How much do you know about, for example, copyright law? If you're like most developers, you probably haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this kind of thing. But that's exactly what we're talking about in today's episode. It's an interview with a lawyer, Gary D. Nissenbaum. You can find Gary's practice at gdnlaw.com. Gary was kind enough to join me, and we worked really hard to get this episode exactly the way that we wanted it to be, to kind of introduce this topic, but also to introduce you to Gary. And I hope that he's going to come back to a future episode to talk a little bit more about how legal affects developers. You're listening to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. My goal on this show is to help driven developers connect to their career purpose and do better work so they can have a positive impact on the people around them. And you are one of those driven developers if you're listening to the show on a regular basis. You know, in today's episode, we're talking about culture, really, at large. That's kind of the theme, the digital culture and how things have changed. And this is the kind of stuff that you should be engaging if you want to become a great developer. And the opposite of this is really just not caring, not thinking about this kind of thing. So that's why we decided to have Gary on the show. It's a new perspective for developers, a different perspective on the industry. Thank you so much for listening. I do want to tell you about one thing before we get into the interview, and that is the Beyond Bootcamp Interview Week Prep Guide. You can get this for free by going to beyondbootcamp.io. It's a 100 page guide to help you connect to your purpose and your strengths as a developer, and then use those strengths and that purpose in your interview. It's going to prepare you for that interview. Lots of practical tips. Again, it's totally free. Head over to beyondbootcamp.io to learn a little bit more about the Interview Week Prep Guide. Now, let's get into the interview with Gary Nisabal. Gary, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. There's so many questions I have because as a developer, I certainly don't have any training in legal. I took a media law class, but that's pretty much the extent of it. And this is what you do every day, right? Exactly. Exactly. This is something that we're very focused in. Yeah. So I'd love for you to kind of, before we jump in, kind of give a little bit of background on yourself and how you ended up being interested in not only law, but specifically for technology enterprise. Why are you so interested in this? Well, you know, the law is basically an 18th or 19th century profession that has made its way into the 21st century, which is... Yeah. In contrast to what your audience is about, which is you're basically a late 20th, early 21st century industry in the 21st century. And to some extent, your audience really belongs here in what you're doing. You're very cutting edge. You're affecting every aspect of our culture, I believe, for the better on balance. We felt that the law was an area that needed... needed to be supportive of what the digital industry was doing. And so my training originally was in large firms and doing all commercial work. So I would represent very large businesses, multinational companies, and very small businesses, and one-person startups, and everybody in between. And we'd be doing all sorts of transactions. All sorts of... All sorts of litigation in a number of different places. Ultimately, I'd say maybe in the late 90s, I decided to open this law firm. So it's exactly 20 years ago. And the thought I had was that we would stick with commercial law, but we would do our best to also offer services in the intellectual property field, in entertainment law, modeling, literary. Music, film, television. And of course, now the big one is apps and video games. And that we would also be able to be full service for companies that were getting on board with the dot-com industry. And that has now really driven a lot of our growth. The firm started 20 years ago with me sort of alone in a room staring at a phone that wasn't ringing after having been a lawyer already. Yeah. For 15 years. And we're now in four states. We're in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and in Texas and Dallas. And we have active practices in all of those. A lot of that, not all of it, is digitally related. We also are full service for regular businesses as well. But I find that even the bricks and mortar businesses now have questions that relate to this sort of thing. So it actually... The overlaps, I believe. It's unbelievable. And the growth area for us right now is video games and apps and licensing as well. Yeah. The interesting thing about that is to the lay public, they see television shows, movies. They see video games and they think of them as ways that the people that created them made money. The people that coded them made money. And then they see dolls and apparel. Towels, bestselling books, films, whatever. And they figure, okay, those people are making money as well. But they don't link the fact that there's an overlap. It's sort of the same people. That the people who create this intellectual property are then giving it out to users who then want to buy licensed products in a secondary market. And so it's this... We call it... There's a word for it. Annuity. Annuity. It's like creating an annuity. The idea that you create intellectual property that lives on beyond the life cycle of the thing that you created. The film you created. The television show you created. The game you created. The app you created. Whatever. And this is something that we're heavily into right now. And it really is a growth area. Yeah. I think... I love this idea because, you know, first of all, a lot of developers who are listening right now, you probably don't realize... Uh... Uh... That the code that you write, it's easy not to think of it as an asset, right? Because it's a file on your computer. And it's easy to think that when you create something that's a file on your computer, that unless maybe, you know, maybe if you come from a background in music, then maybe then you understand that, oh, that file is actually a song. And it's representative of, you know, the chorus and the composition of the song. And it's kind of the proof that it exists. But actually, that file is an asset. And the code that you're writing is... Can be an asset. And so, I love... You know, IP and the law surrounding IP is so intriguing to me. And I think a lot of developers don't recognize that the things that they're building, you know, they really are more than just, you know, material. It's more than just bits. That's right. And really, the value of your... Intellectual property, your IP, as you called it, is in direct proportion to how exclusive it is, how protected it is. To the extent that you are putting out there something that the entire world can use, the value decreases dramatically. Also, the hour of time comes into play. A new type of software, a new type of app, a new... A new game or whatever has a half-life. And it's very short in this market. And so, the idea of securing the intellectual property rights through appropriate trademarks of the name and the logo, through appropriate copyright of the graphics and the code and the characters. And although characters, sometimes they straddle both trademark, copyright, and sometimes neither. You know, that you can... You can basically secure these legal rights at the outset, grab them, hold people back from infringing on those things by policing your own intellectual property, and zealously providing value to what you have sweated and spent long nights and worked during your vacations to create. And that's really the idea. Yeah. To give people... To give people who create these things the benefit of what they've created. It's an excellent, excellent point that you make. And I hear the dialogue. I hear people who are listening and asking this question. Because as a developer, you know, a large amount of, you know, my career and a lot of the things I've been able to do in my career have been enabled by a lot of things that I can do. A lot of things that I can do. A lot of things that I can do. A lot of things that I can do. A lot of things that I can do. A lot of things that I can do. And I got for free, right? It's been enabled by open source that's been licensed in particular ways so that I can access and I can then leverage this body of work to build my own things. So I'd love to, you know, first of all, and this is a recent topic that's been in developer news cycles, essentially, the React licensing and how all of that affected or may affect startups in 2020. So I'd love to know, you know, when is the right time and when is the wrong time to release those pieces of work into an open source environment versus when is a good time for me to take it and say, okay, you know what? Actually, this isn't something that I want to open source. This is something that I'd like to protect a little bit closer. What we have to understand is that people assume that they are. Giving up their intellectual property rights without any consequence. So the whole discussion has to has to start with the fact that that's not accurate, that every time you click, I agree on the terms and conditions of a so-called free application or free software or something. You're using some website that you're accessing to get information. There is a whole panoply of rights. And even intellectual property rights that you would otherwise have rights in your private information that you are giving up. And, you know, the perfect example is the Amazon Echo and all the other devices that are similar that come into our home. I have the tap. I love it. I think it's a phenomenal product. I have it in my office and I have it at home. But the reason I have a tap versus any of the other products that Apple's coming out. I'm sorry that Amazon's coming out with is that I don't want it to listen to me. I don't want it to hear my private conversations, especially in a law firm, without me pressing the button and tapping. So the tap was meant for battery conservation because you're supposed to be able to use it portably. You don't have to have it wired into a plug. That's why you have to tap. But I like the tap because it's private. I tell it when to listen and when not. And so I guess if there's one of the main messages I would give your audience, it's that the future of development, one of the areas that's underserved by developers that I think can be exploited to create very, very powerful and very useful products that can make a good deal of money for the right developer. Is. Something that. Has the speed, has the performance and all the things that we're used to. But then you have an added layer of security, an added layer of privacy that you don't see in a lot of these new gadgets that come on board and that people have a vague sense they're giving up in ways they don't understand. Yeah, yeah. Because the future is, you know, I had a excellent guest on on the podcast. Recently, his name's Kevin Kelly and his his entire, you know, kind of purpose and career has been around not predicting necessarily, but looking into the future and trying to kind of draw conclusions about where we're headed. And some of the things that he discusses in his books and on his blog and in other places in interviews and that kind of thing. Kevin talks about how the future is kind of. You know, we're sharing pretty much everything in the future. Right. We share cars today. We share every aspect of our activity. And that's kind of the current flow and direction. And I totally agree with you. I think that there's a huge potential market and a huge potential benefit to products that protect a little bit of that. Right. Because so much of this. This knowledge sharing is opaque to me. So much of it is hidden behind something that realistically no one really is going to take the time because it's not economically viable for me to spend the time to learn about the implications about every single thing that I'm using. Every single app, every single device, you know, everything I come in contact with in the public, even understanding what things are, what things are listening. What are they doing with my information? That's a difficult thing to understand. And as a developer, you know, I believe that just from a position of ethics, not only for, you know, business ethics, but for, you know, humanitarian ethics, that opacity, the opaqueness of those devices, the way they collect that information, sometimes that can be a little bit sinister. Right. And maybe not actually understandable. Under the surface sinister. But, you know, being a consumer, I do have the sense that, well, everybody's watching now. You know, there's a word that we use for this sort of thing that sort of typifies the change across all the different industries, and that is disintermediation. The concept that there used to be intermediaries in our society, in our culture, that were titan. Right. And the perfect example of this is journalism. Journalists have, throughout history, especially in the 20th century, had very high standards of truthfulness, and they would not report on things that were scandalous or were not newsworthy. And there was a whole host. And there was a whole host of things. Now, that's still around. But through the digital world, we can disintermediate journalism, and we can get our news directly through social media. And the problem with that we've just seen, which is some of that news was raw data that was incorrect, that's false, or that was out of context, and it was magnified in a way that it shouldn't have been. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.! Right. Right. At. At. is we need to balance, on the one hand, our role as officers of the court who enforce the Constitution, who are here to see that the First Amendment rights of people are not violated, that people are able to exercise their civil liberties. Every lawyer swears an oath that they will uphold the Constitution of the United States, which essentially means you're going to uphold the civil liberties of the United States. On the other hand, that the abuse that people are suffering, because of this disintermediation, is remedied to whatever extent it can be remedied through the court system or through the law. And as everybody knows, it's an imperfect remedy. It's not complete. I'll just give you an example, if I may. A lot of what we do is deal with internet defamation, people who have been defamed on the internet or people whose picture has been put up, and spread around on the internet. And some of these pictures are adult-oriented. It's completely non-consensual. It's a complete violation and abuse of people who are victimized. And frankly, a number of my clients, an unusual proportion of the people who come to me, these pictures were taken five, ten years ago. They're at a different stage of life now. And now they have to see something. And now they have to see something that they did when they were in college. And here they are as a high-level executive somewhere, and they're now dealing with this. My point is that the law is struggling with these issues because we've never been confronted with them before. And getting back to your original question, this is one of the things that drives me, is I don't want to be practicing law in a way that everyone else has practiced for two and a half centuries. I'm more interested in being involved in the issues of the day, the American history that's being made now, so much of which is oriented toward how we're going to grapple with this digital world that we've unleashed so that we maintain our humanity and we're not abusive to people while at the same time preserving our constitutional values. And so that's a lot of why our law firm has been so moving into this area at such a close. Yeah, there is a huge, huge gap. And to your earlier point about it being an 18th, 19th century practice, there's a huge gap between precedent and how quickly things are moving, right? There's so many new things that are happening every single day that every iteration creates a new thing to have precedent for, but we don't have precedent because not everything has happened in that new state yet, right? With the idea being that, okay, there's new ways of getting images. There's new ways of understanding people's behavior. There's new data that I can go and find. Some of it is public, publicly accessible, and some of it is actually publicly accessible in a way that is totally legal in terms of access, but when used incorrectly. But at the same time, there are ways in which the world of your listeners is enhancing us, in extremely positive ways. And if we have a moment, I'd like to give you an example of some of the ways a law firm can use digital technology in a manner that's unusual. Yes, please. Yeah. I'll give you an example from us because this is the one I know well, because it's us. We have a fluctuating number of about seven to eight lawyers who all do this work. We're all doing commercial law litigation and transactional with a focus. In all the areas, but one of the big ones is intellectual property and the digital world. I am licensed in five places. I mean, I have a law license in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and DC, Washington, DC. Other people have multiple licenses. We opened offices in four states. The idea of a firm this size being able to serve clients, in four different states, and keep that going, that never could have happened without the internet. There is no way that that could have happened without our ability to reach out to people through our website, to have a phone system that is not analog, that's a digital phone system where I can create several configurations of conference calls at a moment's notice that I can see the actual calls and who's on them on my computer screen, the whole freedom of a digital phone system that we have, and the ability to contact people and speak to people and help them with their matter in places that are so far away. I will tell you that when I have people call me frequently, what I'll tell them, because I'm very honest and open with this stuff and I'm kind of actually proud of it, I say to them, listen, I'd love to handle your matter and I'm ready to be your lawyer. Dr. Justin Marchegiani But listen to me closely. I'm about to tell you something and I want you to hear this. You're not going to see me that much because I'm generally in our New Jersey office. You're in a different state. You may be a thousand miles away from me. Now, we'll still work with you and if I need to, I'll come out and that's fine. But keep in mind that it's not like you're walking down the street every day and saying hello to me and getting me a cup of coffee. It's not that kind of attorney-client relationship that you might have had in 1955. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. Dr. Justin Marchegiani The lawyer you would hire would be the lawyer in town. I'm not generally going to be in town. And every one of them, just about every one of them has said, I don't care. I literally don't care. And you know why they don't care? You ask people, when you buy a product on Amazon, where does it come from? Nobody knows. Who the heck knows? Who cares where it came from? The point is I click, it comes. That's all I care. I don't care what happens. Dr. Justin Marchegiani in between. And so, you know, we, our law firm has been, has, has had a freedom that we never could have had to practice law the way we want because of the digital age. And just one more quick example. Your, your profession has this wonderful concept called the scrum, which very few people know about. But, but really I think is one of the wonderful contributions you've made to American business. And we've adopted it because we saw so many of our clients doing it and we felt, Hey, you know what, this would work for the law firm. So let me describe how we've, we've adopted. I know that when IT people do a scrum, the general concept is, you know, 15, 20 minutes each morning, everybody knows what they're doing that day. And so it's collaborative and people are not going off the rails and everybody's focused because they're doing projects that are imminent, immediate. It's not like this is going to take place over years. It's not like this is going to take place over years. It's not like this is going to take years. This is, this is quick. So I get it. And that, and that works. What we do is different. What we do is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, generally, we will have our paralegal pull up every single matter in the office, all of them, all the clients, all their matters on an Excel or a word, MS Word spreadsheet. And we will have her and everybody will dial in as they're driving into work. So literally this is like, while you're in the car, and we, we, she goes right down the list, calls out a matter and whoever's case that is reports on it and the others comment. And so somebody who has maybe one year experience as a lawyer is now getting the benefit of people that have 10, 20, 30 years of experience telling them about something going on in their case. And, and so it's truly collaborative that that meeting could take two hours, but it's a wonderful two hours. It really solidifies the firm. And frankly, generally the client doesn't have to pay for it. We, we, we eat most of that time because we feel that it's, it's helpful to us to manage the cases and get, get ahead of the curve, know what the deadlines are. And if anyone is doing something that we could improve, it's immediate. It's every 48 hours, everything is reviewed. And, uh, and it's very, very powerful. And I got to say, it's something that we never would have thought of if we didn't see our it clients doing it. That's such a cool story. So, uh, I have a very close connection to quite a few people who are deeply involved in, uh, the agile, uh, kind of movement of project management. I'm using the wrong words here, but, uh, you know, stick with me. Uh, uh, my, my father-in-law is a long time agile coach. He was, uh, uh, you know, kind of a, just a few steps removed from that original agile manifesto. My wife kind of took on, uh, some similar, uh, ideology when she, she works with me at whiteboard. And so we also, you know, practice scrum and we have a very similar things that, that we do at whiteboard. But what's interesting, uh, and this is kind of a side note for the listeners, but a lot of people who are listening probably are in a similar situation. I work at an agency. I don't work at a, at a startup. I don't work at, well, I, you know, I, unless you count spec, I don't really work at a startup. I work with clients, which, you know, generally speaking has a lot of parallels to something like a law firm. So you have multiple clients, you have a lot of things going on in parallel. And I would imagine that you have to, you know, prioritization of one client over another. That's a, that's a real intangible problem. Uh, prioritization of, you know, uh, one very urgent thing for a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very small client versus a less urgent thing for a much bigger. And you might say more important client in terms of their effect on your firm. So, uh, it's very interesting, uh, dichotomy there, but I love what you're talking about here is kind of re-engaging every single thing that the entire team is involved on. Um, this is actually something that I think would be a really cool thing to do as an agent. Um, you know, it's, it's not the same thing as, like you said, it's, it's slightly differentiated from, you know, a typical product scrum meeting because a product scrum meeting is going to talk about, you know, what is, what is most relevant on this project for our team today. But this is really more about visibility and, and, you know, that experience sharing such an incredible, uh, you know, and that's, that's not a, that's what's, what's crazy is it's not really a technical thing. No, think about it. It's, it's something that physicians have done probably for a hundred, 200 years or more where they have grand rounds. So you'll have the attending physician in the hospital. Uh, he'll go from patient to patient to patient with the resident, uh, doctors following. And, and when they go to a patient, uh, patient's bed, the doctor will say, okay, whose patient is this? The resident will then present and say, what happened? Last night when that resident was staying up 36 hours to deal with that patient's problem. And the attending now is here during business hours and basically says, okay, I agree. I don't agree. Here's what we need to do. Here's the next test. And so it's, it's similar to that, which has been going on for a long time, but it's, it's upgraded. It's, it's, uh, it's, uh, attending to it's it's grand rounds 2.0 because I'm doing it with digital technology. I'm doing it with a digital phone system that gives me complete. Yeah. Freedom to get people on, off, move them along. Plus an X, a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet. That's giving me all these things that I can change. And then we can share through a network. And so the idea is you're sort of creating a melange of all these different concepts. And with the understanding that what you want to do is create, um, scalability, uh, to your point, if we have a small client, um, who needs the same document, the same type of document, as one that's larger, and we've already done the work for the larger client. And now we have a smaller client who wants the same thing. We're not going to charge the smaller client for the time that we save by using something that we have for a different client. We've already done things at the same time. We don't use forms in the set because of how we define forms. It's different the way normal, other people, non-lawyers define forms. You know, we don't, we don't just say, well, you know, you have a, an assignment agreement. Uh, we're going to assign your intellectual property. We've done that 50 times. So we'll just take the same thing we've always done and we'll just use it. We, we customize it for the client. We look at it. We, we deal with the client's own business plan and what they need. And, and so, you know, the, the technology really allows us to do that. You know, another, another great example, um, is SEO. When you, when you think of it, the way lawyers used to work, the way my profession used to work was you would have, um, a yellow pages ad. You would have, um, uh, a flyer that somebody is going to give a lecture at the chamber of commerce or the Knights of Columbus. And, uh, you would, you would get to know the vice president of the bank who's giving mortgages in town and things like that. And so it was, it was one of these things where the lawyer would go to a broad, broad audience of people. So basically everybody in town and then whoever kind of needed a lawyer would remember that. And so it was, it was one of these things where the lawyer would go to a broad audience of people. So basically everybody in town and then whoever kind of needed a generalist and they would pick you in the new, this new world that we have through SEO, we're able to take our website, which, which we have 27 videos on the website that we shot. These are not things we bought. I literally shot videos about each practice area we handle and, and, and actually seven or eight of them are about debates on different areas of intellectual property law and other laws like that. Um, and so, um, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so, and so That's a different way of advertising. And so rather than scattershot, this is like hitting it with a laser. And that, again, is an area where the digital world, the people who listen to this podcast, have enhanced our world as lawyers and taught us a different way of marketing. So huge congratulations to the Fuse team. And along with that change came Fuse Studio and the Fuse Premium Plan. If you don't know what we're talking about yet, Fuse is going to help you develop mobile applications with less code and better collaboration. They do this by including everything in one tool. You can use this on Mac or on PC. And you can deploy to iOS and Android platforms. So this is a single place for you. To develop your application all in one kind of housed solution. But on top of that, Fuse has launched a new set of tools. It's their Premium Plan with Fuse Studio. It's their premium editor for mobile applications. And it includes built-in UI components. For example, if you wanted to build an app that uses the camera and it allows you to add stickers to the camera, you can do that with Fuse Studio. Now, this premium offering from Fuse is part of their professional plan, but most people don't even need the paid plan. And this paid plan includes Fuse Studio. Most people don't even need it. Most people can actually get started on the Fuse platform itself. And you can get started for free with that platform today by heading to FuseTools.com slash plant. Now, if you do decide that you want to check out that pro plan, then you can use the code DT and that's going to get you 70% off. That's 70% off for 12 months. That's the majority of the cost is cut off the top for the first 12 months. If you use this code before December 31st of this year, head over to FuseTools.com slash plans. You have two months to use that code. So check out the free plan and then come back and use that code. Whatever it is that you need to do. Thank you again to Fuse for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. For developers who are listening and you're thinking, okay, yeah, this, of course, you know, digital is changing. The world around us. And how does, how does this, how is this relevant to me? I want to answer that question directly here. Wherever you see change, first of all, it's powerful, right? You think, you know, strip it way back to something like physics. Change is kind of the, the proof of energy, right? Any change is an exchange of energy. And where there is energy being exchanged, something is going to change, right? Those, those two things kind of go hand in hand. They're reciprocal. Where there is change in culture, where there's change in business, there is going to be a lot of people who gather to that change. Because in the margins is where profit is made, right? When there is change, that means money is moving. And if you get in the flow of that money, you can get a piece of that money, right? So that it's a motivator. And the reason this is important to you, is because where there is change and where there is money, there is going to be legal, period. Every single time. If you go and look at any big cultural movement, there's going to be a significant amount of legal energy necessary to surround that cultural movement. I would. And, you know, there are, we have a number of people who come to us to start businesses. And there are some general challenges that they face. Would you like me to? Go into some of that? Yeah. You know, I think actually you started to mention, just for the disillusioned developer who's like, ah, I still, I'm still not convinced. I'd love for you to tell the story that you kind of started to mention before we started rolling of a client that they were seeking a trademark. Can you tell that story, Gary? Well, we had this very nice young woman who came to us and wanted to start a small business. And she hired us to do a number of different things. Contracts. And other formation issues. And one of the things we always say in that situation is, do you need a trademark? Of course, we know the answer. Obviously, she does need a trademark. And she shocked us because she said, no, I don't need a trademark. And so I said, well, okay, you're having us do all this other work, but you're telling me you don't need a trademark. Could you elaborate? And she said, well, yeah, I already did my own trademark. I went online and I found one of the services, that will register a trademark. And I registered my trademark. And I said, okay, how much did you spend to do that? And she named a price that was very, very low. It was unusually low for the services that would be involved. And I said, well, this is new. I've never heard of that before. And I should know that because maybe there's something I'm missing. I'm always interested in learning new things. So we went on the USPTO, the United States Patent and Trademark Office website and looked it up. Turned out there was no trademark. Instead, there was something different. And when I told her what had happened, she became very angry. I'd love to know. All right. So what happened was she had a reservation of the name. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.! Okay. so all it was was a reservation it's similar to going to a restaurant having a reservation to eat and thinking you just had the meal you didn't have the meal all you had was a reservation to go to the restaurant if you didn't go there the reservation expired and it's worthless and and she got very and she had to pay for that reservation at that and rightly so i thought because when i looked at at what i was what she had done um there was a fine print uh as there always are with these with these websites that say we're not a lawyer we're not offering you legal advice you know you should go to a lawyer well okay but nobody reads that so so they assume that they're getting sort of low-cost legal advice and that uh you know what's why do i need a lawyer it's all nonsense well it's not nonsense because if you're not reading the fine print uh you end up getting something that you don't need and so rather than saving money it actually was a waste of money and this is illustrative of one of the key aspects of what i deal with all the time which is i i believe we're giving quality legal services i believe there are other lawyers in commercial law like me who are giving quality legal services and that is and that what we're offering is is worth what we're charging because it is customized for the client and we're basically fighting the client's battles in ways the client doesn't know how to do um but to convince somebody of that when they can go file an incorporation for a small amount of money or get supposedly get a trademark or a copyright for virtually nothing um it's very hard to prove that because you know it's hard to prove a negative of what would go wrong if you do it the other way it's hard to know what would go wrong if anything would go wrong so this is one of the challenges that we have as lawyers to educate people on why it's really necessary to collaborate with us and use us and let us represent you when you're handling something like starting a business yeah and especially in particular you know if you have a uh a digital space that you're not really sure about right because here's the thing this this is what most people, you know, for example, if the average person who has a salaried job and they have no external, you know, nothing else is going on for them, they can probably go and, for example, do their taxes with TurboTax. And that works for tons of people, perfectly fine. You know, maybe they don't get the perfect return every single time. Maybe they could get a better return, but ultimately, you know, they're checking that box. And, you know, because everything is so typical for them, there's not like a reason, a good reason for them to expend resources, time, et cetera, right? So that technology has given a large group of people a good utility. But the problem is, you know, if you're building a business and especially like, for example, Spec. Spec has people in multiple states, right? We have all different kinds of weird income streams and we have weird, you know, deals with sponsors and we have deals that we had to do between podcast owners and creators and all this stuff can get very confusing very quickly. And filling out a form on your own when you have no idea what half of the boxes mean, you know, that is a situation where you say, okay, you know what? Maybe this form is more important than I think it is, right? Maybe there is a reason that there are people who are trained in this that know how to do this. Better than I can that know the ins and outs, know the ramifications, you know, not only of taxes, but, you know, to your point, Gary, in a legal scenario, what is, you know, for me, if I'm going to, and one of the things that we talked about before, beforehand, before we started rolling was, you know, versus a partnership, should I do an LLC? Should I do a partnership? Should I do an S-Corp? You know, I don't know how to answer those questions. I'm going to Google it. I'm going to, and I'm going to get, second rate information. And very often I'm going to get information that's been influenced by somebody who has a stake in my decision. So, you know, this is a perfect scenario where I could totally lose. I could totally get, end up in a disadvantaged position because I didn't take the time to go to someone who knew what they were doing. Well, you know, this is the conundrum that we all face, which is somebody who actually cares about me and wants to help me. And I'm going to Google it. And I'm going to Google it. And I'm going to click on it and click on it and click on it and click on it and click on it and click on it and is living his values versus somebody who is trying to trick me and essentially steal from me and lie to me, those two people, they sound the same. They use the same verbiage. They say the same things. And so people in this day and age try to filter a lot of what they're being told with disbelief, with a cynical attitude. And we have to find a way of embracing one another's humanity and not assuming the worst about the other person unless proven otherwise. And I know that's not what you would normally think a lawyer would say to you. But I got to tell you that the reason that I love what I do, the reason I enjoy coming to work in the morning is that I feel that I am solving other people's problems. And I feel that I am solving other people's problems. problems that they cannot solve themselves. And while it's true that I'm seeing people generally at their worst, not always, sometimes they're doing great things like starting businesses, but a lot of times they're in trouble. I take pride in the fact that the people that are in this law firm, we are dedicated to not taking advantage, that we're dedicated to listening to what the person wants and tailoring the legal services to the way they want the services done, even if they can't. put it into the proper legal terminology. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope you can tell that Gary is passionate about what he does. And we're going to continue this conversation in the next episode of Developer Tea. If you don't want to miss out on that, make sure you subscribe and whatever podcasting app you're using right now. You can do that with a single click. And of course, podcasts are free, right? So you don't really have a good reason not to at this point, if this episode was interesting. Go and subscribe and whatever podcasting app you use. And you can always unsubscribe. It's, it's free. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to today's episode's sponsor, Fuse. Fuse allows you to collaborate better for your mobile application development. And it's all in one. You can get started for free today by heading to fusedtools.com slash plans. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to get that interview week prep guide by heading over to beyondbootcamp.io. And remember, Gary's a legend. And I'll see you next time. Bye. The law firm website is at gdnlaw.com. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.