What the Health Just Happened?
Nicholas Morcom, Partner | Woolsey Morcom
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's episode of what the health just happened. We talk about all things health care, community, business and life. We bring on a variety of guests to talk about all things healthy versus not healthy in the health care community. Again, business and life, the goods, the bads, the ups, the downs and everything in between. Thank you as always to our show sponsors, 212 benefits and all you listeners who enjoy to learn and laugh. I'm excited for today's guests for a variety of reasons, including him being the first guest to show up in a tie. Congratulations. You set a record. I have a jacket on, but you do have a button down and shirt on. But again, that's what lawyers do. So welcome Nick Morkum. I said Mormon. I love butchering the names, the intros of my favorite apartment. You got to read this stuff. We have a prep call. Nick Morkum named partner with Woolsey Morkum lawyer for 20 years, right? 20 years, 21 in November. Okay. Right. Undergraduate from Florida State. Yes, sir. Going old and law degree is from University of Texas, Austin. Yes, sir. Oh, okay. Oh, cool town. Oh, yeah. Never been there before. And I just, I got in and said, heck, I'm going to go out there. Really? And just went out, picked an apartment out and then went there, didn't know a single person. That's super awesome. But Austin's a fun time. If you had to do that and parachute in, Austin's probably one of the towns you do that. That's great. So again, that's, let's start there, right? I do want to hear the story about like, how do you end up being a lawyer? Cause I was hysterical. Went to Florida State. Austin, you picked that you got in that law school like, Hey, they accepted me. They didn't mean I'm not a math guy. I think we talked about that. I'm really not. I'm a talker, but I, I, you know, you ever heard a US news and world report, like they come out with the top schools? Well, they put something on there that's super useful. And I always tell parents when they're like, where should our kids go to this workplace or undergraduate? But it definitely works for law school. They have, you know, 25th and 75th percentiles of the admitted class. It has their GPA, the 25th percentile to the 75th, and then the LSAT score, which is like the SAT score for lawyers. You just take the GPA, you multiply it by 10, right? So that's like a 38 or whatever your number is. You add it to the LSAT. A 38. I was more like a 25, but whatever your numbers, and you add those together. And I create it was like the Nick Morgan Law School score because that told you what the average kid score was. And so what I did was I figured out my GPA, multiply it by 10, figured out my LSAT, added them together. And then I just sat there and said, I hate the cold. So I drew a line of the Mason Dixon and said, I'm not going anywhere north. And then I applied to all the schools I wanted to go to that I could get in with that number. And so I applied like Duke, I applied to Texas. Those are both top 15 schools. I didn't apply to Virginia. I didn't have the number. I got it everywhere that I wanted to. And so Austin was the farthest away. I grew up in Jacksonville. Born and raised. Born and raised. Well, I grew born in Lakeland, but I mean, it's all about the same lived in kindergarten. And I wanted to get away. My parents went to FSU. My brother and sister were going to go to FSU. It was like, I want to get away. That's the farthest away I applied and got into. And so I just went for not being a math guy. Like that's a lot of math, medical equations there. It's angles. And I will say that's one thing that like I like about the law is if you're litigating a case, because that's what we do is all courtroom stuff is it's ineffective to just talk and tell a story. You figure out what this case is about. And why are you going to win? Right? Why are you going to win the other heads going to lose? And so here my angle on the law school thing was law school applications, they suck. It's a long piece of paper. You sometimes have how long interviews, not super long, but we have to write essays, essays and stuff like that. And some of them want you to come in and interview and all that. And I was like, I am not going to sit there. And Harvard was like Harvard and the Ivy League ones and stuff that were mathematically, I would have been lower than the 25th percentile. So it didn't make sense to do. That's why I didn't. But the ones I applied to, I got into. And that's what I said. I'm glad I did. I didn't know anybody. But now I've got lifelong friends. We've got two lawyers that I'm that I work with that I went to school with in my class that work for the firm. And they're out in Texas, ones in San Antonio, ones in Austin. We'll get to that, too. Tell the story. I love this story. We talked earlier today. I love the prep calls because it's like, we don't know each other that well. Maybe you met once or twice. I want to talk about how the name happened, but how did you decide to be a lawyer, right? So listeners think like, oh, man, I want to go to law school. I want to be a lawyer. But yeah, we had no lawyers in the family. Dad worked at Epperson and Company in town. And he was like, he ran the Jacksonville branch. That's like an industrial belt thing. Mom was a school teacher. And they met at FSU, but I had no interest in being a lawyer. Didn't really think about it. I watched Law and Order, Jack McCoy. I've got Jack McCoy's hair style. I've had coma hair like that, but never thought about doing it. I thought I was going to be a doctor. And I had no real basis for it. It's thought I'd be a doctor. And that's what I did the first year at FSU and had decent grades. I had a couple problems. I was horrific in lab work. You had to take labs. My grades were fine, but mostly because I'd look over and see what other people were putting down. And like, you could do that. And right then I could disprove gravity in a lab. I mean, my stuff was always, always wrong in biology. It was wrong in chemistry. It was wrong. And I realized this might be a problem when I'm trying to actually diagnose someone and I'm telling them they've got some flu and they've got lung cancer. So I sort of think like maybe this is work. I also just I really don't like math. I was getting okay grades, but eventually you get it. You have to go through calculus too. And I knew that would have been like a real struggle. And I like stories. I've always been drawn to stories. I've always like, I would read history, serious history books when I was in high school and took a bunch of AP classes. And I just said, you know, I want to be a history major. And I was in Landis, which is like the honors dorm at FSU. And my roommate was a Shakespearean actor. I told you not and his name was Bobby. Bobby, I wrote that down. A Shakespearean actor. Great guy. Did not get up before 1 p.m. And that affected his grades eventually. But he so I walk into the room after classes one day and he's asleep and I wake him up and said, Bobby, I'm switching to history. And that's kind of a problem. And he's like, oh, what's the problem? And I said, well, what am I going to do with a history degree? And I just sit down on my bed on the, you know, it's a two bedroom. And he said, well, my dad's a history major. I said, what does he do? Well, he's a lawyer. And so I said, well, I can start telling people I was going to be a lawyer. And then, you know, years go by, I take the LSAT. And that's what I decided to do. Wow. Okay. We'll say healthy or not healthy. The LSAT. That's the test. Yeah. I think if you is that to get into law school or the test to the AT is what you take to go to undergraduate. Yeah. You could get to grad school. It's called the GRE, the LSAT. And they're like, it's an MRE from medical school. But it's just like, what is it really? It's a harder version of the SAT verbal, a significantly harder one. The SAT, I got like, I got, I got a, what I got 10 points off in the verbal side when I did it back in the day. Like I killed it. I thought it was easy and all that. Wow. The LSAT, no, no, did not get a perfect score on the LSAT. Didn't get a bad score on the LSAT. But like, that's one of the cool things about law school is that it is humbling. You know, arrogant people like myself, I thought I was the smartest guy in the world at FSU. And, you know, there would be smart people, but they're peers. You went into Texas law. And, you know, the best you could hope for was you were like average. That there were kids. One of my guys goes, it works with me, Bustamante, he was undergraduate MIT. And like, we got half it through a neurology degree and just brilliant, you know what I mean? You got people that speak multiple languages, all the stuff, sons of governors and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, there's me. And so it was, it was, it was, I don't know, I remember ambling, but that's, no, you're not. This is gold. This is gold. Okay. So undergraduate Florida State University of Texas, Austin. I almost wanted to just talk about Austin the whole time. Yeah. It was a lot smaller when I went. It had doubled in size. I went, I went to school there from 2000 to 2003. And what they had told me was it had doubled in size in the last 10 years. And they were all complaining about how it wasn't, you know, it was getting less weird and more corporate. I've been back since then. It is completely different. It is very, very corporate, a lot more towers. Yeah. There was a guy. I don't think companies go there now. Yeah. Well, what's your call in? Was it Intel or Dell? Dell was there at the time. And you could see it was an up-and-coming thing. And they had some really nice corporate law firms there as a consequence. And they were building big skyscrapers and stuff, but it has gotten dramatically, dramatically bigger and more expensive. It's probably a less of a, kind of a fun, weird town now, although when I go-- In their tagline, keep Austin weird. That's, that's, that's important landing back in the day. And it was, Austin was a fun town. I mean, you could, I remember where you lived at the law school where if y'all lived right by there, you could walk from the law school to the Texas State Capitol and then you just walk around back in the day. This was before, you know, 9/11 was my first year. You could, you could walk around. They had no security. You could walk onto the floor of the Texas house or walk, you know, walk into the rooms and stuff like that. Way to age yourself, by the way. Yeah, I know. I was there, I was there for Gore versus Bush. And Jeb Bush's son was going to law school with us. And so there was times it was a little awkward. Like I walked down to the Texas, I'd go to the Texas Capitol. I'm a cheapskate. They had a cafeteria in there. They would serve the legislators. The food was so good. It was like three bucks. And I would, I would walk miles to sit there and-- To do that $3 meal. Oh heck yeah. And then I walked out one time and it was perfectly calm. When I walk down, when I walk out, there is a rip roaring like, you know, Bush is a felon type stuff going on. And I walk out, it's like a four scump moment. The security is like, what are you doing? Who are you? And I walked, I threw it off. But it was, it was a wild time. And then obviously, I remember I was in law school when 9/11 happened and going to class during all that. It was, it was, it, it things changed. But I mean, everybody knows that. Oh yeah. That's, again, I remember that moment. I was a freshman in college, by the way, UNF. Speaking of cafeterias, went to UNF right, right down the road. That cafeteria was awful. You know what I was saying? It was awful, awful. I don't know. It must have gotten better though, because when I was there, this day, go ahead, time in Danny, Danny is in the background, too. We got some people. Yeah, we know when I was at UNF, what, 2018 to 22, just, you know, it got better. The food was actually pretty good. You're plugging the cafeteria UNF. Yeah, absolutely swoop. Yes, we are. We are right. We got three UNF graduates here, right? Whenever I go to UNF, I'm always impressed with it. I like watching the basketball games there and stuff like that. Oh, I got several buddies that went to UNF undergrad and it did them well. Yeah, we, we, we're big, I don't want to say sponsors, but we, we back up UNF a lot. I love that school, changed my life. I moved up here and never left, moved here in 2001, but talking about cafeterias, you know, when I was there, it was like a, it's like a three or four, but it was cheap. Okay, we'll see more of them. So finished law school, what the first couple of years look like after law school? That's a good question. I didn't have a job when I got out of law school. I had, I had gone and again, talking about just goofy nonsense, I had gone into Texas and said, I want to be an intellectual property lawyer. Oh, well, looking back, I didn't know what an actual property lawyer was. What does that mean? Yeah, you need to have a biology degree or like a high advanced degree, because you're going to be like representing Microsoft on patents. John Bustamante, the guy who talked about an MIT, he went into an AML all 100 firm work for while representing Microsoft and these lawsuits about pages of software code and crap like you, I don't know. I couldn't follow it. I had no business doing it. And the reality was, when I started talking to people, they said, well, are you like really, really, really good at science? Because you don't have a science degree. And then eventually I was thinking about being a doctor for about six months. And that counts for something. But it didn't actually, and I booked, which means you got the highest grade in the class, which is not an easy thing to do necessarily any law school. Criminal law 101. And the guy who taught it was this salty old Texan who wrote the juvenile criminal code. And he was a really, really good professor, but I got an eight plus in the class. And after my first year, I started taking more criminal classes. And I noticed I had a 3.0 and everything else and a 3.97 and criminal law. And by the end of it, I'd taken a criminal defense clinic and a criminal juvenile justice clinic. And I decided I wanted to go do criminal law. And I was going to be a prosecutor. And I couldn't even get an interview with the prosecutor's office. This is in Texas or Florida, Austin, Travis County. They only hired about five or six kids at the county courts thing and about 500 kids graduated from Texas. And there's a bunch of the law schools in Texas. So good luck. Well, regardless, I just, and you're a Florida boy, they're not welcome. And then I'll let in some Florida boy into the system in Texas. Maybe or maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. But so I'm not blaming them necessarily. So I couldn't get an interview. I don't know what it was going to do. So, you know, I'll tell if anyone's listening to this in your college kid, a great piece of advice is talk to the college person who's like the guidance person. They actually do care, which I thought it was the biggest waste of time. And I said, Oh, well, I don't know what I'm going to do. And so I went and just told her. And she sat me down. And I remember this lady was super nice, asked me a bunch of questions. He reminds me of how you ask a lot of probing questions. Yeah. And she asked a bunch of questions. And then I said, Oh, I'm not going to hear anything from her. She didn't got anything. She called the next day and said, have you ever heard of a guy named Joe Turner? I said, no. And he goes, because we should have, if you're going to do criminal law, you need to go talk to him. He's talking about hiring somebody. And so I went and talked to this guy, Joe Turner was a shout out, Joe Turner, Joe Turner, Joe Turner. He had been a former prosecutor, former US attorney, when a assistant US attorney, when he was a state prosecutor, he prosecuted a literal serial killer, which is kind of rare. And a couple of years before I was there, he had represented Matthew McConaughey and the naked bongo dude. Willie Nelson, this guy was like, had a ranch. And so he hired me to do Bobo stuff. My first job was I served a subpoena in a federal case, having to do with a silencer on a stripper in a strip club. Say it again, say it again. There was a baby daddy who was arrested and federal court for silencer. And most people are like, Oh, sound, that shouldn't be a crime. That's what he told me. That was like, well, he was planning on allegedly planning on killing this woman, his mother, his job. And she was a stripper. And they couldn't track her down. And they needed her at this hearing. And so I needed to find her and I needed to find a witness. And they couldn't find the witness. And he said, I've used process servers. He said in Texas, you don't got to be like any kind of fancy thing, track them down. I'll pay you know, $25 an hour. And so I went into some small town in Texas and I found where she was. And I paid the cover charge. And when she was, she was working, you personally, I served with a secedent, she got off the stage and came and talked to me and she said, okay, I'll show up. And Casey ended up working out, uh, well for us. And so he, he was part time gig. And he started having me do more stuff. And then I just decided on this is mad dog. This is mad dog, Joe, Joe, Joe Turner was people get these stupid nicknames, like I want a pit bull of an attorney. What's your nickname? I don't have one. You're slick Nick, but children want lawyers that are animals. That's the stupidest thing ever. You want a pit bull is a lawyer. You want your lawyer shot in the head. You want a lawyer that thinks and knows what they're doing. But anyways, Joe, Joe's had a head, his trick was he would try one homicide a year and win it. And that would keep business coming in. And he had one coming up. And I just started taking home the interview videos and just transcribing myself. And it's just type out every word of the thing. I had it literally everything with the time side it. And he eventually started looking at these things and he's like, wait, you transcribed all these? I was like, yeah. And so eventually he said, well, I'm thinking about having you come on board. Let's have you come on board. And so he was going to potentially hire me after law school. And so I took the bar. I mean, I took the bar. And so it's November. We haven't got the results yet. And I remember I was in the homicide room in Hayes County, Texas. And I'm playing with this rifle and I am not a gun guy. And I'm trying to figure out a chamber of the round. And eventually it kind of clicks. And then my phone rings. And Mary picked, it's my wife at the time, not even just a girlfriend. She called and she had gone online. You pass the bar, you pass the bar. I got some big block phone to my ear. Joe, I passed the brick and the brick. And he says, you want to try this case with me? And it was a Wednesday. And so we went back to Austin. It's like an hour and a half drive. Found a judge, sworn me in. The trial was on Monday. He was the first chair. It went to Friday. I got to do stuff. Now don't get me wrong. Joe Turner was the lawyer on that case. And it was a not guilty first degree murder. And we're driving and this guy had a BM, not a BMW or Sadie's been convertible. And we're driving through Hill Country, which you've ever been out there. It's gorgeous. Beautiful. Just not a cloud in the sky. And we're driving and he's speeding that back down one of the highways and goes, Well, you're gonna have a hard time topping this. And it's true. It was that was, I don't know that I topped it. It was nice to talk about it. I worked for him for two years. You don't try a lot of cases. We had some high profile stuff. I mean, we had other murderers and we had other people that were like politically important. I don't know if you all know who Tom DeLay is. He used to be the majority whip in the House of Representatives. Austin would prosecute and still does, I think, all the criminal political prosecutions. And it's a blue dot and a red C. And so it was very political. And they're prosecuting Tom DeLay. We were representative as executive director of the like the finance committee. Our guy walked, Tom DeLay got a prison sentence, which was reversed on appeal, but not by us. And so anyway, so I did that for two years. Mary, I got married to my wife when I met at law school in Austin, in Austin, out to Mary. Hey, Mary Mary. She's a beautiful lady. And she put her foot down, eventually said she's from West Virginia and said, I want to move back East. I got to pause this. Sorry. You're going to that story. No, no, this is gold. Sorry. Why were you loading a rifle and answering the phone? Oh, like I got him back to me. No, back to Mary and how you know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I was definitely holding like, why was he answering the phone? I apologize. We're in the evidence room at Hayes County, whatever. They, you're allowed to go see the actual stuff at a homicide trial. They don't, you don't just have to go into court and to see it for the first time. And so we wanted to see the individual was unarmed when he was in a home and shot by the defendant. And the defense was, although he was unarmed, he outweighed the defendant by about 150 pounds, had punched the defendant once and was going to try to take the rifle. And if he had taken the rifle, would have killed the defendant. And so that was the case. It was a one shot with a rifle in fairness to our, our defendant shot him once, put down the gun, unloaded the gun, called 911, told them what happened and sat on the porch. The police came out, interviewed everyone that night and said, we're not making an arrest. Rightly so. And what happened later was another witness came forward and claimed that our witness had said, Oh, it was not self defense. And, and, and Texas is jungle rules. You don't have to disclose evidence. You just kind of try those. That person was never disclosed, never in a police report, never in anything. We drove to Hayes County, Texas, because none of this was online back in the day, flipped through the clerk's file, looking at the trial subpoenas, and there was a person we didn't know who it was. And then we asked our client, who is this guy? And Joe Turner, just he'd been doing it all the time. Shout out to my dog. That was that, that not the guilty was out of the last 10 homicides. Nine had been not guilty. Matt, Matt Dogg looked at that, that, that subpoena and said, listen to what the guy said, he goes, they're going to claim you confessed to him and he goes, that didn't happen. He goes, that's what they're going to do. But it was fine. We, we surprised him. So we have, we brought in an expert on quote, self-defense. You couldn't do that in Florida. And that guy got on the stand and goes, in my expert opinion, this was self-defense. Sorry about, no, this is gold. This is gold. I told you we're going to write a time. We got four minutes left here, had to understand why you were loading a rifle. It makes sense now. No, that's great. So the beautiful Mary, Miss Mary, Miss Mary, Miss Mary was a professional ballerina. She grew up in West Virginia, went to school called North Carolina School of the Arts, where she learned ballet. It's like a, literally that was her high school, went to IU for like half a semester, dropped out. Yeah. But she only, she dropped out after half a semester, danced in Indiana ballet, Colorado ballet, the Austin ballet. And then she tore something and at some point, I mean, I don't know if you know this, ballerina is, if you're a principal, like one of the main ones in New York, you can make like six figures, but you're not crushing it. And at some point, she's like this in her daddy. Physically, yeah, I'll beat you down. Yeah, she's in great. She's still like a phenomenon. I mean, she's, I'm not artistic or athletic at all. She's, she's, or mathematic, right? Not mathematic. I couldn't add it up. But so she, she said, this isn't going to do it. So she, she stopped being a dancer, although she was still dancing for like a, like a modern troop while she went to undergrad and then in her law school. So she was, she's a little bit older than me, but she was two years behind me at law school. Okay. And so I was going to stay at Joe's anyway, but once she graduated, she said, we're moving. And so I came back here and I joined the prosecutor's office in Jacksonville. And now the difference was most people that joined the prosecutor's office, they're coming straight to law school. Well, I, is that, is that for reps? Like you, you get a, you get a good award. Like as a prosecutor. Oh, yeah. You're going to, you, you can't be a good criminal defense attorney if you're not ready, willing and able to go and win trials. That's, that's a prerequisite. Because most times you don't want to go to trial, but there are types of cases where you have to in order to get what needs to be done. Um, for example, they were not offering that guy in Texas, the one I'm talking about that, we went to trial and they weren't offering him 10 years in prison. It was a lengthy, lengthy, lengthy prison sentence. He needed a trial lawyer to go in there and walk out. And that's what he did. And so I, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Other than honestly, also my mind, that's probably a little more prosecutorial. I think most people that get arrested. That's a big word for a stumps folk. I'm kidding, prosecutorial. I just think that there be most guys that get arrested. And I know I'm not, we, we do defense work too. So I'm not prejudging our clients, but most people that probably did it. And so I, I joined the state attorney's office and I did misdemeanors for six months, felony line. So that's everything, but like the most serious stuff for six months, a supervisor in county court for a year and then homicide for a year. And then cheese. That's when I left and joined Smith Holsey, which is a completely different thing. That is what they call silk, silk stocking law firm. That's rich people in big corporations. And I did commercial litigation. Okay. That is a good, because we're first half almost done. Man, I wish we had more time. That's a good journey to Woolsey, Morkham. So second half, it's like dive further. Sorry. No, you're sorry. Don't, don't say sorry. What do you think? I have more questions. Yes, this is wild. I know. We want to talk about Woolsey, Morkham. Talk about that, what you all do. Who's a good client. But I just want to hear you tell stories. That's the best part of doing the job. And, and, and I, I like, I'll take a case sometimes, just because I'm saying to myself that opening statement is going to be fun. Awesome. How many, how many times are you in a situation you go, this, this could be a documentary, this, this case? There's, we have several right now that, that I would not be shocked. I don't want to go into pending stuff, but there are ones where judges come up and have asked, what happened on that? I mean, I heard a story about X. Well, some, I mean, some of them are just crazy, crazy cases. Yeah. And, you know, some of the cases we've defended have been high profile criminal stuff. I'm not a person that says, oh, you can't, you can't defend someone just because they're probably guilty and all that kind of stuff. We've got constitutional rights. And so, but, you know, the PI stuff can be really wild. Some of it's confidential because, you know, if they settle with you, they don't let you tell the stories on the radio afterwards. Man. This is awesome. I know. Nick Morkham named partner. Can I say badass? I'm going to say that you can loop that out. I'm not a badass. I think you are now. Um, we'll see Morkham. We'll, we'll dive into that the second half. Dang, man. I got so many questions. That's what the health just happened. Go back to the second half of what the health just happened. Today we have Nick Morkham with Woolsey and Morkham. Good news is if you missed the first half, you can catch the entire episode on your favorite podcast platform under what the health just happens. Man, the first half was fun. We got off topics in the best way possible. Incredible stories, Nick. Incredible stories. I warned you, health, you're not healthy. Speed round? Far. You guys, if you want to chime in any, it's Danny over there thinking to some healthier, not healthy B and I. I think it's healthy. Our group is actually really fun. Okay. Health, you're not healthy, studying for the bar. Not healthy. Everybody, everybody's convinced they're going to fail. Every, if you talk to a law student, they're convinced they're going to fail. The smartest human taking it thinks it's... I took it twice. Florida and Texas convinced both times 100% was going to fail. Health, you're not healthy. Game days at FSU. There are a lot of unhealthy activities going on that those, but they're fun. I got one here. Health, you're not healthy. Room mates that sleep in past one p.m. Healthy. It makes you feel better by yourself. In college? Yeah. What was his name? Bobby Daley. Bobby, he's not in the bottle now. That's hilarious. Health, you're not healthy. The first three to five years is a lawyer. Unhealthy. Most of being a lawyer in a lot of ways is unhealthy, but unhealthy. Health, you're not healthy being a named partner at a law firm. Healthy. Health, you're not healthy. Mad dog. Oh, he's super healthy. He's still kicking. I like this guy already. Okay, let's do this. Let's go. You got any healthy or not healthy? You want to throw out there? I don't know. I think it's jumping out. No. I mean, the radio show I'd say is healthy. I do think worrying too much. I mean, it's obviously it's unhealthy. That's probably the biggest thing I try to tell the young lawyers is you and clients. They get so stressed out before deposition or trial, whatever. I'm like, you worrying, it's not making the case better. It's only going to make the case worse because you're just going to stress out new stupid stuff. Sorry. That's no, no, that's great. That's good. That's true. Like, what can you control and what can't you control? Absolutely. You can control your attitude, your level of stress is tough. There's no way it's not stressful. Yep. You all do your job prep for it, but stressing about it and putting that anxiety on who's going to take care of you. That doesn't help. Imagining the tiger behind every door and the law, you can constantly be like, well, what if they do this? What if they do that? What I haven't done? You just got to learn over time. One of the young guys, he had been a lawyer about four years before me when I started a Joe attorney, worked for Joe too. He said, Josh Sacred, he said, you're going to learn after a little bit that everything's going to be okay. It seems like every single case you have when you're first a lawyer that you think you're about to get this bar or you've screwed the whole thing up and you're going to find out it's going to be fine. And you know what? Oh, I like that. He's right. And if you sit there and tell yourself that every once in a while, I can't even remember the things that stressed me out six months ago. Right now, there's probably about 15 cases I have out of like 70 that I'm responsible for, that caused me to start my blood pressure just to spike. And six months from now, I wouldn't even be able to tell you for sure what was bothering me about them. It just goes away. There'll be new things to stress me out. That is very healthy advice, by the way, in applicable to every industry, I think your world's a little different. So we'll see more come, you had a crazy journey right off the bat. I'm like, he's got to come back and just tell stories the whole time, right? So we'll see more come areas of what's your practice expertise? You got a couple of things you specialize in. There's five things I think we excel at. We don't do everything. We don't do any kind of transactional stuff. So if you need someone to write a will, draft an operational agreement, review a contract, we're not your guys. If you needed to be sent the right way, we know several really excellent ones that won't gouge you. They'll do a good job. But what we do is certain types of courtroom stuff, personal injury. And that's where people get hurt. If you're hurt and it was someone else's responsibility, we have a team of lawyers that do it. They're not baby lawyers. We're not a mill. Our theory is we've got a lot less cases. We're going to settle them or take them to trial at a much higher number. Back when we first started with just me and Josh, I would second share him. I don't do as much of that anymore, but Woolsey, the lead guy, he's in charge of it. And he's got several lawyers that are excellent trial lawyers that have the ability to take these things to the mat. That's one area. Another area is criminal defense. We've got two lawyers that do criminal defense. They're both excellent. There was a person that once that was, we've had people that will hire us without getting too specific for homicides that can pay. And those are kind of... Homicides that can pay? That can pay a retainer for a homicide defense. Those are kind of the unicorns. There was an individual, this was public record. So I can say he was a homicide detective in Jacksonville and was arrested on a cold case homicide where the allegation was that he had learned of the victim during his time as a detective. It was a death penalty prosecution. And he had the ability in the way we're thought to be able to hire a private counsel. And he chose to hire one of my partners, John Rockwell, who was a prosecutor back with me in the day. That's a high compliment, and John does great work. He's routinely appointed by federal judges and state judges for murder cases. He's a great lawyer. Third area we do is family law. I'm a co-chair of the family law department. It's me and one other guy. I'm going into my 21st year in November. The other lawyer has been doing family law for 14 years, the other three years, who was a prosecutor with me. So he's a 17-year lawyer. You're not going to get shuffled off to a baby if you're going through a divorce or child custody dispute. Can I pause? Just a follow-up question. Sorry. No, I like two things that we talked about prior to this conversation. It just helps have a prep call. One is you're not hiring fresh college graduates. We don't do that. The Woolsey-Morkham team has been together for seven years, and we've tried it before. You come out your baby lawyer. We encourage people to go. If they don't know what they want to do, we encourage them to go to the state attorney's office. We have interns that we've sent over there. We hire from there regularly. It makes sense because you can weed through--not saying that there's a lot of bad lawyers, but it exists. Well, and if you make it from the state attorney's office, pretty much everyone, if you stay for a year, gets put into felony. That doesn't prove much other than you can show up to work for a year. We still show something, right? Then from there, there's specialty divisions. That's how it still works. So Josh was in repeat offender court. They don't have that anymore. Repeater fender court was literally like you're in trial one or two jury trials a week all year round. I was in homicide for a year. If you make it to a specialty division, somebody up high-up trusted you to do it. So it shows a good--anyways, so yeah, we do-- This is a plug for Woolsey-Morkham, right? You do not have--by the way, I'm waving at him because I forgot to sit my timer. You're good. I'm over here waving like an idiot because I forgot to sit our timer. You are not hiring fresh grads, which, again, like a hospital system. If a doctor walks into a room as a patient, you don't want someone fresh out of college. Even though they have experience, they do their rounds. That's good, in my opinion. Well, and it just--it helps. We don't practice in areas where not excellent. And we don't hire lawyers that aren't particularly good at what they do. And so I would hire--if I was, God forbid, not going through a divorce, I would hire Andrew Garro. They're the law partner to help me. I trust him. And so, you know, we do that to the family. The fourth area is a weird one. You're not going to be like, "What is that first party property?" Everybody's had to deal with something like this or hurt or someone that has. You got a problem with your roof. You call the roof route. It's not like they're knocking on your door. That's not what we're looking for. And the guy goes, "Hey, you got a problem with your roof." And they go, "Ply to your insurance. You need a new roof." And the insurance comes back and says, "Oh, I'm sorry. You don't need a new roof. How about $500?" You're able to sue your insurer company and say, "Look, I've been paying I've been paying premiums all these years. You need to fix what you need to fix. And if they don't, we can take them to court and make them." And so that's been an area of growth for us. We've had a lot of success. And some of our state other offices in other states are because we get such good results that people will call up and say, "Hey, can you represent us on these cases?" And we say, "Okay, we need to open an office in California." And then the final area is the area where I'm the chair of is commercial litigation. That's what I did at Smith-Halsey. And that's business disputes, fights about money. They're very complicated. And it's a wide variety of things. I have three, I call them direct reports, three lawyers that work exclusively in that area full-time. We also have a lawyer. He's 50 year lawyer. His name's Rick Rumbrell. Rick is kind of like, if you've been a Rick, Rick has his own podcast. He talks mostly about religion and stuff like that, but he's like, "Hey, whoop." He's a great storyteller. He was the kind of guy that, back when he was full full-time, you had a catastrophic commercial claim. And I'm talking eight figures and they can pay. And the insurance company has screwed it up. They would call Rick like weeks before the trial and say, "We need you to come down and try this case." And he'd come down and say, "Rick, you need to land the plane. That means get a verdict for less than $15 million. Can you do it?" And he'd be like, "I'll try." And he'd go in and he was just a wizard. And so he lives in St. Augustine. And so we met him through some of the civic stuff we do. And his wife had passed away. And he was looking to get back in though. It had been a little enough time. He wanted to get back in. And he's come back. He's been a huge resource. And so he does commercial litigation. We've got a great team. It's a wide variety of stuff. It's very interesting. We do things a little different. Let's say you've got an issue and you want to know about it. I typically, if I could tell it's a great case, like it's a huge dispute. I'll just let you hire us and you can pay. Normally what I say is this, pay for an hour of my time. Come in person. That's not cheap. I was just going to say, what's an hour of your time? He is $3.95. Let's go, man. I'm like the three of us are buttonheads about this radio show. What do we do about it? I'm like, "I need Nick." Well, you would come and we would, you would bring if it was, hopefully if you're going to sue someone for real money, you've got stuff in writing. It's not just, he said, she said, "But Barnap can count." Yeah, that would count. If it's all been selling, it could. It depends what it says. And then, and so I would have you come in and that way, because what I found was, is a lot of people don't do that. A lot of people will get on the phone and they'll shoot the briefs for 10 minutes, but what's going on in the lawyer's mind has to be as this. I'm not getting paid for this. I'm an hourly person. You're taking up my time. Am I going to be able to be paid for this? And it creates all kinds of weird incentives and stuff. And plus, sometimes, you know, the God's honest truth is, you should not do this. This is a terrible idea. You have a dispute that's like $10,000, right? I could not do this for you for less than $50,000 if the other person fights you. Is the other person an idiot? Oh, they are. They're going to fight you then. You're both going to be sitting there throwing rocks at each other and you're going to spend the money on the lawyers. Let's find a solution for you that's different and I talk them through stuff. And so, that's the money we'll spend. Yeah. And I don't have people that do it and say, "This was a waste of time." Typically, they say, "Well, I really appreciate it." And then sometimes, I'll say, "I don't know that this makes sense for you to do it. Here's my strategy. We could try to thread the needle. I'm going to warn you 10% chance." And people will still sometimes say, "Let's see if we can't thread the needle." And so, the retainer is refundable. The retainer, if you wanted to hire me on a case, is $7,500. So, let's say I wrote a letter and you got everything you wanted. I'd give you whatever it was to minus writing the letter, which is like half an hour. You get that back. That's not how it works though in real life. In real life, people fight and then they hire a lawyer and money goes away. And so, it needs to be a real dispute, but that's kind of how we do things. And unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess for me, there's plenty that goes on. I got two questions. Actually, let me do my not-serious one before the serious one. Danny, you put us in touch. Set this up. How much do we owe you for you coming to hang out here? Zero point zero. Probably not. It's a stupid few here. Did you have questions? Because I got some. I want to talk about family loss specifically. You go first. Yeah. But I kind of just wanted to ask you a quick question about your team. Because like, you're describing- We'll see more. Come by the way. We'll see more. Yeah. You're describing some of these guys that you've worked with and some of their skill sets they bring to the table. Are you a symbol- Is your team like, you got nerds, you got guys that are great in front of people? Is it kind of a mixed bag of people that are coming to the table? No, I got- Because I used to be in politics and like, you need a group of nerds and you need like bros and you kind of need a mixed bag of everything. And women and- Yeah. I'm just curious. That's a great-nervous. Right now, I would say primarily, we have- We have talkers. Okay. And now don't get me wrong. There's a woman who works with me, who's an associate- Actually, senior associate now, it's Elizabeth Pender. Shout out, Elizabeth. Shout out. Elizabeth. And she's been an associate. She was like one of the- She was the first legal hire. And she left a little bit and then to go to Kentucky where she practiced and she came back. Miss Elizabeth, I joke around you don't want an animal for a lawyer. She's got a little pit bull in her. She looks real sweet, real small, mean-spirited sometimes. I say, "Miss Elizabeth, you can't yell at them like that." And so, and- But no, seriously, she is- She- She is a bookie person. I'm a bookie person. And so, do we have different personality types? Yeah. I am Mr. Pump the Breaks. I'm about to run out of water. Josh Woolsey, my law partner, says, "I'm about to drown looking at this half a little bottle." He is the go-go-go pedal to the metal, the end of the yang type thing. And so, there are different personalities, but I'm telling you, like, typically though, no, we don't- There's not a single person in our office who's not a trial person. The people on my team, Elizabeth, is- I send her to all types of hearing. She takes depositions. She's made people cry, which I'm not proud of, but it's true. She can do it. She's probably the biggest book person besides me. Joy Whitmore was a special prosecution, which is like sex stuff in kids. She's a really good trial lawyer, and then that stone was my best friend in law school. Now, he's worked remotely out of Austin, Texas, doing commercial litigation. It's a little weird. He can tell me if that makes sense, but he does great stuff, but he was a former criminal defense attorney. So, when I got out, he was working for a guy. I was working for a different guy. And so, he's tried to boatload a case as to. He's a little newer to commercial litigation, but he's real smart. He's a better writer than I am. But so, that's a good question. I would say some guys have better skill sets. Like, one of the guys that are firm is also the general counsel for the FOP, the fraternal order police in Jacksonville. And so, me and him respond to police shootings in Jacksonville and St. John's. Well, he doesn't do St. John's. It's just me for St. John's. But one of his skill sets he has from the FOP is negotiating. I mean, he negotiates their labor deals and stuff like that. He is big conversations. He's a world-class negotiator. So, he does these personal injury cases. He's one of the personal injury guys. Lord, the guy can negotiate. He negotiates better than I do. And so, there are people that have better skill sets and things like that. And some people have certain specialties. If I had a specialty, one of mine is, I typically, I think I'm good at hearings in front of the judges, talking to people about the law. Just judges or juries also? I'm a jury trial lawyer and I like juries. But like, if I had to say like, what do I do in the firm that's a little different is, I can go in and talk about a particularly complicated issue of law and have it be a conversation with the judge or I try to do it or it's a conversation with the judge where I'm kind of getting him to go along with and interact with them and I'm used to it. We did a lot of that Smith-Halsey and the lawyer I worked for Smith-Halsey was really good at it. That was like a specialty was to go into these hearings. You're good because I got to pivot here. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I'm just thinking about listeners who I think listen sometimes. So, family law, what does that mean? I know, like we know these answers sometimes but they're a softball and then who divorces? Divorces. Divorces. Modifications of both. Yeah. And we represent, we don't, one of the tricks is commercial litigation. I'll go anywhere if the money makes sense. P.I. anywhere if the money makes sense. Criminal defense, no. Family law, no. First party property we go worldwide. But those two might say, well, why not those two? The relationships matter on a level that they don't. Prosecutors have more power than defense attorneys. That is the basics of criminal law. Is that the state of Florida or everywhere? Oh my gosh. There were some rude prosecutors back in Texas and you just have to eat it. One time I had a guy named Crazy Cleve, he was schizophrenic. Well, that was what they called him, the cops. And he had his schizophrenic break. He had a real, he was a serious crime he was arrested for and while he was out on bond, kidnapped his wife. And SWAT calls the law office and says, we're about to go in and we're going to kill Crazy Cleve and say that. But they said, we're good about that. They did say we're about to go in and you need to call him on the phone. He says he'll talk to his lawyer. And so I called him on the phone and said, what the heck are you doing? Well, I didn't say that. But I said, I said some things that's sober up there. And so he turned himself in and he ended up, you know, he went, got some treatment and he didn't go to prison for a long time or anything and he got straight. I told the prosecutor, this was before all that day, he was in custody. And I said, you know, it was a wild incident. I, I talked Crazy Cleve in and he was going to get shot. And she looked at me for half a second and said, it'd be better if he was dead. And I wanted the prosecutor. That's what she said. And I wanted to tell her, they called her district attorney and assistant district attorney. And I wanted to tell her a lot of things that, that that struck me as wrong and that, you know, human life has dignity and all that. And also just kind of like, as a baby lawyer, I haven't been a lawyer a year. Arguably, I did something that was, I'm not going to have a chance to do it again. And just to sit there and crap on that moment, but prosecutors can do that and get away with it. I never tried to do that when I was a prosecutor because it happened so often. But I'm saying is, you don't want to be going and flying into Orlando. And these guys have no clue who you are. We still know, we still know Melissa Nelson was a homicide prosecutor when we were lawyers over there. A lot of the guys that I tried cases with, my boss on homicide is now a circuit judge. A guy I tried five homicides with is a county court judge. And so we have these relationships. They matter. Yes. And family law, you need to have relationships with the judges and know who they are and have them know who you are. But also, there's just kind of like, what's the market price? What kind of things, how does it normally shake out? Has alimony normally get treated? How does child support? How does, how do they do it? And if you go into these different areas, you don't get the same results. Commercial litigation is not the same. It's a business dispute. It's a business. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you said, what's in writing? What's not the numbers of the numbers, the family law. So I'm just curious, too, like we're at the age now, right? I'm 41. How do you trade? 38. Justin? 33. 33. I was I'm not asking Danny because he's way too young. Like 12. 24. Oh my gosh, baby. Yeah. When you guys then talked about 9/11, I was like, I was in fifth grade. I don't even know. Was Danny born yet? I was too. No. It was a nice. It doesn't matter. The way to age us again. Sure. Sure. I'm at the stage of life where our close friends, right, we have young kids, divorces are happening left and right. Oh, yeah. How do you make it amicable? Is it again, in your world, is it like I want husband or wife to win as much monetarily as possible or custody? How do you pick your cases and what do you decide? This matters. I typically represent the payor. It's just how it goes. That's the person who makes more money. Yeah. I don't take it on the payment on the back end. I require to be paid as we go and that limits some people from hiring us. As far as what do I do? Do I try? I try to Zelsi represent the client at the same time. Zellously represent the client. That's a great term. But at the same time, I find that if you sit there and say, well, I get everything, if the other side is a lawyer, what the hell are you? What are you doing? The other side, you have to presume that the other side is not a collection of morons. And typically, you know the other lawyer. And so if you're like, okay, for example, the marital state, you get married December 1st, 2010, you get divorced, 2021 or whatever. Everything that's coming into the marital state that's not a gift or inheritance is marital estate. So you earn your paychecks, put it in your own bank account. It's still marital estate assets. You know what's going to happen? It's going to get split 50/50 and you balance it all out. If you go, well, I want 75%, why? Because I'm a good guy. You're wasting everyone's life. Wow. And so what I try to do is I tell my clients, and I'm really blunt about this, is look, I just try to bring sanity to the thing. I don't want a bunch of drama. Florida is a no fault divorce state. Don't take positions. You're not going to be able to win. But if you're going to win and they're being unreasonable, that's when you have a lawyer, that's why you fight. And there are times where you guys are going to have disagreements. We have family law trials coming up that the sides just don't agree. And there's strategies to put yourself in the best position possible. And then none of those are jury trials. So it's all bench trials. You put yourself in the best position possible for the judge and then the chips fall where they will. We're out of time. That's a word. I know we have. We have like a minute and a half to wrapping up here, which is, that's really like, keep going. I told you'd fly by. It did for us. I don't know about you guys are great. Thank you for joining. A hundred percent question. I always ask in the air. Will you come back up? We get in the spot. Yes. This is a contract, by the way, it's under law. I have a lawyer to represent me. That was great. I appreciate it. We'll dive deeper into the business and specific topics. We talk about AI, the Jacksonville Bar Association, so many cool things. I knew this would happen. I got notes and notes. We're not going to hit it. Nick Morgan with Woolsey and Morgan, that was amazing. I enjoyed it. I know these three did. They're over there, grinning left and right. Yeah, you're coming back. Awesome. I don't know. We'll pay half as retainer fee. I don't know. Is that a contract too? No, you guys don't have to pay anything. This is fun. I will say four to five works the best because I can book that off. There we go. Nick Morgan with Woolsey and Morgan, a variety of things they cover. Again, I'm blown away. I want to hear more stories. That's what the health just happened. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]