are your clients. Now that's good business. Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. But they'll also say, because that's the reality, the way you do this, encourage everybody to think, we're your lawyer, we're your firm. Unless and until you document otherwise, these individuals are going to be current clients.

So think about that. If we don't document, if we don't have... Well, what is the document that gets you there? Obviously a letter of closure. This concludes our representation of you in this matter, that kind of thing. If we don't have that kind of documentation, I strongly encourage you as you do conflict resolution over the years on this particular issue, that if you don't have a closure letter, I encourage you to always say, these individuals or clients are perhaps inactive but they are current clients regardless of the passage of time or the bright lines that have transpired, okay? If we don't have a closure letter clear on its face, this concludes our representation, inactive current client.

I will also tell you that savvy firms in terms of what they do with their conflicts systems, best practices, even after seven years, if a firm may have a far retention policy of seven years, they start shredding things in accordance with the policy and that's fine but they don't destroy the closure letter. And I'll typically maybe a digital copy or something like that, but that's part of the conflict database. It helps us document, is this a current or a past client? Well, it helps us document it's a past client. So the continuous use by all in a form of letter closure can be very, very beneficial on this topic. So I want to underscore bright lines; nope, passage of time; nope, documentation is key and a must.

But there's another really interesting issue here. There is a side learning that I'd also like to toss out. I shared initially that the rainmaker and this first client that lost out on the option have been working together for many, many years. And I want to toss this side learning out because a lot of lawyers do have, whether it's family, friends, long-term business relationships, but we really develop good relationships with some of our clients. And there is a thinking that just comes into play at times that says, I don't want to be offensive, I don't need to document my files as thoroughly, think closure letters then absence of that, because it's off-putting. I don't want to say goodbye, get out of here. And really these are good people. I have real faith and trust in the relationship in other words. And based on that faith and trust, these folks just aren't going to Sue. We go way back and I don't want to offend. But I got to tell you that's not accurate.

We need to think about faith and trust in these relationships and what that means from the other side. In this situation, the client basically came to the lawyer in the firm and said, look, I've been harmed here to the tune of several million dollars, it's a lost profit calculation. And I know, again, said this way, but this is what's driving it based on the faith and trust in this business and personal relationship we've developed over the years, I know you would not want me to suffer any harm as a result of your misstep. Would you help bring the claim against yourself and the firm so that I can recover? And would you and your wife like to join us this weekend for dinner? We're going to take the boat out.

Now, in this situation, actually, I spent about a week with this firm after all this resolved looking and talking about the issues and doing some other education and consulting with them. But literally that conversation occurred and the boat, taking the boat out, we're not talking about some small, we're talking about something that's like 65-foot yard or so. I mean, it's a big, big boat. There's a lot of money here. But can you appreciate how in this relationship, faith, and trust really means something different depending on which side of the relationship attorney or client you're in? So I encourage you also not to minimize this. People that we have as lawyers, great faith and trust in in terms of the attorney-client relationship, this is a population that really is pretty litigious. Every carrier has many, many claims over the years that arise out of these relationships, but still some things go wrong.

So a key takeaway here in this situation too is really just to look and say, Hey, I understand that sending a closure letter out or something may not... I don't want to offend but it doesn't have to be a goodbye kiss-off type letter. You've been honored consistently over the years by this person or this company or this family continuing to bring work and it's a real privilege, honor them back and simply say, thank you and write your audience. You need to phrase it and put it in the language it's typically you and how you would interact with whoever it is, but this concludes my representation. I hope you found my work to be exemplary. It's always a pleasure. I look forward to working with you on the Jones matter or whenever something new arises. Say hello to your lovely wife and I'll see you at rotary.

But write your audience, but you really do need that documentation, that closure letter. In this situation, had we had a closure letter, that really could have made a very, very significant difference because we would've been in the 1.9 role. Now yes, if you do this analysis on 1.9, we would need to have a consent to our moving forward or this firm should have had consent to move forward and that's a different topic. But if you think about just the learnings of this fact pattern, I hope you begin to appreciate the importance of documentation and the difference in terms of how we walk through the difference between 1.7 and 1.9.

So that's my quick little rundown on a conflict issue that's been topic that we've been chatting about with a number of lawyers in recent months here. I hope you found it worthwhile and interesting. I have a little learning here and so it's been a pleasure. I appreciate your listening. Look forward to being able to share another story, another call at some point down the road. So, Hey, thanks for listening. Stay well all. Bye, bye.