Warren Zevon; Financial Management Best Practices; and “Number One Fan”

Episode Notes

Transcript

Jared Correia: I’d like to take a moment to thank my mom for listening to every episode. Now my mom is the real reason you’re listening to this show right now but the sponsors have a little something to do with it as well. So I’d like to thank our sponsors too. Clio, Time Solve, Alert Communications and Scorpion. Now more than ever, an effective marketing strategy is one of the most important things your law firm can have and Scorpion can help. With nearly 20 years of experience serving the legal industry, Scorpion has proven methods to help you get the high value cases you deserve, join thousands of attorneys across the country who have turned to Scorpion for effective marketing and technology solutions For a better way to grow your practice, visit scorpionlegal.com.

[Music]

Intro: It’s the Legal Tool Kit with Jared Correia with guest Brooke Lively a round of number one fan and, depending on how this episode goes, maybe we’ll just become a cooking show or something, but first your host Jared Correia.

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Jared Correia: The Legal Toolkit Podcast is right now like literally this second. Yes I’m your host Jared Correia. Richard Dawson was unavailable so you’re stuck with me. I’m the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, a business management consulting service for attorneys. Find us online at www.redcavelegal.com.

I’m the COO of Gideon Software, Inc. We build chat bots so law firms can convert more leads. You can find out more about Gideon at www.gideon.legal. Before we get to our interview today with Brooke Lively, I want to talk about a rock star with glasses. No it’s not Cub Koda from Brownsville Station. You probably feel like you know Warren Zevon but if I ask you to name a song that wasn’t Werewolves of London, could you — it kind of sounds like Dr. Seuss book. I’m rolling with it though. Maybe Lawyers, Guns and Money, maybe Excitable Boy, did I have to remind you of those. Now Werewolves of London and those others too are great fucking songs. Don’t get me wrong but that’s only the tip of the Warren Zevon iceberg and yes many, many of his songs are even more sardonic than Werewolves. In fact, Warren Zevon was so far ahead of his time. Time is still catching up to him. He wrote a biting satire of life in LA among the rich and famous in which a gorilla switches places with him. He lives in the zoo and the gorilla gets a good psychologist. That’s gorilla you’re a desperado. He wrote a song about software integration in 1989 that’s networking. Thomas Dolby, hold my beer. He also wrote a song about a headless ghost who haunts violent conflicts across the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. That’s more Washington Irving than Susanna Hoffs for sure and that’s Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. Yes that’s the actual title of the song and now I’m beginning to understand why Warren Zevon never really got popular. In fact if it wasn’t for Werewolves of London, probably nobody ever would have heard of Warren Zevon. One of the reasons Werewolves of London took off in my opinion is that people viewed it as a novelty record but the twist was that the novelty was the whole act. Warren Zevon was never going to build an album around a boy meets girl concept. Instead, he was far more interested in bacterial infections in cows. Yes that’s a real thing. That’s in a song called Play It All Night Long or the opal mining rings. Yes that also appeared in the real song. Mr. Bad Example. This is not exactly fair for a top 40 radio. Warren Zevon partied with Hunter S. Thompson. He was David Letterman’s good friend and he subbed for Paul Shaffer leading the house band when Shaffer was absent doing Paul Shaffer things. He was buddies with Jackson Brown but he also made fun of him and pardon his hair in some of his songs and you get the feeling that he was probably also pissing on his front lawn when nobody was looking or maybe even when people were looking depending on how much gin he had in his system. It was almost as if Warren Zevon was accidentally like a martyr led into a club that he never belonged to. In fact, he probably wrote a song about that very theme. Actually, most of his songs are about that theme. So probably 20 plus years ago now I saw Warren Zevon play before a small crowd in Boston at the House of Blues on Lansdowne Street. I don’t go looking for it, it’s closed. It was a small enough crowd that you could hear everything and this one drunk asshole from the crowd kept yelling play Werewolves.

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So Warren Zevon refused to play the hits. Good for him. Much respect to my guy. The end of Warren Zevon’s career including the House of Blues performance and maybe his whole career right was kind of rough. He had substance abuse issues. He was a rake in the traditional sense not the gardening tool but he was probably involved with some hoes along the way and he never really got all that mainstream or sold many albums. At late stages in his career he was playing in bus stations. So I know what you’re thinking great now we can all rediscover Warren Zevon and the redemption arc can commence. Unfortunately, Warren Zevon is dead. So another twisted cruel item just like some of the stuff that goes on in his songs. Warren Zevon actually died of mesothelioma in 2003 at the age of 56 and you know that that’s the keyword that all those law firms spend thousands of dollars bidding on in Google. Ironically the albums Zevon released months prior to his diagnosis was called My Ride’s Here. On the album cover he was sitting in the back of a hearse and he called the work of meditation on death. See, always ahead of his time even in a morbid way. Before he went out though he recorded one last album that was called The Wind and it featured some of his richer more famous friends like Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen song called Disorder in the House actually won a Grammy for best rock duet and the win was nominated for three more Grammys. It was a magnificent album. There was a small surge in Warren Zevon nostalgia and then it was all gone like the wind. The Wind came out 20 years ago and still most people can’t name a single song off that album. There’s one famous cover you will definitely know but you’d be guessing if you hit it right. When asked about his mesothelioma diagnosis Warren Zevon said, it might have been a tactical error not going to a physician for 20 years. He was funny, brash, cutting right to the end even when it came to his own bad choices which is why a lot of his music was also about. Now I would love to see Warren Zevon get more recognition because I think he is massively underrated in the history of music. He’s just so unique. No one quite did it like he did quite so well but there’s probably not enough critical mass for the giant box set or remastered set of recordings and demos to come out. Of course that doesn’t mean that you can’t spend some time listening to the non-remastered works that are available. Start with the Spotify playlist I’ve made to associate with this episode. It’s linked out from the show notes and I’m calling it Warren Zevon favorites. So I spent some time this week in splendid isolation with Warren Zevon and remember enjoy every sandwich. Now stay tuned because we’re about to bring out our guest Brooke Lively from Cathedral Capital. Brooke and I are going to talk about some financial management best practices for law firms. That’s next but first, let’s take a moment to listen to the Clio legal trends report minute.

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Joshua Lenon: Did you know that three out of four lawyers are meeting with clients virtually storing firm data in the Cloud, accepting payments online and nearly two-thirds of law firms support electronic document sharing and e-signatures. I’m Joshua Lenon lawyer-in-residence at Clio. Beyond the necessity of these technologies in the past year, their value in saving lawyers time and money while also increasing client satisfaction cannot be understated. For the first time, we’ve seen lawyers adopt new technologies to a degree that we’ve never seen before in the history of legal practice what was once a competitive edge has now become a baseline in the legal profession and you do not want to be left behind. To learn more about these technologies for free download Clio’s legal trends report at clio.com/trends. That’s Clio, spelled C-L-I-O.

Jared Correia: Okay it’s about time to get to the marshmallow shapes amongst these lucky charms. Let’s interview our guest. My guest today is Brooke Lively who is the president and founder at Cathedral Capital. Brooke welcome to the show how are you?

Brooke Lively: I am awesome. Thanks so much for having me.

Jared Correia: Yeah this is going to be really fun. So I have a confession to make. When I first started talking to you, I know your name is Brooke Lively but I kept typing in Blake Lively, the actress. Do you get that a lot?

Brooke Lively: Yeah so I was —

Jared Correia: I had to correct myself like a million times.

Brooke Lively: I was on an airplane one day and I could see the two flight attendants like talking to each other and kind of looking at me and I’m like, what have I done? And so finally one comes over and she kneels down beside my seat and says, okay so my friend and I were talking.

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Jared Correia: It’s always a bad start by the way.

Brooke Lively: I know and she thinks you’re Blake Lively. I’m like, if only I were that young, that rich that then and married to Ryan Reynolds oh I’d be ecstatic. But on a flight manifest I show up as Lively, B.

Jared Correia: That’s really funny. I see — all right I’m glad I’m not alone then.

Brooke Lively: Oh God no.

Jared Correia: All right let’s get to the lost stuff, the serious stuff that people are listening for maybe. So you help law firms out with financial management and we’ve been talking about this a little bit and I think you have some really great insights here. So I want to ask you a few questions on that. So let’s start with 2020, a really weird year, right?

Brooke Lively: Yeah.

Jared Correia: So a lot of law firms —

Brooke Lively: I think we learned a lot.

Jared Correia: We did. We learned a lot and I’ve been a lot of law firms they’re thinking like was this just a blip? What can I carry forth from 2020 that’s actually going to be useful to me moving forward like what does that look like for you as someone who advises law firms on finances?

Brooke Lively: I think law firms really kind of got in touch with their financials this past year when the PPP started all of a sudden they had to have a ton of information to file for the PPP to apply and a lot of law firms figured out that their financials were a mess and they needed a different bookkeeper or they needed a bookkeeper period. And so that I think was the first thing that people learned that there really is a lot of value in having clean books and having the ability to pull financial reports quickly. I think the other thing that people learned or did was get a little more in touch with their expenditures. Which ones were really necessary, which ones were actually had a good ROI, return on investment, what was going to generate more revenue and what things did they have that were superfluous or not really useful or you know were an ego trip.

Jared Correia: Like office space? Something like that.

Brooke Lively: So we have talked to clients that are getting less office space. We’ve also talked to clients that are getting more office space. A lot of people think that the real estate market is going to be heavily impacted by this and we’ve got a couple of law firms that we work with that are negotiating for additional rent at a time when they feel like they’ve got the upper hand.

Jared Correia: Right oh that’s really interesting. Are there other expenses you’ve seen that people are dropping or are overspending on?

Brooke Lively: I think there are always some expenses kind of like that gym membership that you apply for and you don’t use.

Jared Correia: That no one ever uses and especially now.

Brooke Lively: Yeah. I think they’ve — I think law firms have figured out a lot of those. I think they’re doubling down in some interesting places. The first one is marketing because you can’t go out and market one-on-one as much anymore. You can’t go out and it’s harder online on Zoom to create those referral relationships.

Jared Correia: Totally. So they’re shifting that money to other buckets is what you’re seeing?

Brooke Lively: They’re shifting it to online and with Google starting LSA, the local service area thing.

Jared Correia: Yeah. Which I don’t think a ton of attorneys are taking advantage of yeah maybe you see it differently in terms of your clients.

Brooke Lively: They really should. You know we had a firm in Atlanta now granted she’s stepping a lot of money in but she’s PI. She’s getting as many cases in a week as she used to get in a month.

Jared Correia: Yeah, yeah.

Brooke Lively: And we’re like, can we tone that down a little? We’re not sure we have the staff to work these cases.

Jared Correia: Well it’s interesting because a lot of the talk you hear about the pandemic in law firms is like retrenchment and they’re trying — they’re kind of waiting it out but you’re actually seeing firms conservative law firms.

Brooke Lively: Yeah.

Jared Correia: Probably making bigger moves. I love it that law firms are like starting to market in different ways. A lot of this stuff is overdue frankly.

Brooke Lively: Absolutely and you know let’s be frank here. We work with law firms that want to grow. We work with firms that have goals, that aren’t happy with the status quo, that are really run by entrepreneurs and so they’re always looking for that advantage. Where can we do something, where can we move forward and the other thing I noticed was a lot of firms are always kind of on the edge on cash like cash is just always kind of sort of tight.

Jared Correia: Yeah.

Brooke Lively: And with the first round of the PPP, with your payroll being paid by PPP it freed up cash. So these firms have a cushion that they may not have had before and they may have freed up some money that they can spend on marketing or spend on this new rent.

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They’ve kind of you know if you can take that cash and deploy it effectively, that’s going to make a huge difference in your firm.

Jared Correia: Right and that’s the rub. Can you deploy it effectively? But at least you have it.

Brooke Lively: Absolutely.

Jared Correia: Well let’s turn the subject a little bit because frankly i’m kind of sick of talking about the pandemic to be honest. So one thing you do a lot which i really like, I’m a big believer in like data analytics is. You’re focused on reporting, you’re focused on KPIs for law firms. I know you’ve done a lot of work in this space. So if I’m a law firm that’s just getting into that kind of thing from an accounting standpoint, what are some of the important financial KPIs I should be looking at?

Brooke Lively: So I had someone asked me one time. I was in an EO meeting, entrepreneur’s organization and they said, okay you’re on a fabulous desert island in a five-star resort no phone, no internet, no TV.

Jared Correia: Sounds great so far.

Brooke Lively: I know I’ve done that. There’s a supply boat that comes once a week that drops off new guests and all the supplies for the week and the captain can give you a piece of paper with three pieces of information on it that will let you decide if you can stay another week or not. What are those three pieces of information and I’m like, three? These people are on crack. I can’t do it on three and I took it back to my team and over a couple of years we really worked with this. Is it three, five, seven, forty-two, eighteen and we came up with six.

Jared Correia: It’s pretty good still only double.

Brooke Lively: Yeah double I don’t know a bit reasonable.

Jared Correia: Yes.

Brooke Lively: And so four of the numbers are forward-looking and two of them help you get back on track. So the first one is a cash flow forecast. We all know that cash is king and a cash flow forecast tells you how much money you’re going to have at the end of the week every week for the next six to eight weeks. And that really is the first thing you need to get under control. How much cash do you have and are you looking at a cash crunch? Is your cash flow forecast red? Do we need to do something? The second number we look at is whip work in progress because this month’s whip is next month’s revenue. So are the people in your firm billing up to their goals? Are you working enough this month to be able to pay all your bills next month and there’s nothing better than that moment in the month where you realize that you’ve got enough in whip to cover the nut for next month everything else is gravy.

Jared Correia: Right then you just nap right?

Brooke Lively: Yeah.

Jared Correia: No, no. You keep working. Go ahead.

Brooke Lively: Right. You grind out few more hours. The third one is sales calls.

Jared Correia: Not something that a lot of law firms focus on by the way.

Brooke Lively: No. How many sales calls have been booked? Because by knowing how many sales calls we have booked, you tend to know how many become clients but this month’s sales call is next month’s new client is the month after that’s revenue. So that shows you, you’re starting to be able to look further and further out and the last forward-looking number that we talk about is net new cases and this is cases opened minus cases closed and what this does is really looks at the caseload of your firm or the caseload of a particular attorney because if we have an attorney that can handle say 30 cases and you’re adding net new 10 cases a month, that attorney is going to be maxed out in three months.

Jared Correia: Yeah.

Brooke Lively: Yeah. So by looking at your net new cases you can see your hiring needs coming up six and eight months in advance.

Jared Correia: Yeah I love how you do this in terms of like forward-looking metrics because I think when it comes to finances most law firms are working backwards but you’ve also got some useful backward-looking metrics as well right?

Brooke Lively: There are, there two. The first is your budget versus actual report. You can find it in any accounting software and first of all – hey, can I go into my whole budget rant?

Jared Correia: Yeah go. This is the place to rant. I just ranted now you can rant.

Brooke Lively: Budgets suck. Nobody wants a budget. It’s all about what you can’t do and limitations. We like profit plans.

Jared Correia: Ah I like that. That sounds so much better.

Brooke Lively: Oh my gosh we are entrepreneurs. We are all about the possibility not the prohibition. So we have thrown out the word budget. We use profit plan because what is better than sitting down and planning for the profit you’re going to have this year.

Jared Correia: It’s a beautiful thing.

Brooke Lively: I have not been able to convince any of the major accounting software companies to change to my verbiage so we got to go with theirs.

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Jared Correia: You’re fighting the good fight however.

Brooke Lively: I am. I’m trying really hard. So yeah the budget versus actual report comes right out of your accounting software and it puts what you actually did last month against your profit plan what you thought you were going to do and it allows you to get back on track. It’s just like you know when NASA fires a rocket off to the moon they don’t just say go here and never check it. They’re constantly adjusting and this gives you the ability to adjust.

Jared Correia: Yeah that’s a great analogy.

Brooke Lively: The last number is owner compensation. And here’s what it is. Here’s my thing about owner compensation. You are taking a lot of risk as the owner of the firm and we need to make sure that you’re getting paid for that and getting paid for all the different jobs that you’re doing because you’re probably practicing law and you’re running the firm. So you need to — you need to get paid and I think the question that people ask me the most is how much should I be spending on my people, how much should I be spending on marketing, how much should I be spending on, how much should I be spending on and I think really what they’re asking is how much should I be spending on so I can figure out how much I should be taking home.

Jared Correia: Yes.

Brooke Lively: So we really monitor that owner compensation number to make sure that you are getting what you need because if you’re not getting what you need at home you’re not going to be in a good place to run the firm.

Jared Correia: Right and I think owners of law firms especially they view themselves as like they have the smarter complex almost like the last person to get paid. So changing that perspective I think is really important.

Brooke Lively: It really is.

Jared Correia: That’s a great set of metrics. Okay so we got about two minutes left here. Give me your quick thoughts on accounts receivable because budgets suck but accounts receivable also suck. So how do you avoid that as a law firm as best as you can.

Brooke Lively: Okay so here’s the thing. AR is created the first time you ever meet a client. It’s created in the sales call. The way to eliminate AR is to set expectations in that meeting and back it up. So here’s what we say, get an initial retainer equal to about three months and here’s why three months because they hire you in April, you work all of April, you send out a bill on May 1st I don’t care what the hell your bill says they think they have 30 days. So —

Jared Correia: Right, right.

Brooke Lively: All right wait. We hired in April, we billed on the first of May. So now you’re working all the month of May they think it’s not due until the end of May. Okay great. So first of June you send out your invoice they are now just thinking they’re past due and you start collecting. So it takes about three months to figure out if you’ve got a deadbeat client or not.

Jared Correia: Right it’s a great point.

Brooke Lively: The second thing you want to do is have an evergreen retainer. So most cases are busier in the first three months and then the workload drops down so you want to keep an average of three months. Just average work and people always ask me they’re like, dude why do I have to have an evergreen retainer if they’ve already proven they’ll pay I’m like, because they’ll stop paying at any time for any reason and it really has anything to do with you.

Jared Correia: Right and for those who don’t know evergreen retainers essentially get this number that you just get the client to top off on a recovery basis.

Brooke Lively: Yup. They keep $6,000.00 or whatever it is in the trust account at all times.

Jared Correia: Right.

Brooke Lively: Okay. So if they don’t pay their bill you need to have a stop work policy and it doesn’t have to be difficult. The best one I saw is totally low-tech and cheap they went to Office Depot bought $2.00 worth of red rubber bands and they would just throw it around off of a file when it was — if they haven’t paid their bill it’s red rubber banded and so it was really easy for them to kind of negotiate that internally.

Jared Correia: Yeah. Yeah.

Brooke Lively: However, I don’t want to give any client the option of not paying and so one of the key things you need to do is take payment timing out of the client’s hands and put it into your hands. And we do this by inserting a paragraph that says, we are authorized to charge your card usually 10 days after we send the invoice unless you dispute it and then they sign a credit card authorization form and this really came home to me I was at my best friend’s house on a Sunday night and we walked in the house and she opened a drawer which she could barely get open because it was stuffed with mail. She takes it out, she starts opening it I’m like, Martha what is all this? And she said, well it’s about six weeks’ worth of mail.\

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I’m like, dude what about your bills? She’s like, oh I pay everything, you know everything’s like auto pay. These are just one-off bills and junk mail. So she goes through it all ends up with a much smaller stack which she then shoves back in the drawer.

Jared Correia: Of course.

Brooke Lively: I’m like, what is that? She’s like, well that’s what actually needs to be paid but I’ve done enough work on this tonight so I’m not going to do any more. Okay attorneys this is what is happening to your invoices. I promise and if you’re — if you say oh no, no I only work with businesses it’s not much better they’re never going to pay in the first check run of the month because hello they think they have 30 days to pay and then they get to the end and they’re going to add up everything they owe and see how much cash they have and you may or may not get paid. So take payment timing out of the client’s hand and then really the last part of this is do it all in your fee agreement. The state says you need to have a fee agreement. You might as well have a contract that benefits you and if you put these things into place, if you then have the procedures in-house to make sure that the evergreen retainer is being topped off, the credit cards are being charged on the 10th or the 11th all those things, I got to tell you the average — well according to the legal trends report which I think is totally wrong, the average collection rate.

Jared Correia: Oh boy.

Brooke Lively: The average collection rate is 86% for 2020 in the U.S. for law firms.

Jared Correia: Yeah. Yeah.

Brooke Lively: I think that I don’t know.

Jared Correia: You think that’s high? You think that’s low?

Brooke Lively: Yeah. I think they’re putting contingency firms in there that like once they settle they always get paid because no one can figure out why it’s so stink and high. I’ve talked to –

Jared Correia: Yeah I think it’s probably lower too to be perfectly honest.

Brooke Lively: Yeah I think it’s 75% to 80%. So by doing those things, you can pop your collection rate up over 90% which means you’re getting paid for work you’re doing.

Jared Correia: Yup.

Brooke Lively: And you’re getting just a ton more money.

Jared Correia: That’s always good. So let’s end there on a ton more money. I like that. So that was Brooke Lively of Cathedral Capital. She makes finances fun but we’re not finished with Brooke yet. She’ll be back in a moment. We’ll take one final sponsor break so you can hear more about what our sponsors can do for your law practice then stay tuned for the rump roast it’s even more supple than the roast beast. Oh God.

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[Music]

Welcome to the rear end of the Legal Toolkit. We call it The Rump Roast. It’s a grab bag of short form topics of my choosing. Brooke, you’re into numbers so today we’re going to play a little game I invented. It’s called number one fan.

Brooke Lively: Uh-oh.

Jared Correia: So your job is to settle a long-standing culturally divisive debate whichever way you answer people are going to hate you but let’s leave that aside for now.

Brooke Lively: Okay can I get off this show? I don’t know that I signed up for this.

Jared Correia: You’re going to love it trust me.

Brooke Lively: Okay.

Jared Correia: So what we’re going to do is I’m going to give you some options. You’re going to give me your opinion, I’ll give my opinion and then I’ll tell you what America thinks.

Brooke Lively: Okay.

Jared Correia: Are you ready? Are you ready to try?

Brooke Lively: Yeah.

Jared Correia: All right. We’ll play around you’ll pick it up quick. Okay. Brooke, which do you prefer hamburgers or hot dogs?

Brooke Lively: Oh, burgers 100%.

Jared Correia: Burgers okay. Me too like I like hot dogs as well I’m probably you know I’m willing to admit I like hot dogs even though they’re like chicken lips and all this stuff but I really love like a hamburger done well is fantastic and you’re in Texas so you probably have really amazing hamburgers done there too.

Brooke Lively: We’ve got some great burgers though I will tell you my family does like hot dogs a lot in fact, my parents will drive down the street to the QT gas station on Friday nights and they will get hot dogs. They say they have the best hot dogs ever but —

Jared Correia: I mean yeah there are some good dogs out there.

Brooke Lively: Yeah give them the choice they’ll also go for burgers.

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Jared Correia: Interesting my dad was a giant hot dogs fanatic which may have contributed to an early passing so my dad you see so many hot dogs that literally like the week after he died, the hot dog plant that he got hot dogs from closed. So that’s a man who loved hot dogs.

Brooke Lively: That’s a lot of hot dogs.

Jared Correia: However, do you want to know what America thinks?

Brooke Lively: Sure.

Jared Correia: Okay last year 2020, there were 20 billion hot dogs consumed by Americans and hamburgers 20 billion is a lot hamburgers 50 billion so more than two to one so you’re right aligned with America. I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad thing that rating combines 70 billion hamburgers and hot dogs a year but we’ll leave that aside for another time.

Brooke Lively: Well hot dog consumption was probably down because you couldn’t go to a baseball game.

Jared Correia: That’s probably true okay so we’ll have to get those stats in 2021, 2022 and see what they look like. Are you ready for your next culturally divisive issue to resolve?

Brooke Lively: Yes.

Jared Correia: Babies versus puppies.

Brooke Lively: Oh man.

Jared Correia: By the way if you’ve seen the movie Boss Baby this is the entire plot of the movie who’s cuter babies or puppies?

Brooke Lively: Okay let’s see here. My nephew who is a baby spits up on me all the time that’s the downside.

Jared Correia: Yes.

Brooke Lively: They do snuggle better.

Jared Correia: Ah, true.

Brooke Lively: None of them stay young enough long enough.

Jared Correia: Yeah. Yup. Yeah.

Brooke Lively: I’m going to have to go with your own puppy or somebody else’s baby.

Jared Correia: Oh that’s a good answer okay way to equivocate. This is a very like legal answer that sort of lawyer would say.

Brooke Lively: I was going to say, did I mention I worked with lawyers?

Jared Correia: Right. Right.

Brooke Lively: Of the daughter of a lawyer, the niece of a lawyer, the sister of a lawyer.

Jared Correia: Because my kids are in earshot possibly. I’m going to say children however in private I might think differently about this topic even though I’m allergic to dogs.

Brooke Lively: Oh really?

Jared Correia: Yes. Yeah I’m allergic to like a bunch of things including like pretty much any animal that has fur or hair. Now do you want to know what America thinks?

Brooke Lively: Sure.

Jared Correia: 34% of parents prefer their pets over their children according to a 2019 study. So even people who have actual children like puppies better. All right we got one more question for you.

Brooke Lively: All right.

Jared Correia: So we’ve got a lot of this going on right now. The Justice League movie was just out on HBO that was a big deal. There’s a lot of Marvel shows on Disney Plus right now. So another culturally divisive debate which do you prefer Marvel movies or DC movies?

Brooke Lively: Yeah okay so I’m totally out on this one. I have no idea.

Jared Correia: So you’re going to pass? I’ll answer that.

Brooke Lively: I’m going to pass because I don’t watch those movies. I did like Ironman. That was a good one.

Jared Correia: Okay.

Brooke Lively: Which may have been the last superhero move I saw.

Jared Correia: That was like 10 years ago. So I’m going to put you in the Marvel camp for now.

Brooke Lively: Okay.

Jared Correia: Because you’re going to be right. You’re going to be three for three. Americans actually overwhelmingly prefer Marvel movies to DC movies. 47% percent prefer Marvel, 11% prefer DC and the rest of America which you’re aligned with is don’t know. So you’re hitting like the massive percentage here so well done. That was that wasn’t too bad was it?

Brooke Lively: No.

Jared Correia: Okay good. Well Brooke thanks for coming on today. That was great. I really appreciate it.

Brooke Lively: My pleasure.

Jared Correia: You were fun, you made finance fun not an easy job.

Brooke Lively: You know I figure that finance is something that people have a lot of apprehension about and a lot of fear around I’m like, guys it’s just numbers and so I try to be as entertaining and as real as possible.

Jared Correia: It’s a great message. All right thanks for coming on again we appreciate it. Now for those of you listening in Chugwater, Oklahoma I know you’re still out there. Our Spotify playlist for this week’s show as I mentioned before features the best of Warren Zevon. So listen up and slow yourself down. Our guest today has been Brooke Lively of Cathedral Capital. For more information about Cathedral Capital go to cathcap that’s cathcap.com. Unfortunately, we’ve run out of time. It looks like we’re sticking to legal and we won’t become a cooking show after all. Now that’ll do it for another episode of Legal Toolkit podcast where we live in a world in which cousin Oliver never ever joined the cast of The Brady Bunch.

[Music]

Podcast transcription by Tech-Synergy.com

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