 Welcome to Barbell Logic Rewind. Welcome to the Barbell Logic podcast. I'm Scott Hamburg. And of course I have Matt Reynolds with me. And today we have my concigliary attorney, David Kiesling. Do I get paid more for being a concigliary? I don't know. We've worked it out. I hope not. I hope not. Let's start with that. What's your hourly rate? Wow. So it depends on if it's an Oklahoma. If it's an Oklahoma and you're not a preferred rate client, you're 350. Okay, just normal. 350? Yeah. If you're in any of our other offices internationally, we have 16 offices nationwide. Are you live in some Missouri? I do practice in Missouri. So we have. You are hired. I'll hire you. We have offices in 16 locations nationwide. We have an office in London. We have an office in Beijing, China, Toronto, Puerto Rico. So we go over. So the rates differ depending on what it is. International rates typically around $900 an hour. Yeah. I'm paying $580. I didn't know they hadn't bought in China. Yeah. So we do a lot of patent trademark work there. And then I have clients in Pakistan, Dubai. What's the hourly rate in Dubai? In close rate, $900. That's $2,400. Plus all the expenses, plus two security guys that travel with them. Plus you want to go eat at Newsthor at Place. But Dubai's a great place. You want to go there. It's a great place to visit. It's actually more Western than you would think it is. But when you get on the plane and go from Dubai straight into either, well, typically Islamabad or Karachi, all the West is gone. The West is gone. You're no longer in the West. So I had an attorney locally in Tulsa. They're kind of a purportedly a full service law firm. They're pretty good at looking over the lease or whatever. And business grew. And I got up in the, I don't know, low 20 employee number or something like that. Start having some HR problems. And one of my former employees brought suit against us. And David was the opposing counsel and mopped the floor pretty well with my counsel. And so after the smoke cleared and I quit being so damn mad, I called him up and said, you want to be my attorney? Exact words were, I realized that day I had the wrong lawyer in that room. And I should have been on the other side of the table. And so I remember that call because it's not the first time it's happened, number one. And then number two, a lot of people will call you up because they're frustrated with their lawyer. And I think the first thing I said was, Mr. Hamburg, are you still represented by your prior counsel? He says, no, it's what this call is all about. So we'll get those calls from time to time because it'll be frustrated with their lawyer. They'll try to communicate outside of them. And as a professional courtesy, and typically you don't want people saying that you're talking to their clients without them being present. You try to stop that train before it gets off the tracks. But that was a great transition for Scott for a number of reasons. He didn't get sued anymore. And if he had been sued in the future on the things that could have occurred, I suppose, in the world of possibilities, he would have had a great defense, not only a great defense, but a winning defense across the board. He didn't have that the first time around. I'm sold. Yeah. So one of the challenges, and here's the problem, I'll just let you know that the problem in business is that you cannot wait to fix the challenge, but you have to proactively work to avoid the challenge. And so 90% of what I do is a federal court issue. We deal with federal court matters all the time. And there's so much, particularly in employment law, that if you proactively engage the employees, proactively do certain things to ensure that the environment is what it's supposed to be. And if it's not that there's a method for resolution, then companies can avoid that. And so when you're small and you're growing like Scott did in those early days, their budget or their awareness and their vision for growing all aspects, including insurables, including your accounting function, including your HR function, including your legal function didn't grow at the same rate. Because typically when you start small and you end up substantially larger than where you started, you don't grow those things the same way at the same pace. What do we know about small businesses? We know that 99% of the guys in small business, those guys are working 80 hours a week. They're trying to keep the lights on. They're trying to keep themselves paid. They're trying to resolve petty little things that occur on a day-to-day basis where you put people in the same room. They're not thinking about lawyers and they're not thinking about how am I keeping my stuff straight with the Secretary of State? How am I keeping my insurance properly evaluated? How am I worrying about employed liability issues that make them up? They're not worried about that until it hits them because they're too busy. I miss those days. You got it. So we take that off their shoulders and say, you know what? You go do what it is that you need to do to make good money. We're gonna hand a lot of other stuff and you shouldn't have to pay us a ton if you listen to us. We should be able to proactively kind of give you that peace of mind, that insurance, by setting you up for success, not failure, and you go make more money. And you need a bunch because if you do anything long enough and are successful, you have a target on you and you will get this payment on you and you will get it. You will have trouble. Well, sure, people with resources, even if they're just perceived as having resources, create a target-rich environment for those that don't. And so in this country as a whole, we have people that think, I'm entitled to this job. I have a right to this job. No, you don't. And unless you have a contract that says you have a right to this job because you have a contract, not just an agreement for an at-will employment. Yeah, it's not that the contract would say that you have the right. The contract is the right to the job for the length of the contract. That is correct. But most people aren't employed under terms of contract. They're employed as at-will employees. And so you're entitled to nothing. I can't terminate you because of certain protected class issues or certain unlawful basis for termination. But I can certainly say, hey, I don't like you anymore in this job and you're gone or I can just say, you know what? It's not working out. You gotta go. Right. And so it changes the dynamics substantially. And most people think that that's not the case, but it is. I tell you, it's no different even as the companies grow larger, the number of people that come out of the woodwork to try to target those companies because they see the perceived resources and think, you know what? Even a nuisance value lawsuit will get me $25,000. Well, there are a lot of people that will tell you, pay them in 25 and walk away. I look at it differently. I said, pay me 15 or 18 or 20. And I'll bury them in a hole somewhere in the desert they'll never come out of and they'll never want to sue you again. And no one else will want to sue you again because we won't make it a pleasant experience for them. Right. And that's the consigliary part. That's the consigliary part. That's the former Marine part. That's what it is. Yeah, so David's former Marine. I think we were talking at the deposition table. You were teaching insanity classes or something like that. I was teaching about four of those a week at two local facilities in Tulsa and making it more miserable. So you were working on 70 hours a week or something like that. You know, an insanity instructor running a radio show on the weekend. Yeah, live radio, by the way. Yeah, and then raking our ass over the coals. And so we scheduled this and I said, hey, you know, I've got this bourbon collection. So if you'd like to drink, we can get into that. He says, no, well, I do like that, but I'm in a 30 mile indoor bike race at 430. So I can't. Yeah, gotta get on the pedal. So I said it wouldn't look good if in the first lap, you know, I'm on the side and skin it up the side of my head. But plus I like to perform on those things and I'm pretty competitive. So for example. No shit. Yeah, no kidding. He didn't tell. Loves the conflict. Loves the conflict. Yeah, and I hate it. Me too. What can we tell about this stuff that happened in my office in October? So there's a couple of things. There are really two people that had suits in that case. There were two separate companion related trains. All that you tell it because you know. Yeah. And functionally where you have certain people that are perceived as having slides because of certain language or certain environments that can be created. Can we say what the environment was? You can if you want, but I wouldn't get in too great of a detail, but it was a workshop environment, functionally, kind of a warehouse environment. What happens is when you have related parties and by related parties, when you have family members working in the same environment, if you take action against one family member, it's often going to be the case the other family member also feels the impact of that because they have an obligation somewhere deep inside them that are triggered to think I have to take up for my sister. I have to take up for my aunt or my cousin or whatever. For whatever reason, unless they hate their aunt cousin sister also, which in this case was not the case. And so Scott got kind of double teamed I think and created a good circumstance for me because what we have is we have two people that perceive the same thing, but they believe that they perceive and here they're both recipient to the same allegedly unlawful events. And so we have someone that can back up as a recipient witness the story of the other person and then obviously it's small enough that two people out of 15 make a difference. And so we had a little bit more leverage and in that circumstance, we found like we do in every case, we try to find the best avenues of approach to deploy our weapons, right? Where is the enemy coming? Where would Scott be coming from? And what would he like to avoid? We want to channel him into that. What did you see those things to be? Clients that you currently had, customers that you currently had being. You were wrong about that by the way. Well, I could have been. That was one area because we made some effort to try to find out. You're like, did you call this client this name? I'm like. Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah. Does she know it? I'm not so sure she knows that. I'm not so sure she wasn't either. Yeah. And she might not have been, but I can get on top of you with all kinds of argument. But once I start extracting from your pocketbook, from your client lists, that's a recurring income. And it means more to an employer than me just yelling at him for a day in a deposition. So we got into some client history stuff and some perspective. I'm going to go out and speak to these people, get them in a deposition, ask them those questions. I'm going to bring your wife and ask her those questions and find out if that's the kind of discussion points that we would have and just create somewhat of a toxic environment for litigation. In the deposition, his goal was to create anxiety, fear, anxiety, and doubt. And it did because Scott took about 18 bathroom breaks in six hours. Yeah. In my attorney, it was no help. He was. Not there. Ill-prepared. So interestingly enough, within the first 10 minutes I made a reference, I think, to the parking situation at his attorney's office because we had to feed meters every two hours. And I said, listen, we're going to have to take a break at some point. I'm going to have to feed this meter probably three or four times today. And his lawyer says, what? And I said, I'm going to have to take a break about every two hours and go feed the meter. And Scott says, I quote, this clown told me it was only going to be about an hour or two. And I pointed to this lawyer. And I said, well, that clown was absolutely wrong. And so I think we went for eight hours. Yeah. I don't think we took a lunch break because I typically don't if I can continue to hit the accelerator. Yeah, we did. Did we? Or did you do it? I'm kind of like, I have some anxiety. Just listen to this guy talk. Oh, dude. So I can see why you were like, I never want this guy on the other side again. So we start drilling and drilling and drilling and his lawyer had not, it was clear, had not prepared him for any of the areas of inquiry, any of them. And that is probably the biggest mistake you can make. If you ambush your lawyer, that's a huge problem. If you let your client get ambushed, that's a huge problem. It just depends on who's wearing the responsibility for that at the time. And so it was a really tough experience for Scott. The deposition came off horrible. You would never want to go forward in litigation with that deposition because it just didn't come across well. I got concessions where I should've never gotten concessions. I got really almost no resistance at all. And at times early on when his lawyer would oppose me, I would just say, you know, that ship is sailed, be quiet and just keep going. And he would, he would just do what I said. And so it worked out to where Scott actually paid more to resolve his differences than the statute even required. So we got more in settlement than we could have gotten in trial with the exception of my attorney's fees, which could have been, you know, 100, 125,000, 115, maybe. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. So what happens in a circumstance like that, what you do is you expose people that are plain at their profession versus people that are truly committed to their profession. You're exposing them. So that's a moment of truth because when they're on, everybody can look great reading the book and they can pick up someone else's notes and they can sound like they're intelligent. But when they're on their feet, they're either going to be on their toes or on their heels. You don't attack from your heels. And so in this case, he was on his heels literally in the way he prepared, in the way he failed to prepare, I should say, in every aspect of that. In fact, I believe, if I recall, this has been five years ago, maybe. I think Scott had just met with him briefly before that deposition. It wasn't like they had sat down and had hours and hours and hours of deposition prep. Yeah. And I told him I wanted to do a mock deposition. He said that although that's not necessary. Yeah, here's the deal. General piece of advice. I tell people all the time, prior to depositions, you don't need to know everything. You don't have to know everything. There's no possible way for us to know every possible question that this guy's going to ask or this lady's going to ask. But you need to know, pick three things that you need to know inside and out. Three major topics on this issue. Know three things and know everything about it, right? And do well with everything else, but know three things inside and out. And if you don't know the answer to that question or you can't recall it at that moment, say, I can't recall it at this time. Doesn't mean I won't in the future. We're not closing the door on additional testimony when we get to trial. But right now, if you can't recall it, then don't be afraid to say that. It's not a moment of weakness for you. It means that you caught me with a subject matter that I don't have the specific details on. Maybe the issue happened three or four years before. Maybe you've dealt with 150 employees during that time period. And you don't remember what you had for lunch on the day the event transpired. I don't recall. Maybe I will in the future, but right now I don't recall. And so that gives you a sense of relief when you're in the crosshairs that you don't have to perform and win every single thing. Now, you don't win your case of deposition. You don't win depositions. You can lose a case of deposition, but you don't win your case of deposition. You certainly don't. And so, you know, Scott didn't get prepared. And if he had to have gone through that circumstance again, it would have been a completely different experience almost to the point that he couldn't compare the two. Like he couldn't say I've been to two depositions and prepared for two depositions. Now, he got slaughtered in one. And the other one, he went in there and did his job. So you have to arm your people with the weapons to be successful. If you don't arm them with the weapons to be successful, don't expect them to be successful. How did you find you're without throwing the actual attorney you had under the bus specifically? Did you just look somebody up? Did you Google it? Did you pull up the white pages? Did you know a contact that put you in contact with them? No, well, when I got started in business, I was young. And it's actually pretty difficult to get anybody good to do anything when you're 22. Yeah. And, you know, I had had some old guy that was just like a single practice, you know, in an office in downtown Broken Arrow that had helped me do the purchase agreement or two. And then he retired and I'm like, man, you know, I need to go to a real life firm with some specialists. And I mean, I interviewed him and they didn't want to talk to me. I mean, most people didn't want to talk to me. So I ended up with him really because they were who would help me when I was 24. Right. And then I ended up having a friend, an acquaintance who ended up actually taking a job there at that firm. And then he kind of became my account guy. But he's just a general practitioner or whatever. And they pun me off to their completely in that probably alcoholic HR guy who cost me a lot of heartburn. In fact, when I called you, David, after that had cleared, it was actually about 13 months later because I'm mad about the whole thing. I couldn't even talk about it for that long. So I called him. I said, well, it's been about a year, you know, call him and we did a brief postmortem on that whole situation. And then in that little postmortem talk, which took four minutes or something, David's like, well, you know, at least your insurance should have covered, you know, some chunk of that. Yeah, your EPLI insurance should have covered that. Yeah. And I'm like, we never filed a claim there. He's like, what? And he's like, well, we need to bring suit on your attorney. I mean, he's like, it's malpractice. Like they should have told you the right. Step number one. Sure. We were like 22 days out of the statute of limitations to file on that guy. But we would have certainly gotten a malpractice suit on them. What happens is, I mean, the first time someone walks in and you don't know them, say, if someone walks on the street, they own a company and they say, I'm getting sued and they need help in defending against that suit. The first thing you do is say, let's talk about your insurance coverage. Well, I don't know that I have it. Bring me your house insurance. Bring me your rental insurance. Bring me everything you've got. We're gonna look for a way to find a way if we can get coverage. And if we need to hire someone, you're gonna pay to hire someone to give us a coverage opinion, a letter that says, I've read this coverage and it says A, B, and C, and you have exclusions for this, but you have inclusion and coverage for this. That never happened. That conversation never happened. One of the horrible things about what you do. Well, let me give you a great example. I tell people all the time, what's your job like? It's kind of like a fireman. You know, I'm basically a fireman. So if you do litigation like I do, 99% of my world is litigation. I've got other lawyers on my team. We've got 100 lawyers, but my day-to-day operation is people come to me because there's a disaster. They need to sue someone or they've been sued by someone. They had a loved one that was killed or mangled or maimed. They lost tons of money, which most of ours are financial injury issues, or they've had some type of terrible circumstance where things that belong to them rightfully were taken or vice versa, they got caught, right? So no one comes to you to say, hey, I just won the lottery. I wanna give you a check for $100,000 and let's have a part. They don't do that. They come to you because they're in the middle of a disaster. So I'm putting out a fire every time the phone rings. And when people are in litigation, do you think they're at their best? Absolutely not. They're at their tipping point emotionally. Often they're at their tipping point financially. They know it's something, it's like medicine. It's like not being able to afford the medicine you need to live on, right? It puts people under that kind of pressure because they're not all independently wealthy. They still have mortgages and car payments and kids in school and college and medical bills and things that occur in life. And so, when you're talking about paying a lawyer $350 an hour or $275 an hour on preferred rate or something of that nature, that creates a huge chasm in that person's life and it's not easily filled. Not only that, litigation when it could and should be done in pretty short order can sometimes drag on and on and on at Infinitum ad nauseam. And so, when you have circumstances like that, I think you have to deal with what we often refer to in this business as litigation fatigue for clients when they're in it for the fight, that's great, but after 15 rounds, it's tough to get their hands up. Yeah, our first encounter took 22 months and nothing happened. Right. Nothing happened. And that's the stress of federal litigation because you file your initial claims and employment depending on which type of employment claim it is with the EEOC and it will sit at EEOC for months, years, sometimes 18 months is not unusual, 22 months was not unusual. Then after EEOC kicks out what's called a right to sue letter or they make a finding, whichever one, then you have so much time to file your lawsuit. And then once you get into the federal system, then you're gonna get a scheduling order pretty quick and people are gonna be on track for a pretty quick resolution, typically six to months to a year at that point. But it takes a while to get there. Pretty quick. You can have a baby faster. Yes, but it takes a while to get there and that's one of the challenges. And so that creates litigation fatigue also. You know, for a small business person or just a homeowner or whatever, it's very difficult to evaluate legal services. Like if I take my car into the shop and they say, okay, your car is done, I go pick it up and I get in the car and I start it and I drive down the street and there's some shimmy in the steering wheel and I'm like, this ain't right. You know, I have a frame of reference or even if I don't know a lot about cars, like the brake squeal, this rattles, it didn't start well. Like, you know, I have something I can hang my hat on and say, this isn't right. Help me out and you take it back and you cry before you go to the other guy. With the legal stuff, you don't know it ain't right until it's way, way, way too late. Until it's way too late. So the question that's begged by that statement is, how do you find out if your lawyer is the guy that you want or not? Let me tell you, and this doesn't apply across the board. I think it's the 99% or given the 1% of bad name, but lawyers that routinely do big advertising, I would never choose. I don't do advertising. You'll never see me in a bus bench or a billboard. I'm not on any commercials. If people want me to come on to their public forum and spout off my stuff, with the exception of certain circumstances, such as the one we're in right now, I'm getting paid for that because I'm doing a service for them and I'm not doing it necessarily just for me. So I don't advertise myself that way because my name gets passed around amongst those that would need my type of services. So here's how I get advertisement, word of mouth. Everybody has a website now because you're pretty much half to you. And so we give our clients an opportunity to put up a blind review, for lack of better terms. They can pile a blind review on there. And I last counted at 35 reviews on there. They're all five star reviews and they continue to turn in all the time. I've got them from Norway. I've got them on at least one from Norway in France, from Canada, from Texas, California, New York, you know, Georgia, all Tennessee, you name it, Indiana clients all over the world functionally that have said, I chose this guy and this is what you can count on. And they all say the same thing, right? He's not inexpensive. You're going to pay one. Number two, his bedside manner, not so great. Okay, he's not a hand holder. But if you want someone to hold your hand and get someone else, that's what the associates are often better at doing. But if you want someone to understand how to get from point A to point B and is not trying to take a lot of prisoners in the process, then he's going to have your best interest in mind. That's the guy you want. And so you often have to now rely on other people's experiences in that review process, which is kind of the modern day way it's done. Don't believe someone's own advertising. Believe more what other people say about them, right? That makes a bigger difference. Because I see some of these commercials on TV and I'm amazed. This is a sore spot. Can you tell? Oh my gosh. Am I turning red? No, no, but it's still early. I see some of these advertisements on TV and I know them to be completely false. I know that they're an absolute lie. And those lawyers that you see there often on television have never even seen the inside of a courthouse, let alone actually litigated a case. They're bringing people in, they're casting a wide, wide net and they're doing a volume practice and then they're going to shove your case in front of some admin assistant, maybe a paralegal, maybe not, to kind of turn your case for a little bit until they can get a bottom dollar settlement and they'll do 10% settlement value and do 1,000 cases rather than doing 100% settlement value and doing 100 cases. And they don't care. They're not interested. You wouldn't even know if you walked by them on the street and they're supposed to be your lawyer. So are those people looking over the horizon to protect your interest? Absolutely not. They know anything about you. They know nothing about you. So one of the things that my clients will tell you, no matter where they are in the world, because you know, I go everywhere. I'm in the Hague. That was in the Hague one time and Scott's trying to get hold of me. I'm like, sorry. I have to get back from the Netherlands before I can resolve this issue. Anyhow, I go to those places because I wanna learn. I wanna find out, I went to Scott's business and I met the people that are working there. And I got my feet dirty by walking through the warehouse to try to understand a little bit more of what they were doing and the kind of personality you were dealing with there because it also gives me some insight from a strategic perspective too. If I'm with a client that, you know, I represent the largest emergency animal hospital in the state, I go there. I participate. I am hands on as much as I can be to get an understanding of the pulse of what's happening in that business. It's very difficult to represent someone's interest from a long distance. And then from the client's perspective, you should love it because it's very difficult to be stabbed in the back when you have that person standing in front of you. I had an employee kinda, let's say act up a little bit. It was like late spring or something. And I just had him come and just read everybody the riot act. I called him on the room and David just chewed their asses out for an hour. And so you have to do is you have to let them know I'm serious about making certain this environment is the way it's supposed to be. And if you step out of line, I already have someone that won't even be bothered at all trying to resolve this. A big company would have legal, right? So to have the attorney come and choose somebody's, but at Boeing or whatever, whatever, you know? So have a small business that has that kind of resources. And the big company also have collective bargaining rights a lot of times, I've been on the side of the company where a small company doesn't. So people go, well, how did you do all this, you know, in kind of short order in Tulsa? I didn't target Boeing. I didn't target American Airlines. I targeted to this company that had fewer than 50 people because the really, really big firms when I was starting out, they didn't want the small companies because they were kind of a nuisance. They weren't gonna give that recurring fee every single month to you where you were gonna get a $20,000 check from them every single month for just recurring legal stuff. Now they were gonna give you maybe $1,200 this month. Maybe the next month it was $3,000. And at one point, 10 years ago, I was representing more than 300 small businesses in the state as the registered agent. And then as issues would pop up, we would direct it towards insurance. If they didn't have coverage for it, we would take it. If the client wanted to do that. And if you just think about it from that perspective, the corporate governance of keeping their books straight, holding onto the books, we would have, we had two clients audited at one point and the agent comes in that was handling the audit and says, I understand you're a registered agent for this company, absolutely. And they said, well, we wanna inspect the corporate book if you've got it here on site. And I said, of course we have it. We have a whole room that's a dedicated library for every bit of that stuff. And we had it up to date to the quarter because function of what we were doing is we were giving those companies an annual update where they would fill out a worksheet of about 35 pages of updated information. They knew if there was anything big to happen that year, they had to call their lawyer. We would update it if it required so in the corporate books or in the management agreement. Yeah, so usually if you're a small business, you have to have a board meeting, right? So the board was being charity. It's your corporation, that's right. The board was being charity. So we'd have to have a board meeting. You have to have a record of that meeting. We had to have a corporate resolution to sell the assets of data storage. That's one of the things that had to happen for the sale to go through. So David had to track all that out that we had to charity and I had to approve the motion to, to sell the product. Thank God you approved it, charity. What if you thumbs down it? I will tell you that the interesting part about that circumstance and why that's important is because you have to have in a corporation environment with Scott West, you have to exercise the corporate formalities in order to get the protection of the corporate shield. If you're in LLC, you don't have to have the same formalities. So LLCs are designed to be managed with less formalities and have the same protection of the corporate shield that a standard corporation would have. And so that's why people often choose one over the other. The reason is because sometimes when you're selling the business, there's a difference between an asset sale versus a stock sale and some other things of that nature. They're taxed differently depending on how you do it and your basis issues and how you price and value your assets are different depending on the circumstance. We kind of look at all of that, help guide people in the right direction. So is there anything you can tell about our, I was gonna ask. Workplace disturbance and the, just as we were getting the sale kind of off the ground, is there any way we can tell any of that? Sure, I mean, I can help you out. So the great news is it wasn't an employee that created the workplace disturbance. And we can tell it from two perspectives. I probably want to tell it in the juiciest way. Tell it, make it salacious and keep us from going to court. But this is my narrative. I do not define this anything other than a narrative for the purpose of entertainment because. Infotainment purposes only. I was not there. And so I'm not recipient to the events and Scott was not recipient to the events. So anyhow, here's my understanding from the perspective of the agreed party. The agreed party was at her desk and had the spouse of another employee which was functioning her equivalent with the agreed party come in and alleged to have threatened to put a bullet through her head if she ever did certain things. Is that against the rules? Well, it's against a lot of rules. And if she ever alleged any allegations against her husband again. And so that resulted in filing of protective orders and criminal sanctions that follow protective orders and other allegations. Yeah. And so that's an example of a workplace situation that can blow up very quickly. And it didn't even involve an employee. Involved the spouse of employee coming in and making a threat to another employee. And so there are methods for handling that also. Do you still have an obligation to keep your people protector from that? You do. Do you have the same obligation as discriminatory behaviors and things of that nature? No, but you do have an obligation to keep your employees protected if you haven't known risk to those employees just like you would anybody in the public. It's not just legal, it's a moral one. You don't want anybody harmed, you know. Well, that's exactly right. But ultimately from my perspective even if you toss the morality out of the window. Wait a minute, attorney just- Yeah, I just said, we got it. I almost didn't get in law school until they removed my heart, right? You're hired. That's exactly who I want to be. So you toss it out the door for a minute and go, I understand that you may not be making a popular decision but legally this is what your rights are. So anyhow, we did a complete investigation. We interviewed every single person that could have been recipient to that event and events that had transpired personality events that had transpired prior to that and even post. We extracted the aggrieved person from the environment and put her in a protected place and did a complete thorough interview after we let some people kind of settle their nerves a little bit. And what we found out is ultimately that the avalanche of information came out that the quote unquote aggrieved person was the source of most of the challenge. And so there were decisions made that helped remove that person and the environment miraculously within short order improved dramatically. Sure. And so sometimes even the person that's claiming victimhood could have drawn Amazing. That attention to themselves. Sometimes the victim is in fact, you got it. Not entirely the victim. Or not the victim at all or they've invited it or they've asked for it and they wouldn't take no for an answer. I mean. Very common. Exactly. So when you pick up the rattlesnake and it bites you, the snake says. It wasn't the rattlesnake's fault. I'm a rattlesnake. You knew that when you picked me up. Sure. And now you're complaining? When I hit you, you hurt my hand. Yeah, exactly. So those are the things he, and that's not uncommon. So maybe not even. Did you actually go in and interview these people you, every person you did? Right. You got it. We made appointments. They all went on the company dime to his offices. Yeah, sure. And he held the interviews. And some of them were very uncomfortable. I'm sure. Sure. And I'm sure some of them were great. I mean. They were all better than my deposition or whatever. Well, they were. What happened to it at data storage for a while was that when I would show up people, someone was getting fired. So because I quit firing people, David did it. So I was the firing guy. And I do that. I fire 50 people a year, probably maybe 60. If I hired you, could you fire Scott for me? Or would that be a conflict? Maybe a conflict at that point. OK. And then he has an attorney that works with him, who's a former law enforcement guy. He's the bouncer. Yeah, he's worked with me for 11 straight years. And yeah, often clients think that he's not just going to represent them, that he's actually going to go out and physically hurt the other side. He's a straight guy. He's kind of like Musser, man. He's like Musser is what he is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's just that kind of guy. And he has no compunction. He's like quietly terrifying. Yes. He has no compunction about anything he says or does. The first time I fired somebody, Scott knows this story, I probably fired 10 or 12 people. The first time I did it took 48 minutes. You're a newbie. Well, it was my first time. I said this is 10 years ago. Oh, I'm good now. I got it down. You'll find out one day, Scott. And yeah, it was this person cried in my office for 43 minutes. So yeah, it's my fault. I called my brother. My brother owns a pretty big-sized company. I was got about 300 employees. And so he's always been a little head of the game. And he said, oh, this is your fault. My wheels are turning, but I know they are. Keep going. He's like, this is your fault. This is not their fault. It's your fault. And he said, this is how you do it. He said, what I do now is he said, I set a 60-second timer on my cell phone to buzz, not to go off. And I have them come into my office, and I reach in and hit Go. And when that thing starts buzzing out of my office, that's what he says. So 60 seconds. Well, the problem with turning an employee as a boss is you can screw everything up real bad and open yourself up to litigation if you say the wrong things, right? That's why it's important to have somebody like you do this. And you know exactly the words to say. You've got to be so careful. Yeah, and it's this simple. My name is David Kiesling. I represent this particular company. I don't represent you. Today's your last day. You'll not be going back to your office. You haven't tell about, you know, 60 seconds to give me all the company material that you have on you. We're going to send you a list if you don't, and you're going to be escorted off the building not to come back. So I'm not answering any questions. I'm not required to. I'm not going to. So best of luck. All your stuff will be mailed to you at your last address in your next paycheck. And that's the length of it. Everybody wants to say, well, but what? I got a good review last quarter. And can you just tell me why? I'm not answering questions. Please leave. Yes, it's the money ball. It's the money ball. Yeah. And then the other guy drags them out. They don't. So it's the other guy. Yeah. Kittle hits him with a taser. Well, the last guy, the last guy for the same place was the same thing. So he had, I hadn't come in. I said, hey, man, it's not working out. Thank you very much. The office assistant is going to help load those into your car. We'll pay you for the rest of the pay period that always helps. By the way, you're paying for the rest of it unless you tell me not to do that. So do what you have. Well, it's one of those deals. I just want it to me. It makes them look like I'm going to pay you for 10 days. It didn't work. I don't do that. Typically I pay them for what they're absolutely owed. And then if they come back and say, hey, is there any way I can get any type of sure. But here's the release. Sure. And here's all these other things that I'm going to want. Right. And then we can throw 10 days on. No big deal. He's never given anything without receiving something. Yeah. And something that is grander ultimately if you had to monetize it. Sure. So if you give 10 days worth of value, let's say that employee was making $200 a day on your dime, well, now you've got a $2,000 outlay for something you're not getting back. Sure. Well, if we get a release from that person, a universal release for all claims from that person, period, then you just saved yourself maybe $50,000 in legal fees. Sure. Or more. Sure. Right. And so just depending on how motivated they are to try to create a narrative. So you document, document, document every single event. Every time your person's five minutes late, every time they cut out 10 minutes early and they don't clock out without doing it, stealing company time, every time they have some other issue whether you find them searching for porn on the internet when they're at work, you find them doing something else that might violate company rules and procedures, whatever you document, document, document. Because people say, oh, that's not a big deal. So they stole 11 minutes on company time, no big deal. Well, at the end of the road when they come back and sue you for some nonsense, because that's the kind of employee that does. Sure, that's right. That's the kind of degenerate. And you have 75 cases against them. They're all those little little cases. That's the kind of degenerate that does it. And you've got 75 examples of that type of thing. You get terminated because of these events that transpired. That's why. And we gave you so many opportunities. And you couldn't, you wouldn't take no for an answer. You just kept doing it, kept coming back. See, it's easy. Think about it from this perspective. Most jurors aren't me. They're not people that have my job because, quite frankly, it just. You can't get a jury of your peers. I can't. It just feels like you're getting a lot of people that have been retired that have done other things in life. Maybe they don't have anything to do at that moment. So they're not trying to get out of jury service, which everybody should commit themselves to jury service when they get it. But sometimes there are needs to not serve then, but maybe serve later. And so often, you don't have people that reflect you as the business owner as much as you have people that reflect the former employee. And so you have to get them to think differently about someone that they can identify with and think positively about someone they maybe can't identify with. And that's going to be tough. You don't want them to start conveying their own feelings, transferring their feelings towards their former employer or their employer towards you and seeing you as the bad guy because their employers are going to be hard. Well, this guy reminds me of my last boss. I hated that guy. So let me tell you what we do and why you would pay more and why it's worth it. OK, we do this in all the cases and your brother needs to listen because he needs to be calling me when this is over. So we use the psychologist for every case because if you're going to go to trial and you don't have a litigation psychologist involved, you are missing the boat. My psychologist that I use for all litigation, she's from Lufkin, Texas. And that's where all the good ones come from. Well, let me tell you something. I want to get a jury pool. And sometimes we get it three days in advance. Sometimes we get it 30 days in advance. Everybody that's going to be a prospective juror. And we build a dossier on every single one of them. I want to know how old they are. I want to know if they've ever been bankrupt, if they've ever been arrested, if they've been divorced nine times, if they have four kids, one kid, zero kids. You're not selling me on being on jury duty, by the way. Well, that's OK. But I want to know all that stuff, right? Because every one of those things is a window into how they may think. And so I want to know what words I need to use. I want to know what words matter the most to those jurors. So if I come to you, and this is a perfect example without even going into great detail, if I come to you and say, let me tell you why you should find in my clients favor, that's a whole different message than saying to you, let me share with you my clients experience, right? One, I'm empowering you to get to the point where I want you to be on your own without me forcing it down your throat. Let me tell you versus let me share with you, not my client's case, client. I'm going to tell you, let me share with you Scott's experience that brought us all here today. OK, so it's not a case, it's an experience, it's not a client, it's Scott. I've personalized him. I've made it more digestible to you and I make you feel as the receiver of that message that I trust and can empower you to do the right thing rather than telling you what to think because I'm a lawyer and you should just do what I say because I got a $3,000 suit on. Does that approach change from jury to jury? It changes from jury to jury based on the case that you're doing, some of it does, some of it doesn't, I should say. I always want to empower a jury to find in my clients favor. Think about what happens when you walk into a courtroom as a juror, you've probably never been there before and if you get it, it wasn't a good experience, right? And so as a juror, you walk in and you've got a dozen people that you're sitting next to if you make it to the panel, if you're in the pool, you may have 150 you're sitting next to waiting to see if your name gets called and you look around and there's the judge, most of them are intimidated because they have the power to put you in jail for contempt, even if you're a juror, they see two tables with lawyers. Like I said, we're in $3,000 suits, they know none of them, they don't know who they can trust, but they know they don't pay that for a suit, do you? I pay more than that. My suits are handmade, they have been since 2001. Where do you have those things at? Tom James. That's all right, right? I've used the same guy since July of 2001, I'm not changing and they come to my house or my office, they meet with my house manager and go through my closet. I always figured that a man has really arrived when the barber comes to your office. Yeah, I'm not doing it like everybody else does. I promise you, but... No, I get it. The cases that we litigate where we see the biggest guys that you see on TV all the time, by the way, I had an opportunity today instead of coming on to your show to go on to Laura Ingram's show. Oh, really? I just said no, no, no, we're going on BarberLogics crazy. And I said, all right, tell this guy. So anyhow, so we get to do some exchange with some pretty good lawyers. I mean, we deal with the biggest in the country and biggest internationally, sometimes biggest house and biggest firms. And so when jurors come in, like I said, a lot of them are more like the folks that grew up around in the country than they are the lawyers I deal with on a day-to-day basis now. And they don't know who to trust, they absolutely don't know who to trust. And there's just this division, right? Here are the lawyers. We're smarter, we have more money, you should do it because we tell you to do it. It's the haves and have nots. I mean, that's the feeling, that's what's created in that environment. I want to be the guy that doesn't create that. Now everybody has that opportunity. Most of them don't take it because most lawyers find their confidence in telling you what to think rather than sharing with you the story and empowering you to come to that same conclusion that your client came to. That's the approach that most jurors prefer. That's my category. Thanks for coming in and telling some more stories and giving us an insight into the psychopathic mind of the litigation attorney. Absolutely, psychopathic mind. Hey, let me tell you something. When lawyers go off the rails, they go off big time, trust me. So it's a delicate balance. Remember, you're a fireman, you're just putting out fires all day long. Sometimes the stress of that can get to some people that don't have the constitution. Yeah, that stuff wears me out. You've been a great help to me. So thank you. You got it. Thanks. Absolutely. We're shaking hands even though you can't see that. That's right. Thanks. Next time go on Ingram show and just skip us, but give us a plug while you're there. Yeah, plug. What she does is she sends an invite out basically and says, look, here are the two topics. Can you give me a blurb comment? And if we got time to work yet, no problem. So this was all about the government shutdown and the March for Life. It's today's topic. So if you're listening to our podcast recorded today, not that I'm plugging her, that's what it's about. Yeah. I could have gone on for hours on that stuff. Well, there's another show if you're getting any questions, you can email us at barbelllogicpodcast.gmail.com. How would they find you, Mr. Kiesling? Man, they'll give me a call at 918-998-9350. Or how about an email? D. Kiesling at DBLlawyers.com. So that's D-K-E-E-S-L-I-N-G at DBLlawyers.com or the website, which is www.dbllawyers.com. Yeah, what's the name of your firm now? It's Dunlap Bennett and Ludwig, which is based out of Leesburg, Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C. We have an office in Tyson's Corner, Northern Virginia, Leesburg, as well as Washington, D.C. and then all around the world. Yeah, it's right around the time that I sold bond and he merged up with the sale. Yeah, I need this big firm. One big time litigator, so that's what they got. Well, they got one. Well, thanks for coming on the air and we'll talk to you guys in a few days. Thank you.