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Tom Morrison on Law, Laughter, and Literature · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hello and welcome.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: I'm Roger Rehm, and this is the Liberty and Leadership Podcast a conversation with T-Fast alumni, supporters, faculty and friends who are making a real impact in public policy, business, philanthropy, law and journalism.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Today, I'm joined by Tom Morrison, a lawyer turned author of satirical legal novels.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Tom's latest novel, send in the Tort Lawyers was just released today, september of 2023.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Before becoming an author, tom had a distinguished career in the legal profession that spanned more than 50 years, serving in the Air Force, jaguar and then at several distinguished New York law firms.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: In addition to his legal work and writing career, tom is a dedicated supporter of the Fund for American Studies.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: He established the Thomas and Sarah Morrison Scholarship Fund, designated for students from Audubon University in Westerville, ohio.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Tom is an alumnus of Audubon and served for eight years as chairman of its board.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Tom also served on the T-Fast Board of Regents for more than a decade.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Tom, congratulations on the release of your third novel.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Roger, and thank you for having me on.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Now I'd like to begin by just pointing out you served five decades in the legal profession, including leading holding roles as an active duty legal officer in the Air Force, working at several New York law firms, and you helped pioneer the field of false advertising litigation.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Before we discuss your second career as an author, perhaps you could just touch on your legal career and some of the landmark matters that you worked on.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: Sure, as you mentioned, I started out right after law school.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: I went into the Air Force, I had an ROTC commission and my duty of service was deferred while I went to law school.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: So after law school I went almost immediately into the Air Force Jaguar and that turned out to be one of the best experiences in my life.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: That's where I learned how to try cases and it was really a very profitable.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Four years After I departed from the Air Force, I went back to the firm with which I had spent a summer as an intern.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: The big firms in New York and all the big cities hire students in law school between their second and third year as a way to recruit new members to that firm.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: That firm was then called Royal Cagle, rogers and Wells, best known for William P Rogers, who was, as you know, attorney General under Eisenhower, secretary of State under Nixon.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: I was with that firm until 1977.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: I did become a partner, but in 1977, I transferred to the firm with which I spent the bulk of my career, that's Patterson Belknap, web and Tyler, also in New York, and I spent about 35 years at Patterson Belknap.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: One of the things that I got into really was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Myself and a couple of other lawyers in the firm began utilizing the Lanham Act, which at that point was really a trademark statute.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: But there was an obscure provision in the Lanham Act that covered false descriptions of products.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: We developed the theory of false advertising.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: That would enable big companies to sue their competitors for the competitors' false or misleading advertising.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: We were one of the first firms to do that.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: Now every firm, every big firm has attorneys that do false advertising litigation.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: But when I started doing that in the late 1970s, we really pioneered that area of law.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: That was really terrific for me.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: It was a way to attract new clients.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: It was a way to become known in the profession.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: I did a lot of writing, a lot of speaking and a lot of the cases that I tried became landmarks in the field.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: A lot of new attorneys that joined Patterson Belknap would tell me that when they were in law school they studied such and such a case that I had actually tried.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: So it was really a terrific run for me in that field.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: Well, let me actually step back just for a minute, because I know when you went off to Otterbine.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: You grew up in Ohio and went to Otterbine, which is not far from Columbus.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: For people who don't know where it is, Well, you didn't go there, I don't think.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: As I recall, you're telling me planning to be head to law school after you graduate.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: What kind of shift did you in the direction of law school?
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: Well, when I first went to Otterbine I just assumed that I would probably graduate and go into the savings and loan business with my father.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: My father was a number two executive at a very small savings and loan in Columbus.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: It was a wonderful industry, a wonderful business.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: As you know, the whole business collapsed in the 1980s.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: But about halfway through Otterbine I got involved in a debate team and I realized how much I enjoyed arguing and presenting arguments.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: I also participated in intercollegiate extemporaneous speaking where you would be given a topic and given 15 minutes to prepare a speech about that topic.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: So between debate team and extemporaneous speaking I thought, gee, this is a lot of fun, I could do the same as a lawyer.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: And I also read a couple of books that really influenced me.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: One was Louis Nizers, my Life in Court, all About His Career as a Trial Lawyer in New York.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: And then, ironically, richard Nixon's first book, six Crises.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: The lead case, the lead story in there was the Alger Hiss Pumpkin Papers Trial.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: And those two books really got me interested in law school.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: So between those books and my speaking experience I decided I wanted to go to law school.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: But the best thing that happened is I just assumed I would go to Ohio State, which was the local law school, and go back to Columbus and be a lawyer in Columbus.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: But a professor at Audubon alerted me to this wonderful scholarship program that New York University had, whereby they were trying to turn NYU into a national law school Back in the 60s.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: It really wasn't, it was mainly just a school for local and New York students, and so they developed a scholarship program whereby they gave scholarships to three students in each of the 12 federal judicial circuits and I was lucky enough to get one of those scholarships from the Sixth Circuit and that took me to NYU and really changed the trajectory of my life.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Well, after joining the law firm or graduate from NYU, what prompted your decision to join the Air Force?
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: I mean you might tell me you were drafted.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: Well, no, I was, audubon, had an ROTC program and I was in ROTC.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: So I got a commission in the Air Force the day I graduated from Audubon, but they simply deferred me for three years to allow me to go to law school.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: They didn't pay for the law school, but they deferred me during that three-year period.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, and then in the Air Force you had the chance to get in the courtroom and try some court martial cases, as I recall.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: I tried a lot of them and that was just a wonderful experience.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Had I just gone to Rogers and Wells at that point after law school, I probably would have sat in the library for four years and I wouldn't have had nearly the experience I received in the Air Force.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: Since retiring, you've published three novels that poke fun at the way attorneys sometimes take themselves too seriously, I guess, or their cases too seriously, and I have them here.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: The first was Torts.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Are Us there's?
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Please Pass the Torts?
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: And your latest release today Send In the Tort Lawyers.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Well, you got to begin by telling me what inspired you to write novels, and especially novels about the legal world, Right?
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: Well, I've always been a big fan of novels.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: I've read novels most of my adult life and going back to my college days and I always wanted to write one.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: So when I was in the Air Force, life wasn't as busy as it was when you were with a big law firm, so I had a lot of time on my hands and I actually wrote what I called a spy novel 400 pages I think it was.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: Luckily it was turned down by the three publishers I sent it to and has never seen the light of day.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: And then when I got out of the Air Force, I got very busy in my career and put aside any idea of writing.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: But in my final year of practice, after practicing for about 49 years, my thoughts went back to this idea that I would love to write a novel sometime.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: But this time I had the good sense to decide I'm going to write about something I know about.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: I know about modern American litigation.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: What did I know about spy novels except what I saw in movies or read in books?
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: But I thought I knew something about litigation.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: But I didn't want to write a legal thriller.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: They're kind of a diamond dozen.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: I didn't want to write a serious book about law because I thought nobody would read it.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: I really wanted to write a humorous book about law and the inspiration for that came from a book I read when I was in the Air Force.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: I spent my last year in the Oseon Air Base in Korea.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: It was a long flight getting to Korea and during that flight I began reading Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which then was very, very popular.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: And I was just stunned with Heller's ability to turn a very serious subject the Army Air Corps during World War II into a satire and farce.
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: And I marveled at the way every character he created, every interchange, every conversation turned into farce.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: And I've always held that in the back of my mind so that when I decided to start writing and I wanted to write a satirical novel, that was really the model I had in mind.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: I wanted to try to do, in my poor way to the current American legal system, the way Joseph Heller treated the Army Air Corps in Catch-22.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Well, before we get to the books, let me ask you how you go about it.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Do you tend to block off a specific amount of time each day to write?
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Do you get up at 4 am and write till breakfast?
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: What's your technique, Roger?
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: I'm retired.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: No point in being retired if you're going to get up at 4 am to write the first book.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: There was no particular routine because I started thinking about it during my last year of practice and collecting ideas.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: But now that I've done one and are onto books two and three, I kind of have a system and the system is simply this I look for amusing stories about lawyers or about legal cases or just amusing things that happen in society and I put them in a file and when I get ready to start writing I go through what I've accumulated and sort out what I think could be made into a great episode in my books.
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: And it's the collecting the material and deciding which material to use and develop.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: That's really the hard part For me.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: Once I start writing, it's fairly easy.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: I generally write when I'm writing I do it in the morning, not at 4 am, and my prior PR firm was quite amused that I do all my writing on paper and pencil.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: Number two pencils on legal pads and they actually took ahead of had me send them a picture of a stack of about 20 legal pads with a pencil on top to show how I wrote the first draft.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Then I input the draft into my computer and then at the end of the process, I have a computer expert who ties all the chapters together and sends it to the publisher.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: But the key for me is collecting material and identifying episodes or cases that lend themselves to humorous treatment in the books.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I would imagine that that file where you keep those interesting stories is a big one.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of material out there.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: I'll say yeah, there is.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: And the other thing I should say, roger, is that in all three books with, I think, maybe only one exception every single case in all three books has a real life counterpart.
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: I didn't just make up the cases, I took a real life case and then did a riff on it to turn it into what it is in the book.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: But all of those cases, with one exception, are based on real life cases.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: That's true of all three books.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we'll get to your latest book, which takes a real life case, and you didn't have to do much to add the humorous edge to it.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: But Well, in your latest novel, send in the tort lawyers.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: We see the return of the twins who are lawyers, patrick and Prescott, peters, pap and Pup for short.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: There are other recurring characters throughout the novels, which makes it very interesting.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: I know I'm sure readers like to see the return of interesting characters from one novel to the next, but tell me a little bit about these two lawyers.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Sure, well, patrick Peters is and his brother, prescott Peters are twins, although Patrick was born first, as he constantly reminds Prescott.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: And Patrick is sort of the alpha male and it was his idea to start up this class action firm.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: Both of them, in book one, started out with very traditional legal careers Pap is with a firm, rogers and Autry, and Pup was with a blue chip, the bluest chip firm in New York City, oliver and Cromwell, and they had very prosperous careers.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: And in book one, the first third of the book, I actually developed their characters and their life in their prior firms and the cases they handle.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: And the interesting part here, roger, is that the cases that they dealt with in their prior firms were all takeoffs on cases that I personally handled.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: Once they decided to start up a class action firm, that was out of my bailiwick.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: I know the class action litigation never wanted to do it, but the early cases in book one were actually based on cases I handled.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: In any event, patrick convinced Prescott that if they started up their own firm they could have a lot more fun, make a lot more money, and so they started up this firm called Peters and Peters.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: They have about four associates.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: Those four associates appear in all the books.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: Everyone's favorite is Charles Pierpont.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: The third, known as Chip, Chip has the distinction of having betted virtually every woman he's ever met, and a lot of the banter in the firm meetings deal with Chip's very successful love life.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: So those characters are in all the books and then when we get into the plaintiffs that they encounter along the way.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: When I wrote the first book I didn't really know if this was going to become a series or not.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: I just wanted to write this satirical novel.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: But people, a lot of friends and colleagues, like the book and they like particular characters such as Mona Lott, who has a case in book one involving her mug shot taken when she was arrested for shooting at geese with a BB gun.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: And another character, Lydia Lollace, who was a stripper but Chip found her at a club in New York and the firm brought the class action on behalf of her and other lap dancers who weren't being paid the minimum wage.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: So Mona and Lydia became favorites and they have now appeared in all the books.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: I hesitate to ask, but is Chip, Mr Peerpoint, based on someone you worked with in one of your firms?
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: Now he's based on someone all the men would like to be.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: I don't remember what people say.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: If they ever make a movie version, I want to play Chip.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: No, he actually.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: None of the characters were really based on real live people.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: A couple of people were vaguely an inspiration for the characters, but by and large the characters were fictional.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Well, what's been the response so far?
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: From the books first of all, from people in the legal profession that you worked with or knew.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: I'm sure they've read these with interest.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, almost all the well, with one exception.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: All the lawyers that have read the books have really really liked them.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: One of the reviewers, who was, I knew it, nyu Law School, said he hadn't laughed as hard since reading Portnoy's Complaint and an interesting story with him.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: He read the first book while his wife, while he was in the waiting room.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: His wife was in a hospital having cancer surgery and he's in the waiting room and so he decided to read the novel then and so he's laughing out loud and everybody's looking at him.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: You know why are you laughing?
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: Your wife is having surgery.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: But yes, with one exception, all the lawyers like.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: The only lawyer who didn't like them was a former partner.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: He thought the characters weren't realistic and I said, well, they weren't supposed to be.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: These are.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: This is a farce.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: But the lawyers all liked them.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: To my pleasant surprise, people who are non-lawyers have also liked them.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: Now, I must confess, I think the demographics here skew 40 and 50 and above.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: I don't think anyone in their 20s would read these and say, oh, they're great satires.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: But all the non-lawyers that have read them, that I'm aware of and have either posted a comment or talked to me about them, all seem to really enjoy them.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: So you don't have to be a lawyer to enjoy the books.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that response from the legal profession proves that lawyers do have a sense of humor, even though they're often the butt of lawyer jokes.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: I was curious about that.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: I'm glad to hear that.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: Well, Roger, the best example about that is you're probably familiar with the National Tort Museum, which was established by Ralph Nader, the most famous tort lawyer in the United States, and the museum was constructed as an homage to tort lawyers and I sent them the first book and the executive director invited me to do a podcast.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: He loved the book and I've.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: Now the new executive director has asked me for the new book and I've sent that to them.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: So even real tort lawyers seem to have a sense of humor.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah Well, tell me, when you're writing these, what do you find most enjoyable and what's most challenging of trying to kind of blend humor with legal themes in your writing.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: That must be a challenge.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: Now, for me the only difficulty was with Book One.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: When I was starting from scratch and I was struggling with wanting to introduce the characters Pap and Pop talk about their prior life before they went into the class action firm, I frankly struggled with how to do that and how to make that humorous at the same time.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: Once I got them into the class action context, it was really much easier.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: There's no shortage of cases out there that can be made fun of, and once I kind of identify a case that would be fun to write about, for me it's kind of easy to create the story of how Pap and Pop attack those cases.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: So that part actually comes fairly easily.
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: And in your latest book you include the.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: You don't identify it by name but it seems clear it's the FTX cyber currency case that's been in the news a lot.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: That must have been required less of your creative license and humor to make fun of that case.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: It kind of parodies itself, right.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: No, that's absolutely true.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: I actually have written an article that's going to be published somewhere on a website about that process, and the article is entitled Stranger Than Fiction.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: The facts of that case really are totally bizarre and I didn't have to do any other than changing the names of the company.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: Ftx is now FUX.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: They're token, they're cryptocurrency.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: Fux is now FUX, ftt is now FU.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: The Sam Bankman Freed has a different name.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: His girlfriend has a different name, but the basic facts are really as they occurred in real life.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: This was really a bizarre story.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: The whole world was taken in by this strange guy in his early 30s, sam Bankman Freed.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: He wore a t-shirt, shorts and sandals and baseball cap to every meeting he ever went to, including meetings with bankers and clients, and he was constantly playing video games on his cell phone, even during these meetings.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: Now, you can't make that up.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: But that was real life, and he and his colleagues at this company lived in a $30 million complex in the Bahamas, and the girlfriend referred to it as a polycule a polycule of sexual relationships.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Everybody was sleeping with everybody else.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: Those were the real facts.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: So I started.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: That story broke just as I was starting to think about the current book, book number three, and so I voraciously read those stories.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: They were in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post every day there would be a new story, and so it was just too good.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: Too good to be true.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: The interesting thing about including that case in this book is it's the first case in any of the three books where I would say it represents an appropriate use of the class action mechanism.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: As you've probably figured out, the books, although they're mainly humorous, they have sort of a hidden secret message, which is the abuse of the class action system by lawyers who are just out to make money, and all of the cases in all three books are examples, in my judgment, of inappropriate uses of the class action system.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: This case, though, where this company built consumers out of I think the number was $16 billion or invested in their cryptocurrency, and all of that was lost and you have all of these individual investors lost their entire investment.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: That's an appropriate use of the class action mechanism.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: I hope people listening to our podcast will pick up these books.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: They're available on Amazon and elsewhere.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: It's a good beach read and some of us still have beach plans for the fall, so I assume you'll work on a fourth book.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: Yes, I have.
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: At this point I'm probably just a one-trick pony.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to try to write the great American novel.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: I'll probably write another book in the series.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: As I mentioned, I have this computer expert who helps me with computer matters and he's been after me to incorporate artificial intelligence in the next book.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: So I've been collecting odd stories about AI and I hope to work them into the new book.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: Just for example, an AI bot made the list of the 100 best American lawyers.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: Oh, is that right?
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: More recently, just about two weeks ago, there was a story in the New York Post.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: A lawyer in a real-life case in New York submitted a brief generated by AI and it turned out that everything in the brief was wrong.
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: The judge was incensed.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: The cases that the AI came up with had nothing to do with the issues in the case, and the judge sanctioned the lawyer for submitting this brief.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot you can do with that in your next novel.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: I hope so, that's for sure.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Let me ask you this just for someone in your situation.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you get a lot of pleasure writing these books.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: I don't know if all authors do, but maybe they do.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: But you obviously hope people will buy it and read it, and that's a challenge, especially in the world we live in today, where it seems like reading books isn't quite what it used to be, but still a lot of books are sold every year.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: Is it a frustrating process trying to get attention for a book you write?
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: Well it is.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: Luckily I didn't write the books to make money.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: So far, the main financial benefit I generated is a business deductions, and in fact two years ago my business deduction was so substantial that I actually got a refund from the IRS.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: I haven't gotten a refund from the IRS since I was in the Air Force, so that was most welcome.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: But obviously I'm hopeful that the books will sell well.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: I get a lot of feedback from friends and colleagues who've read the books.
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: That's very rewarding.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: I'm working with a new PR firm that I hired for this book.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: They represent authors only They've been able to generate a lot of interest.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: Actually, until today they've been focusing on promoting the first two books.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: They've managed to generate a significant amount of sales of the first two books.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: They just have ways of doing ads and getting attention that I never would have thought of, so I'm pleased to have help in that regard.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: If it results in a lot of sales, that's fine.
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: If not, I'm still happy with the.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: I enjoy the effort.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Well, that's wonderful.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: I congratulate on the accomplishment of these three books and hopefully this latest will sell well and get a lot of attention.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: If I could shift just for a minute, because, as I mentioned in my introduction, you served on the Board of Regents.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: You've been very active with the Fund for American Studies.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: You and your wife Sarah have established a scholarship.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: Could you perhaps touch on what inspired you to get involved with T-FAS?
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I've told you this story before, but it's quite interesting.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: 20 years ago I received in the mail, totally unsolicited, a letter announcing an event in Washington DC sponsored by a group I'd never heard of turned out to be T-FAS and the event was going to be a roast of Fred Barnes.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: Well, at that point our son, chaz, was probably in the eighth or ninth grade, but he loved Fred Barnes.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: My wife and I would typically tape the six o'clock Brit Hump, brit Hume news report on Fox and watch that during dinner, and Chaz would typically watch it with us and he became a big fan of Fred Barnes.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: So I told Chaz.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: I said wouldn't it be fun to go down to DC for this roast?
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: So we did and the roast was great.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: But what I hadn't counted on was it was during the summer and a lot of the T-FAS summer students were there and at the table we were sitting at during dinner I began talking with these students and they began telling me how wonderful the T-FAS summer program was, the best thing in their lives.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: They just were enthralled with it.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: So that really piqued my interest.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: Because you guys now had my name, I had come to this roast event.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: I suddenly was on your mailing list, and Sarah and I then began attending the donor conferences in DC regularly.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: We would frequently go to the journalism awards dinner.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: Those were a lot of fun, and the more time I spent with T-FAS, the more I realized what great work you folks were doing and I really wanted to support it.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: One other question I'd like to ask you relates to the fact that so many of the undergraduates who attend our programs are interested in legal careers.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: Do you still think that's a path that you would recommend to young people?
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: Has the profession changed so much that it's a whole different world than it was when you entered it?
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: The answer is the profession has changed dramatically.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: I was always amazed when I was at Patterson Belknap.
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: I was on the hiring committee for several years and I was always amazed at the number of new attorneys that would come to us every year and after a year or two they would decide they really didn't want to practice law.
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: They'd go off and do something else.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: Right, a novel.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I don't know about that, but they had spent three years and tens of thousands of dollars to get a legal education.
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: So I had the feeling that we didn't necessarily need more lawyers in the world.
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: We need a lot more of everything else perhaps, but the other thing that's happened is that the profession is very, very different.
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: When I started out, if you were a trial lawyer, you would actually go to trial a lot and try a lot of cases, which I did.
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: I probably tried well over 100 cases or more around the country.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: That's not true today.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: And the big firms, the cases are so big, the stakes are so high that companies typically will settle those cases rather than roll the dice at a trial, and so by the time I retired, very few cases were going to trial compared to when I started out.
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: Now, what that would tell me and what I would tell aspiring lawyers if you just want to make a lot of money, okay, go to a big city and join a big firm.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: But if you want to be a trial lawyer, you want to be Perry Mason or the kind of stuff you see on television go to a smaller city where the law firms aren't as big, the cases aren't as big, and get involved, be a local prosecutor, be a defense counsel, but you'll get into court a lot more.
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: But if I were starting out today, I don't think I would even consider going to a city like New York.
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: I'd probably go to a secondary city where I thought I had a better chance of making my mark.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's great advice, not something I'd thought about.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: Well, I want to just we're up against our time limit here, I think, but I'm going to again tout your books here.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: Torts Are Us, which is the first book Tom published just a few years ago.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: He followed that up with Please Pass the Torts, and now his latest release this month is Send in the Tort Lawyers.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: I congratulate you on that success, tom.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: It's been a pleasure talking about the books.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: I'll reiterate what you said, and that is, you know he's really developed some zany characters and there's a lot of laugh out loud stuff in there.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: So I think readers are in for a treat if they purchase any of these books.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: And the nice thing I noticed when I picked up book three is even you know, you don't need to have read the first two to get right into it and you introduce us to the characters and some of their zany personality traits right at the beginning of the book.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: So right away they're dealing in a staff meeting with Cliff's behavior at a party.
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: Yes, Well, I'm glad you saw that, because, yeah, that was exactly my intention.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you very much for joining me.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: I appreciate your time today and we'll look forward to reading this third book.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: Roger, thank you so much, and I wish you and T-Fass all the best.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: Please don't forget to subscribe, download, like or share the show on Apple, spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: If you like this episode, I ask you to rate and review it, and if you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcastattfassorg.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: Liberty and Leadership Podcast is produced at K-Global Studios in Washington DC.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, roger Rean, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.