Richard Gurak: Building A Powerful Law Firm (Paper-Free) And Out-Of-The-Box Thinking

Strickland Bonner: So you're a lawyer, and your clients are squeezing you for lower fees. How do you put more cash in your pocket? We want to expose you to new ways of practicing law. Endless hours with no home life and a lease on an expensive office are so 1999. It's time to make a change for the better. Here to help you with that are your hosts Ron Bockstahler and Kirsten Mayfield. Welcome to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast.

Ron Bockstahler: My name is Ron Bockstahler,

Kirsten Mayfield: and I am Kirsten Mayfield. I'm your co-host here on the 1958 Lawyer.

Richard Gurak: Thank you, Ron.

Ron Bockstahler: And today we're joined by Richard Gurak, co-founder of Advitam IP, an international IP law firm. Let's start there. Tell us a little bit Richard earned his bachelor of science in mechanical about being the SEABEES and what they do. I think my only engineering at the University of Illinois and his JD at John Marshall Law School, where he also was founding member and president of the Patent Law Clinic. Richard, you are a civil engineer and heavy equipment operator in the U.S. Reserve SEABEES. First, thank you for your service. knowledge of the SEABEES comes from John Wayne's movie, The Fighting SEABEES.

Richard Gurak: That would be correct. The Fighting SEABEES. So I want to thank both of you for having me today, and I hope both of you had a nice holiday weekend for Memorial Day.

Kirsten Mayfield: Oh yeah, not long enough, but it was nice.

Richard Gurak: Never long weather. So the the SEABEES. When I was in college, I decided that I was going to join the military reserves. It was after my first year in college studying for engineering, and I looked at the Navy. I looked at the Air Force, but I went toward the Navy. And then once in the Navy, I decided the program I wanted to try was the SEABEES, which was a heavy construction battalion. And in the SEABEES, we got to do all sorts of fun things, including dig water retention pond, which was at the Navy base in Glenview, Illinois. The base was decommissioned, I think, about probably about 20-420-five, years ago, and then sold back to the village of Glenview. The water retention pond was used to divert the water from the concrete runways because the planes would take off from here. They did a lot of training exercises. In fact, George Bush Sr. he flew out of here for his training missions, which were mostly successful except for his last one when he had to eject from his airplane and he landed in the ocean. Or eventually he was found, and of course went on to become president of the United States. What a story that

Ron Bockstahler: is! So go about that.

Richard Gurak: He flew out of the base in Glenview; those were his training missions. So I actually now live on the decommissioned base, and I'm all but a five-minute walk away from what used to be the water retention pond that we dug when I was in the SEABEES is now a nicely landscaped lake with all sorts of you know lake plants that the village planted around it, and fish and turtles and frogs and of course coyotes that will come there and eat some of the animals once in a while. So we got all sorts of wildlife in this area, even though it's highly populated.

Ron Bockstahler: You've come full full circle from the beginning of being a SEABEES.

Richard Gurak: Exactly,

Ron Bockstahler: that's awesome. Well, tell me, so you you get out of the SEABEES and you decide to become an attorney.

Richard Gurak: Well, when I got out of the SEABEES, I actually became an engineer for three years. So I worked as a mechanical engineer for three years in a corporation here in Illinois, and during that time I met a patent attorney. So I was very interested in what the patent attorney was doing for a living, and engineering was great for me. But I just felt that I wanted to accomplish a little bit more in terms of my education, and have more flexibility as my career continued in my life. So I looked at law school, and I went part time to law school at John Marshall in night school just to check it out to see if I would enjoy it, and I really loved it. So I gave my two three weeks notice at the engineering firm, and then I went to day school, John Marshall, and that's where I finished my my law school education for my JD, and I went on to become an intellectual property attorney, which I still am today.

Kirsten Mayfield: Now you you have a very interesting setup for your intellectual property firm. You guys are technically brick and mortar, but you're so much more than that. You and your partner Michelle traveling the world, IP law. It's global. Can you talk a little bit about how you've set up your firm? Why you set it up this way?

Richard Gurak: It's interesting that you're interviewing me about. This during our current health and economic crisis that the world is is dealing with right now, because our firm, as I think you probably might recall, was set up shortly after the 0809 and 2010 crisis. It was at least three or four years of crisis, I would guesstimate. So we we formed our firm in March of 2012. Took us about a year of planning to get to that point. So we actually started working on it 14 months before we launched our firm because you just don't walk out of a firm and into a empty office. You have to have full capabilities. Plus, we had a lot of clients that we figured were going to want to join us. So, when we started up our firm, we literally started from a blank page, 100% blank. And my partner Michelle and I, we enjoyed a lot of out of the box thinking. What do I mean by that? Well, entrepreneurs, and we are certainly entrepreneurs, usually break ground in their field if they think out of the box. I listened to an interview on YouTube just a few days ago that kind of explained how, based on their data, 90-7% of the people tend to think inside the box, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but you don't break new ground if you're constantly thinking inside the box. And based on this presenter's estimates and their data, only about 3% of the people in this world think outside of the box. We were certainly thinking outside of the box when we created our firm, when we branded our firm with our name and Advitam IP, that was certainly not the norm on a wide scale basis to not use your surnames when you branded a firm. So everything that we did, we thought it out before we made a final decision, such as technology, such as where we were going to work, such as how we were going to work, the people we wanted to hire. Well, we hired each other. We were the only two people when we first started, so that was pretty easy. But now we've grown to 1415, people total, which is great for us because now we can handle just about any type of intellectual property situation. We need to, but when we built the firm, because the economic crisis was still full in play, of course we were very very careful how we spent our money, and we identified where a firm spends most of its money, and it's primarily on real estate needs, staffing needs, including the attorneys. When I say staffing, because we are all employees of the firm, and including technology needs. So, real estate needs, people needs, meaning the employees and technology needs. So, for each one of those aspects, we asked ourselves, how are we going to craft a firm to keep our overhead as low as possible, while still balancing a firm that clients would want to work with, and still balancing a firm that we wanted to work with? So we came up with a hybrid model, and our hybrid model really kind of grew from the fact that we wanted to be a mostly paper-free firm, I don't think any organization is 100% paper-free, so I hate to use that loosely. So let's just say we are mostly a paper-free firm in that we're 99.5% paper-free, which is pretty close. So what we've done in terms of us being able to either work at our downtown office across from Sears Tower or Willis Tower, depending on what you want to call it, or whether we work in our dedicated home offices-that's our choice, and we come and go freely from downtown to our home offices, and it's seamless in terms of how we work with the the data that our law firm relies on and the clients that we serve.

Ron Bockstahler: So, Richard, let me let me jump in real quick because we want to focus. You know, the it's all about change in the business of law. What was the maybe top three things in technology that allowed you to to set up your law firm the way you did versus a traditional law firm, what what did you see in technology that said, "Hey, we can do this" coming out of the 2008 downturn.

Richard Gurak: So, we if we had tried to set up our firm 10 years prior to 2012 we might have had to make a lot of different choices. But it was a really great time at that time, because there were so many software offerings and third-party cloud service type offerings and software as a service offerings that were available, including from Microsoft and and from various Dropbox, especially Dropbox for Business, which is which is a great program to use. It's. Much more security than Dropbox for personal use. So there were so many, so many platforms out there that just weren't available 10 years prior, and we were able to put together the various software that we needed, including practice management software, in order to customize a tech platform for our firm that, frankly, from the AmLaw 100 firm that we were leaving, we gave up nothing. In fact, I've joked with Michelle that I actually think that our tech capabilities were better because in the eight years that we've had our firm in operation, knock on wood. I think our tech has gone down cumulatively over eight years, maybe 15 minutes. Whereas in our previous firm, I think our tech went down 15 minutes every other day. Okay, again, they were running 600 attorneys out of that firm, so it's it's much more of a challenge than what we're dealing with. But still, we we gave up nothing in terms of our tech capabilities.

Ron Bockstahler: So you know that leads me to a question: Are we seeing the demise of the mega large law firm?

Richard Gurak: I think mega large law firms are not going to go away. I expect they're going to continue to grow. There's certainly a place for those firms. A lot of the large multinational companies, they're most comfortable in those firms. But the large companies also work with smaller and mid-sized firms, such as ours, especially in specialty practices such as intellectual property, so we're not trying to replace or compete, and I certainly don't think those firms are going away anytime soon. And they have a position in the marketplace. There's no question about it. It's a good training ground for us. We spent what was it about 15 years in in midsize or very very large law firms, and we learned a lot, lot of what we wanted to do in our firm, and some things we didn't want to do.

Kirsten Mayfield: That's how you and Michelle met, wasn't it? You guys worked at a firm together.

Richard Gurak: Exactly, we worked really from the start of our careers in our first firm, which was Walsh and Katz, and then our firm merged into an Am Law 100 firm, where we continued on as partners.

Kirsten Mayfield: And I want to just say, like a lot of the technology that y'all are using in your firm currently is what people would associate with. Oh, I only need that if I'm a virtual law firm. But you guys heavily associate as a brick and mortar. That's like very important to you, both for clients to understand that they can come in and they can still meet with you, but I mean you've got 1415, people. How many offices do you have? It's just one, right? And unless something's changed recently.

Richard Gurak: Well, we have multiple offices depending on how many attorneys are in our downtown office, and it depends on you know if we're going to have a meeting with a group of clients, we use our board room, or sometimes we'll we'll take clients over to the Union League Club where I'm a member and I know Ron is a member, and we we have meetings over there in some of the private rooms. It just depends. The thing is that our firm is built to have tremendous flexibility, tremendous capabilities for the different spaces that we need for a particular setting, without constantly carrying all the costs, which inevitably would have to then be rolled into our billing rates and our and our flat fees that we charge clients for particular projects. So the clients pay for all that when they walk into the big, fancy you know granite or marble walled law firms in the ivory towers, so to speak. Clients are paying for every single one of those extras. So for us, we certainly have office space that is beautiful, but it's it's within reason for the services that we provide and what our clients expect from us. We are not looking to pass on any additional cost to them. We don't have to because we know how important it is for them to spend the least amount of money they need to for their IP support, intellectual property services, while still maintaining the best attorney services that we can give them.

Kirsten Mayfield: So, what's good for the clients is good for the firm, and you know, a lot of people are talking and writing these days about that disassociation between firms and the way they like bill their clients and what the consumer is asking for. Do you guys feel like you're just better able to meet what their expectations are because of this. Then,

Richard Gurak: well, our firm is all about flexibility, and part of that flexibility is that one, we are essentially a paper-free firm. Two, we minimize our overhead costs. So three, when it comes to. Pricing and estimates for particular projects. One of the things I actually tell referring attorneys is, hey, you know, if if if a client is a is a bare bones startup and they need to have you know a bare bones legal plan moving forward, let me know, and we're going to tailor our service proposal to that budget. If they say that hey, this company's been around for you know five years, they just got a $10 million private equity investment, and they want you know top shelf, and they definitely have a large budget that they want to spend on this. Well, we're going to give them that type of a proposal because it's not one size fits all. Some clients have $100,000 that they want to spend on their budget in one year. Some clients have $2,000 and we work with both of them. So our firm is about flexibility. Our firm is about keeping costs low. There's no question that watching our real estate footprint in a in a downtown Chicago area and staying virtually paper free, the two work together, and in in turn they assist us with with having our flexibility when it comes to pricing.

Kirsten Mayfield: So is that more like a packaging kind of setup versus like the billable hour?

Richard Gurak: That's a good question. So new clients will often ask the question of their attorneys, "What do you charge per hour? And my answer to them is, "You're not asking the right question. You want me to be your advisor? Let me start now. Ask what the project's going to cost, because it doesn't matter what the hourly rate is. It matters what the project is going to cost. So we will provide those estimates for most projects that we can give a flat fee for. We will provide it in writing, so the client has an idea as to what it's going to cost, and then they can choose if there's 10 projects that we identify. Often we can identify quite a few projects that the client should pursue. They can't afford to do them all at once, usually. So we'll help them to prioritize it based on their budget and based on what's most critical for them to protect first. Is this

Kirsten Mayfield: a common setup in an IP law, or is this you know new even in that sector?

Richard Gurak: In the United States, it's certainly not as common as you might think logically it would be. Internationally, it's a lot more common. And when we started our firm, and as we continue to practice to today, we modeled a lot of the international law firms and how they work with clients around the world. Because many of those international law firms are our clients, they reach out to us to assist their clients. So, in effect, law firms become a client of ours as well. But in the United States, it's certainly not as common. It's it's often billable hour focus. A lot of referrals from existing clients and from law firms in the U.S. or internationally, and of course referrals are the biggest compliments an attorney or any business for that matter, could ever receive so it never fades the the happiness I feel when I get referral because I always tell myself okay you must be doing something right especially when the repeat referrals from clients or from other attorneys. However, at the beginning of our careers and and not that we've stopped doing this, but it's more of a blend now. Is you know a tremendous amount of of networking, going to different events, meeting people, working with not for profit organizations, which we still do today, being involved with a lot of different groups, and you know even though we're all going through this health crisis right now, and we're doing what we should have been doing over the past few months in terms of a lot of the video connecting with with clients and with new clients and with our contacts. I think everybody will agree there is a place for that, but I do not think it is absolutely the best way to form strong bonds because we formed our strong bonds by meeting with people face to face for lunch, for coffee, for for cocktails, for professional events, and I can't wait to go back to that personally.

Ron Bockstahler: So tell us, Richard, what's it mean to be a virtual law firm? Can you just give us a quick description?

Richard Gurak: Well, you know, I I don't really know that I know because we are not a virtual law firm. I guess if I were to ask somebody and they think they're a virtual law firm, we would get many different answers, and some of the answers might be that they have no physical. Office space in a commercial building. Okay, so they're running everything out of their home office with the website, which is fine. Nothing wrong with that. We choose to not be a virtual law firm because we like to have physical office space along with reception services, scanning services, paralegal services, photocopy machines-if we ever need them, which we don't often, but once in a while we do-and then located, you know, within walking distance of the federal and the state courts in downtown Chicago. Those things are really critical for our business, and when our clients visit with us, it certainly lends to the credibility of a firm such as ours. But it doesn't mean that somebody in a virtual office, legal office, couldn't do just as well or better than us. It just depends on the clients and it depends on the culture that you're trying to create in the firm. So, my thought would be the biggest divider would be virtual or not virtual. Would be whether or not you have an office in a commercial building in you know in a. It doesn't have to be in a downtown area, but it doesn't hurt.

Ron Bockstahler: Okay, let me throw a curveball at you. Let's talk about 1977, Bates versus the State Bar of Arizona. I'm sure you studied up on that because I didn't give you a heads up. That struck down the prohibitions against advertising by attorneys. So if we're going to see more and more attorneys working remotely, maybe not getting together in a downtown office or a central location as much. At least that's what we think is going to be happening with COVID 19 or and and afterwards. Will we see a need for law firms to do more advertising to gain new clients? Because I mean, it's my understanding a lot of attorneys are getting probably 80% of their business from other attorneys.

Richard Gurak: Okay, so I'll certainly answer that question, but and I wouldn't mind exploring, you know, that. And I realize your assumption is based on what everybody is saying right now. I do not believe that this current health crisis is going to completely change the world and how people meet and how we get together and we come to our office space. I think it's going to leave an imprint that will be lasting, and I would be happy to discuss my thoughts on that. In fact, I have some very interesting thoughts on that, which I think we should look at here quickly. But I think after the health crisis is is generally subsiding, I do think people are going to go back about their normal way of doing business for the most part. Having said that, we're still in the health crisis, so there's a lot of people who have certain advanced risks to them if they were to, you know, get the virus. So they have to be more careful, and there's some people that just want to take extra steps, as you know, as government officials and and the CDC has has suggested that we do during this crisis. So, and there are some people obviously you've seen they seem to care less. Okay, so it's a mixture of all those different types of approaches to this, but for the attorneys that are going to take the position that they're not going to be out and about as much as they were prior to this situation, at least for the foreseeable months or year or two, we have no idea how long this is going to be. Okay, I would guess that already they are spending more money on advertising. I was just reading literally a few hours ago, not prepping for this, just to read an article that Google ads have not only gone up, but Google is charging much, much more for them. Okay, in terms of how you can advertise through Google with keywords and all the various programs that they have, and I have to guess that attorneys are increasing their spend that way as well. And again, it's going to vary depending on the practice that people are in. Best that I can recall, we haven't spent one penny more on advertising, but we use social media strategically, and we use our network strategically, and we can do that remotely or face to face. Having said that, like I said at the beginning of this interview, I can't wait to get back to face to face because that's where I really am most comfortable.

Ron Bockstahler: So you didn't name the firm Gurack and Katz; you named it Advitam IP. Can you give us a little history on that name?

Richard Gurak: Well, it's it's part of thinking out of the box, Ron, as I mentioned early on. So instead of going with the surnames Wrinkle Dinkle and Mo, like a lot of law firms do, okay, and then every time they add more partners with a book of business, of course. Those partners are jockeying to put their name into the name of the firm, and before you know it, you have a firm that six or seven surnames long, and frankly, that shit gets ridiculous. Or you have the very large firms that have severed all the other surnames, and they only keep the first surname that was historically part of the firm, and that person is probably no longer with the firm anyway. They've since either retired or passed on, or some reason are just not with the firm. So we didn't want to go down the path that, as we attracted new people, that politics would play a role in in the brand of our firm. And my partner and I, as you can imagine, as we were thinking very open-minded. Well, what if it's Gurak and Katz? Well, what if it's Katz and Gurak? And that just doesn't lead anywhere pleasant. So we decided that the path we were going to go was to brand the firm with a word that was not either of our surnames and eliminate a lot of the politics involved in all of that game, because we didn't we didn't want people in the firm, especially if additional attorneys came on, to feel like they weren't part of the firm. So Advitam IP took about six months to come up with, and I'm very proud of this. And I've actually told many of my clients are either choosing trademarks for rebranding or doing a startup or adding a service line to their existing company. Whenever they tell me after a week that they can't find a name, I'm like, oh no no no! Don't give me this. A week is too long. It took me six months. You got to spend at least three weeks on it. You must come up with the brand that you're comfortable with, that you can live with, that you've tested, and that you understand, and that is going to have meaning for for your company. So, advidum means it's two words from old Latin. It means for life. It really resonated with us the for life meaning the tenured position because what we do we actually created a slogan from the meaning it's identify protect for life so we identify our clients' intellectual property we protect our clients intellectual property and we do it for the life of the intellectual property but also the for life has a very positive meaning in that we love what we do and we want to do what we do with clients that we really enjoy working with, and a team within our firm that we really enjoy working with. So that for life message is also there in our brand.

Ron Bockstahler: I love the name. I love it has a meaning, and and you're right. It's easy to remember.

Kirsten Mayfield: I have a quick question. You and Michelle, you obviously you guys sat down. You gave it a lot of thought when you were setting up your firm. From just the as you went into depth, the names of the firm and what it means and how it can resonate with a client. I love that kind of metaphors that are built in. You know, if you search, you find it. You started in 2012, and I'm just curious: has there been any decisions that you guys made right out the gate that you found yourself pivoting on, or have you guys pretty much stayed in place on the decisions you made back in 2012 or 2011, and how your firm is operating today?

Richard Gurak: I think weekly, we consider if we need to pivot because we we don't want to be locked down. Okay, the world is just constantly changing, and and of course the situation we're going through right now has forced everybody to consider what they should change, or how they should adapt, or how they should do business differently, and and even without a health crisis or a economic situation that we're in now for many businesses, I think it's important to stay open mind to change. It takes it takes time to change. It takes money sometimes to change, but in order to stay on top of your game, not only in the legal business but in any business, you have to adapt, especially to technology. So we are always thinking creatively, like many of our clients, of course, think creatively as entrepreneurs, and we're constantly tweaking our our business plan as we evolve, as we grow, and I don't anticipate that we would ever want to stop.

Kirsten Mayfield: So, just out of curiosity, then, what is the one item that you guys found yourself looking at and going, "Oh man, we need to pivot quick on that one. Like what we thought was going to happen, and what what ended up happening. Like we need to find a better solution. Do you have one like that, or is it mostly just a bunch of little little items that you constantly adjust, as you said, week to week?

Richard Gurak: You know, that's a question. I'm not sure that I have an answer off the top of my head. I I think the answer is not so much huge dramatic changes. It's often. Many subtle tweaks to our existing tech platforms or how we do business that add up cumulatively over the year to very large changes, none of which are immediately obvious because we're often doing it in small tweaks. Okay, but if I were to look at from one year to the next, we're always looking at you know how we keep our brand in front of people. That's critical. Even though we have a great referral base from, we we get referrals from probably 50 different countries. You always have to keep your brand in front of people, and considering we have such a broad reach internationally as well as domestically. That's a challenge to do it on a limited marketing budget. And some of the things that we've done in a big way were create a brand and create a team of international law firms to assist us with hosting networking events for up to 1,000 people when we attend professional intellectual property conferences around the world. So that was a big change for us and very exciting one, which has helped to keep our names out there, meet with a lot of the attorneys we work with, and we use a variety of tech with social media, of course, and just you know, great people partnerships that we have to pull that off.

Kirsten Mayfield: Correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys host like a really big one every year, right? What was oh my gosh, what was that called? Fill in the space here for me, Richard. Well, well,

Richard Gurak: the brand-it's a fun one. Okay, and again, this is out of the box thinking. So, if you're part of the IP conference circuit, you immediately understand what this means. Okay, the brand for the party. What we bring together anywhere from 800 to 1000 intellectual property attorneys from companies such as Microsoft or Apple or firms from Canada or from Singapore or from South Africa, we call this party IP junkies. IP is for intellectual property. What's up with the junkies term, which is a little bit odd for attorneys? Well, we laugh at each other because we tend to go to so many of these conferences, and they're challenging because we're juggling all the work that our clients need and the law firm administrative administrative duties. We go to a lot of these international conferences, and there's select groups of attorneys that attend a lot of these. We we call ourselves conference junkies. We can't get enough. Okay, so that's how IP junkies came up. It's a it's a very industry specific joke that primarily IP attorneys who go to a lot of these conferences would understand.

Ron Bockstahler: So, Richard, what is the one thing in law that you think needs changed?

Richard Gurak: If I may add to that a little, Ron. I would like to add to that the situation that we're going through right now and how I think this health crisis is going to bring on some of this change. Is that okay?

Ron Bockstahler: Absolutely.

Richard Gurak: Okay. So nobody can predict the future per se. It's really a bunch of educated guesses, and I'm going to make my best educated guess here. So, to answer your question specifically, I think that if law firms can continue in a direction of being more of a paper-free environment, they will have considerably more flexibility as to where they can work and and and when they want to work, so they won't be tied down to a brick and mortar office. That's the key: is you have to be in a position where you can be virtually paper free. Otherwise, it it doesn't work that easily. You're always lugging papers back and forth. For our practice, it's much easier than for some other practices. Okay, because they have inherently more paper. But everybody's moving in that direction. So I

Ron Bockstahler: want to stop you real quick because I want to clarify: you guys do litigation also,

Richard Gurak: absolutely.

Ron Bockstahler: And how do you do litigation? A paperless litigation.

Richard Gurak: Well, it depends on the jurisdiction we're in. It depends if it's litigation before the the Patent or Trademark Office. A lot of electronic filings are accepted these days, much more than it would have been 15 years ago, and we receive the communications electronically as well. Deposition transcripts can be put electronically. So, in the intellectual property world, this is much less of a challenge than it was 15 years ago, but again, that doesn't necessarily translate into the other legal professions. I know quite a few attorneys in other professions; they don't have it that good in terms of the paper coming and going from their office is electronic. It's not. It's still it's still hard copy, but it's all trending certain.

Kirsten Mayfield: So eliminating paper, then it's more complex than just on the burden of the law firm. It's a burden on the system then too to make it easier on all these other practices of law.

Richard Gurak: It's certainly a two-way street, but if we can kind of just look a little bit at where do I think this health crisis is going to lead law firms, and how is it going to create a big impact on them? And how does the the paperless or paper free concept aid in this? Well, we've had pandemics before around the world, okay, and and we're going to have them again. And in the United States, in the past 100 years, we'd have we've had at least three significant ones. We've approached each one of those very differently than we approach this one. I think it's a bit of a stumbling block every time these things come up. If it's been more than 50 years, because we just are not used to it, and we were not used to it like some other countries were. They were more prepared in some ways than we were because they have had them more recently than we have, so I'm I'm reading and I'm listening and I'm watching videos about all these predictions as to how this is going to shape law firms in in the coming future. Well, it's already shaping law firms. It's not how it's going to. It's already shaping law firms, but at the end of the day, I think lawyers are going to go back to their offices for the most part. I think clients are going to want to meet with lawyers. I think lawyers are going to meet in groups, and it's just part of the camaraderie that you need not only to build your client practice and to maintain your client relationships, but internally within the firm, I mean, I've been in all size law firms, small, midsize, and Am Law 100 firms, and nothing changes in that you have to have face time with the senior partners in these firms if you want your career within that firm to advance. Okay, what I think is going to happen is how this COVID situation is going to leave an imprint. This is my best guess. I think what we're going to see is that certainly many firms, as they are doing right now, and some really struggle to get there, and some are not there yet. They're going to make sure, just as they have a geographically redundant data backup for their servers, just in case you don't keep your backup servers in the same geographical location, they're going to have a geographically redundant backup for their people. That's my guess. Okay, so that if another crisis were to hit, like it just occurred in the Sears Tower, where they lost power for days. I don't even know if it went back on.

Kirsten Mayfield: That thing was spooky, and if no one has seen it, we have a receptionist over there. She sent a picture, and it was like this black night, like just giant shadow in the distance. Exactly,

Richard Gurak: exactly.

Kirsten Mayfield: Incredible. So

Richard Gurak: one crisis within a crisis, so situations like that are going to continue to happen, whether it's virus-driven or not. What I think you will happen is you will see firms now give a lot more serious thought. Most firms that have the capability to do so, they're going to have these redundancies built in. So, if there is another situation, whatever that is, however it's driven. It could be driven by many things other than the virus, where they cannot physically be in their brick-and-mortar offices. I think many firms after this crisis are going to be set up so it's much easier for them to do this transition overnight. Okay, and that was not the case with many of these firms, even though many of them moved in that direction, I know I've spoken to many attorneys in all different sex firms. They were struggling, okay, for many reasons. Paper being one of the biggest reasons, but there were other reasons as well. So what I think is going to happen is that's going to be the imprint that's going to be left. I also think what's going to happen. This is an interesting one. The bigger the firm is, the more likely I believe this will happen. The smaller firm is, the less likely I believe it will happen because it's a numbers game. Think what's going to happen in the bigger firms, and it's already moving in that direction because real estate is costly, especially in the big downtown areas where a lot of the firms practice and they have their office spaces. Is there's going to be another layer to the pecking order of how your office and where you work is presented to you? I actually think it's going to somewhere down the line perhaps become a privilege. Yes, privilege to be able to come into the office, okay? I think the big, big firms are going to look at this and say, "Wait a minute, we just we have all these redundancies, and these attorneys are working from home fine. They're producing for us, but they're not our top producers. We're going to keep them in their home office. Let them pay for all that." Extra air conditioning and extra real estate, and they're going to be fine over there. And those people are not going to like that. Okay, some of them will because they won't care. But the ones that really want to advance their careers, you could bet they're going to be doing everything they could to be awarded the privilege to be able to work from the downtown office.

Kirsten Mayfield: You know that's interesting because in big law firms, mentorship is you know a big component of how you start to get that good book of business, and so out of sight, out of mind for those attorneys. Like the word privilege then just has that extra connotation.

Richard Gurak: That's where I see it going. So as you're aware, our firm we've been doing the work from our brick and mortar office, or working from our dedicated home office. And I stress, it's their dedicated home offices. We're not working at the kitchen table. We have a dedicated space with with the door for privacy that we work in from our home environments, which makes it feel more like an office. We've been doing this for a little over eight years now, and I love going to the downtown office. I don't do it every day. I'm never forced to do it, and that's why I start to love it because it becomes an event. And I usually organize my trips to my downtown office around client meetings or events going on Union League Club or lunches with clients or getting together with you know other attorneys or friends after work for happy hour. So it's something to look forward to now, rather than the every day on the train or in the car hustle to downtown, which I did for 1314, years. That's not fun at all. I will never miss that.

Ron Bockstahler: It's like anything. If we don't have to do it, we want to do it.

Richard Gurak: That's right, and and that's where I think we're going to see more of this balance out. That is a. It's a great life. People in our firm love the balance. We love the flexibility. We don't force anybody to be in the office every single day. We we don't have anybody to leave our firm. They stay with us, and we think that's that's that's a big part of the reason.

Ron Bockstahler: Interesting perspective, Richard. We appreciate you coming on the show. What is the best way that our listeners can contact you if they need an IP attorney.

Richard Gurak: So I can give our web address, and then we have all our email and phone number contact information there. It's probably the quickest. So our our website address is advitamip.com, and that's a d v i t a m i p for intellectual property.com or they can literally search Richard Gurak, G U R A K in any web browser, and I'm going to come up immediately.

Ron Bockstahler: Richard, we appreciate you coming on on the show. It's always great having you. Look forward to having you again soon and catching up at the Union League Club for a drink.

Richard Gurak: Thank you both, and I very much look forward to that as well.

Strickland Bonner: Thanks for listening to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast. If you like the show, tell a friend, and please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to hear more about Ron, Kirsten, or Amata, go to amataoffices.com All the links are also available in show notes.