 and welcome to this edition of Create a Life You Love. Now, as you know, I believe everybody has a Dharma, a path that they're destined to be on accidentally or purposefully. Some people know this from early on. Others kind of get guided into it willingly and sometimes unwillingly. We're going to talk about that today with one of my favorite people in the world, Attorney Scott Wagner. Hi, Scott. Hey, Tony. How are you? Good. How are you? Good. I can tell at the accidental Dharma is what we're going to talk about today. It's possible. It's possible. Fair enough. Fair enough. Thank you so much for being a guest. It's such an honor to have you on. I'm really grateful you could be here today. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. So, Scott, you have quite the story. You're an attorney. I am. The first question I ask everybody, when did you know you wanted to be an attorney? I'm still trying to figure that out, but it was not something I was drawn to. It was something I sort of fell backwards into because I had no other marketable skills is the story I like to tell. I was fortunate to have an older brother who was a prosecutor for years and decided that I should be an attorney as well. I originally wanted to be a musician, but I wasn't any good. I don't believe that. It was true. I was terrible, but it was a great way to meet girls, which at the time was, you know, what was important, and my brother fortunately told me that I wasn't any good at it, and I listened to him, and somehow I ended up in law school. Okay. That's a great way to end up there, though. I mean... Well, it beats working is what I was at the time. My brother is Jeff Wagner, as you know, and he's actually on the radio now for WTMJ and has been for years, and I was actually a broadcasting major because that's what I wanted to do, and at the time he was a federal prosecutor, as I said, and he came to me in my junior year and said, Don't be an idiot. There's no money in radio. You've got to go to law school. So I went to law school and now I work 12 or 13 hours a day, and Jeff is now on the radio for three hours a day. Awesome. He's the smartest Wagner, but nobody likes to brag about it. Oh, that's funny. So where did you end up going to law school? Well, I went to Marquette. I really never had any interest in going outside of Milwaukee, unlike my daughter, who is now in beautiful San Diego, and I'm very jealous going to school. I know. She's, again, I'm not the smartest Wagner, but... And I had gone to Marquette for undergrad and liked it and liked Milwaukee, and so that was really the only place I applied, and it worked out just fine. Marquette is one of the best law schools? Well, it's funny because when I went to Marquette because I'm really old, the law school was this tiny little building on the corner of Wisconsin 11th that was a fire hazard. No one from Marquette is watching, right? But after I was done with all the tuition dollars I had spent, they had built a beautiful new law school. It's like state-of-the-art. It's all glass windows. Everything is Wi-Fi. I went back to speak to a class about plaintiff's class action work, which is one of the things I do. And as I walk in, there's like signs where students can get massages and stuff, and it was a completely different law school experience than I had. Anybody at my law school who offered you a massage you wanted to stay away from. I think this new thing was something different. So do you think about taking a class just once in a while so that you can get a massage and be in the new state-of-the-art building? Well, I would never say it that way. Oh, yes. Maybe that's the wrong way. Right. Maybe I'll teach a class. Oh, that's even better. You should do that. Right, because I'm a little old to be a student at this point. You're never too old to be a student. It's close. So you mentioned earlier you played music. What kind of music? What type of band? Tell me. I need to ask. I know it's really not about the band, but I need to ask about the band. Well, when I was 15, I was a fat kid, and I've since become a fat middle-aged guy. I've reverted back. Between my freshman and sophomore year at high school, I shot up six inches and lost 40 pounds, so I was suddenly okay. And as we were in the high school, they had what they called a night-scaler. I went to Nicolet, and there was a kid sitting on a table playing a guitar, and all these girls were around him. I mean, all kinds of girls, and he wasn't any good. So I'm thinking to myself, you know what? I can do that. So I learned about six chords, and even smarter than that, I was the guy who was really good at it, and the two of us would play different bars because at that time the drinking age was 18, and I was tall enough that nobody cared and I wasn't drinking anyway. So we played around the city, different things, and had a great time, and was considering expanding our touring area, but my brother properly told me that I sucked and I should really go back to doing something else, and he was ultimately right. The funny part of this is most of the places we've played have either burned down or gone out of business. That is hilarious. Yeah, so I'm not so sure what the lesson of that is, but I don't think it's a career I'll go back to. Yeah, I get that. I get that. So let's go back to law now. What type of law do you practice? I'm a litigator, which means I'm in court as much as anybody is these days, and I do commercial litigation, which means, you know, not family or criminal, but generally kind of business to business litigation. And the niche I've sort of fallen into is plaintiff's class action work representing shareholders when they're mergers or acquisitions and making sure they get paid properly for their shares. Okay, can you expand on that a little bit? What type of class action other than, you know, the basic titles that you just gave, some of the cases that you may have handled? Sure. We've done, I actually helped try the case against a mutual fund company that had a very precipitous drop in the value of a bond fund that a bunch of retired people were in. That was back in 2008. We tried it in Milwaukee. It was the only civil trial of a class action to go that year. I'm involved now in something a little different for me in the opioids class action against the manufacturers and distributors. I have two of the counties in Wisconsin. I'm the local counsel for that. I've also represented retirees against various governmental entities when their benefits were cut. But most of the work I do is more the shareholder type work either in connection with misrepresentations made in a public offering or if a merger and acquisition is not compensating the shareholders adequately. And that's also an area I kind of fell into. There's a really, really good firm out of San Diego which is one of the reasons my daughter is there. That was my connection. And they started working with me and so I do all the Wisconsin work as far as I know and they're very excellent attorneys. I mean some of the sharpest minds I know and they become very, very good friends of mine there. My daughter's adopted family out there and that really is the reason she's there is how much I like San Diego. That's amazing. So do you get to go visit her very often because that would be an amazing trip to be able to take right now? Well, I was talking to her a couple of days ago and she was complaining about the weather being 80 so I wasn't very sympathetic for her. But I was fortunate in May we had a mediation out there in one of the cases that was, the mediation was in San Diego so I swung out to see her and actually to bring her home but I was able to make it a work trip. And last year my brother and I went out to see Jimmy Buffett weather which wasn't really a work trip but I'm a bit of a parrot head as you know. That was my 54th show and it was Sydney's fifth so that's pretty good for a 19 year old. Nice. That is awesome. So awesome. Very nice. So in doing litigation and some of the work that you do how did you end up deciding that's what you want to do? Well that's got to go back to my brother who as you can tell is very dear to me. And very influential in your life apparently. Well, both my parents have passed away but my father was a complicated man let's say and as someone once said who get very friendly when they drink and my father was not one of those people so my brother was always there for me and still is to this day I would do anything for him and I'm sure he would do anything for me but he ended up sliding into the father role considerably and he said look you want to litigate you don't want to sit around in a room all day you want to be in court you are reasonably charming in small doses people like you until they get to know you and you'd be bored otherwise so he actually got me a job with one of the smartest guys I ever met in town who was a litigator and like an idiot I started working my first year of law school and I was working 40 hours a week while going to law school just because I liked it so much. Wow, that's very very impressive. Well I don't know if it's impressive or just took me that long to get stuff done but it was different back then because now you can go on any computer and you can research but I graduated in 89 because I'm old but back then you had like dedicated research terminals you couldn't just go on the internet and start doing legal research and I remember I was two days at the firm still in my first year of law school and one of the partners gave me this bankruptcy assignment I knew nothing about bankruptcy law I slept at the firm for two days just trying to put it together because I didn't want to go back and look like an idiot because he had to sort of redirect me but that was how it was back then and my health things have changed, huh? Yes, I'm still tired but I know a little bit more now just to add a bit more to add a bit more so okay so the next question I would ask is where do you practice law? I just joined a firm called Mallory and Zimmerman in Milwaukee I had been it's a great firm I really like the guys and I had always been at purely litigation firms before and generally smaller and usually I was the owner or one of the owners and there was a couple of problems one, I'm not a great administrator so having somebody else handle that has been very good to me good for me and the other thing is this firm not only does litigation but it also do corporate and real estate work and it's just a nice synergy that I can offer my clients services I couldn't at a purely litigation firm and there are other litigators at this firm but the other people can use me or the other resources as well nice, very nice so and how long have you been practicing? I graduated in 1989 so we're coming up on 30 years in June that's amazing well again it's lack of any other marketable skills no, I don't believe that it was too far in at that point to figure out something else I don't believe that in that one bit I really don't let's talk a little bit about your awards awards that you have won there's a couple different recognition you can get there's Super Lawyers which is from West and I've been named in there since 2012 and there's Best Lawyers News and I've been in there since 2012 but to be perfectly honest and Martindale Hubbell too is rated A-plus or ethical but a lot of attorneys get that but the best rewards are when your opposing council sends you cases when they give you referrals in the future when your clients refer cases back to you and I've been very fortunate to have those relationships nice very nice and if somebody would come in for a consultation they want to talk to you what can they expect during a consultation with you? Sure, the first meeting is always free because I've got to figure out whether I can help you or not and the hardest part of being a lawyer is sometimes just telling people that one, they don't have a case or two, you have a case but it will cost you so much to bring it and to succeed that it won't be worth your time so they can expect brutal honesty from me which is good, I think that people need that I really do Well it's an interesting thing because I had one of the biggest cases I ever had was a very successful defensive software firm that they actually brought me out to Colorado to handle the case and the only reason I got that case is because I had told the company that they should not pursue an action they had a couple months before and he respected that and even though another attorney had told them chase it, give me $10,000 down and I just said, here's why you're going to spend more than you're ever going to get back how much time are you going to spend on the litigation that's going to be away from making money and he respected that so it paid off and that's always the hard part of my job is to make people understand the flaws in their case at the outset because you would much rather have that discussion on day one than you would on day 600 and a lot of people come in and they say, look I don't care what it costs but I'm going to take these guys to court and we're going to make their lives miserable and that lasts until bill number two because they've seen how much it costs and then it's, you know, what do you mean how can it cost this much so it's very important to have that conversation on day one and say, you know, this is how it's going to go and you can't always know how it's going to go because it's not like paving a road where you can have some idea if it'll cost me X to get from A to point B because as somebody once told me it's kind of like painting a room we try to paint the room but then the other side comes in and puts graffiti all over it or paints it a different color and then you've got to go back and paint it again so it's hard to give an exact cost estimate or explain exactly how this is going to work but after so many years you have a pretty good idea of range of cost and you just want to make sure that they sign on for no surprises nice, wonderful now when someone comes to you and typically like you mentioned you deal more with businesses than individuals but if an individual were thinking I need an attorney what type of cases could an individual bring to you the cases where I deal with individuals primarily or with their owners of businesses because you would be amazed when people start businesses with friends don't think about how it's going to end and then ultimately have some sort of falling out and there's two reasons businesses have falling out one there's too much money and somebody gets jealous that Jane is taking too much and not earning enough and then it becomes this issue of how do we separate the business and still let it run but get somebody bought out and two is there's no money which is a situation just as bad or perhaps even worse but that's where I see a lot of individuals is hey I'm an investor in this deal my partner we used to get along great but now we don't how can you help me out I also do things there's a contract that went bad I mean I would do that kind of thing but that's most where I see individuals is when they're investors or if they had invested with brokers who had treated them poorly or some kind of securities offering so that's good for people to know I think I think that's really important for people to know second you deal with a lot of bigger businesses so if somebody has a business and they're looking they have a problem with their business or they're looking for someone to represent them what types of cases could they bring to you well they could bring any kind of case but where we can really provide value is litigation avoidance which is how to keep you out of court because once you're in court the money is flowing and as we said you only have half control of what's going on at best because the other side is going to do what they're going to do but we do things like review the contracts of businesses to make sure that they're protected to make sure that if a client doesn't pay we can collect our attorney's fees and we go after them to make sure that there's appropriate releases in there to make sure that the individuals are protected behind the corporate form they've chosen so there's all sorts of things we can do for businesses at any size pre litigation and I prefer to do that to keep them out of litigation because it's amazing how many very successful businesses started with no foresight at all in terms of what's going to happen when we grow and what kind of protections are we going to need how do we make sure we as individuals are not liable for things and a business is just like a marriage but people don't understand you should be thinking about how it's going to end because all the businesses do and that's what I do is business divorce Oh, nice that's a really interesting way to put it It's not a very romantic sentiment but they're finite entities Well, when people get into business they think they know I think they know there's a possibility it could go this way but they're so focused on it's going to go this way it's going to look like that they don't think about the dissolving of a business or the separating of a business and what that will look like because you're focused on success is how do we make this generate money, how do we get fat and happy and get the cash in but nobody ever thinks about the backside some people do until it's too late and it's much easier to work that out when everybody's getting along than it is once you're three quarters of the way through and one of the things I know when people first go into business together the little things on the contracts that they think, oh this isn't a big deal we're in this for the long haul I'm not going to worry about this detail or that detail those are the details that kind of bite you in the butt but you think you can trust this person which is great but that's why you can blame it on me exactly that's my role to be the fall guy, exactly but that's really what we're doing more of and I enjoy more than litigation because you can actually do something productive and prevent litigation nice, that's a really nice role to be able to take on when it works it's great absolutely so what was your first big case and if you can't talk about all the details or names that's okay but well it's ironically and I think you know this my first big case was actually in Sheboygan where we're filming when I was young and dumb it was years ago, it was probably in the early 90s the two hospitals in Sheboygan that had been vicious competitors they won't mention any names they've both been sold a couple of times got together to put together an ambulance service when the city of Sheboygan privatized its service and at that time the the model was changing where if you outsourced everything and took everything off the payroll the private provider would do the benefits and everything else so the two competing hospitals merged into an ambulance service that they put up for bid with the city council and just assumed they would get the service and I represented a Milwaukee provider who had been doing paramedic service all around the country and came in and blew them out of the water and Sheboygan the city council chose my client instead of the homegrown one which caused all sorts of consternation and the two hospitals made life as difficult as they could possibly do both hospitals wouldn't cooperate with my ambulance provider and ultimately they would run out and they came to me to represent them and of course it was me three years out of law school at a three attorney firm against the two biggest firms in the state oh my goodness today it was young and dumb and of course I took it on a contingency basis which I'm probably too smart to do now but it was fascinating we filed suit in the eastern district of Wisconsin we drove out to get the Sheboygan press it was the first time my name was in a good way in a newspaper it was a front page story out in Sheboygan in fact I would take the same exit to get there we used to go to city council meetings all the time so I did bring back some memories on the way out here it worked out just fine it was a long friend of mine since then we had a lot of interesting cases together that's very very wonderful so can you share with me a more intriguing case perhaps well I don't know how intriguing it could be we've represented a couple different interesting businesses over the years my partner had fallen into representing an adult bookstore and had fire damage to it and that resulted in some interesting inventory sheets in terms of the various different products that had been supposedly smoke damaged we spent a lot of time laughing over that I can only imagine and we had another adult entertainment center that had burned down those were only two adult entertainment cases but they do stick out in my mind over the years now I can imagine you mentioned earlier a class action suit that has to do with the opioid epidemic and that is such a sensitive and kind of a hot topic right now also and there are I think everyone at this point might know someone that in some way has been affected it might not be your direct family friends family or neighbors family where they have somebody who has been directly affected by the what they're calling the opioid epidemic so in handling this case I'm sure that there's a lot of passion for you in seeing I don't know if justice or the right thing can be done here well it's actually one of the cases I'm most proud of because usually what I do is just moving money around and that's important and it's significant to people but when you look at the opioid crisis I mean it's staggering I had no idea until I started investigating and I'm just a local counsel there's national counsel that are handling these cases which are all consolidated in Ohio in a multi-district litigation but the impact that these pain killers that I don't think were ever meant for people of our age or younger is devastating and the addictive quality they have is frightening when you look at how people on relatively quick turns become addicted to them and as we were talking about the other day in many situations when they clamp down on the opioids you see the heroin rate rise because it's such a gateway to heroin it's the same feeling the judge who's handling this in Ohio is a great judge he's really trying to move these cases along and trying to get a settlement that will actually address this problem which is more than just throwing money at something but you know it's a multifaceted problem is how do you educate people not to fall into that trap how do you educate physicians who generally aren't trained on pain management in medical school I mean there's all sorts of things about law I wasn't trained as and they learn about in many cases pain management from the people selling them the drugs so it's a frightening situation I think the statistics are for every 10 people in the United States a man, woman and child there are 7 opioid prescriptions written I mean it's frightening it's astounding and I've heard some cases about the FDA and what they've passed that the doctors as far as painkillers the doctors have said do not pass this that's too addictive and the FDA has still passed it passing so that 5 year olds can get oxy what 5 year old needs oxy that's not in the hospital all the time it just my mind can't even begin to process all of that it really cannot some of the county people that are on the front lines that I work with I mean the dedication they have to really combatting this problem whether it be you know kids who are in foster care because of the addiction of their parents and just the incarceration that's up so much which again takes parents away from their kids and the deaths I mean the death rate has just skyrocketed for this so for the opioid abuse so I really admire some of the people at the county who are on the front lines and really spending time trying to make this work and the difficulty in this case is going to be how do we craft a solution at the end of the day I mean with education and treatment and different areas need different solutions so it's not the usual puzzle which is how much money can I get for how many people because money alone isn't going to solve this directly so Scott first and foremost I want to thank you so much for being on the show it's just so amazing to have you on and have you share your gifts with everyone please tell people how they can contact you the easiest way to get me is I'm an attorney at Mallory and Zimmerman is my email it's the quickest way s-wagner s-w-a-g-n-e-r at m-z-m-i-l-w dot com nice and I will respond generally within 24 hours perfect excellent thank you again for being on the show it's absolutely positively such an honor and I'm really grateful you were able to make the trip and sit here with me and discuss your journey and your path absolutely my pleasure Tony thank you so much for having me thank you and I want to thank you for this episode of create a life you love in the next episode Jen and I will be making holiday spirits what signature drink are you serving at your holiday meals find out on the next episode can I come back yes absolutely