Episode 8–LIVE Fees, Fees, Fees: Our Attorneys Discuss the Taboo Topic of Attorneys’ Fees.

Good afternoon and welcome to the stand fight win podcast another episode hosted by Albertson and Davidson I'm Keith Davidson I'm Stewart Albertson and today we are coming to you live from YouTube and Facebook and you can also find a recorded version of our podcasts with on our pod beam site with the audio if you like to listen to audio or you can always pick it up on YouTube and Facebook after we're done being live where it's recorded so today is gonna be our fees episode and we're gonna go over all issues dealing with fees fees fees fees and everybody likes to talk about attorneys fees actually nobody likes to talk about attorneys fees but we're gonna cover a few fees issues and let's start off without breaking news so in today's breaking news we have a case by the name of Smith versus Zell yer I'm probably mispronouncing that but this is a case that came out of the appellate court you have a different opinion on how to pronounce that I I would put the inflection on the ass but so we get asked a lot of the time who is it that is ultimately gonna pay for this for the attorney's fees so a beneficiary is having a problem with the bad trustee they have to file a lawsuit for some reason and the beneficiary has to pay their attorney to file that lawsuit and the question is ultimately who's gonna pay them back or can they even get paid back and what's the typical answer Stewart when somebody asks you can I get my fees back as a beneficiary no you're going to pay your own attorneys fees yeah it's pretty rare so the in this case they also did have to pay their own attorneys fees and apparently they paid a lot of attorneys fees like $700,000 yeah the fee award was quite large over $700,000 in attorneys fees so I don't know who charges that kind of money that's a small award around here no I don't think so but so we have a case where there's five kids and of these five kids one of the kids was trustee and that was Joann and her brother dawn took issue with the way she was managing the trust and asked for an accounting and I guess he was right to take issue because once she filed in accounting it turned out that Joanne and her husband took about two million dollars out of the trust right before mom died in the year before mom died and of course their argument is well that's what mom wanted to spend mom was just spending your money the way she wanted to spend it but that two million a lot of it was gambling gifts quote unquote all the nonsense though you know we see fairly often actually in these types of cases so dawn litigates he fights against it's a fourteen million dollar trust estate and they actually have five days of trial and after five days of trial they come to a settlement and so they settle the matter and part of the settlement that they come to is that Dawn's going to get a payment from Joanne but that's confidential so they don't want to talk about how much that payments going to be and then Joanne agrees to waive all of our trustees fees which could be a substantial amount of money who knows forty million dollars day there's also Joanne agrees to pay for all tax tax penalties that were incurred because of her actions and then dawn also is going to be paid his attorneys fees from the trust so Joanne's not gonna pay Don's attorney's fees out of her own pocket instead Don's gonna be paid for the attorneys fees out of the trust estate right off the top well you know what that does is if you take a dollar off the top then everybody's gonna be paying a portion of that right so once the court orders that then sister Dawn gets in or Dona gets into the mix because Dona sat on the sidelines during the entire lawsuit but when she finds out that the fee award is gonna be let's say I have it here seven hundred and twenty thousand two hundred and fifty eight dollars and twenty eight cents it's important get those sense of that it's very important so when Donna finds out that Don's gonna get seven hundred and twenty one thousand dollars out of the trust right off the top for his attorneys fees she's not happy she's a little upset so she files a post-trial motion it gets denied because she had never appeared she'd waited her objections what the court said and so she appealed and she said that the court violated her due process rights by approving that big of an attorney's fees because of course she's gonna have to pick up one-fifth of it out of her share so what do you think so far in terms of what the what the court would do with something like this well and this is the problem that we see in these cases where there's multiple beneficiaries and we represent one of those beneficiaries and they go to great expense to pay for attorneys fees and costs to bring and confer a benefit on the rest of the trust beneficiaries and here it sounds like there was an additional two million dollars that were was taken in the form of alleged gifts and so forth prior to Mom's death it sounds like a portion of that or maybe most of it was recovered because of the efforts of the beneficiary that spent all the money and attorneys fees and these attorneys fees are very expensive seven hundred thousand dollars is even in a 14 million dollar estate that's a lot of money and so the question then is who should have to bear those attorneys fees should it be the person who decided to move forward with the case here the one beneficiary should he have to bear all of those fees because it sounds like he conferred a major benefit on the trust that benefited the other remaining beneficiaries right so you've got this johnny-come-lately beneficiary that says oh well I don't want you to you know what I want you to do is give me all the extra that you got into the trust but I don't want to have to pay for that and it's just fundamentally unfair and so the court actually has a doctrine for this and what is that doctoring so the doctrine the court so first of all the court says this is not a violation of her due process rights because she was notified throughout that Dawn was asking for his attorneys fees to be paid back it's a pretty common prayer you see it in a lot of pleadings where they say we want our attorneys fees so there's no problem there and then what the court used is a doctrine and it's an offshoot of the Common Fund doctrine and so the whole idea between behind the Common Fund doctrine is if you take an action that benefits the entire fund then everybody should pay you for that out of the fund you should get your your attorneys fees reimbursed out of the fund the reason I say that it's an offshoot of that and let me get the exact terminology here because it's interesting this is what they referred to it as a substantial benefit doctrine and there's a difference between the Common Fund doctrine and the substantial benefit doctrine in the sense that with the Common Fund doctrine it's just about money so if you increased the the amount of money in the fund because of your actions you should get paid back with substantial benefit doctrine you can also get paid from the fund if you did things that were non-monetary so for example if you went in and you got the trustee removed you didn't necessarily increase the value of the fund but you certainly helped protect it if you remove a bad trustee you're gonna protect that fund and so you can still get your attorney's fees right and so under that doctrine the court said there's not really nothing wrong I mean this guy went in and through his actions he got better accounting because the accountings were terrible he found out about this two million dollars that was lost he secured what was left and they came to a settlement and they they were able to resolve the case so I guess the bottom line is there are ways to get attorneys fees but it in this case it was attorneys fees out of the trust not I think what most people want is they want jo-anne the bad trustee to pay back dawn and that's not what's happening in this case at all that's right I mean that rarely happens right the one thing that hits me about this case other than everything you just went over was that there was five days of trial and then they still settled the case right and this goes to my theory that you know 97 98 percent of these cases settle and there are so many opportunities for these cases to settle I'm sure the judge before they started the trial in this case pulled counsel into chambers and said why aren't we settling this case right and then probably after the third day of trial said why aren't we settling in this case and then finally the fifth a trial the judge says look I've heard it all you guys need to settle this case so cases generally end up settling the court likes the case to settle so it doesn't surprise me that the court is going to go along with all this because it's also seen all the actors fighting in the trenches for the last year and a half to two years and then the here comes this one beneficiary who's never said anything I've never made any objections never lifted a finger to help out saying oh no I want to have all the benefits that came with my brother spending money but I don't want to have to pay my brother back for the attorney's fees that were used to convert a huge benefit onto the trust so we see this case happen all the time the problem is we don't see the judges or the courts they don't have a uniform way to apply this and so there are cases where you believe as a lawyer that the fee should be spread amongst everybody and the court doesn't always see it that way but in this case it did and that was a good outcome yeah it's an equitable power so that means the court can do it at its discretion or not do it at its discretion and so it's very hard to predict it the court will in fact do it but and you raise just to close this out the one point that you just raised too is look if you're gonna sit on the sidelines and not participate in the lawsuit you're gonna you're gonna have to suffer the consequences of that right and that's what happened here is Donna never participated until the very end and now all of a sudden she wants to come in and and we've had a case we've got a number of cases in fact where that's happened the whole litigation has gone through the parties have reached a settlement and maybe the parties are going to court asking a court to approve the settlement and now here comes somebody who never participated was a beneficiary but sat on the sidelines and they're like we want you to deny the settlement and a lot of times the court will say no we're gonna approve it over your objection because you weren't here I have something in the back of my mind about you appearing in Riverside and what from one of our favorite judges there and somebody's showing up late and objecting to a settlement that we had on the record and I guess the judge dressed this person down do you remember that yeah I remember that it happened there it also happened in San Diego County and I've had it happen in San Jose County and so look courts want settlements there's no doubt about it and it doesn't surprise me either that not only did the court want these people to settle but then the appellate court affirmed it well more than settlements do they want settlements they also don't want people to sit in sit by on the sidelines and wait to the last minute to come and destroy a hard hard-fought settlement right and here you know this was a settlement way late in the process most settlements happen before trial right here you went to the expense and time of both sides gearing up for a five-day probably a longer trial than five days oh yeah it just happened to settle five days so a lot of money $700,000 was a lot on a 14 million dollar state but it sounds like there was oversight from the judge and again I think this is a good outcome for the person that actually stepped forward and did something they should get compensated for that yeah seems fair that's for sure I mean even if the amount doesn't seem fair the the concept is right let's go on to our next segment there's gonna be our practice pointers so today's practice pointer so Stuart have you dealt with anything recently that had to do with dealing with fee issues well I have and and this comes to the idea of we primarily represent beneficiaries here and we normally sue trustees and trustees are the ones that are in control of the assets the money they're supposed to manage it or managing other people's money and so they never they never treat other people's money like they do their own money all right we call that the OPM issue other people's money that's why the law imposes such stringent fiduciary duties on trustees to force them to care about other people's money because they they just don't by nature I mean it's just who we are right we care about our own toys not about the next-door neighbor's toys yeah and so we have these duties that trustees are supposed to follow one thing that we're seeing more and more of and we saw this early on in our career was that trustees were taking very adversarial positions towards beneficiaries which is a duty of the conflict of interest which is a violation of the duty of not to have a conflict of interest with a beneficiary it also breaches the duty of loyalty that you have to a beneficiary and we're seeing this time and time again and it was interesting this last week we have a lawyer up in the Bay Area who is essentially representing a trustee up there and is treating our clients like litigants in a regular plaintiff versus defendant fight and she's taking the gloves off and she's playing brass knuckles and she's hitting us in the face and I'm saying to her look you have substantial duties that you owe to us you can't do that if she says yes I'm well aware of the duties my client owes and then she goes ahead and files a petition at great expense a petition to have my our clients the beneficiaries of that trust surcharge whatever reason she's come up with which we looked at her reasons and they're not very good but think about the money it took from the trustee to hire the lawyer to file this petition to go after the beneficiaries of the trust so now you have a trustee who's actually going after the beneficiaries of the trust when the trustees whole job is to protect and maintain the property for the beneficiaries and that trustee is also a beneficiary and essentially what she wants is for the two these two beneficiaries to have to pay her as a beneficiary that's right so the more she damages them the better it is for her personally personally correct and so she's got these two hats she's got one on as a trustee and the other is a beneficiary well here she's just leaving her trustee hat on doing all of this and I pulled out my trusty little probate code here and it's it's funny it's the probate codes kind of like the Bible you pull out the Bible or the probate code and you you read something and whatever you're experiencing at that moment you find something new in in the text and here the trustees duties on in California law are under probate code 16,000 and it's a it's a series of probate code provisions that you run through with duties but the one in particular that struck me here was probate code 16,000 and four and that's entitled duty to avoid conflict of interest and it says that a trustee has a duty to not take part in any transaction in which a trustee has an interest adverse to the beneficiary right and that it never struck me the way it did I knew that rule but I never struck me the way it did when I was reviewing this trustees petition to have the two benefits research arch because she is taking part of a transaction that is adverse to those beneficiaries so you and I we talked about this and we said hey if she wants to resign as trustee and she wants to then just put her beneficiary hat on she can go hire a lawyer and she can file whatever she thinks she needs to she's not gonna win Michigan filed whatever she thinks she needs to to have our clients surcharge for whatever her theory is now we have a chance to oppose that and we have a chance to put evidence on to show that she can't do that but she's doing it as a trustee and the problem with that is their damages that are taking place there because her lawyers charging to file an action to hurt trust beneficiaries and where's the lawyer being paid from out of the trust I mean that's the problem that's the problem and so that's that's something we dealt with this week and we put together some Discovery written discovery and we sent it over and we put together I don't use requests for admissions a lot requests for admissions as you know we asked somebody admit something to be true or false and they're kind of fun because you can ask legal questions to parties in a case and hear the trustees a party and so we're asking her legal questions and so some of those questions just simply started out with admit you're the trustee of the trust and that one seems easy enough right yeah yes I am I am admit that as trustee of the trust you have duties fiduciary duties to the beneficiaries naturally yes and admit that you have a duty not to take plate not to take part in any transaction in which you have an interest adverse to the beneficiaries oops yeah do we start slowing down there a little bit all right okay and then you know admit that you're paying for the petition out of trust funds admit that you're paying for the petition out of your own personal funds yeah so we're looking for is an admission or a denial right and so it's put this this lawyer has put her client the trustee in a difficult position because she's now at a point where she's being so adversarial and she's not allowed to do that so and this comes up a lot what trustees are also beneficiaries because the other thing you had them admit is admit that if you're successful you're going to receive more and that was really the GOC I think question because at some point you know you can't be doing that's really what makes it an adversarial transaction I suppose is that this lady's gonna get more out of her Tran out of her efforts and she's paying from the trust to do it so you have a trustee there also beneficiary they see let's just assume for a moment let's not take our case but another hypothetical case where you feel like a beneficiary did do something wrong and the trust should be compensated from the beneficiary or there should be a reallocation of assets among the beneficiary for some reason what's the right way to go about doing that for a trustee beneficiary if I was it that's a great question that's the question that should have been asked at the very beginning of any of these cases where you as a trustee or having problems any kind of problem with the beneficiaries in a trust let me give you an example that I would have you that two of the beneficiaries live in the trust residence when the mom passes away and you're the trustee now and the beneficiary refused to leave the property well the trust the probate code that I just registered you cannot take part of any transaction where you have an adverse interest to the beneficiaries yeah and so you have to step back and say well what do I do here I can't get them to leave I need to prepare the the asset for sale and then once it's sold I need to divide up the the proceeds amongst the beneficiaries as the trust terms require so how do I get these people out of the house well you don't call them names you don't take you don't sue them in a civil court for damages what you do is you petition the probate court and you say we want an instruction from you the probate court telling us the trustee what to do because we understand this a very fine line here right and we don't think this is us being adversarial to the beneficiaries because it ultimately is gonna help the beneficiaries because we got to get them out of the house so we can sell it but they're not leaving and I don't want to be so difficult to them I don't want to be so adversarial with them so I'm simply asking the probate court can I bring it unlawful detainer action which essentially allows me to remove them legally from the house have the sheriff come out and escort them off the property ultimately so that I can clean the house up get it listed for sale and Sally and you're talking about a step that would come before an eviction because a lot of times the trustees will just go out and file eviction and you're saying no no you can't just go and file eviction first why don't you get court permission yes or no can I do this eviction action and then you go on with the eviction if it's yes right I think if you were just a trustee and not a beneficiary you probably could go ahead and just tell people hey I'm gonna have to file an eviction here I still think the best way to do to do that is with a petition for instructions but the probate court but when you're the beneficiary and trustee wearing those two hats you have to have extra due diligence if there's such a thing and you have to make sure that everything you're doing is showing that hey I have the best interest of the trust at heart and I don't want to hurt be ad material to the beneficiaries I've obviously got a difference of opinion with the beneficiary on this issue they won't leave the house right and so I'm gonna use the tools that California law gives me to gently and kindly get them out of the house so that I can sell it rather than just take it an adversarial position what about using separate attorneys so sometimes you'll have a trustee beneficiary hire two attorneys want to represent them as trustee want to represent them as beneficiary that works every single time that I've seen it and it works really well because what courts understand what judges understand is that that trustee has number one identified the issue and number two they're reaching into their own pocket to pay for their beneficiary attorney and I've never seen it I'm sure it could happen but I've never seen a judge remove that trustee just because they have to wear two hats because what the trustee is saying to the judges I've identified the issue I see the potential conflict there and that's why I have one attorney that's helping me administrate the trust and do a good job there and I also have another attorney protecting my beneficial interest so you'd pay for the trust attorney how the trust funds you pay for your personal attorney as representing as a beneficiary of your own pocket that's right and I would even say that you know when anytime a beneficiary sues a trustee for breach of fiduciary duty if we're advising that trustee and that a trustee comes in and we see there's some breaches there we're gonna highly advise them look you need to pay out of your own pocket to an attorney that represents you as a beneficiary to defend this because the courts gonna find out sooner or later that there truly were breaches like in the in the case that we went over earlier and there's two million dollars missing and potential gifts the that's the argument you always hear you're gonna need a separate attorney representing you and that not the trust attorney representing you in that and the good news is is that if you do pay for it out of your own pocket later on you could always ask the court whether or not you can be reimbursed from the trust and the court can give you permission to do that if it feels it's appropriate the problem is I think if you pay for the true out of the trust to begin with now it looks like you're doing something wrong and you might you might get hit that's very negative way by the court that's right so you kind of it's a good way to hedge your bets it is let me just say one other thing that these these the fees that we see and since we're talking about fees and you saw this seven hundred thousand dollars we litigated against a firm several years ago in San Diego and I will I will not mention their name but they had done about a year and a half on a case so it was about eighteen months and we went to three weeks of trial three weeks through that trial the judge finally had enough of us and it was one of the best judges I've ever been in front of and he sent us into mediation like four o'clock in the afternoon and said what don't come back and see me until you guys settle this case and we did settle but we learned at that point what was left owed by that trustee in that case he'd already paid I think about a quarter of a million dollars in attorneys fees he had another eight hundred fifty thousand dollars in attorneys fees on top of that at two fifty you're talking over a million dollars for a trustee Wow on a case in that case was a five or six or seven million it wasn't as large as the the case you had but yeah these fees are and it's not you know I'd like to say I'm probably Tooting my own horn here it's not just the lawyers fees it's the cost of doing these cases it's really expensive expert witnesses accountants all the that goes into depositions video depositions yeah I mean the fees are astronomical yeah or they can be the one benefit we have I suppose in our practice area is that there's a pool of money that really nobody owns yet at least in theory they don't own it and so then usually the attorneys fees can come from there it's a little bit more palatable than having to reach into your own pocket to pay for an attorney but it's still very expensive although I mean we've seen a lot of high fee cases but 1.1 million is getting up there I mean yeah that's that's definitely at the high-water mark of what I mean I can't think of a billable case we've had where we've had those kind of fees for a year and a half a work you'd have to be working that seems like a lot yeah yeah so it goes all right let's go on to our last section this is our asked and answered segment so we have a few questions that people have asked us over the last week or two and we get hundreds and hundreds of calls into our firm every month asking about trust and we'll issues it's a very confusing topic but since we're on the topic of fees today let's talk a little bit about some of the fever related questions that we get okay and I have not been given any of these questions yet so you have not very she's going very nervous yes all right so here's a big this is a question I get some form of this question probably every week or multiple times every week so why can't the beneficiary of a trust get money out of the trust so that they can hire their own attorney well the practical answer to that well the theoretical answer to that is they should be able to get money out of the trust if there's money that can be distributed to them and there's still enough money left over for the trustee to complete the trust administration but in practice trustees understand that if you give someone a war chest they'll use it to fight against you and so many of them will try to leverage that and try to get you to and you the beneficiary to sign off on something before a distribution can be made to you which usually includes a general release and waiver of all liability against the trustee whether that's effective or not that's another issue but they're not going to distribute money to you because they're afraid you're gonna use that to go hire a lawyer to attack them for their job that they've been doing as trustee yeah so it's kinda like the golden rule right he was the gold makes the rules so possession nine-tenths the law so they're not gonna make a distribution out now it could be that some trusts don't allow distributions out to beneficiaries yet so you see this a lot with married couples so a married couple will create a trust and when dad dies maybe the wife who may not be mom to the children might be a stepmom everything's held for her benefit during her lifetime and so the kids aren't beneficiaries yet so there's nothing to distribute but maybe there's some problems and they want money out of the trust to fight those problems and the reality is is they're not current beneficiaries are not entitled anything yet that's right so then I can't get anything yet right so that's it depends on the type of trust you have to there are trust to where acids are given to children but they're very restricted right so you can only use it for I saw one the other day that was really particularly restrictive where it said you can only use it for catastrophic medical items whatever that means I have no idea what that means what make something catastrophic versus not cast well since we represent them catastrophic is a very broad category ya hangnail I got a scratch that's catastrophic give me money yes that one was particularly restrictive but that's the other part of it as a trustee could legitimately say well you don't meet the standard of distribution therefore we're not gonna give you the money right where did the trustees pay for their attorneys out of though the trust every time yes and you know are they supposed to pay it out of the trust as long as there's a whole line of cases on this as long as the trustees can point to that this is a benefit conferred on the trust then yes and also you want to look at the trust terms what do the trust terms say some trust will say the trustee is allowed to spend as much money as they want to defend the purposes and the terms of this trust others don't quite say that expressly but ultimately if the trustee is doing their job and someone's attacking the terms of the trust trust contest to say no it should I should be getting fifty percent not twenty percent they're allowed to take trust assets to pay a lawyer to litigate that matter but the problem we run into is where the trustee themselves has breached their duties say that the trustee took over five million dollars worth of bank accounts four years ago and left them in non-interest bearing bank accounts well that that's bad because five million dollars over five years we're talking a substantial amount of income that could be created out of that right that was not lost that is now lost and so when you the beneficiary sue that trustee and say hey you breached your duties under the probate code you should have diversified the trust assets you should have had an investor policy statement put together you should have invested these assets in a diversified portfolio with a time horizon based upon the likely distribution there should have been all of those things should have been done and you didn't do those now when the trustee reaches in the trust to pay for their lawyer they're defending themselves they're not bringing a benefit to the trust and like you said let's say that somebody makes a bad faith argument against a trustee and says they didn't diversify but the trustee did they did all their their duties to diversify and there were just some market losses right now the trustee I think should still pay out of their own pocket but then I think the courts gonna give them a reimbursement of those seek reimbursement that's right so if the trustees trying to fight their own personal liability they really should pay out their own pocket I think it makes them look and think how far that goes with the court that's not something we normally talk about in court except when this issue arises but I know we were being attacked up in a case up in Santa Clara County we were represented a trustee and I represent the beneficiary side and our good colleague up there represents the trustee side of it and the opposing counsel in that case was telling the judge that she should be removed because of the inherent conflict of interest and I was just so proud to tell the court that I was being paid personally by the client and the court was very impressed with that because if it takes away her conflict or at least mitigates it enough so that the court feels comfortable to allow her to continue on that's right but on these cases where a trustee is trying to just protect their own personal liability they shouldn't be paying using trust money to pay the attorneys fees do they it's a tough conversation to have with the trustee thankfully thankfully we represent mostly beneficiaries but we do have our share of trustees we represent it's a tough conversation have because you're asking them to reach into their own pocket to defend against what they see as baseless allegations and they feel that the court will reimburse them down the road anyway so why should I have to reach into my own pocket you know my argument might be well then maybe you should resign even then that doesn't do away with the breach that can still move forward so they're still reaching into their own pocket so it's it's a tough it's a tough decision to have to make and it seems in my experience at about 80% of the time the trustees will pay for their defense out of the trust even though they really shouldn't and now it's up to the beneficiary to have to argue against that the other thing we can do and we don't like to do it because it causes an argument and you never know which way the judge is gonna go on it but when we really are in a position where the trustee doesn't have the resources to hire the lawyer well then file a petition with the court and say we would like to use trust assets to pay for this with the understanding that if we lose that we would owe this back out of our distribution amount or whatever the case may be so if you have a beneficiary who can't get money out of the trust to pay for the attorneys fees and they still want to take action what's the alternative what option is there are you talking about hiring like on our contingency fee basis yes yes yeah and it's you know the contingency fee practiced in trust in States we've seen that grow a lot across many firms in California over the last ten probably ten years or so I've really seen a spike in that and some people they don't like contingency fees but if you look at the access to justice that it allows for many people who don't have the resources think about a trustee who has done some really bad things right and they have resources in the trust assets to continue to do those bad things and to hire lawyers well let's take this miss case fourteen million dollar trust the trustee has access to fourteen million dollars she knows she took two million dollars before mom died what is she gonna do she's gonna try and cover it up any way she can that's right she doesn't want to face the music and now you have a beneficiary who's coming after her but what if this beneficiary didn't have any money that's probably why the one beneficiary sat on the sidelines quite frankly this dawn I probably sat on the sidelines because you can't afford it how you can afford right going after somebody has 14 million dollars a war chest of 14 million dollars that's right so how does that work I mean what's the advantage I guess of a Donna type person of going in contingency because then you hire a lawyer that is eager to win the case obviously because they don't get paid unless they do win so they're gonna go in and fight very hard against a side that has a lot of money to use and if a firm specializes in this type of practice like we do I think we're in a position where we can give the trustee a uniquely difficult time by trying to ask the court to keep them from using trust assets for their trustees fees which is it's denied more often than not but at least you ask and you're trying to push that every once in a while you win one of those right and then the case settles because the war chest is dried up gray so a lot of this I mean we've been doing this for years in warfare right the the people countries don't lose wars because the other side fought better they lose wars because they run out of money I hate I mean that's and and the same happens in litigation you run out the side that runs out of money first is the one that's gonna settle the case out and be done right there's also the matter of costs right because as we talked about before lawsuits can be very expensive so if you need an expert that's gonna cost you twenty five thousand dollars minimum per expert depositions you know to take a deposition you have to pay the court reporter you have to pay the videographer because most of our Deborah's depositions or videotaped nowadays they don't call it videotaping anymore they're recorded whatever you call it and and there's other expenses to witness fees or expert witness fees so a deposition can easily run you five to six thousand dollars just in hard costs right including turning attorney time that's right and and just like with anything when you spend your credit card during the month you you know you think you went to Starbucks four times and you got a CD CD do people still get CDs they get itunes or whatever into the month you've got like two thousand dollars that you have to pay on your credit card same thing in litigation it's just these expenses just keep mounting and mounting mounting and that's the benefit of the contingency fee is that the law the law firm that takes that contingency case on they pay those costs the beauty is if they lose the case in most cases then the client doesn't have to pay them the costs and so as you can see these costs are a real issue the fee tourney's fees and costs it's the hardest discussion we ever have with clients once we get over that discussion and we hire us we can roll up our sleeves and go to work although you should be careful with the engagement agreement make sure that it does say that if the lawyer doesn't obtain any money for you that you don't have to pay back the cost that's right we that's how all of our agreements are but not every law firm works that way and that's right so anyway that's any other thoughts about contingency fees versus hourly fees I don't like hourly fees myself I mean if somebody wants to I mean we've had plenty of people hire us on an hourly fee basis it's just that the thing I like about contingency fee practices I get to had a client tell me the other day you front-loaded the case and he said if I'd been on hourly I would have been really upset at you but since I'm not on our land thrilled with what you're doing keep doing it does that mean front-load the case so we just went we filed a pleading immediately jumped all over that we got written discovery out we got depositions subpoenas out we got noticed this is a deposition out we think we got some subpoenas out to finance institutions I think even a couple of medical providers the reason we want to do that is we want to get moving quickly on these cases and we find that if you move quickly and you solidify up the elements that you need to prove at the time of trial there's nothing better than showing up to the first or second possibly third hearing with the judge saying we're ready for trial we're ready for trial we're ready for trial so on contingency case you can put in a lot of work at the beginning of the case and that's gonna help you build the pressure that you need to get a good result that's right and if you try to explain that on an hourly basis the client in that first 60 to 90 days it's gonna go wow that's what you've been on yeah this is really expensive to do a lot of work on an hourly basis yeah it's not seven hundred thousand dollars or one point whatever it was another case but it's still it's still very expensive on an hourly basis and I don't like to have to be having those discussions with clients I just prefer to put put me on your case and let me do what I do and I'm gonna do I'm gonna work this case hard I can promise you that and it's much easier for me to do that if you set me free then for me to constantly be thinking what can we afford to do that can we do that can we do that yeah let us do what we do best and good things happen yes great well that's all we have time for in today's stand fight wind podcast I want to thank you for joining us we will be here next week and we will be going over another exciting trust and well topic yes and I want to thank you for setting all this up I wanted to know what you thought I mind what my red sweatshirt like I like it you like it look good okay and we have somebody new helping us today right yeah we have our new marketing director Manisha with us today and we of course didn't set up a camera for because we're rude and Kayla as always as here working our laptop she's doing a great job of keeping us on track and our hope is is to get them involved in the future so that you don't have to just hear us drone on which is although it's fascinating to hear astronomic on so much so I agree with that yeah that's one thing you and I can agree on yeah Trustin Estates is stimulating okay see you next week.