Hyped for “Cocaine Bear”; Filevine’s Ryan Anderson; and “The Magnificent Andersons”

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: It’s the Legal Toolkit with Jared Correia, with guest Ryan Anderson. We play The Magnificent Andersons and then since this is supposedly a tech show, we catch you up on the hot tech issues. This week, Betamax versus VHS. Who will reign supreme? But first, your host, Jared Correia.

Jared Correia: It’s time for the Legal Toolkit podcast. And yes, it’s still called the Legal Toolkit podcast even though I’ve never actually used a right angle flex shaft. I’m your host, Jared Correia. You’re stuck with me because Elizabeth Banks was unavailable. She’s working on some shit as you’ll hear more about in a second and also hosting a reboot of the most underrated game show ever, ‘Press Your Luck.’ No whammies, no whammies.

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 chatbots so law firms can convert more leads and conversational document assembly tools so law firms can build documents faster and more accurately. You can find out more about Gideon at gideonlegal.com.

Now, before we get to our interview today with Filevine CEO Ryan Anderson, let’s talk about the 2023 Best Picture Winner of the Oscars. You might be asking yourself, I wonder what Jared is going to be doing on February 24, 2023. You’re probably not alone in asking that question honestly. So let me tell you, I’ll be at opening night of Cocaine Bear. Yes, it’s true. Just as I was lamenting the lack of quality, R-rated comedy films but a few short weeks ago, here comes wandering into my life Cocaine Bear which appears to be an R-rated comedy horror film. Cocaine Bear is the hero we need but not the one we deserve.

So there’s a lot to unpack here literally. Let’s start with the story of Cocaine Bear. He was a real bear. That’s right. This shit is based on a true story. So this drug dealer was flying over a forest in Georgia and he had too much cocaine in his plane. I mean how many times has that happened to you? Am I right? And he parachuted out of the plane, only was still carrying too much cocaine, this time on his person. He hit the ground too hard and died leaving the cocaine spread all over the forest floor.

Now, here’s Cocaine Bear, not yet Cocaine Bear, just chilling out in the forest back in the halcyon days of 1985 and this high grade coke just literally falls into his lap. So he tries some and he dies of a drug overdose. The authorities find that the bear is dead amongst the cocaine like fucking Scarface only in the woods. So it turns out Cocaine Bear did about five grams of cocaine all by himself. That’s kind of a lot for a single biological entity I’m assuming because I’ve obviously never done cocaine. But that’s the whole story. Nobody knows what Cocaine Bear actually did while he was tripping balls out there in the forest. Well, I guess it’s not the entire story. Cocaine Bear is now stuffed and is taxidermied hide is in Lexington, Kentucky as something called the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall. I don’t know what the fuck that’s about. Shitty way to go. Resigned to being stuck in a mall forever. Don’t do drugs kids.

Now and actually, Cocaine Bear the movie takes some poetic license with this story because the movie would be kind of boring if it was just about a bear dying alone in the woods for cocaine overdose. So of course in the film, Cocaine Bear goes crazy and runs off on a cocaine-fueled killing rampage. Now, at that point, I’m already in but the movie is also directed by Elizabeth Banks who’s funny and so now I’m in further. Oh, and by the way, this is Ray Liotta’s last film role. I always wondered how Henry Hill would have fared against the cocaine adult apex predator. Now I know. Fucking Ray Liotta man, always saving the best for last.

Let’s do a trailer breakdown. Movie opens with an ambulance pulling up to a cabin in the woods. Inside, the whole place has been destroyed and someone appears to be dead. Paramedic opens the closet. Oops, there’s a bear waltzing out of the darkness and it’s coked up beyond belief. A chase ensues. Backstory, authorities are looking for missing cocaine, parents looking for missing kids, missing kids find cocaine. Ray Liotta, a drug kingpin, shot of cocaine bear ingesting a metric shit-ton of cocaine weighing more than five grams.

(00:05:11)

Bemused henchmen, new Han Solo and Ice Cube Jr., wonder what sort of effect housing all of that cocaine will have on Cocaine Bear. Well, I have an idea. Ray Liotta seemed surprised that a bear would do cocaine like he hasn’t seen that before. Kids are found but they’re hiding in the tree because bears can’t climb trees. No, wait, they can. And coked-up bears can climb trees like a motherfucker apparently. Cocaine Bear is coming after this kid but hauls ass up another tree because this guy on that tree has cocaine on his body and Cocaine Bear is feigning for the White Horse. Keri Russell astonished by Cocaine Bear’s agility. Next, Cocaine Bear is seen licking cocaine off a severed leg.

Now, Cocaine Bear is chasing after an ambulance containing an injured forest ranger and the paramedics from the first scene were obviously scared shitless. And here’s Cocaine Bear leaping at a full sprint like 15 feet in the air into the open doors of the ambulance like a fucking Earth sign Roy Tarpley. End scene. Well not exactly. Cocaine Bear is next seen humping a tree rather vigorously and trying to get some privacy but these two hikers stumble upon him and of course he’s on them like a fly on shit. Maybe he thought they had some coke. Okay, I’ve seen enough. Take all my money.

Now I don’t know how you follow that up but here’s Joshua Lenon, executive producer of meth squirrel with this week’s edition of the Clio Legal Trends Report minute.

[Music]

Joshua Lenon: Today, fewer than 30% of lawyers work exclusively from an office and 49% say they prefer to work from home. I’m Joshua Lenon, Lawyer in Residence at Clio and this is just one finding from our recent Legal Trends Report. As legal professionals embrace more flexibility in where they work, the boundaries between professional and personal life have blurred. Today’s lawyers need the tools and resources that can help them stay connected to their work no matter where they are while also helping them disconnect when they need to. Learn how cloud technology can help lawyers balance work and life by downloading Clio’s Legal Trends Report for free at clio.com/trends. That’s Clio spelled C-L-I-O.com/trends.

Jared Correia: Okay, let’s get to the meat in the middle of this Legal Tech sandwich. Today’s meat is pastrami and I still love the pastrami sandwiches at Sam LaGrassa’s in Downtown, Boston even though I haven’t been there in ages. Okay, I’ll stop digressing. It’s time to reveal our guest. My guest today is Ryan Anderson who’s the founder and CEO of Filevine which I would call a leading case management software company for lawyers. Ryan, I’m sure you agree. How are you doing sir?

Ryan Anderson: Yeah. I mean I think you’re missing the leading case management.

Jared Correia: I tease you up for that. Thanks for coming on today. It’s been a long time since we had you on the show. I think almost like 10 years.

Ryan Anderson: I don’t think it’s been that long. I think it was 2015. But it has been a minute for sure, yeah.

Jared Correia: Yeah. So I’m glad to have you back on. I wanted to do like a wide-ranging conversation about what you’re up to, how Filevine is doing and then we’ll get into the Rump Roast which is really why I do this. All right, so I know a lot of people out there know you but not everybody does so let me ask you like the founder story, right? Why did you start Filevine? Why did you get into the case management software game when you did when they were already some established players like how did that come about?

Ryan Anderson: Yeah. So I practiced law for about seven years and as a lawyer, I found that there really wasn’t good what I would call project management software that was sort of built around the needs of lawyers. In particular, when I would attempt to make assignments to my team, it always felt like I had trouble with when I went to follow up with them, there was, “Wait a sec. You didn’t tell me to do that” or “I didn’t know what the due date was” or “what was the priority on that.”

So I said about to find something that could help with that and I looked at sort of all the players that were available at that time. Frankly, none of them did that thing. There was a lot of software out there that held kind of libraries information or held your documents or might help you run a conflict check but none of them were really focused around what I thought was the most important work which was the back-and-forth communication that lawyers engage in between partners, between associates, between paralegals. And so, I really wanted to solve that particular thing and that birthed Filevine.

Jared Correia: So sort of like communications centric platform for project management?

Ryan Anderson: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Jared Correia: Yeah, that’s really cool. So you mentioned this, you ran a law firm before Filevine so I’m always interested. I want to explore this a little bit. You talked a little bit about how that informed how you built and managed Filevine.

(00:10:01)

I’m not surprised to hear that. I knew that a little bit. Now, if somebody who’s like a lawyer and also running a law practice software company like how do you make the call to move out of law practice and do something like this full time? How do you make that transition? And are you still making it? Are you like involved in the law firm from time to time?

Ryan Anderson: Yeah. I mean I get asked that a lot and I guess my answer to the question is like, I don’t know that I ever sat down and I said, “Okay, like this is the day.”

Jared Correia: I’m not practicing law anymore today.

Ryan Anderson: Yeah. I mean I did tell folks, “Hey, I’m going to do — there’s a trial I think in 2016 and I kind of said, “Okay, like mentally this is my last trial. I’m never going to do another trial after this.” So there was that but there wasn’t a particular day when I said, “Okay, I’m never going to be a lawyer again.” And you know, I get asked a lot about sort of this notion of risk of like, “Oh my gosh, you’re moving from being a lawyer to being an entrepreneur” and “don’t you worry about the risk involved in that?” And my answer is always like, “Well, wait a second,” like, “it’s not as if my ability to be a lawyer goes away the day I started a tech company.” I’m quite certain I could get hired as a lawyer today. Now, maybe I wouldn’t get paid as much, right? But if I went and applied at a law firm or a series of law firms, I’m pretty sure I could get a job even if the spotlight –.

Jared Correia: I suspect that you would, yeah.

Ryan Anderson: I suspect that I would. And so to me, the risk didn’t seem all that severe. And so, my encouragement to anybody thinking through this is, think through the downside and I think you’ll find that it’s actually not all that much more significant than if you didn’t do it at all. So yeah, I mean the other thing I’ll just mention is, it is hard, right? Being an entrepreneur is harder. There’s a lot more unknown and so if you’re kind of afraid of waking up in the morning and thinking, “Gosh, what are all the things that need to happen today? I don’t actually know all the answers.” That is different. That’s substantively different than being a lawyer.

Jared Correia: Yeah. There’s like no precedent really in law practice.

Ryan Anderson: Right, exactly. Yeah.

Jared Correia: I think that’s really interesting that you look at it that way and it’s funny because lawyers are like the most risk averse people in the world because their whole job is like figuring out risk profiles for everyone else and solving for them. It’s really hard for you to look at an endeavor and be like not seeing all the negative behind that.

Ryan Anderson: That’s exactly right.

Jared Correia: I wanted to segue off at this little bit. So like there are a bunch of legal tech companies out there now, the legal tech industry keeps growing like by the day by the hour and then some of these companies are founded by lawyers and then I hate this term but we’re just going to use it for clarification. Some of these companies are founded by non-lawyers. So somebody who’s an attorney who built the legal tech company, do you view yourself as running that organization differently than if you didn’t have that legal experience?

Ryan Anderson: I think it’s really hard to found a legal tech company without being a lawyer. Now, that isn’t an unpopular opinion.

Jared Correia: That’s all right. What’s wrong with it?

Ryan Anderson: Yeah, I just think if we’re being honest, to start a company, I really like sort of the line out of Silicon Valley. I think Peter Thiel sort of made it famous which is you should be able to have an answer to the contrarian question of, what do I believe that most people don’t believe? And that’s actually a really hard question to answer. And so, what I would say is like, a lawyer has a key insight. A lawyer has an ability to come up on a secret about what they may believe about the world that they think is true that a whole bunch of people won’t know about.

And so, when I walk into a product meeting to this day, you know, coming up on not quite eight years but seven years after we launched Filevine, I can still say, “Hold on, wait a second, that’s actually not how this works. I’m missing some key steps.” And often times, the product gets reworked based on something that I saw in a design session with one of our UI folks and sometimes it’s like a critical component. Now, my team might say, “Yeah, Ryan’s always driving us crazy. I wish they’d just let us do our job.” And so, maybe I’m adding no value at all. But if I’m being honest, I think that I am and I think that sort of deep industry expertise is really hard to replicate.

What I would say is, we find that the best people and fine but not the best people but some of our best people. Obviously we have great people who didn’t have prior legal experience. Many, many, many people. But boy, if you have law firm experience and you have an entrepreneurial mindset or some technical capabilities, basically just drop me a resume. We want to hire you because those folks tend to do so well at this company. You look across any sort of list of Filevine rock stars and you just see it populated by a bunch of people who have both legal experience and some tech prowess or at least sort of an entrepreneurial bent. And I do find that those sort of Venn diagrams coming up on each other, where they overlap, you really do find some magical people who can progress the business in really interesting ways.

(00:15:09)

Jared Correia: You’ve been very kind to answer questions about yourself. You’re a successful guy but also I know you’re a modest dude so let’s talk about Filevine now, the product.

Ryan Anderson: Phenomenal.

Jared Correia: So, I think you guys have done a really nice job and I tell people this all the time about focusing on the product and not the outside noise and like building valuable features into the system. And that’s not necessarily true of every technology company, right? So, how do you maintain a focus like that across your organization?

Ryan Anderson: So I’ll say another controversial thing. I think that’s really hard to do when — it is not impossible. There are examples of this happening but when a founder leaves a company, I do think there’s a bit of an entrepreneurial spark that goes with it, right? There’s a reason founders start companies that is above and beyond any sort of monetary benefit and that certainly was the case for me. I deeply wanted to see some of these problems solved for myself but also I took great gratification and seeing them solved for others.

And so, look, it’s not all about me of course, you’re 100% right. But I do think that because I care so much about solving problems for our customers that it sort of gets infused into the entire business. Nothing drives me crazier than a customer saying this doesn’t meet my needs. Oh my gosh, that’s like nails on a chalkboard. That’s not a world I want to live in, right? And so, you know — but honestly, it may even hold us back sometimes. A professional CEO might say, “Well, look I’m just going to ruthlessly tell this customer that that’s just not the business we’re involved in and that may be the economically correct decision but for me, like gosh, getting the customer what they need to solve the problem, that’s what drives me. And so, I do think I tend to hire people that have that same intensity around solving customer problems.

Jared Correia: That makes sense.

Ryan Anderson: That and we’ve just really have fallen in love with our community. Obviously, I’ve always really loved the community. There is no more fun thing than to take somebody who hasn’t come up in Legal Tech and take them to a conference. Maybe it’s a Filevine event, maybe it’s — or maybe it’s a conference where our customers are there and they stop by the booth and the customers say, “Oh my gosh, we love Filevine. We can’t live without it. Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us.” And actually having that experience as somebody who hadn’t known the customer base before, our team members, they just light up and they get addicted to that feeling.

So, I think that’s part of it too. It’s just sort of a relentless obsession with –.

Jared Correia: Yeah. Always chasing that high.

Ryan Anderson: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right. I think that’s what it is.

Jared Correia: All right. So let’s talk about a couple of specific things you’ve done recently. So you acquired the DACA which is a CRM and Outlaw kind of a contract management software you were kind of building it out to be more like document management tool as well. And that’s been one way to expand your products. So, how do you — because everybody’s trying to build like sort of an operating system for legal where they have as many features that they can with the product. How do you make decisions about which products to target and when to pull the trigger to make an acquisition? Because that’s a big deal.

Ryan Anderson: Yeah, it is a big deal. So, two things, I think it’s good to be strategic and have a thesis on what the industry is going to look like in a few years and execute on that thesis by way of either product development or acquisition. And it’s also good to be opportunistic and when opportunities come along that look interesting, take advantage of them. And so, I can tell you, Lead Docket looked a little bit more like the latter and (00:18:36) looks a little bit more like the former. On Outlaw, we really have a strategic belief around what the future of documents in law is going to look like. As you know, we recently released .vine.

Jared Correia: Oh man, let’s tease that because I want to talk about .vine but later. All right everybody, hang around for that.

Ryan Anderson: Fair enough. Well, I would love to talk about .vine.

Jared Correia: Great.

Ryan Anderson: That very much came out of a thesis I had and quite frankly, I need to give a lot of credit to Cain Elliott and our head of product Michael Anderson who happens to be Cain’s brother. Cain is great. And you know, there’s a lot of people at Filevine who deserves so much credit who do so much more than me but I’ll just say like the three of us really had a firm belief that the way that documents were going to work in legal was going to be different 10 years from now. And we had some very specific beliefs about how that was going to happen and we didn’t see anybody doing it. And so, that was what spurred the Outlaw acquisition.

On the Lead Docket side, frankly, we just had a ton of customers who are coming to us saying, “Hey we need a Lead Docket integration.” And then they stopped coming to us and saying anything because it turns out Lead Docket went and built the integration and we didn’t even know. And so, I asked some of those customers. I said, “What happened? Were you able to integrate with Lead Docket? Did you not go with it?” And they said, “Oh no, Lead Docket did it and it’s great and we love it.”

(00:19:59)

So that spurred an initial conversation with me and some of the founding team and we were able to come together a few months after our initial conversations and boy, what a great product, what a great team. Just a special call out to Eric Hoffman if he’s listening to this. Another mission driven founder. And so were the Outlaw folks too I should say but Eric Hoffman is a mission-driven founder who just deeply cares about the customers and has built the product that has, I don’t know if I should say these kinds of things but I sort of can’t help myself.

Jared Correia: Go ahead, let it fly.

Ryan Anderson: Yeah. We look at MPS scores right across all of our products and Lead Docket has the highest MPS score of any product in the file line suite including Common(ph) Core, the product we built. So it’s just a beloved product and for good reason it’s amazing.

Jared Correia: That’s super interesting. I’m glad I picked two that you acquired for different reasons. That was helpful. All right, I only got two more questions for you. We’re going to get to .vine. But before we do that, one of the things that I think is really interesting is like there’s this crazy good sales culture out in Utah probably because of the influence of probably like the Mormons stuff and knocking on everybody’s door. It’s like you’re located in Utah so what’s it like being in that environment? Does that help you to raise your game within your company? We see all these other companies like really executing on sales at a high-level.

Ryan Anderson: Oh, totally. And look, salespeople are competitive. I know they’re competitive and there is no doubt about it. When you see a bunch of companies around you that are successful, you want to be just as successful as they are. So it does help you raise your game from sort of a competitive emotional standpoint. But also, like the ecosystem is just incredible. I mean there’s just not that many places on planet Earth where every day, new sales leaders are getting mented in hundreds of companies within a relatively small area and those people might wind up working for us. And so, that’s just incredibly valuable. And hopefully, we’ve done some of the same.

There has been some great people who’ve come and gone through the Filevine sales team and gosh, some of them I just think any company that hires some of these folks, they’re just so lucky. Not because they’ve had the chance to work for Filevine but Filevine had the chance to work with them and see them grow and mature and if that meant that they needed to leave and go work at another great company, that’s totally fine. And gosh, some of those people are just really amazing and I’ve kept in touch with them and really look up to them.

Jared Correia: Next, we will find high quality talent within like a couple of square miles.

Ryan Anderson: That’s right. It’s awesome.

Jared Correia: All right. What we’ve been waiting for, .vine. So for folks who don’t know, you guys have developed a proprietary document format which kind of makes sense given like the conversation we just had about Outlaw. But as you probably know, there’s also been some consternation about this online. I was looking at articles that Bob Ambrogi wrote the other day and one of his headers was misguided idea. So there’s that. What an asshole, right? I mean, can you talk about like what .vine is and then talk about your thesis for pushing this out because I think it’s really interesting. It’s an interesting play for sure.

Ryan Anderson: I think you’re being too kind. Bob is great but let’s be clear. He said we were and I’m quoting, “hallucinatory.”

Jared Correia: You pulled a better quote than me. That’s on me. All right, go ahead.

Ryan Anderson: Look, I would rather be, what he calls hallucinatory, I’ll call visionary. I would rather be visionary and envision a world where we are not encumbered by a platform that’s been around for 40 years that wasn’t built for us than to simply succumb to the idea that every new product is going to spend massive amounts of time and resources, not only integrating with Word, but continuing to deal with the Byzantine and ever-changing API ecosystem around Word.

If you ask a developer who’s had to develop something forward, they will tell you it’s a challenge. A bit controversial here the Ironclad CEO actually remarked about .vine on Twitter in sort of kind of a negative way. And his note was, “Hey, you know, we spent the past three years building interoperability with Word.” Well, that’s fine. And by the way, I’m sure it’s fantastic and I’m sure it wins them a lot of deals than they should because everyone uses Word. And so, it is probably a great business move.

But the question is like, is that the world we want to be in where any startup that it wants to have a really good experience for those who are drafting legal documents has to spend three years and probably millions, if not, tens of millions of dollars of venture capital money building integrations into Word? And by the way, it won’t end. Word is going to change. Microsoft is going to make improvements and updates to Word as they should. That’s what any company would do. And when they do, those APIs will change. And so yet again, that team will have to dig in and fix those changes and make them better. So, it’s hard. It’s a slog.

(00:25:06)

And the Outlaw guys, Evan and Dan, did something that is really gutsy and that you just don’t see. There’s a crowded CLM space. Everybody’s rotating around Word like it’s the sun and these guys said, “Hey, wait a second. Let’s start with a beginner’s mindset. If we were going to build a CLM and Word didn’t exist in the world, what would we do? How would we build it?” And so, they started from fundamental first principles and they said, “Actually, we would build our own document system, our own document format.” And so they did. And I find it incredibly visionary, interesting, novel that these guys would do that. And they did and Evan’s actually put up a piece about how long it took him to do this. This is like a 20-year journey for Evan. Yeah, it’s just really incredible.

And so, I just find it awesome that somebody was willing to go out and make that happen. And so, when we saw Outlaw for the first time, I can tell you, my mind was just blown. I thought, “Oh my goodness, like why in the world would you want to operate in anything but this? Why would you want to draft a legal document in anything but something like this? And look, it’s not perfect, right? It doesn’t obviously doesn’t do everything Word has done. That’s one of the biggest companies in the world.

Jared Correia: It’s a high bar.

Ryan Anderson: Yeah. I mean my goodness. We’re not going to meet them feature for feature today but I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of things Outlaw does and .vine does that are significantly better than I think the experience is in Word. So yeah, we’re going forward. We fully believe in this model and frankly, we’ve already had some interest from other companies who want to integrate with .vine and it’ll be an open protocol. Anybody will be able to use it and we think they should.

Jared Correia: Good for you man. It’s baller. I love it. Like, why not? And then the fact that you as the CEO of the company were able to support these guys in the project that they were working on for a long time, that’s great too. And now yeah, it’s always an evolving thing but we’ll see what the adoption and what the community thinks of it but kudos to you.

Ryan Anderson: Thank you.

Jared Correia: Now, I think Bob and I are going to have lunch in a couple of weeks. I think I am now probably going to have to pay for lunch but that’s all right. I’ll do it for you. Thanks for coming on man. You were great as always. Can you hang around for the last segment?

Ryan Anderson: Of course, absolutely.

Jared Correia: All right. So we’re going to take one final sponsor break everybody so you can hear more about what our sponsors could do for your law practice. Then stay tuned for the Rump Roast. It’s even more supple than the roast beast.

[Music]

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Welcome back everybody. 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. Ryan, thanks for coming back, appreciate it.

Ryan Anderson: Thanks for having me.

Jared Correia: We did the Legal Talk. Now, we’re going to do something entirely different. So today, we’re going to play a game I’m calling The Magnificent Andersons. And for the first time ever, it’s a two-parter. So I don’t know if you know this but I had Eric Bermudez on the podcast on your team.

Ryan Anderson: Oh my goodness.

Jared Correia: Yes.

Ryan Anderson: Good for you.

Jared Correia: A couple months back.

(00:30:02)

Eric’s a great dude. I love that. He’s hilarious.

Ryan Anderson: He’s the best.

Jared Correia: And so what I found was there were like probably 700 Eric Bermudez’s online. So, we went down the list of Eric Bermudez’s and I asked him to rank himself against these other people.

Ryan Anderson: Okay.

Jared Correia: Now as you might imagine this, there’s also a lot of Ryan Andersons online as well.

Ryan Anderson: Oh my goodness. There were three or four in my high school so yeah.

Jared Correia: Really? No way.

Ryan Anderson: I think there were at least three, yeah.

Jared Correia: Oh my god. Okay. Segment one, we’re going to talk about some other Ryan Andersons and I’d like you to rank yourself in the list of Ryan Andersons. Where would you be — you’re a successful guy. Where will you be with the other Ryan Andersons? How are you doing? How are you keeping up with the Joneses or the Andersons in this case? And then we’re going to do a little trivia segment in which I’m going to ask you to choose between famous Andersons or Ryans.

Ryan Anderson: Okay, I’m all in.

Jared Correia: I don’t do this for just anybody. Here’s just a smattering of Ryan Andersons I found online. They’re actually two Ryan Andersons who have played in the NBA, at least two. One guy was the 21st overall pick in the 2008 draft by the Nets and the Magic and I think he’s still playing right now maybe for the Rockets. Another Ryan Anderson in the NBA played for Xavier University and also went to Boston College. And then there’s also a Ryan Anderson in the NFL believe or not.

Ryan Anderson: Wow.

Jared Correia: He is a linebacker or was a linebacker for the Washington Commanders. And then there’s even a Ryan Anderson playing Major League Baseball. He’s in the Yankees farm system right now. Around 12 pick. So let’s start with the sports related Ryan Andersons because there’s another category of Ryan Andersons I would like to get to. How would you rank yourself among the Ryan Andersons or alternatively, if you could be a Ryan Anderson playing a sport, which sport would you play? Basketball? Football? Baseball?

Ryan Anderson: Undoubtedly I’d play football.

Jared Correia: Really? Now did you play?

Ryan Anderson: I played Peewee League football and I was the second best safety on the team.

Jared Correia: Oh, that’s pretty good. Two safety starting, right? Free safety and strong safety, you’re one of those.

Ryan Anderson: Yeah. Strong safety. I love playing football with my two boys. We love watching football together so football definitely.

Jared Correia: Okay. Now, there’s another option if you wanted to subsume the identity of another Ryan Anderson. There are actually a lot of Ryan Andersons who are college professors. Did you know this?

Ryan Anderson: I did not know this.

Jared Correia: Okay, so let me give you some more choices and you can tell me which Ryan Anderson you would prefer it to be. This is a Ryan Anderson at Santa Clara University who is a cultural and environmental anthropologist. Sounds pretty interesting. Works in Baja, California, Mexico. There’s a Ryan Anderson who works at the University of North Carolina and he has his Bachelors in Social Science Education and has written a couple books. He works on advertising gender and race. And then lastly, we got a Ryan Anderson local to me at Berkeley College who’s the director of housing and residential education.

So if you could be one of these Ryan Andersons, would you be the anthropologist, the music school housing director or the social science professor?

Ryan Anderson: Without a doubt, it would be the anthropologist. I’ll trade him straight up, same salary, whole deal as long as I get to live in Baja, California. I’m sitting here on a very cold day in November in Sugarhouse, Salt Lake City, Utah and I want to get the heck out of here so I would love to be in Baja right now.

Jared Correia: I’m learning so much about you. This is delightful. There’s also a Ryan Anderson who’s a lawyer in Orange County but that’s warm also but I think we already know your answer to that because here you are having left the law practice and started a tech company. All right, let’s go to portion number two. I got some trivia for you. Now, I want to see how you perform. I’m going to give you five questions. We will grade you. So we’re going to do famous Ryans, famous Andersons.

First question, we’ll start off with an easy one. This Ryan starred in the movie, The Notebook. Do you need multiple choice or do you know this Ryan?

Ryan Anderson: I saw The Notebook but I don’t know it.

Jared Correia: I was actually trying to get you to admit that you saw The Notebook.

Ryan Anderson: I did, it’s just –.

Jared Correia: Okay. So Ryan Gosling, Meg Ryan.

Ryan Anderson: Of course Ryan Gosling.

Jared Correia: All right. We went one for one. One for one. All right, next. This Ryan threw seven no-hitters in his career.

Ryan Anderson: Nolan Ryan.

Jared Correia: Beautiful. Two for two. All right, now it’s going to get a little harder. This Anderson, the Anderson grouping is harder than the Ryan grouping. I don’t know I did it that way. This Anderson made her London theater debut in 1938 at the Windmill theater. I know you probably know this off the top of your head. Is it Daphne Anderson? Jessica Anderson? Pamela Anderson? I told you they’d get tougher.

(00:35:02)

Ryan Anderson: I’m going to go with Daphne. I think the name is era-appropriate.

Jared Correia: You are correct sir. Well done. Look at you, man. You still got those lawyer skills figuring out using the context clues. All right, I got two more. I think you might be able to sweep the category. You’d be one of the very few people who swept the trivia. Okay. This Anderson was Scully on the X Files. Ivy Anderson, Lindsay Anderson or Gillian Anderson?

Ryan Anderson:  Gillian.

Jared Correia: Beautiful. I met Chris Carter of the X-Files a couple months ago. Really interesting dude. My wife was a huge X-Files fan. She made me put this in. Okay, last question. This Anderson is Jethro Tull. Anderson Cooper, Ian Anderson or Hugh Anderson?

Ryan Anderson: Hugh.

Jared Correia: You were so close.

Ryan Anderson: Damn, I was so close.

Jared Correia: Right at the end.

Ryan Anderson: And I said it with so much confidence too.

Jared Correia: I know. I almost was like yes. Ian Anderson is the guy behind Jethro Tull. All right, Ryan beautiful work here. I learned that you in another life would want to be an anthropologist and an NFL safety and then you crushed it in trivia. Four out of five, 80%, nothing to sneeze at. Thanks so much for coming on. This is a blast.

Ryan Anderson: Oh, thank you Jared. It’s always good talking to you man.

Jared Correia: Thanks, take it easy.

Ryan Anderson: Bye guys.

[Music]

If you want to find out more about Ryan Anderson of Filevine, visit filevine.com. That’s F-I-L-E-V-I-N-E.com all one word. Filevine.com.

Now, for those of you listening in Ball’s Ferry, Georgia, I’ve got a health playlist for you because cocaine is a hell of a drug. This week, I’ve got songs about bears and cocaine. You don’t think I have enough songs about bears and cocaine to make a full playlist? Think again. I’ve run out of time here so I won’t be able to — ongoing controversy surrounding the Betamax versus VHS debate. But next week, we’ll take up a discussion about Blu-rays. This is Jared Correia reminding you that that’s not your turkey sandwich Rob. It’s probably Cocaine Bears.

Outro: The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, it’s officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.

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