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Law and Life: Insights with the Simon Brothers · Justice Team Podcast

• 0:02
  Bob: Welcome to this episode of the justice team podcast
• 0:05
  on the justice team network.
• 0:06
  And today we have a very special episode with, you know, it is my goal to clone
• 0:10
  myself using artificial intelligence.
• 0:12
  So I could do a podcast doing that, but we're doing as close as we can today
• 0:16
  as we have my roommate, we shared a womb, we shared some rooms, we share
• 0:20
  a firm, we share everything together.
• 0:23
  My twin brother, Mr.
• 0:23
  Brad Simon.
• 0:25
  Brad: Brad here.
• 0:25
  I know I'm not a common guest.
• 0:27
  I could be, I should be, but you know, got a lot going on.
• 0:31
  Besides we've got.
• 0:32
  Our law firm, we have Justice HQ, we have Attorney Share, we have
• 0:36
  the Ravel video game, we have a lot of things going on at once.
• 0:40
  Bob: Yeah, so, uh, we always joke that Brad operates the firm and the
• 0:44
  companies in his underwear in the closet.
• 0:46
  First of all, Brad, is that true?
• 0:48
  Brad: It is a closet that we, we had a his and hers closet when we were
• 0:51
  doing the house and his closet got turned into an office for two people.
• 0:55
  Uh, so I work in a two by six room, uh, with my wife.
• 0:59
  So two computers, two humans, sometimes a dog, a couple cats.
• 1:03
  We have a bearded dragon.
• 1:04
  We got four kids.
• 1:05
  There's a lot going on in that house.
• 1:06
  Bob: Do you see a bearded dragon?
• 1:08
  Brad: Yeah, a little bearded dragon.
• 1:09
  He's been hibernating for like four months.
• 1:12
  We thought, we think he's dead, but then he moves every once in a while.
• 1:15
  Bob: Wow.
• 1:15
  There you have it.
• 1:16
  They learn something new every day.
• 1:17
  So Brad.
• 1:18
  Um, you are what we call the managing partner of the Simon Law Group.
• 1:23
  Can you explain to everybody, because a lot of people think that,
• 1:25
  you know, when we started the firm that it's all glitz and glamour.
• 1:29
  We started 2010.
• 1:31
  Um, kind of what your role is.
• 1:32
  And I know when people, when they start their business, what
• 1:34
  they need to look forward to.
• 1:36
  Brad: So I would say when we started out, I was doing 50 percent lawyer
• 1:42
  stuff like depositions, everything that a lawyer would do and 50
• 1:45
  percent managing the business.
• 1:47
  What does that mean?
• 1:48
  That means payroll.
• 1:50
  That means sitting down on when you had a condo in Brentwood and us designing
• 1:53
  a little logo together with the Hulk solid rock solid font that we found.
• 1:59
  It means doing letterhead.
• 2:01
  It means ordering business cards.
• 2:02
  It means everything that you need to do to run a business.
• 2:05
  Compliance red tape.
• 2:06
  It's what's the best jurisdiction for taxes?
• 2:09
  What domain name should we use?
• 2:11
  We originally had uh, The simon law group because simon law group was
• 2:15
  taken slg was taken obviously So our domain name was the simon law group.
• 2:20
  So every time I said, hey, what's your email address?
• 2:22
  It's hey, i'm brad at the simon law group the thean had to spell it every time
• 2:26
  and so When we big enough and had enough money, we spent a sizable amount of money
• 2:32
  to get the domain name justice team.
• 2:34
  And I think that's a lot of things people overlook when you're managing a
• 2:37
  business, starting a business, what's your domain name, what's your email name.
• 2:40
  You're going to have to repeating that a lot.
• 2:42
  I know there's a lot of that NFC, you can just like tap your phone and it populates
• 2:45
  into theirs, but a lot of potential new clients, they just need to hear your, your
• 2:49
  domain name needs to be easy to remember.
• 2:51
  Um, And get them all get.
• 2:54
  com.
• 2:55
  org.
• 2:55
  net every variation because someone's going to cyber squad on you.
• 2:58
  Bob: Yeah.
• 2:58
  And I mean, Brad's the master of that.
• 3:00
  Like he owns so many, he's the master of domains.
• 3:03
  You're the master
• 3:04
  Brad: of domains.
• 3:05
  Bob: I mean, there's so many, we even have a lot of.
• 3:07
  esq ones.
• 3:09
  Um, you know, people do a lot of like negative, they call it negative SEO
• 3:13
  where they like bid on your name.
• 3:14
  So if you search Robert Simon and your city, sometimes it'll just show
• 3:20
  like, you know, Whoever's paying for your name to go number one, which is
• 3:24
  Brad: the buyer like put you as a tag a code to get to that area but
• 3:29
  managing a business it's it's something that I wish I didn't college was take
• 3:33
  business courses like we We I did fine arts and criminal justice and
• 3:37
  that was great for I tried to do comic books I did speaking of comic books.
• 3:42
  I have a new graphic novel right here graphic novel called Morado
• 3:46
  created by Ronan Dugan a famous lawyer out here in LA And he co
• 3:51
  created this with some of his buddies.
• 3:53
  Um, it'll be released soon.
• 3:55
  We got the pre release, probably some typos.
• 3:57
  I mean, he's from Ireland, so I'm sure there's some arse instead of ass in there.
• 4:02
  Bob: Speaking of arse, uh, arseface is one of the most famous
• 4:05
  characters in graphic novels.
• 4:07
  From a preacher.
• 4:08
  He's from the preacher from preacher.
• 4:10
  Uh, for those of you that don't know, Brad, Brad actually is an amazing
• 4:13
  artist designed the logo for our firm.
• 4:15
  Um, all hand done.
• 4:17
  He also did hand drew it.
• 4:19
  And we were 14 or 15 painted on our bedroom walls as kids in Pittsburgh.
• 4:23
  All the Marvel superheroes.
• 4:24
  Um,
• 4:25
  Brad: I also did a children's book called the turtle and the lion.
• 4:27
  I can send anyone a copy if they request it.
• 4:29
  It's for kids.
• 4:30
  Um, my best friend from high school, like wrote it and I did illustrations.
• 4:34
  Pretty cool.
• 4:35
  Bob: Yeah.
• 4:35
  And the other cool thing that, um, Brad and I actually wrote a book in early
• 4:39
  2010s about artificial intelligence, creating artificial intelligence
• 4:43
  and it being kind of the end of humanity called a wonderful life.
• 4:46
  So we have now, there's two books you've written.
• 4:48
  My third on spine is coming out.
• 4:50
  Actually a practical how to on disc injury cases, but like, and this is
• 4:53
  the thing, Brad's, you know, goal was always to have a comic book shop, be
• 4:57
  able to play your game, ravel there.
• 5:01
  And I mean, you're actually getting to the, your life goal here.
• 5:04
  Brad: I mean, it's being impeded by youth sports.
• 5:07
  Um, we have all these kids in different clubs, sports club, soccer, we've got
• 5:10
  basketball, we've got like football now.
• 5:12
  All of them are doing flag football, which is giant and which is really
• 5:16
  cool in our, in our district, Los Alamitos, it's a CIF sports for girls.
• 5:19
  So there's a girls flag football team at Los Alamitos high school.
• 5:22
  We actually went last Friday and watch it.
• 5:24
  It was super cool.
• 5:26
  It's going to be in the, in the Olympics next, next Olympics, they'll
• 5:28
  have flag football in the Olympics.
• 5:29
  So you've got young kids and you want them to like be
• 5:32
  introduced into a new fun sport.
• 5:34
  That's allegedly no contact.
• 5:35
  There is a little contact, but Definitely less than basketball and soccer.
• 5:39
  Flag football is awesome.
• 5:41
  Bob: Yeah.
• 5:41
  And I have two broken fingers on my hand.
• 5:43
  One was smashed between two football helmets in high school.
• 5:46
  The other one was from flag football, grabbing a flag.
• 5:48
  It just broke my finger sideways, but it was worth it.
• 5:51
  We did flag
• 5:51
  Brad: football in college.
• 5:52
  We went, our college team went to like the finals.
• 5:56
  Then we had to play the, well, we won the undergrad final.
• 5:59
  And then we had to play the GW.
• 6:01
  Law school who had like some guy in the, on the team, he had
• 6:05
  two brothers in the NFL and it
• 6:06
  Bob: was Johnny Morton and his little brother and you cannot catch them.
• 6:09
  It was just so cheap.
• 6:10
  Like we just got blasted.
• 6:11
  Yeah.
• 6:11
  They, they are a quarterback actually got hurt celebrating.
• 6:14
  We won the championship undergrad cause the guy jumped on his back,
• 6:17
  whatever, we digressed anyway.
• 6:18
  So I'm going back to like the managing part of the firm.
• 6:21
  So like Brad does a lot of things that I'm not good at at all.
• 6:25
  Like Brad actually handles, The trust account, the finances.
• 6:30
  So like, I literally never know when Brad just says, Hey, take them out
• 6:35
  of XYZ and a draw, or, Hey, it's time to pay taxes and plan for it.
• 6:40
  Right.
• 6:40
  But that's, I think, whatever you also,
• 6:42
  Brad: as you manage a business, you need to know what you don't know and
• 6:44
  get someone to step into that role.
• 6:47
  Can't know everything about you can't.
• 6:50
  And if you try to, you're going to fail.
• 6:52
  So surround yourself with good hires and people that can
• 6:55
  help take that off your plate.
• 6:56
  I used to do payroll on a lot of this business oversight myself.
• 7:00
  And then I hired Marat.
• 7:01
  from college.
• 7:04
  life's ever saved me so much time to then be able to take on these ravel, ravel.
• 7:10
  game, rakeco.
• 7:11
  com.
• 7:11
  If you want to see more, um, other things that we enjoy, cause you
• 7:16
  know, kids take up a lot of time.
• 7:17
  And that's the most precious thing, free up your time to do
• 7:20
  these things with your kids.
• 7:21
  So I dropped them off at school, came right up here and I'll be back
• 7:24
  in time, to get them from school and then go right to the college.
• 7:28
  So I'm a dance and piano.
• 7:31
  Bob: Well, I think that's what the, the big takeaway here is you have
• 7:34
  to be willing to sacrifice what you think is to make less money by hiring
• 7:38
  other people to do what you want.
• 7:40
  It's not your skill set or not what you want to do.
• 7:42
  And that's how you actually grow the business.
• 7:43
  It feels
• 7:44
  Brad: a step, it feels like it's a step backwards.
• 7:45
  Like you're going to pay someone to do something, but
• 7:47
  it's like in the game of life.
• 7:49
  It's an old board game that I know we played.
• 7:52
  I never bought
• 7:53
  Bob: the insurance in the game of life.
• 7:54
  Brad: You don't need insurance, but you should go, uh, backwards.
• 7:58
  Like you can go backwards and go forwards.
• 7:59
  You kind of like take a different route to get ahead later.
• 8:02
  But that's what you got to do.
• 8:03
  You got to think about who you're You're making a hire, you can
• 8:06
  hire a really kick ass paralegal to push your practice forward.
• 8:10
  You can hire a new associate and you pay for what you get.
• 8:13
  Don't try to go on cheap.
• 8:14
  It's like when we, you're hiring experts in a case you're going to
• 8:17
  trial and pay for what you get.
• 8:20
  So you get the best expert.
• 8:21
  You gotta really be cognizant of that at all times and think about the future.
• 8:25
  Don't, like, the now is great.
• 8:28
  But how is this going to affect us two to three years from now?
• 8:31
  Bob: Yeah.
• 8:31
  And we've talked about like finances.
• 8:34
  We now have a CFO.
• 8:35
  You could do fractional CFO.
• 8:37
  There's ways to do that, to get guidance, people that understand money.
• 8:40
  If you have to borrow all these types of things or things that you have to have
• 8:44
  on top of mind, um, you know, personnel, HR issues, you don't have to think
• 8:47
  about my doing an employee handbook.
• 8:50
  You likely have to, what are the protocols for certain things?
• 8:52
  Cause you have to build your firm, even if you're a solo to kind of scale with it.
• 8:56
  Brad: Yeah, you got to build the foundation early and do it right
• 9:00
  and think about all of these things before you just try to push ahead.
• 9:03
  Um, and you got to reinvest in the business.
• 9:05
  A lot of people try to, you know, you get that one big hit and they'll put it
• 9:10
  all into a new house and an awesome car.
• 9:13
  But I would think you got to reinvest at least 50 percent of what you, what you
• 9:17
  get back into the business, a new hire, maybe a new marketing campaign, something
• 9:21
  to generate new leads, um, something where you're expanding your footprint.
• 9:26
  And another thing we did early.
• 9:28
  Which was we started buying buildings, um, and to run back to our things, our
• 9:31
  office buildings, the building we're in now, the Hermosa Beach office, there's
• 9:35
  an awesome tool called an SBA loan, small business loan, it's a government
• 9:38
  loan, you can put 10 percent down on a business, and as long as you are
• 9:42
  leasing or occupying 51 percent or more of that space, You can get a 90 percent
• 9:48
  of that loan and it's at awesome rates.
• 9:50
  Um, and you can start depreciating that asset.
• 9:53
  There's a lot of benefits to have.
• 9:55
  Yeah.
• 9:55
  Bob: And that's another thing that we've learned recently, the past few
• 9:57
  years, if you have to hire a good, someone that gives you tax strategies.
• 10:01
  So we have a home office shout out to heritage.
• 10:03
  In Phoenix, Arizona, but absolutely lifesaver for these a lot of skill sets
• 10:08
  that we teach at Justice HQ, put people in the room with professionals that are
• 10:13
  really good at what they do, and it's the only way to really evolve like if you want
• 10:15
  to run a business and do it efficiently, you have to be there with somebody that
• 10:19
  that's what they do all the time, but we don't have time to stay on top of the
• 10:21
  tax code every single day to figure out what advantage that we could take with
• 10:25
  XYZ or where we could invest dollars because in our industry, you know, we're
• 10:29
  doing case advanced costs and those case advanced costs when they get paid back.
• 10:32
  You can't really loan that to yourself there.
• 10:34
  It's like a very interesting, There's a
• 10:35
  Brad: really messed up IRS rule that you can't expense the
• 10:39
  loss until that case resolved.
• 10:42
  So if you advance 500, 000 on a trial, you know, case cost
• 10:48
  experts, you can't expense that.
• 10:51
  Until that case resolves.
• 10:53
  So that's treated as profits and you're paying a higher tax and
• 10:57
  then, yeah, maybe it catches up into the future, but then you're also
• 11:00
  advancing cases on future cases.
• 11:02
  And there was a law that they were trying to pass when people were like greedy
• 11:05
  trial lawyers are trying to pay no taxes.
• 11:06
  It's like, no, we're just trying to expense things at the same
• 11:09
  level as every other business can.
• 11:11
  So,
• 11:13
  Bob: yeah.
• 11:13
  And we're going to have Brad on more often to talk about, you know, specific
• 11:18
  managing law firms, managing companies.
• 11:20
  I mean, it's not only.
• 11:21
  Our firm, but Brad has experience managing all the other companies
• 11:24
  that we have, uh, big on communications and building culture.
• 11:28
  Brad: I do think that the most important thing and I'll go
• 11:30
  back to it is just organization.
• 11:33
  You have to be organized.
• 11:34
  You have to pick Google was a foundation for your office suite or, or Microsoft,
• 11:40
  those are the two big players.
• 11:42
  Just pick one.
• 11:42
  They're both, they both have their benefits.
• 11:44
  They both have their drawbacks pick one.
• 11:46
  They've got subscription services where you pay per person.
• 11:49
  You're going to need some kind of payroll service.
• 11:52
  there's.
• 11:53
  Paychecks there's ADP.
• 11:54
  They're both pretty much the same.
• 11:56
  You can pick one You can try to do it yourself on quickbooks to save some
• 11:59
  money But that's going to cost you some time and your time is pretty valuable
• 12:03
  as an attorney Um, there's a lot of different things that you can use The
• 12:09
  adobe suite just for scanning in ocr have a case management system You can
• 12:13
  actually start without one for a while But once you really need to scale up
• 12:17
  It's great to have all that data in one place in one case management platform
• 12:22
  that Um, you can throw it in there and you'll get a lot of cool effects.
• 12:26
  So you can do a lot of different stuff when you're testing a product
• 12:30
  and you don't have And so you can have that kind of, you know, that
• 12:34
  performance improvement background.
• 12:35
  And that's, that's the really
• 12:36
  Bob: key thing.
• 12:37
  And also we're having a lot of questions now about it.
• 12:40
  But I'll just see it.
• 12:41
  can set it up if you need to.
• 12:45
  Right.
• 12:45
  Processes.
• 12:46
  But it's different for everybody else.
• 12:47
  Depends on how you want to run it.
• 12:48
  Brad and I wanted to run an office where we could be anywhere in the
• 12:51
  world and still be able to do it.
• 12:52
  Where we can have, be in trial all the time and still have support with everybody
• 12:57
  without physically having to be there.
• 12:59
  And you have to be intentional with it.
• 13:00
  You have to start early.
• 13:01
  We were literally, I think, the first, one of the first ones to
• 13:03
  be scanning in all of our mail.
• 13:04
  We were doing it manually back in the day.
• 13:06
  You know, we have artificial intelligence that does that for us.
• 13:09
  Um, well, Brad, thanks for coming on.
• 13:10
  How do people find you?
• 13:11
  Actually, you don't want people to find you.
• 13:13
  Brad: No, I'm a ghost.
• 13:14
  I'm a unicorn.
• 13:14
  Don't find me.
• 13:15
  Don't look for me.
• 13:15
  Uh, I don't exist.
• 13:17
  Bob: Um, If you're looking for Brad, just look for me.
• 13:19
  I'll get to him.
• 13:20
  Okay?
• 13:20
  I know, I know a way.
• 13:21
  Brad: Bob's, Bob's my, uh, he's a paywall.
• 13:23
  You got to get through Bob to get to me.
• 13:24
  That's right.
• 13:24
  Bob: That's right.
• 13:25
  Well, thank you for listening to this episode of the Justice Team
• 13:27
  podcast on the Justice Team Network.
• 13:28
  And now
• 13:28
  Brad: I'm going to go and, uh, survey the office.
• 13:31
  We're put, we're soundproofing it.
• 13:32
  We're putting in all these awesome things into the office that's structural,
• 13:34
  that, you know, Bob doesn't even know about, but they just need to get done.
• 13:37
  Bob: No idea.
• 13:38
  Brad, I just want to have a golf simulator.
• 13:40
  I want to have a gaming table in the basement.
• 13:42
  There is a gaming table in the basement.
• 13:44
  Okay.
• 13:44
  We'll check one and I've already skipped the golf
• 13:46
  Brad: simulator.
• 13:47
  We just need to put two, a two 20.
• 13:49
  Uh, line down there, which we're talking about today.
• 13:51
  So spoiler alert, your birthday's ruined
• 13:55
  Bob: our, our birthday, January 29th, share with Tom Selleck
• 13:58
  and Oprah and also Brad Simon.
• 14:01
  Thank you for watching this episode of Justice Team Network, www.
• 14:05
  justiceteamnetwork.
• 14:05
  com.
• 14:05
  Bye yins.
• 14:06
  Bye yins, guys.
• 14:06
  Bye yins, guys.
• 14:07
  Oh, you got your yin shirt on?
• 14:08
  Look at that.
• 14:09
  Bye yins.