Hey now, welcome to another edition of the Inside BS show. It's Dave Lorenzo and today we're talking about what you should do when you have a disagreement in your business. Now I'm talking about a disagreement between you and your partner or a disagreement between you and a supplier or a disagreement between you and a client.

So often I see really smart typically level-headed business people just go absolutely berserk when it comes to some sort of a dispute and you know as much as I tell you this is not necessary, I wanted to go out and bring in an expert on these situations so that you can hear firsthand how really terrible it is if you want to get into a knockdown drag-out brawl because that could be expensive, it could be time-consuming and it could derail your business, but don't believe me. I want you to believe Brian Housman. He's an expert in this.

He's a partner at a law firm in Chicago and he handles these types of things all day long. His job is to get you through that process with the least amount of damage and he's gonna explain to us the good, the bad, and the ugly of litigation and disputes in businesses. So please join me in welcoming Brian to the Inside BS show.

All right, Brian, welcome to the show. I love to talk about litigation because unless you've been part of litigation, you truly don't understand what this is all about and, you know, we hear people say all the time, oh, I'm gonna sue them or oh, I'm gonna file a lawsuit. Tell us, this is what you do, right? How distracting is it, first of all, for a business owner to be involved in an acrimonious dispute? Yeah, it's a great question, Dave, and thanks for having me.

I like to talk about these things because I talk about them all day, every day, and I'm not always listened to, I'm not always heard. So to answer your question, it is, you know, I spend my time representing business owners and investors in protecting their investments and their businesses from internal and external threats and I like to litigate. That's how I'm built.

I enjoy making arguments. That's how I came into this. But for the person whose money and time and blood, sweat, and tears it is, it is a phenomenal drain on them.

And that's particularly true if it's, you know, the closer we get to your inner circle, you know, in terms of who's on the other side of that dispute, the more disruptive it is, the more time-consuming, the more stressful it is. And so you should, you know, act accordingly. I mean, that's what I try to explain to my clients.

It's not just a matter of, you know, numbers on a spreadsheet. It's also gonna impact your sleep and your relationship with your family and your relationship with your business partners outside of the person who you're in a dispute with. So it's something to consider.

So lawyers are not immune from this, right? Lawyers sometimes fight with each other and you found yourself entwined in some of those situations too. Give us a sense for how even, you know, what's the expression like the cobbler's kids have no shoes, right? Give us an example or your thoughts or share a war story with us on how even lawyers can get sucked into the emotional heat of the moment here. Yeah.

So, you know, there's a saying, and I'm not sure where this came from, but they say that no ship sinks like a partnership, right? And so, you know, I sometimes call my cases business divorce cases, and there's a reason for that. I didn't coin the phrase, but these, you know, partnership disputes, particularly in law firms where lawyers can tend to be self-centered folks who like to think that they, you know, know the ins and outs of the law, and they like to think they understand what the just and right results should be in any particular situation. And even if they're litigators, the process of playing out a dispute in the courts can be incredibly stressful for lawyers.

You know, I'd like to tell the garbage can story, what I call the garbage can story. And the garbage can story is this. I once represented a partner in a law firm partnership that was breaking up after many years, decades, in fact, of a two-man partnership effectively.

And the dispute was over millions and millions of dollars in receivables for the firm and client relationships, things that really mattered for both partners and their families. And when one of the partners left, it happened to be the partner on the other side, he took with him, in addition to some things that really mattered, like client files, he took the waste baskets, you know, from the office. And on Monday morning, when my client came to the office, he found himself without anywhere to put his trash.

And I, you know, we almost got to trial in that case, and it took me a long time to convince my client that we weren't going to spend any time at trial talking about how the waste baskets had been stolen. Because it didn't matter in the scheme of things, but to him, having to go out, it was something that was a personal insult, it impacted him. And, you know, I have a hundred other stories that are similar to that, but perhaps that's the most stark example I can think of, of how, just how, you know, up in your head people get when they get into a dispute like that.

I, you know, I regularly think about stuff like that. And I say to myself, the time and the energy put into just harboring that resentment and anger is, it's just such an unproductive emotion, I understand getting wrapped up in it. But, you know, the 15 minute walk to target to pick up another garbage can would probably be the time I would spend cooling off and I'd be, you know, I just like that.

I understand how people can get triggered. And I, because I, you know, I've been there, I, you know, I've been to a kid's basketball game and I've gotten upset with the ref. So I understand how people can get triggered, but it's just, it's beside, it makes me, it makes me incredulous that people who make great decisions in every other aspect of business will get all twisted up like a pretzel over something in, that's so simple that if it was a negotiation with a, with a, with a vendor or to buy or sell, you know, a business unit or something, they'd be like, let them have the garbage can we'll just go on our way and be fine. But because of the acrimony of the situation, things get all tangled.

What do you do as their counsel to kind of diffuse that? Like, how do you, how do you, I mean, of course, in the moment, you can't say anything. You just let them go nuts about the garbage can. But at some point, you got to pull them aside and go, hey, listen, we're not going to do this over.

The judge is going to, first of all, the judge is going to laugh me out of here for allowing you to make this an issue. But second of all, if this is your reputation, you're putting on the line over a trash can. Yeah, I think, I think the only, I mean, you have to build a rapport and you have to have trust with your client and you, you have to, as best you can, and it's never going to be perfect in a circumstance like that.

But as best you can, you have to focus them on, you know, on looking at and focusing on the things that matter. Number one, because not only should that be where they're focusing their efforts anyway for their own benefit, but it will be the most persuasive and number two, to look at this as best they can again, you know, through the lens of cost benefit. There are some things that are worth fighting over and, you know, if we have a bet the company case, there is, there's a reason to turn over every stone.

There's a reason to go to war sometimes and, you know, there's no more fun for a trial lawyer than having that case, but not every case ought to be a bet the company or bet your financial future type of case. And so I think the way to counter the garbage can phenomenon is to try to help your client to get to the point where he can say or she can say or they can say, their business can say, you know, here's what really matters to us and here's what we ought to be looking to achieve. You know, I joke also that I had a law firm partner at a prior firm who once said to me, do you know what the most expensive words in the English language are? And I said no, and he said, it's a matter of principle.

And, you know, I think oftentimes clients come into these type of business divorce cases with the mindset that I'm here to vindicate my principles. And that's great by me. It's going to be very costly to do that.

And I often think that I'm against my better judgment, perhaps, if you were to talk to my partners, I think I'm – which is not true, I'm just making a joke there. But I'm able to advise 90% of the clients that, you know, I'm able to help them to see that it's actually not a matter of principle. It's actually a matter of making sure that they protect their interests, but in a way that achieves, you know, a reasonable business objective in the end.

So I want to ask you about something very specific and, you know, I know you a little bit. We've had a few conversations and you seem to me to be the scariest type of lawyer because you seem like a nice guy. And that is the worst type of litigator, in my opinion, to go up against because I think people probably will meet you and they'll sit across the table from you in a mediation and they'll let their guard down and then you just kill them.

So tell me a little bit about your strategy when – I'm going to give you two different types of clients. First, let's take the client that you really, really like, right? And your – you know, how do you separate the emotion from your – you know, you like this client and maybe they don't have the greatest case in the world. How do you separate those two things so you don't get all sucked into, you know, the client's bad decision making or the bad fact pattern or the fact that the law is against them? Like, how do you control yourself when you – you know, somebody you really like is probably going to get their head handed to them in a case? That's a great question.

I don't think anyone's ever asked me that question, Dave. And it's – it shows that you understand the mindset of the lawyer and you understand that someone like me loves nothing more than being an advocate, whether the client's position is a good one or not. I do develop personal relationships with my clients.

They trust me. I usually like them. I prefer to work with people I like.

And you're right. There is often a moment in time where I sometimes have to catch myself and say, wait a second, am I – you know, even in private, am I being an advocate now or am I being an objective evaluator of the situation so that I can give the best advice? I think that the short answer is I try to involve my phenomenal bench of colleagues to check me and make sure that, you know, more than one set of eyes runs across something before we file it or more than one voice is heard before I stand up in court. But I – you know, that is a great question.

And, you know, that's part of the fun, frankly, of being a lawyer is that it's somebody who's going to stand next to you and they're going to advocate for you no matter what. And I don't think – I think lawyers get a bad rap sometimes, but there's a song lyric that I like by a guy named John Moreland, and he says – he talks about not giving your – I forget the exact lyric, but it's don't give yourself a way to settle someone else's score, right? And that's great advice, but it's – that's what lawyers do every day, right? We kind of give a piece of ourselves a way to help someone else. And so you're right.

That is a tough part of the job, frankly. It's tougher than the advocacy. And to your point about me being a nice guy, thank you.

I don't mind it at all. Everybody has their own style. And, you know, look, if you're the type of client that thinks that yelling and pounding the table is an effective way to achieve your outcome, then I'm probably not a great fit for you.

I'm not going to scream and pound the table. And I think you're right that more often than not, that's completely ineffective anyway. Yeah, and I think you can – I think the worst competitor, whether it's in sports or, you know, in the litigation matter or even in a business negotiation, the worst person to be up against is somebody you totally underestimate or somebody whose skills you don't see coming.

And I've always counseled people. In fact, I tell – I have a 13-year-old kid who's a competitive athlete, and I tell him all the time, you want to go in there. I show him – you know what I show him? Videos of like Mike Tyson before he became huge when he just, you know, like a big star.

But when he would just walk into the ring, no robe, you know, no socks on, just boxing shoes, the fight would last 15 seconds, nobody saw it coming. That's what you want to be, in my opinion. You don't want to be the braggadocious guy.

You don't want to be the guy that pulls up in the Rolls-Royce and has somebody carrying his briefcase, you know. So I worked with a client who unfortunately is no longer with us who was a fantastic litigator at a huge firm. And he said to me, look, there's – he's like, the cases that I know we're going to lose, we try to settle.

He's like, I've had two trial losses in my entire career, and he was in his late 60s when he said this to me. And he said, those two trial losses I had were the cases where I probably build the most money ever. He's like, because the client was stubborn, the client was thick, they wouldn't take our advice.

And we went to the mat, we told them the whole time that we thought this was a losing case. We did everything we could. We tried to settle courthouse steps while the court was considering the verdict.

He's like, the client was intractable, and those are the cases that we wind up losing. So, Brian, what do you do when you get, especially when you're as emotionally invested as you get in cases, what do you do when you get a client? Like, you don't like them. They're not – they're not – they're not getting what's going on here.

They don't see the way things are going, because in my opinion, and I haven't seen as many cases as you have, but it's not like on TV where the jury comes back and it's a surprise, or the court comes back, the judge comes back, and you're shocked by what happened. You pretty much know what's going on. And if it's going bad, you do everything you can to get out of this before you get your head handed to you.

What do you do when you've got a knucklehead that just won't listen? I mean, I think that you do the best you can, right? You give them the best advice you can. You make sure it's as clear as it can be, and you make sure it's in writing. I like all my clients, certainly right now, but I understand what you're saying.

There are those clients that won't take good advice, and I've had those cases in the past, and you put your best foot forward and you make your best argument, and at the end of the day, I sleep. If the result that I expected and I advised was likely comes, then I sleep very soundly at night, knowing that I had made good recommendations and the client made their decision. There is something to be said for having your day in court, and I think one of the failings of our system is that so few cases go to trial and that trial, for most clients, is the only place where they get to actually tell their story and have somebody evaluate it and hear them.

For some business disputes, that's not a critical thing. For a partnership breakup case, I can tell you, it is. Often times, I counsel my clients to move away from courts and into arbitrations and other forums where we can kind of ensure that they're going to be able, at a minimum, to tell their story and have somebody evaluate it.

All right, so I want to get into now talking about prevention. What's some advice that you would give to folks to prevent these disputes from getting out of hand, to prevent from going down this path in the first place? Before we do that, I need to tell the folks that today's show and all of our shows are sponsored by Cendrowski Corporate Advisors. Since 1983, Cendrowski Corporate Advisors has provided expert client service to a client base all over the United States from their offices in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, as well as their offices in Chicago.

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We're talking with Brian Housman. He's a partner at a law firm in Chicago. He's one of the people who you should be calling if you have a dispute between you and your partners or a dispute with another party.

And you can reach out to Brian. You can connect with him. We're going to put his contact info down in the show notes.

But if you want to call him, his phone number is 312-762-9471. 312-762-9471. Brian, what do we do to make sure that we don't get into any kind of a dispute that's acrimonious like what we were talking about? I mean, there's the expression that good fences make good neighbors.

Is it as simple as having good agreements? I mean, what's the best recipe for avoiding this onerous litigation process? Yeah, I do think good agreements is part of it. So good agreements in a couple ways. First, almost all internal business disputes, shareholder partnership disputes happen, I think, over essentially what I'll say are two things, but they could be related.

The first is somebody feels that their contribution, whatever it is, is not being appropriately valued. And so you've got to think really carefully about how you structure your compensation for lack of a better word. It might have to do with ownership or stock, or it might have to do with actual cash compensation.

But whatever it is, everybody has to feel as though it's crystal clear on the page how they're going to be compensated. And I recommend that you align their compensation, whatever it may be, to some type of incentive so that everyone is clear that if they work harder, they make more, and if they achieve less than expected, maybe they make less. Usually there are fewer disputes when that can happen.

The other thing is that disputes over corporate ownership and governance, when do they happen? You were just talking about Senderowski. They happen when there's an event, there's a transition, there's a change. Maybe it's a retirement of a major contributor, maybe it's a sale of the company or a sale of majority ownership or controlling interest in the company.

Maybe it is some other change or transition, a merger. Whatever it is, we know when the disputes are going to arise. They're not going to arise when everything is kind of even keeled and everyone's firing on all cylinders.

They arise when somebody's not holding up their end of the bargain or when there's a transition or a change within a business. We can kind of predict when those are going to be, and we can try to work on that on the front end from an agreement standpoint. The other thing I would say is there has to be a good dispute resolution process, and that process, people are not creative.

Business transactional lawyers, God bless them, they're a source of a lot of income for me, and I'm good friends with many of the best transactional attorneys out there. But a lot of the agreements that we see are cookie cutter when it comes to how we're going to resolve disputes. Many are just as simple as, hey, we're going to go to court in Illinois, let's say.

That might be the right choice, but there's a lot of other options out there that a lot of business professionals are not aware of. Sometimes, in the simplest of disputes, I'll tell you, you have the two-person partnership. Sometimes the best dispute resolution procedure is to say, hey, we both know and like Dave Lorenzo.

He has no interest in our business or in the outcome of our dispute. We want him to help us resolve. We both trust him, we both like him.

We want him to help us resolve our disputes. And oftentimes, that's the most effective thing. They're not going to pay a retired judge $500 an hour to come up with a solution.

Maybe they're going to hire you. I don't know. There's a lot that can be said about that, but thinking about how you are going to resolve disputes when they arise is a big thing.

The final thing is sometimes they can't be resolved without some help. This will sound simple or overly simplistic, but you've got to get the lawyers involved early. Oftentimes, what can be a small dispute and can be resolved reasonably for a reasonable amount of money becomes a very large dispute if we wait.

If the answer when I ask the question, well, how long has this been going on is, well, for three years my partner has been embezzling funds and funneling it to another business, that's now become a very big problem. And maybe you just learned about it, but maybe it started as something much, much smaller. And it could have been handled earlier in the process.

So those are some of the things that I think about when people come to me. And oftentimes, I only get to see this after the fact, after we're already at war, and I usually then get retained by when my entrepreneur moves to their next venture, they will often come to me and say, hey, that was terrible. How do we prevent that from ever happening again? Everyone has the best of intentions when things are being formed.

I often joke with those M&A lawyers. A lot of times, a good outcome for me, I know I've done my job, but nobody's happy. Unless I want a trial, which is so rare for business litigators, no one's particularly thrilled with the outcome, and that lets me know I've done a good job.

I'm not out having steak dinners with the M&A people and trading fancy pens about how we've just created this great deal. Anyway, I'm getting off track. So you raise a point, actually, it's like you've been a part of my past.

I still have a very good client who is, I've got to protect our confidentiality here, so I've got to keep him as blind as I possibly can, who is in business with his wife. They were both lawyers, and they went into practice together, and I forced them. I was there when this gentleman was a partner at a larger firm, and he said, I'm going to go on my own, and I'm going to go with, let's call her Jane, that's not her real name, and I'm going to go with Jane.

Jane is great at the administrative stuff, she's great at the marketing, she's a lawyer in her own right, but she's going to be the administrator of the firm, and I'm going to go out and give speeches and I'll do the day to day work of the firm. And everything's humming along, and they're doing fantastic. They've tripled their family income when they go out on their own, but their marriage falls apart.

I made them have a partnership agreement as if they were partners, and because I made them have the partnership agreement when they set it up, they were like, we're going to put Dave Lorenzo in as the arbiter if there's ever a dispute. Brian, it was the worst job I ever had in my life, because it wasn't that, what was fair wasn't clear. Everything was very, it was crystal clear.

It was crystal clear, but turning to the one person and saying, when it comes to these things, you're lazy, and if it wasn't for her, you would never be half of the success you are now, because she's propping you up in these areas and then turning to her and going, the only reason there's any work here is because of him, and here's what's fair, and neither one of them were happy with the resolution, but at the end of the day, they both were good enough lawyers to know that that's the art of a true compromise. But I will tell you, anyone listening, if you want to name Dave Lorenzo as the arbiter, I'm not accepting that ever again, because I like both of my hypothetical examples. I liked both of these people, and it was just gut-wrenching.

Because, to be fair, the sum of the parts was never going to be equal to the whole that they created together. Now, they've each gotten their separate ways, they're both successful now in their own right, and they both built up to about the same level of income they were at when they were together, but it's taken years to get there, and to keep, and this was really my job in this, was to keep the personal out of the business. So I was like the guardian of the business, to keep the business intact while they were beating the hell out of each other in their personal lives.

I think you make a great point, I think that's a fantastic idea, because I just charged them the fee that I was going to charge them anyway to do that, and so there was no dispute resolution fee, and I basically sold them on the idea of what it eventually became, because they trusted me, so I think that's a fantastic idea. I highly recommend people put that in their partnership agreements. Pick a person you both like, and make that person be the arbiter.

You could give them a fee for doing it, but that makes... But make sure that they're capable, and that they're willing and make sure that if they're not, if Dave says no thank you on second time around, I see that you wrote this into your agreement, but no thank you, that you have a backup plan for that. But you've kind of hit on something that's so critical, and it goes back to the point I made at the beginning of this segment, which was you have to align incentives in a way that makes sense for that business. So here you had a classic breakdown.

It's not quite the exact breakdown that I often see in law firm disputes, which is rainmaker versus worker bee, because here you had two worker bees. The rainmaker was also doing the day-to-day legal work, but you had another person holding up the back office. I hate my building manager.

No, it was like all the follow-up systems, they got all of their business from the follow-up systems that the wife had created, and the insight she brought to that from being a lawyer made it, and one of the things that I convinced her to do was we went out and protected that system, and she now sells that system to other firms, and she makes a substantial amount of money selling that system. Now, technically, if the other partner didn't give up the rights to allow her to do that, he would have had to participate in those profits. So recognizing that value was key, but your point is well taken.

The two parts together are what it took to make it work, so having that discussion was critical, and understanding it was essential. Yeah, and I often find that that's where people don't define when they, especially when you have a close relationship like that, you have a handshake deal, or you have a partnership agreement that just doesn't really address this type of thing, and it's very hard to prove whether the other person has been slacking off or not when you haven't clearly defined what the objectives are, what their role is, and what metrics you're going to use to evaluate whether they're meeting their targets or not. Yeah, and that's another great point.

In this case, and this is the exact example that you're talking about, the husband would go out and give a speech to 300 people, and he'd come back with 150 leads, and then the wife had the system for them to follow up on those leads. Without the husband giving the speech, there's nothing coming into the firm. Without the wife following up on the leads, maybe the guy signs up three people instead of 70.

That's the nature of a really good productive partnership, and in doing the breakup, we had to put together, okay, how is this person, the person who handles the systems, how is she going to end up being made whole? How is she going to make money from this? I had to sell her on how she was going to do that, and then the husband, I had to get him to remember what it was like when he didn't have these systems in place, and I had to have really tough conversations with him, and say, remember when I used to go to those speeches with you, and you'd get two or three leads, and like 15 or 20 people would give you their business cards, and you'd find them in your pocket the next time you wore that suit? Well, do you want to go back to that? Oh, I don't want to go back to that. I can't afford to go. I've got kids in college.

How can I go back to that? Well, you're going to have to find a way to rebuild what's going to walk out the door here, and you have to understand how valuable that is. The final topic I think we should talk about today is explain to people, and many people who are listening, they may have been through this process before, but explain to people what the mediation process is like, and explain why it's so essential to connect with a litigator who's outstanding at the mediation process, because that's where you're either going to find out what's going on, or you could actually resolve the matter. So explain why the mediation process is essential, and how to figure out whether your litigator is good at the mediation process.

Yeah, so I think that mediation, so mediation, just for those listening who might not know what it is, is it's a non-binding process where you get a third party, oftentimes a former judge or an experienced lawyer who's capable of evaluating a case and seeing what might play out if it were to go to court, and that person helps you as a diplomat for both sides to try to come to a resolution, and oftentimes in a way that's more productive and quicker than if your lawyer were simply going back and forth with the other lawyer trading offers and demands. You know, how do we evaluate whether a lawyer is going to be good at the—so most lawyers participate in many mediations and are familiar with the process. What I find with mediations is that lawyers who are good at that process are good at being succinct about what their client's case is about, and they're good at focusing on what matters.

This brings us full circle to the garbage cans. We're not going to talk about it in mediation either. Why? Because it's not going to drive the resolution that would be acceptable to you.

I also think that obviously the mediator plays a big role in that. I actually was the mediator, I should say, in a case recently, in a business divorce case, and it's a very difficult, arduous process. You kind of had the similar experience as kind of an arbitrator.

Somebody may be entitled to make decisions, but the benefit of the mediator is they have no ability to make decisions whatsoever. They can merely make recommendations, and even then they oftentimes will only do that if they're asked specifically, hey, would you recommend something as a resolution, or would you give us your opinion as to the value of this claim, or your opinion as to the strength or weakness of a claim. That process was, I'm used to being an advocate, and to have to take a step back and say, okay, hang on a second, I'm hearing two different stories, and they're mutually exclusive, and how do I navigate that to try to get those parties onto the same page with respect to a particular issue, or a particular, in this case it was really a business dissolution.

We've got to talk about what are we going to do with AR, and what are we going to do with other things. I think that process is really valuable, and as you said, you said something that was very insightful. At a minimum, even if you don't resolve a case in a mediation, you're going to learn something about how the other side looks at the dispute that might be helpful to resolving it down the line, or might be helpful to countering whatever claims or defenses they're going to have.

I think it's a valuable process. I will say, Dave, you've probably seen agreements in your life where in large company agreements where they say, before we arbitrate, we have to have a conversation with the CFO, and the senior vice president of one company, and the similarly situated individuals on the other side. My finding is that that rarely works to resolve the dispute.

I think in part because everybody knows it's just the appetizer, and that we still have the main courses still to come. There's going to be maybe a mediation process with a third party or an arbitrator. If we're going to have a process like that, I often want to understand a little bit more about who are the personalities involved.

I wouldn't say that that's a one size fits all solution. Yeah, it strikes me that, and this is actually a good question for you, it strikes me that it must be more difficult to get the full benefit from mediation if you're doing it virtually. To me, so much of the value is from being in, you're in different rooms, but sometimes they'll let you come together in the one room, or you can, because of the pace of the discussion, you can kind of get a feel for how things are going.

Is it more difficult to do that kind of thing virtually compared to in person? I actually don't find there to be that big of a difference, particularly for mediation. And particularly because, like you said, most of the time you spend a part anyways. There's a certain part of me that would like to be at the beginning of the day in the same room as somebody, and if there's a resolution or we're getting really close to a resolution and the mediator wants to bring us together to make a statement or offer some assessments to the group, I think that that can be more effective in the right case in person.

But I would say, of all the things that I do, having mediations be remote is probably still, probably is closest to the real thing. I just would love the fact that I would love to participate, just to see, let them tip their hands, see what their strategy, maybe you can gain some strategic insight. I also would love to see their disposition, if you could see them in the lobby or whatever.

Are they exhausted? Are they worn out? Is this just wearing on them, or do they look like they could go forever? That to me, that is, I think, if you could get that out of it, I think it would be beneficial, but even in a classic mediation sense, you might not be in the same room with them. You may never get a chance to have that kind of an interaction. Here's what we're going to do.

I'm going to ask you for three big takeaways from today, three things that people need to remember from our time together. I'm going to give you a second to think about it while I thank our sponsors once again. Today's show is brought to you by Senderowski Corporate Advisors.

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Alright, Brian, what are the three things we should take away from our time together today? Yeah, that's a great question and a tough one, Dave. So I guess what I would say is first, business owners are and entrepreneurs are optimists. They're forward thinking people and God bless them.

We would lose out on a lot of things if it weren't for them, right? But they don't want to think about what will happen if there's a dispute. How are we going to resolve a fight? They're not expecting one. They need to.

They need to early and often think about how are we going to resolve a dispute if one arises. I guess the second thing I would say is business owners need to understand that probably the best protection against that dispute is going to be to align incentives and to reevaluate those incentives as things change within their business and to make sure that the key stakeholders are not just being compensated and incentivized in a way that is reasonable and fair, but that they have buy-in and they agree that it's reasonable and fair. And that requires kind of conversations and it requires kind of periodic reevaluation of how we structure the organization and how we work.

And then the third thing I would say is when that dispute arises or even if there's an inkling of it, you've got to involve a lawyer who understands the nuclear option and what it's going to look like if this thing were to go all the way and then hopefully you're still at a point where you haven't aligned the line. It's not inevitable that you're going to have to go there and you can evaluate kind of looking back from a trial let's say, how can we resolve this short of something like a trial or three or five years of litigation. Alright, Brian Houseman, it's been great having you on.

You can reach Brian if this is something that interests you and you want to create an agreement and have Brian review it. It's always good to have a litigator look at your agreement that a transactional lawyer has drawn up or if you find yourself in a dispute, give Brian a call. 312-762-9471 I'm going to put all his contact information and his bio in the show notes.

Brian, thanks for joining us today. I really enjoyed the conversation. It was great speaking with you.

Thanks, Dave. Likewise and stay safe. Alright folks, that'll do it for this episode of the Inside BS show.

We'll see you right back here again tomorrow with another great show. Until then, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.