The LawPay/MyCase Sitch with Dru Armstrong; & “Florida Man: Texas Edition”

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Male:  It’s The Legal Toolkit with Jared Correia, with guest Dru Armstrong.  We play “Florida Man Texas Edition”.  And then, Dr.  Jared’s here to show off the medicinal wonders he has cooked up in the shed behind his house.

But first, your host, Jared Correia.

[Music]

Jared D. Correia:  it’s time for The Legal Toolkit and time’s kept by talk, the faithful and literal watchdog.  And yes, it’s still called The Legal Toolkit podcast.  Even though I’ve never actually utilized a duplex rabbit plane before.  Rabbits can fly, silly.  I’m your host Jared Correia.  You’re stuck with me because Andy Kaufman was unavailable.  He’s making someone feel uncomfortable.

I’m the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, a business management consulting service for attorneys and Bar Associations.  Find us online at redcavelegal.com.  I’m the COO of Gideon Software, Inc.  We build chat bots.  So law firms can front more leads, and conversational document assembly tools, so law firms can build documents faster and more accurately, you can find out more about getting a [email protected].

Now, before we get to our interview today, with Dru Armstrong of LawPay, I’ve got a little something to say.  Yeah, no, it really is just a little something.  Because instead of my usual monologue, I’m borrowing some time here to have an even more in-depth conversation than usual with our guest.  Heck, we’ve got a lot to talk about with Dru.  Before we get to that discussion on payments in the big LawPay acquisition of my case with Dru Armstrong.  Let’s all point and look at Joshua Lenon, who has this week’s Clio legal Trends Report.

[Music]

Joshua Lenon:  Here’s a fact about law firms with growing revenue.  They’re 46% more likely to use client intake and client relationship management or CRM solutions.  I’m Joshua Lenon lawyer in residence at Clio.  And this is just one finding from our recent legal Trends report.  Client intake and CRM tools, keep track of potential clients and help you make a great first impression.  For instance, online forums can help you easily collect basic information related to a client’s matter rather than fielding calls and taking notes on a piece of paper.  For more information on what law firms with growing revenue are doing differently than the rest, download Clio’s Legal Trends Report for free at clio.com/trends.  That’s Clio. Spelled C-L-I-O dot com forward slash trends.

[Music]

Jared D. Correia:  It’s time to interview our guest.  My guest today is Dru Armstrong, who’s the CEO of AffiniPay.  No relation to Stretch Armstrong, as far as I’m aware.  Dru, welcome to the show.  How are you doing?

Dru Armstrong:  I’m great.  Thanks for having me.

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah, this is — I’m actually really excited to have you on the show.  There’s been like so much movement in the legal tech space.  And LawPay/AffiniPay.  I know AffiniPay is a parent company and LawPay is like subsidiary to like, made a huge move recently.  And I want to talk about that.  But can you talk a little bit about AffiniPay as a company?  As I mentioned before, I think a lot of lawyers, no LawPay, but I know you also have CPAs that you work with, and it’s a broader organization and I think most attorneys think of.  So, can you talk to me about what the company does? Broadscope?

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah, so we do business and financial services, technology solutions for professionals that help them thrive.  And so, we started in helping lawyers and accountants and architects and engineers, being able to get paid more quickly using digital payments.  And the core idea was that when you really boil it down for professionals, whether they’re lawyers or accountants, they have a lot of the same challenges around trying to get paid for the work that they do.

(00:05:01)

And the core idea that time is money, the company really believes in serving the lawyer, the accountant, the architect; we believe that their needs are very different from a lot of the other payment providers that are serving retail or E-commerce or think of all the millions of other verticals out there.  And so we feel like —

Jared D. Correia:  That’s for sure.  Yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  Our commitment to helping — honestly, not to get cheesy, but I think people like it’s very much like we work and supported the American dream, right?  People go and get professional degrees.

Jared D. Correia:  Oh wow.  That’s beautiful.  Did you come up with that?

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  Nice.

Dru Armstrong:  Well, they also serve their clients, right?  And I think that’s something that I saw growing up.  And it’s why I thought I wanted to be a lawyer.  And so, when we’re able to get people paid for the super valuable work that they do, we’re able to give them time back to serve more clients, we’re able to help them and their practice thrive, like we’re really supporting kind of professionals and entrepreneurs in this country.  And I think that’s super inspiring to me, and super inspiring to our team.

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah, I wanted to be a lawyer to back in the day, but shit happens, right?

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  Shit happens.

Jared D. Correia:  And so —

Dru Armstrong:  I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and I realized I wanted to be a business person serving lawyers.

Jared D. Correia:  Same.

Dru Armstrong:  Same.

Jared D. Correia:  No, it’s funny, I say, like, lawyers are special snowflakes.  And I like to joke about this quite a bit.  But like it is a different profession, than —

Dru Armstrong:  It is.

Jared D. Correia:  Almost any other profession in large part because the ethics rules that are in place.

Dru Armstrong:  Yes.

Jared D. Correia:  And technically speaking, like the money has to move differently.

Dru Armstrong:  It does.

Jared D. Correia:  Especially considering retainers and IOLTA funds and stuff like that.  So like, I used to get a lot of pushback on using payment processing services as a lawyer because lawyers are worried about some of those ethical concerns.  I think it’s been long established.  That is not an issue.  Do you still get pushback on that?  Do you still have to explain that to people at this juncture?

Dru Armstrong:  No, I think what we see more is — so, we don’t get that pushback, because I think it’s really established that LawPay has created a technology that solves that IOLTA compliance issue.

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  What I have seen and one things that kind of came out of the market work that we did is about a third of attorneys.  So a third of attorneys in the U.S. use LawPay.  about a third of them use non-compliance solutions.  And then about a third, don’t do anything at all, right?

Jared D. Correia:  Right.

Dru Armstrong:  And just, it’s the attorney that’s like, “mail me back a check”.  And you’re like, “Okay, well, that’s a recipe to not get paid or get paid a fraction of what you just invoiced.”  Right?

Jared D. Correia:  Right.  Right.

Dru Armstrong:  And so, I think people sometimes underestimate the amount of risk that they’re taking on if they’ve just plugged in like a Pay Pal, or one of those other kind of non-legally compliant solutions.

Jared D. Correia:  Oh, it’s hugely problematic, yeah.  And just to reset for a second here.  And we’re talking about legal compliance.

Dru Armstrong:  Yes.

Jared D. Correia:  It’s with respect to the trust account stuff.  That means you can’t use that money to pay for processing fees, because you’re impermissibly converting client’s funds.  Sorry, I just want to reset for anybody to know, go ahead.

Dru Armstrong:  Right? And the number one reason lawyers get disbarred, right?  And when you get disbarred, I mean, you’re losing your license, you’re losing your livelihood, I remember taking legal ethics.  And this was a big topic that we covered, right?  So, it’s not an insignificant risk to an attorney into a practice.  And look, others have tried to follow along behind us and tried to configure kind of more horizontal solutions like a stripe.  The reality is like, it’s not just the platform that needs to be compliant on all of the layers of how it handles the funds, like imagine there’s a chargeback.  And then where does that get to put like, there’s a lot of money that gets moved to that has to stay super clean.  But we also have a team that, over half of our customer support team are payments experts and certified payments experts.

And so, it’s not just that they understand lawyers and payments, so they understand lawyers, and payments, and kind of combined.  And so, that gives us the ability to really be experts on partners.  And when time is money, you don’t want to be sitting there kind of figuring out like the money flow, you want someone like LawPay to really be just handling it for you.  And that’s what we do.

Jared D. Correia:  Oh.  For sure.  Yeah, I’m actually a LawPay client myself, actually.  I use it to encourage attorneys to do payment processing.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  And I think you guys have been really good.  One thing I really like is your support team will build up payment pages for people.  I tell people to take advantage of that all the time.  I want to talk about some new you rolled out recently, I think maybe a year ago?  I could be wrong on this.  So, you’re now offering financing for law firm clients, as well?

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  Super powerful.

Jared D. Correia:  Can you talk about that program and how that works?  Yeah, I’ve gotten some clients who are starting to use that now as well.

Dru Armstrong:  So, we call it Client Credit.  And it’s interesting as we were a fintech Company.  So, one of the things that our job is, is to stay on top of digital payments trends, digital fintech trends.  And so, the concept of ‘buy now pay later’ has been around for over a decade, right?

(00:10:03)

And it was this idea that you could have kind of a zero, it’s an alternative to a credit card.  So a lot of like Gen Z, Millennials are using in lieu of a credit card.  And it’s a kind of zero interest way to kind of stage out your payments.  That’s what it was originally born as.  What it has become is like another way to do consumer lending, right?  It’s regulated and it’s the ability to provide lending options for a specific transaction right next to other payment types, right?

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  And so, you’re kind of deciding “do I want to do a bank transfer? Do I want to use a debit card? Do I want to use a credit card? or now, do I want to use a lending option?”  Right?  And so, when we initially were testing it, we actually tested almost two years ago with PayPal, and we found like, “this really isn’t meeting the needs”.  And so then we went back to the drawing board and we ended up partnering with a firm, a firm had not been lending for legal services and for accounting services, and really entered the market with LawPay, because they felt like NCPHR.  So AffiniPay.  They felt like we actually really knew the merchants, we had a critical mass of merchants.  And so, we ended up partnering with them.  We ran a really long beta test, because we wanted to make sure that we kind of understood that we were getting the — there’s a lot of complexity when you actually get into like the percent that get approved, and what are the interest rates?

Jared D. Correia:  Oh for sure.  Yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  And, what’s the ticket size?  What’s the length of time for the loan?  And so, one of the big insights coming out of that was, this is not really what you typically see in retail for, which is like, “I want to finance my pair of Gucci loafers”, right?  I probably can’t afford them.  But you know what, like, I’m going to put it — I’m going to try this new BNPL solution that I can buy them and look awesome.

Jared D. Correia:  I have so many pairs of Gucci loafers now, come on.

Dru Armstrong:  So many, I could tell, I could just tell based on my opinion.  This is actually allowing lawyers without having to chase invoices or chase customers, take on clients that otherwise couldn’t have afforded their services, and to get paid on invoices that their clients could have not otherwise afforded.  And that they were doing like kind of manual payment plans.  And the reason why we’re so confident that is the ticket size, so the loan size is about $3,000 to $4,000 versus an average payment is about $1,000 per transaction.  And it’s usually a 12 to 18-month loan period.  So, instead of being what is probably more —

Jared D. Correia:  Smarter than I thought it would be, honestly.

Dru Armstrong:  Well, it’s — but it’s still like you can see that it’s not actually an alternate to a credit card, it’s actually really the first lending product available on a legal focus payment platform, where you’re truly saying, “you probably don’t have the credit card capacity to take this on, you actually need a loan”, right?  You need a consumer loan.  And so, it’s been a really exciting — like, for me, we think a lot about like what is innovation in the context of the legal market.  And for me, the big ‘aha’ was like the thousands of attorneys that were like, “Oh, my God, like I can take on the client, I get funded up front, I don’t have to chase them and have every conversation be about getting paid for this and like calling them every month trying to get another payment.  And so I’m actually getting paid.  And then I’m giving a new option to my clients so that they’re able to afford my services”.  Like that, to me feels like a perfect kind of example of what LawPay should be doing in the legal market, which is deeply understanding the client, like our client’s pain points, the lawyer’s pain points, understanding they want to serve their clients and grow their practice, and then marrying that with a financial services technology solution that can sit just right alongside their other products that they’re using of ours.

Jared D. Correia:  Are you finding any particular practice areas, taking advantage of that more than others?  Recently, I’ve talked to like several immigration attorneys who are using these great use case for that.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  And it’s, it’s been great.  I mean, with the MyCase acquisition, we also now have Docketwise as part of the family.  So, one of the leading immigration platforms, and they had already been testing it with a smaller lender in the market and saw kind of way more demand than they could provide with a kind of smaller standalone player that they were using.  But, there’s huge appetite in that market because you think about it’s a perfect example of like, “I absolutely have to have immigration legal services and yet I cannot afford it at this moment in time”.

And so, it’s been — I think, you should expect to see us doing a lot more of those types of things, where we’re kind of more broadly saying, “we help provide digital financial services solutions to lawyers and accountants and architects and engineers, like, what else can we provide to make it super seamless and easy to use and kind of all in line with the same platform?”  So, more to come like that?

Jared D. Correia:  Awesome.  That’s cool.  All right.  People are probably like, “hey, stop burying your lead, ask her about the MyCase thing already.  So, here we go.

Dru Armstrong:  Oh my god.  You guys heard about that?

Jared D. Correia:  I heard — yeah honestly though, it’s really funny because like, I’ve heard of it, because I do this stuff all the time.

(00:15:03)

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  Like people stop me and let me hey, something’s happening.  But I still talk to attorneys that don’t know, which is crazy.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  So, I kind of felt like something was going to happen.  So, I mean, I said this on the podcast before, I’ll give you my take on it that it seemed to me that a lot of these case management software’s were moving towards building their own payment platforms, traditionally, they used LawPay as either a white label solution or direct solution.  So, I felt like something was going to happen.  And it turns out that if I’ve got this correct, AffiniPay acquires my case.  So, what does that mean moving forward?  And where does that position LawPay?  LawPay Is a payments company?  Is it a law practice management company?  Is it something altogether different?  A hybrid? Like, what does that look like from your perspective?

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  So, one of the things that I think a lot about is like, I really think we’re maybe starting the third inning of legal tech.  And so, I think the way you think about — 

Jared D. Correia:  I’m here for your baseball analogies, she’s keep them coming.

Dru Armstrong:  So, I think this idea that you had on one hand kind of practice management, which has business of law and practice of law capabilities as one tech stack, and then you’ve got payments as a separate tech stack.  It’s kind of where we’ve been, right?  And of course, there’s integration touchpoints between the two.  I think one thing that I would posit is that for the legal practice management platforms that are plugging in payments, like they’re not building that technology native for the lawyer.

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.  That’s largely true.  Yup.

Dru Armstrong:  And you’re kind of going.  You’re kind of like, “so why does it matter, Dru?  like Stripe’s a big company, they’ve been super successful?”  Yeah, they’ve been super successful working with retailers and with E commerce and with Shopify.  And that’s a very different use case, like we’ve built our platform intentionally for professionals.  Like we don’t take our fees until the end of the month.  So, anyone who’s trying to reconcile between the trust account the operating account, they can do it every single day.  Our entire team is just focused on making sure that lawyers get paid, right?  Like we win 75% of the chargebacks that we help our clients fight, right?

And so, yeah, we’re there.  And you think about what we did with buy now pay later, there’s a ton of other solutions, lending solutions out there.  And we spent like two years figuring out the one that would fit for lawyers, right?  And so, we kind of looked ahead and said, “well, a core part of running your practice is the business side”, right?  And payments and invoicing kind of sit at the heart of that.  But no one’s really thought more broadly about like, how do we really think about the full business of law, right?  And one of the things that really excited us about MyCase was their ongoing investment in accounting and expense management.  We spent a lot of time talking to customers, realizing that at the end of the day, they really want payments invoicing, accounting and timekeeping together.  And then they may or may not want to have actual practice of law or matter management as part of that as well.

Jared D. Correia:  Sure.

Dru Armstrong:  And so, our view is as we move in to kind of — as the technology, the legal tech space evolves, like people shouldn’t be asking for more from their leading technology provider.  It’s great, matter management is great.  It’s a key component.  But there should be broader financial services offerings that are embedded, it should have integrated accounting and expense management, it could even look as far into legal research.  So, we really have this view that there’s so much more that could be offered to these attorneys into these firms, who their job is to serve clients.  Be a hero to your client, their job is not to be like their own head of IT.  Right?

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  And so, we feel like there’s a lot more that we can do to actually really more tightly integrate and then bring online more capabilities than others have been able to do.  And, frankly, I’m sorry, if you’re plugging in a PayFac like Stripe, like or there’s many other ones, like you’re not going to be able to do that and do it in a way that really meets like an attorney’s needs.  So, we’re excited —

Jared D. Correia:  I love it.  Yeah, you bring the sauce today.  This is great.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  Yeah and just like — well, we get the boomerang clients are like, Oh, someone — they offered me, I’m saving like 200 bucks.  And you’re like, first of all, you lose your first chargeback, you’re going to lose that and more because they don’t help you.  So sorry about that, right?  And it’s like, two, these are long-term like clients — our clients are very sticky.  They stay with us for many years.  And so.

Jared D. Correia:  Oh yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  You’re not just signing up for what the product is today.  You’re like, “who’s investing the most in innovation? Like who knows like the financial needs of your practice the best?  Like who’s been the one that like we’re double the size and we’re still at like a 98% customer satisfaction level for our customer support,” right?

(00:20:01)

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  Like, we’re never going to go offshore, like we’re always going to have that be part of our DNA.  And so, I just think what I feel really strongly in carrying on the kind of Amy Porter LawPay legacy is that like, we have really the love and loyalty of our customers and that’s a real gift.  And so, we’re going to honor that by continuing to innovate but doing it in a way where they are very much taken care of, and we very much understand their needs.

Jared D. Correia:  Awesome for life, baby.  All right, I got one more question for you, which is kind of a forward looking one, so I don’t know if your kids have this app on their phones or on their devices but like there’s —

Dru Armstrong:  They don’t get device.  Well, that’s not true.  They have they’ve like Kindles that are locked down.

Jared D. Correia:  Oh my God.  Good for you.  I’m definitely not in that space.

Dru Armstrong:  Well, they’re five and a seven.

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.  All right, my daughter’s seven.  She’s probably on an iPad right now.  But there’s this game that you see an advertisement for constantly.  We’re like, one big fish eats another big fish and a bigger fish comes in and eats that fish.  That’s like legal tech right now.  So like —

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  I think I have this all correct like MyCase acquirers Docketwise which you mentioned immigration platform, CASEpeer, personal injury platform, Woodpecker document assembly platform.  Probably some I’m forgetting.

Dru Armstrong:  Soluna.

Jared D. Correia:  Soluna, the accounting one.  That’s what I’m talking about.  That’s the most recent one.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  LawPay comes in, captures all that.  Now, you got this massive array of technology applications that you somehow have to stitch together.  So, what should people be looking forward to in terms of features or advancement?  So you’re going to move into that you can talk about right now that will give them an idea of how this is all going to work together as kind of like, their technology operating system?

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  So, first of all, one thing that I think people can expect more of is just deeper integrations, right?  I think one thing that we loved about MyCase and the acquisitions that Jim and Nathan have led while they were leading the company under the Apex ownership period was they had bought like, really best-in-class platforms, right?  Like we’re — Soluna was a phenomenal example of just like truly the next gen legal accounting platform.  Like really kind of cracking that code.  We feel the same way about like Docketwise in their view of form automation for different practice areas.  CASEpeer for personal injury, like we just feel like they’ve made really great investments.  And actually MyCase itself, was exactly what we love to see, which is they had been bought by AppFolio.  Appfolio actually kept heavily investing in the product itself.  And the proof point appears —

Jared D. Correia:  Oh, absolutely.  Yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  I mean, they were like they did not invest in go to market, they did not invest in sales and marketing, they put all the dollars back into the actual platform.  And then that was actually continued and accelerated on our Apex.  So they turned on a whole investment stream around API’s to drive integrations, they modularized they really like took stock of what were the things that were missing.  So, they’ve really like filled in all the gaps and from our perspective, we felt like they are the leading legal practice management.  They’ve just been under the radar and needed a bigger platform to stand on, which is what we could provide, right?  As LawPay.  And so, I think what you can expect is really a commitment to integrating these core products that we can see the demand for.  Sometimes companies are like, “yeah, yeah we’re going to integrate them, but we’re like, not really going to integrate them”.  And so I would say.

Jared D. Correia:  Yes.  I’ve seen that happen once or twice.

Dru Armstrong:  Yes, yes.  And so, we have teams dedicated to making sure that we’re able to continue to drive those integrations.  So for example, client credit is going to be available in Q4 in the MyCase platform.  We actually built that API post-closed because when we actually close the deal, we were alive with the integration, which was brand new.  And then we turned around quickly and we’re like, “this is the only practice management where client credit will be available kind of this year.”  So, I think that’s a great example of us really being committed.  I think the second area you’ll see us continue to invest in is other financial services.  So, we’re going to be launching a payment network where people are able to pay out and automate checks that they were sending to attorneys and to accountants.  So, we know that there’s a lot of — for example, like how —

Jared D. Correia:  Wow.  Super cool.  I love that.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  And it’s — think about all the people trying to find.  Like if software companies find it hard to — and they’re just focused on the legal market, they find it hard to find all the solo ones and small practitioners think of like a BillGO or bill.com, where they’re trying to kind of disperse all these checks.  And they’re saying, like, “we would love a way to get your attorneys paid”.  Right?

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.  That’s fantastic.

Dru Armstrong:  And we’re like, “we agree”.  You know, I think other areas that we’re looking at our bank accounts, corporate cards, even payroll, like we just feel like there’s a lot more to be done to create that integrated platform experience.  And I think the third thing that I would say which is kind of a continuation of the MyCase philosophy is that there are definitely different segments of the market that operate different than the others.

(00:25:06)

And so, whether that’s because of size or sophistication or how they’re meeting kind of different parts of their tech stack needs, expect to see more — this is going to sound like not as exciting, but I actually think we have a little bit of an opportunity.  Like one of the big things that changed the music industry was the unbundling of the CD, right?  And so there’s a lot of —

Jared D. Correia:  Oh, but I miss CDs, sorry go ahead.

Dru Armstrong:  So, I think what you’re going to see us do also is like, payments is the first piece of technology lawyers put in place.  Like their first thing they’re trying to solve is getting paid, right?  And so, we have of our before — so today, with MyCase, we have about 65,000, 70,000 law firms that we serve in the solo and small segment of the market.  About 30,000 of them don’t have any practice management.

Jared D. Correia:  Oh, interesting, yeah.

Dru Armstrong:  And so —

Jared D. Correia:  That’s a big growth up for you too. 

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah, it’s a big growth.  So, whether that’s MyCase or it’s something else, like I think we’re really thinking through meeting the customer where they are, right?  And, you know, it’s funny, a lot of us on the executive team and at AffiniPay in general, like have attorneys in our lives, right?  That’s why we’re called here.  And trying to get like my dad to switch off of like Word doc.  And like some of those like legal pads, even, it’s like good luck, but he might be willing to send a digital invoice.  And so, I think that there’s opportunities across the market, whether it’s through specific sub practice areas, like we’ve done with Docketwise and to think about other forms heavy practices or it’s through different bundles to meet the specific needs and not force someone to buy all of the practice management stuff that they don’t necessarily want.  Like expect more targeted solutions that actually solve very specific pain points for our clients.

Jared D. Correia:  Fantastic, Dru.  That was great.  I threw a lot of questions your way, did great job answering them.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  Thanks for coming on.

Dru Armstrong:  Like we could go twice as long.  I could talk about this.  This is my job.

Jared D. Correia:  I know.  I know.

Dru Armstrong:  I talk about this company all day.

Jared D. Correia:  Thank you.  So, 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 settled in the roast beast.

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Welcome everyone.  Here we are again at the rear-end of The Legal Toolkit.  We call it the “rump roast”.  It’s a grab bag of short form topics.  All of my choosing.  Why do I get to pick?  Because I’m the host.  Dru, today we’re going to play one of my favorite games.  It’s going to be “what would Florida Man do?”  But we’re going to add a twist.  This time we’re going to do “what would Florida Man do?  Texas Edition”.  Given the —

Dru Armstrong:  Oh my gosh.

Jared D. Correia:  Located in Austin, although I guess we could call this “what would Texas man do?”  But that’s boring.

Dru Armstrong:  Sounds boring, then you can’t have alligators?

Jared D. Correia:  Exactly or maybe you can?  Alright, here we go.  It’s pretty easy to play.  So, don’t worry.

Dru Armstrong:  Okay, okay.

Jared D. Correia:  What I’m going to do is I’m going to read something out that an actual crazy human being did and all you need to do is tell me whether this person is from Texas or not.  We can get started whenever you’re ready.

Dru Armstrong:  I’m ready.

Jared D. Correia:  Okay, here we go.  And you had a perfect segue, even though you didn’t even realized it.  Maybe.  Mike Trint was about to take his younger daughter to her first day of middle school, then she reported that an alligator was in the driveway.  Trint called the authorities for help, but couldn’t get anyone to come.  So, he took matters into his own hands.  He got a towel over the gator, then calmed down enough to let him dry past and get his younger daughter to school early.  Then, he returned and his 19-year-old daughter helped him to subdue the gator, taped his mouth shut with duct tape, and then he and his friend put it into a truck, released it into a pond.  Now, one thing I want to relay here is that he merely like taped the alligator up and left it in the driveway while his other toddler was at home, because he got to get the kid to school before he’d take care of the alligator.

(00:30:00)

Dru Armstrong:  I mean priorities, right?  Depending on the school, that — pissing off the school maybe worse than get your neighbor getting bit by an alligator, right?

Jared D. Correia:  That’s true.  That’s true.  You are late, but there was an alligator in my driveway, but we don’t care.

Dru Armstrong:  We don’t care.

Jared D. Correia:  The ultimate question is, was this a Texas man or not?

Dru Armstrong:  I mean, I’d go with another state.  How many alligators are there in Texas?

Jared D. Correia:  Apparently, there’s at least one because —

Dru Armstrong:  You’re like, I bet it is a Florida man who moved to Texas and he brought it and it was his pet gator.

Jared D. Correia:  IT might be, I haven’t found that online.  All right, we got a few more for you.

Dru Armstrong:  Okay.  Okay.

Jared D. Correia:  This one’s fun.  A man was caught on camera in a pet store sniffing the butt of another customer, went back three times if I have video.  Maybe he thought he was in a pet store and that’s appropriate to do in a pet store.  Was this a Texas man or not?

Dru Armstrong:  No, that’s not a Texas man.

Jared D. Correia:  This is a Texas man.

Dru Armstrong:  Stop it.  So, we’re all these yeses?

Jared D. Correia:  Maybe, maybe not, maybe not.

Dru Armstrong:  I feel like that’s how you get shot in Texas.  I’m just saying.

Jared D. Correia:  I’m surprised that this guy did not get shot, crazy stuff going down at Texas.

Dru Armstrong:  It does not sound — I mean the alligator thing, I thought we had more alligators, 100% I could see that happening.

Jared D. Correia:  I know.

Dru Armstrong:  But —

Jared D. Correia:  I kind of feel bad because I intentionally used that to throw you off.  Now, I feel guilty.

Dru Armstrong:  No, don’t feel guilty.  It’s okay.

Jared D. Correia:  Well, we’ve got three more.

Dru Armstrong:  Learning everything.  My adopted state.  I’m learning so much.

Jared D. Correia:  I got three really good ones left.

Dru Armstrong:  Okay, okay.

Jared D. Correia:  A man was arrested for eating pancakes on a small table that he brought into a crosswalk on an active street.  He wasn’t wearing a shirt, Texas man?

Dru Armstrong:  Yes.  Texas man.

Jared D. Correia:  Florida man, Florida man.  The Florida Man is a struggle.  It is.

Dru Armstrong:  This is a hard game.  This is a hard game.

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.  It’s not like financial services.  It’s not as easy as that.

Dru Armstrong:  No, this is like a big bait switch.  Because I definitely feel like — one of the things I love about Texas is like, it’s very independent.  And so, I can definitely see someone being like, “A, don’t tell me what to wear.  And B, don’t tell me where to You my pancakes,” right?  I mean like that 100% could happen in Texas any day.

Jared D. Correia:  Honestly, I want to do it in Massachusetts like this afternoon.  It sounds amazing.  All right, we got two left.  Still a chance to redeem yourself here.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah.  Unlikely, but I’m enjoying the game.  So, that’s okay.

Jared D. Correia:  This is a recent one.  At a tailgate, pregame before football game, one of the fans forgot to completely turn off the grill before heading into the stadium.  A fire started and it burned eight whole cars to a crisp.  To a black crisp leaving additional cars with cosmetic damages.  Now, imagine coming out of the stadium seeing that.  Is this a Texas man or not?

Dru Armstrong:  Yes, that’s a Texas man.

Jared D. Correia:  This is a Florida man.

Dru Armstrong:  Stop it!

Jared D. Correia:  Miami Dolphins game.  This happened to the Miami Dolphins game this past week versus Patriots.

Dru Armstrong:  I was like, “are we sure it didn’t happen?”  Because the UT – Bama game just happened here in Austin, so I was like that could — but you know, you can’t picture like the tailgating here is you can’t actually bring your cars that close to the stadium.  So the tailgating is not like, when I lived in South Carolina is like real time.

Jared D. Correia:  Oh, that’s the real deal.

Dru Armstrong:  It’s real.  Real.

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.  Right.

Dru Armstrong:  Real southern tailgating.

Jared D. Correia:  I’ve been down to South Carolina University.  Are you in University of South Carolina?  I always forget.

Dru Armstrong:  I am Clemson, right?  Don’t forget this one.

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah, I’m Clemson yeah, even better.

Dru Armstrong:  Yes.  I live right by Clemson.  So —

Jared D. Correia:  Wow.  Awesome.  All right.  We’re learning so much about you.

Dru Armstrong:  Fun fact, fun fact.  We could do a South Carolina.  Is this a South Carolina versus Florida man next time.

Jared D. Correia:  We’d love to have you back on for that.  All right, we got one more.  I feel like you’re going to get this one.  I feel strongly.

Dru Armstrong:  I don’t know.  So far, I’m over four.  So —

Jared D. Correia:  That’s all right. That’s all right. There’s still a chance to redeem yourself.  A man was wounded after a bullet he fired an armadillo ricocheted and hit him in the head.  The local sheriff says, the shooter opened fire in the early hours of Thursday morning when he spotted the armadillo on his property.  He went outside and took his 38 revolver and shot three times at the armadillo.  The sheriff said comedian, “Ricky Gervais on Twitter tweeted “karmadillo”.  Is this a Texas man? Is this a Florida man?

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah, it’s definitely a Texas man.

Jared D. Correia:  You got it Texas man.  I feel you like we finished strong there.  Are there are a lot of armadillos in Texas.  Are they that much of a problem they have to shoot them?  I don’t feel like this is —

Dru Armstrong:  I mean, there are a lot.  I think there are armadillos —

Jared D. Correia:  Keep as a pet, right?

Dru Armstrong:  I mean, they’re not like in our property in Texas. Like where we live. We’ve gotten more tarantulas and scorpions, but a lot of people have ranches and I think getting drunk and shooting things including armadillos.

(00:35:00)

It’s definitely a part of the — I have a friend.  Fun fact, who has a ranch and he has a Jeep on the ranch and he has built in a frozen margarita blender onto the Jeep.  It’s like Jeep-powered.

Jared D. Correia:  That’s amazing.  Yeah.  You can take that to the tailgate.

Dru Armstrong:  It’s like, “Come on out to the ranch”.  I was like, so what?  The shooting and the margaritas and what’s the order that we take those on?  And then when does the armadillo come in, right?

Jared D. Correia:  Yeah.  You don’t have to come in to party file.  You want to know the order of everything.

Dru Armstrong:  Yeah, I think you start with the margaritas. I just wanted to confirm though.  Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  Oh, absolutely.

Dru Armstrong:  Absolutely.

Jared D. Correia:  Dru, you’ve been great.  Thank you for spending so much time with us.  We learned a lot.  I learned a lot.

Dru Armstrong:  This has been so fun.  Have me on any time.  This was a great conversation.

Jared D. Correia:  Great.  Great.  We will take you off on that.

Dru Armstrong:  And I just want to say this is the first game I’ve ever played where I lost and I actually enjoyed it.  So, I’ll tell my husband tonight. That’s an — Yeah.

Jared D. Correia:  He’d be happy to hear that, I’m sure.  Well, thank you very much.  We’ll definitely have you on again.  Take it easy.

Dru Armstrong:  Awesome.  Thanks so much.

Jared D. Correia:  If you want to find out more about Dru Armstrong at LawPay and MyCase, visit lawpay.com.  That’s L-A-W-P-A-Y at lawpay.com and mycase.com.  That’s M-Y-C-A-S-E dot com mycase.com.  It’s your case, it’s MyCase, it’s our case. 

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Now, for those of you listening in Tarzan, Texas; yes that’s an actual place.  Swing on over our Spotify playlist songs as big as Texas.  Texas is pretty fucking big.  Now, we don’t have time to cover my latest home remedy, but it’s called elephantitis for a reason, people.  Well, maybe we’ll save that discussion for another episode because we’re all out of time and yet, another edition of The Legal Toolkit podcast.  This Jared Correia reminding you that the earth is flat.  No, I’m just fucking with you.  You think Kyrie Irving or some shit?

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