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Dave: Good morning, Chris.

Chris: Good morning, David. How are you?

Dave: Hey. I am great. Thank you for joining me today on the IC-DISC show.

Chris: Well, I appreciate you having me, and glad to be here.

Dave: That is great. Well, let’s get started. We are live. Let me just set up the audience, just tell them a little bit about your background. Chris Hanslik is an attorney, and he currently serves as Chairman at the law firm of Boyar and Miller here in Houston. Chris received his Bachelor’s in Business Administration from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and then, he received his law degree from South Texas College of Law here in Houston. With that, let’s get started.
Welcome to the show. I’ve really been looking forward to having you on the show. I served on a board with your founding partner, Bill Boyar about 15 years ago is how I first came to know the firm. Always been a big fan of it, and we’ve shared some clients through the years. First off, thank you for you, and Bill, and the whole team there at Boyar and Miller being such a great resource for us and our clients.

Chris: Well, it’s our pleasure. We’ve certainly enjoyed the relationship that we’ve had with you and then the clients we’ve shared over the years. Being able to have this opportunity to be on your show means a lot, and look forward to continuing our mutual working relationship going forward.

Dave: That sounds great. How old were you when you first considered becoming an attorney?

Chris: Oh, that’s a good question. I believe it was probably the first thoughts of that were in high school, but I know for certain, it was about this time of year in January, between my fall and spring semester at SMU in college, where the plan hatched in my brain that I was going to major in business as an undergraduate, but then go to law school. And I went to my counselor and rejiggered my coursework for that, and that’s what I did.

Dave: Was that your freshman year or sophomore year?

Chris: It was my freshman year after, in all honesty, after premed biology kicked my rear end in the fall, I decided the medical field was not going to be for me. And I really enjoyed some of the classes I took in economics, and business, and had this infatuation with what the law that started through my uncle, Larry Wadler, and that’s where I decided this is what I think I want to do. And so far, it’s been a pretty good decision.

Dave: Yeah. It would seem like it. You’d mentioned your uncle was an influence on your choice. What else attracted you to the law?

Chris: Yeah, I think it was the… It started really first and foremost watching his practice. My uncle practiced in a small town near Houston called Wharton, Texas, and practiced for over 50 years there, just recently retiring a few years ago, served as a judge for a period of time. And I remember in the summers, when I’d go visit my grandmother, I’d go up to his office some. And as I got older, he would talk to me more about what he did as a lawyer. And what struck me, I think, first and foremost was the opportunity to help people.
Being a small town lawyer, he did a little bit of everything, but I think that’s what really stuck in my brain is it was an opportunity to have, I guess, an education where then, you go out and you’re able to help people with issues that they can’t necessarily help themselves with. So, that started it. Then, as I got more into it, obviously, the challenge of digesting the case law and figuring out the nuances that make one case better for you and your client versus another case that either hurt you or how do you distinguish it away from your situation. That challenge really inspired me.

Dave: Okay. Well, and it’s ironic because from what I know about your practice and some of the other attorneys at Boyar and Miller. It shares elements with your uncle’s practice, right? You’re a resource and a sounding board, and you’re basically just helping your clients navigate any number of business and legal matters, right?

Chris: Yeah. I think that’s a fair characterization. We’ve tried to bring meaning… I think there are attorneys out there, and historically, you may have seen a law firm advertise as attorneys and counselors at law, and we really try to bring definition and meaning to both of those words. And really, that counselor word, when we work with our clients, it’s not just about drafting a piece of paper, or filing a lawsuit, or answering a lawsuit. It’s about gaining a deeper understanding of the client’s business. How can you be an extension of their office and be a partner with them as they try to grow their business, accomplish the goals they’ve set for their business and themselves, and really marry that up so that, again, you’re just an extension of their team.

Chris: We find that when we can approach the way we deal with our clients in that way, everyone benefits. And it really goes to our mission statement of providing counsel beyond expectation, building lasting relationships, and making a meaningful difference in people’s lives. That’s really our focus in everything we do. How can we accomplish those three things when we are asked by a client to do something for them?

Dave: That is a very clear description of how you approach your work. I appreciate that clarity.

Chris: We think it’s important, David, for any business to have clarity about purpose. For us, purpose is your mission statement. Why do you exist. And one of the things that I always tell people is, we don’t view ourselves as a law firm, we view ourselves as a business that provides legal service. And for us, the difference in that is we approach things like a business should approach things and how a good, successful business might attack what it wants to do in the world; and that’s why it starts with what’s your purpose, right? As an organization, what is your purpose?
And we have spent time to get clarity on that. We check in on that mission throughout the year. We reward or praise behavior or critique behavior whether it meets or doesn’t meet our mission, because we have to hold ourselves accountable. That’s kind of our stake in the ground. And everyone up here at BoyarMiller, from our receptionist all the way to me and our co-founders Bill and Gary, are accountable to achieving our mission every day.

Dave: That is great. What year did you join BoyarMiller?

Chris: I joined in 2004.

Dave: Okay, and what year were you elected to the chairmanship?

Chris: I guess it was announced that I was going to be chairman at the end of 2008, and Bill Boyar and I did a two year transition, kind of succession, where I then took over January 1 of 2011 as chairman of the firm.

Dave: Okay. What comes to mind that’s been the best part about being chairman?

Chris: I think the best, kind of most fulfilling part is the obligation that I feel to deliver every day to our people here and to our clients, but really to our employees here at the firm, that I’m doing the best I can to provide each of them an opportunity to be successful, however they define success. And I don’t take that lightly, because everyone wants to be good at what they do. And if the organization you’re in is not providing you those opportunities, they’re going to look somewhere else.
And so the challenge that I kind of have as chairman, at least the one I take on, is to make sure that people feel valued, that they feel like they have an opportunity for growth and advancement. And if we can do those things right, David, then our clients benefit because we have engaged happy employees who are passionate about what they do. And if they’re here at BoyarMiller, that means you’re passionate about that mission statement I described and they will carry that over to how they serve our clients, and then our clients benefit. For me, it really starts here internally at BoyarMiller making sure we’re doing the right things to have the best workforce we can.

Dave: That is great, and it reminds me of something I heard Herb Kelleher say on a podcast, the founder of Southwest Airlines. That was always his philosophy is not that the customers come first, the employees come first. And then if you take care of the employees, they in turn will take care of your customers and clients.

Chris: Yeah, I’ve heard that from him. And again, I’m not smart enough to come up with some of these things on my own know. I do a lot of reading and try to learn from some of the best in the business across the world, and then figure out how can we apply that to what we do here. Herb Kelleher’s one, Jack Welch is one, Jim Collins. There’s lots of people out there that have been successful entrepreneurs. That if you study that, you have the benefit of their knowledge and you try to pick and choose what can work for you.
But we definitely believe it starts internally. And we say our mission statement applies both internally and externally because we want to be great counselors to one another, we want to build lasting relationships with one another here, and we want to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the people that are employed at BoyarMiller. Again, if we can do that, right, we believe our clients benefit in the end.

Dave: No, that makes a lot of sense and I can appreciate that. And I also can appreciate the satisfaction that you derive from building a culture that really encourages your colleagues to be the best they can be and try to remove obstacles in the way of them being able to do a good job.
You talked about your mission statement and we talked a little bit about kind of culture and philosophy at the firm, but I’d like to drill down a little more into that. How would you say that translates into what makes your firm different than other other firms? What would your clients tell you that makes you all different than other firms?

Chris: Yeah. It kind of varies based on the client experience. But ultimately, one of the things we talk about here is what we do, being lawyers, is not necessarily unique because I think the number is over 15,000 licensed attorneys in the Greater Houston area, but how we do it can be different. And it goes back to mission and culture as you described.
I would hope that our clients would say: “That it’s the interaction with the lawyers at BoyarMiller. That I feel like they actually care about my business. They take time to ask questions that aren’t necessarily legal in nature, but to get to know our company better and how they can provide value to help us solve our business challenges. That those lawyers at BoyarMiller are responsive. That they understand our needs. They respond in a timely fashion and we feel that they take our business concerns and challenges on as if they’re their own.”
If we can deliver on that, I think it sets us apart in providing great legal service at an incredible value to our client. We do surveys with our clients. This time last year, we did kind of a fuller effort in getting feedback from clients and how we were living true to our mission and our culture. And the feedback was, I’m proud to report, very positive.
One of the challenges, right, is you think you’re delivering on your mission and values, but unless you ask the person you’re delivering those services to what they think, then you don’t know. And so it was nice to hear that what we thought we were delivering was in fact being delivered in the feedback we got from clients. And so you learn from that and you learn what you do well and that you should keep doing that and getting better at it. But you also learn, you know what you’re not doing well, where do you need to improve and/or maybe something that is not necessarily a value that maybe you should stop doing. And so, there’s always learning and I tell our people here we can certainly learn from our failures and those are going to happen, but we can also learn from our successes because sometimes you may achieve a good result, but may be not because you did your best work, but, and where’s the learning in that? So, we’re always trying learn from what we did, review what happened, be critical about our performance, and then commit to getting better.

Dave: No, that makes a lot of sense. And I know that’s really gratifying when you think you’re delivering a service that is valued and then actually hear that confirmation from your clients. I know from my own experience, that’s very gratifying and satisfying, isn’t it?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And we took it a step further because once we got the feedback from the clients, we realized that what we don’t want to be, what the survey told us, you have really happy clients and they value the services you’re providing. That was awesome. But then it occurred to me that if we’re not delivering the same experience to our people internally, then we kind of looked like a Jekyll and Hyde. And so, the way we started the survey process was what is it like to experience BoyarMiller, however you experience us. And so, we turned that survey, after we did the client survey, internal and asked our people at all levels, what is it like to experience BoyarMiller, because we want the experience to be the same. That if we have really good clients that are satisfied and feel that they’re getting good value, as I mentioned before, we definitely want our employees to feel the same.
And again, that resulted in good feedback. We were delivering internally like we hoped we certainly learned from some things that we could do better, and we went to work on that, and started looking at some of the feedback we got internally to see, okay, what can we learn and what things can we start doing internally to make this firm as good as it can be. And I’ll give you an easy example out of that is we never had, until last year, we’d never had a formal work remote policy at this firm.

Dave: Okay.

Chris: But the internal feedback from our employee survey, we learned that would be valuable to our people. So we implemented one. Now, I know we’re not the first company in America to implement a work remote policy, but by listening to our people we got there, and that was appreciated. So we may have gotten there eventually at some point, but we would not have gotten there as soon as we did without asking.

Dave: Sure. That makes a lot of sense because you don’t know. If you don’t ask, you’re just guessing on what matters. So, that kind of takes me to my next topic that I wanted to touch on, which is my understanding is that for a lot of your clients, both your clients, specifically, and the firm’s, in general, that you all serve in a lot of ways, like an outsource general counsel. Is that right? And what does that look like?

Chris: Sure, no. That is accurate. It starts with a good percentage of our client base are entrepreneurs, privately held companies. Those companies can be from startup size to close to a billion dollars in revenue, but the founders are still in there every day, driving that business forward. It’s their life’s work, et cetera. And where we come into play in that kind of outsource general counsel role as you described, and I’ve used that term as well, is given the full service of our firm, we’re able to be the legal resource for a privately held company that doesn’t have an in-house lawyer. With the relationships we develop, they know they can pick up the phone, they’re not going to get nickeled and dimed on things, but we bring this breadth of service because we practice in really every industry that’s out there and I use the term we’re industry agnostic.
We obviously do a lot of energy-related work for clients being here in Houston, but the industries we serve go from technology, industry, real estate, private equity, healthcare. So when you do that, you see a lot of different things that even though, for example, maybe in the healthcare space, might be relevant to an energy company in some way, in some issue they’re dealing with. Whatever that may be. And then we have the depth of a team behind us to provide responsive, quick service to help that business owner, whether it’s an employee issue or a vendor issue that, it could be a potential dispute, or it’s something that they’re looking to acquire and trying to make a strategic decision about Do they do that acquisition or not? We can be that resource for that C-suite owner. And then we have some clients that grow to where they might hire a general counsel, but it’s just a law department of one and then we help serve as a kind of a counterpart to the general counsel and provide that kind of back office support for the ongoing kind of daily legal needs that the company may have.

Dave: Yeah. I’ve seen firsthand how valuable that role can be, because there’s a couple problems with trying to have that in-house attorney, right? One is that they may not be cost-effective for the company to have a full-time in-house person when they don’t really have a full-time amount of work to do. And the other problem is how talented of a person could they actually hire if they’re going to be the sole department and they’re going to be not real busy. It’s not a great career path really is it, versus somebody who’s serving as that de facto general counsel role for a half dozen or a dozen different companies? They are able to get the variety and other professional challenge and still make it cost effective to the client right?

Chris: Yeah. I think that’s right. What we see probably more times than not it’s the cost issue, and whether the client says, “Does it really justify bringing someone onto our payroll, full-time benefits, et cetera, versus buying it by the hour from BoyarMiller, knowing we’re going to need it? Knowing that each year they budget, and then they can look back historically, and we know we spend about X in legal, but does it makes sense from a cost perspective to move that, and would we really move all of those costs into the person we hired?” I think I see that being the issue more times than not. And on the, I think, the skill set of who a company might hire as general counsel somewhat depends on the industry, right? They may then say, “This particular issue seems to come up more times than not, maybe we bring someone in that really understands that and we can bring that in-house, but then we’ll still outsource the other things.” So we’ve seen it in both of those domains, I think, with various clients.

Dave: Yeah. No, I can see that. So when you think about some of your favorite clients that you work with, what would you say are some of the characteristics, or maybe more importantly, the mindsets that those founders and owners have that make them particularly attractive to you as a client or makes for a really good fit with the firm?

Chris: I’ve got a couple, I guess, thoughts on that. I’m going to start with saying, and this may be too generic, so I’ll try to bring some definition to it. But I would start that answer by saying the characteristic of an entrepreneur, very general, but it’s that can-do attitude that you see in these business owner entrepreneurs that aren’t scared to take risks, have an idea, see a path forward.
Maybe it’s an area of the world that just they view as not being served or not being served well enough, and they’ve got an idea of how to attack it. They just live and breathe it and they grow a business from it. They’re creative about it, they take full ownership of making it happen or not, and trying to make a difference in the world. So, those are some of the characteristics.
When I think about our client base and what maybe transcends all of our entrepreneurial type clients that run these privately held businesses, it’s just this passion about some idea they had or some difference they think they can make, and then going for it, and letting us enjoy the journey with them.

Dave: Right. Yeah, and I know that from conversations with Bill through the years, one of his messages that I hear repeatedly, just like you touched on at the start of the show, is that he doesn’t view himself as an attorney, he views himself as a fellow entrepreneur who just happens to practice law. It seems like that mindset by you all makes it easier for you all to relate to the challenges that that particular client may be having.

Chris: That’s absolutely right. I tell people all the time, I’m really an entrepreneur, but I pursue my entrepreneurship through the practice of law. I mean, we run a business, we have a P&L, we do a budget each year. We have a strategic plan and strategic teams that meet on a regular basis to pursue different strategic initiatives that we believe are necessary for this company to be successful over whatever particular horizon we decided. Usually it’s a two-year horizon and we reset strategy.
So, when we are talking to clients or prospective clients, I think we’re at our best when we don’t sound like lawyers. When we’re asking them about their business and what their concerns are, where they see opportunity. Because what’s important is to understand their business, and you’re not going to do that by talking, you do that by listening and asking questions.
Then we can figure out, based on what they think their challenges are, where they see opportunity, if there’s an intersection with services we provide, then we might be able to have a relationship with that particular business owner, and they become a client. If all goes well, a happy client and a long-term client.
But for us, it really starts with, we’re out here running a business, a small business with 50 employees and providing for, I guess, all those families, and we take a lot of pride in that. There’s a lot of obligation, because success isn’t guaranteed and the business isn’t guaranteed to come in the door, unless you’re out there really thinking thoughtfully about what it’s going to take to put yourself in position to be successful.

Dave: No, I agree completely. Well, since this is the IC-DISC Show, we probably should talk a little bit about IC-DISC. So, although we’ve served clients together who have IC-DISCs, my sense is that IC-DISC is not necessarily a primary focus of your firm, like it is, for example, of Neal Block from an attorney who was on one of our earlier podcasts, who really is hyperfocused on the IC-DISC. Is that accurate? Is that not necessarily a primary focus of your firm because it is such a niche?

Chris: That is accurate. We don’t hold ourself out as having that specialty. I think the way I would describe it, we are more focused on general corporate M&A, corporate finance as it relates to that. I think having worked with you over the years, we can understand the issue and spot it, but we bring in the specialists like yourself to help our clients with that, or evaluate whether it’s something they can take advantage of or not. But we are certainly not a specialist, nor will we hold ourself out as such in that field.

Dave: Yeah. No, I understand. How do you decide what practices to really focus on and which ones to be more of a generalist on in pulling specific expertise? What drives that decision? Because I know as the firm has grown, there have been more practice areas that you all have developed more of an expertise around.

Chris: Yeah, so we strategically made the decision to focus on certain areas and they’re fairly general, there can be some specialties within that, but it’s corporate, corporate M&A and corporate finance, real estate, employment law, and litigation. Litigation is business and commercial litigation, it’s employment litigation, it’s real estate related litigation. January of 2019, we added probate litigation.

Dave: Okay.

Chris: So probate litigation is a new one for us, but if you look at the others I described, from the corporate work, M&A, finance, real estate, employment and litigation, 90% to 95% of the legal issues a business faces fall within those camps. When you think back to what we talked about previously about being that outsource general counsel etcetera for a company. We can bring to bear the skills and expertise needed to cover the breadth of that. Now sometimes there might be what I refer to as the super specialty that may be an issue that pops up. So for an example, in an M&A transaction, there’s going to be a tax issue.
Well, we partner with a couple of really good tax lawyers in Houston to work with us on that. And our client just, we buy their time by the hour, but we don’t have that specialty in house. It could be maybe a very specialized, a IP issue. So a client wants to pursue patenting a technology. We work with a couple of really good IP boutique firms here in town to pursue that patent for the client or the trademark or whatever it may be, so that’s really how we manage those situations.
We’re always involved. So we introduce the client and kind of manage the process, but we don’t mark up that third party’s time or anything. Our client gets the benefit of our network in that situation, is we’ve worked to develop a good network with some of those boutiques, and then they don’t do what we do. So when one of their clients might have a corporate issue or a real estate issue, they’ll send them our way. And it works as a nice kind of balanced referral system in the end. And we’ve seen that work very well for us. Everyone has their own system, but that’s a system that is our system and it has worked really well in what is now our 30th year as a firm. We’re celebrating 30 years in 2020.

Dave: And by the way, congratulations on that. It’s amazing how fast the time goes by. It seems like just not that long ago, I remember when Bill and Gary started the firm and the time goes by. What I’d like to talk about next is maybe a real life example of a company that you’ve worked with for a long period of time. I mean, there’s one that I’m familiar with that recently did an exit, a client that we share, but it doesn’t have to be that one.
It could be just another client where you all have worked or you’ve worked with the client for some period of time, 10, 15, maybe 20 years. And maybe just kind of give the story and an example of where maybe you were involved, maybe from the founding of the business all the way through an exit, or just something where you can give kind of a real life example and some of the things you did along the way to be of value to that client. Does a client come to mind that we could talk about? I mean, obviously anonymously.

Chris: Sure. Absolutely. I’ve got one I think would fit all the things you asked about. So this particular client is in the hospitality industry. It’s a 12 plus, 13, probably 13 plus year relationship. And they came to us initially with kind of a potential landlord dispute. We helped them with that and the relationship grew from there and they were two locations, but they had dreams of growing. It’s just had one of those things you just remember vividly, even though it happened a long time ago, because the relationship has developed to be so strong, and that was one of the kind of, I think, a pivotal moment, even the client has referred to, as being meaningful in the growth of their company.
And what happened, they came in for a meeting with Bill Boyer and I, and they had a plan they wanted to execute on how to grow the company, multiple locations, multiple cities, et cetera. And we listened. And I think where the real value was created, at least, and I say that is I think what I’ve heard the clients say, where the real value was created for them in that meeting, was we didn’t just blindly listen to their plan and say, “Great, we’ll go pay for this for you. Good luck.”
Drawing on our prior experience, we started asking questions about the plan, namely with what were their real goals and what was their purpose in pursuing this plan? Where did they want to end up? And as the conversations unfolded, the client, kind of just through that kind of dialogue, determined on their own, that the plan they came with that day, wasn’t going to accomplish their goals, in fact.
And the meeting ended after an hour, hour and a half, and they say, “We have some more thinking to do.” And they came back three months later with a new plan. And we had conversation about that and it was a good plan. And we then helped them execute that plan to grow as they dreamed to grow. And that company is thriving and doing well. And along the way, we’ve been able to do corporate work for them as they brought in some investors or clean up their corporate documents and their structure. We’ve done real estate work as they done new leases on new locations and/or renegotiated with landlords or had potential lease disputes.
We’ve done employment related work for them because again, the hospitality industry, there’s always employment issues and we’ve helped them navigate those. And we’ve done other commercial litigation where they’d gotten involved in other disputes. And so it’s a really good example of, I think, delivering on our mission and values, making a difference for a client, developing that long-term relationship and being able to use every aspect of the firm in doing so. We have many others, that’s not the only one, but we asked the question that one came immediately to mind and I’m proud to say, they’re not the only one that I could give a story about.

Dave: Yeah it is, that is awesome. I know that’s really what I love most about what I do is serving the clients, being a resource and being able to marvel at the entrepreneurial vision and capabilities that these entrepreneur clients exhibit is, it’s really a blast, because I have this court side seat, if you will, of these really successful entrepreneurs doing their craft. And it’s really a lot of fun, isn’t it?

Chris: It is. I mean, I’m sure you’ll agree. I mean, being that close to the action, if you will, with those entrepreneurs, it serves as an inspiration for me and then what I bring back to the firm trying to do for our business. And knowing that, seeing the risks they’ve taken, the enjoyment fulfillment they get out of pursuing their dreams. And then, inspires me to say, I can do the same or should try to do the same here with our people. And so I think, with some of my better clients, they’re no longer just clients, they’re friends. And they serve as a resource that when we get together, we can talk about what’s going on in our respective businesses and learn from each other. And that’s why I do what I do. The relationships that I’ve been fortunate to make in this career of mine so far, have made everything worthwhile. And it’s really why I do what I do. It’s about the people.

Dave: Yep. I completely agree. So, we’ve talked about this, having this court side seat. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see entrepreneurial companies make when it comes to legal matters?

Chris: David, I think the first thing that comes to mind for me in that question is going to cheap on legal in the beginning. That starting a new company, rightfully concerned about expenses, trying to get the company off the ground. So obviously when they started, they don’t have any revenues, so everything’s just money going out the door. That some unfortunately make what I believe to be a mistake to think, well, I can save on legal, because I can go on a website and pull down a form or do something.
And so I think not getting a good legal team engaged sooner rather than later, because what happens is usually those entrepreneurs aren’t just the only… There’s not just one person, right? It’s a couple, three, four, maybe get together to form a company. If those initial documents aren’t set up right, they can cause problems down the road. And the legal spend, if you were to spend the money up front to kind of think through some of the issues that could come up later, if you don’t do that, it ends up costing 10X, when things go wrong and the documents don’t say what you thought they said, or don’t provide for a certain situation.
Now, we can’t necessarily… Well, I know this. We absolutely cannot predict the future, so we can’t necessarily draft the agreement to cover all scenarios. But we can think through most of them. And unfortunately we’ve seen time and time again, on the beginning, three or four people get together, arms locked, ready to conquer the world with their new business. And at some point down the road, one or more gets sideways and there’s a dispute. And that’s when you really want those documents to have been well-written and well-thought out.
It’s also important, and early on, you’re going to be contracting for your services with other parties, that you have a document that protects you. And so I think it’s that investing in the right legal services upfront and thinking of it as an investment in your business, as opposed to an expense is the mindset I would encourage entrepreneurs and business owners to think about; investment versus expense.

Dave: That is great advice. I guess, as we’re kind of nearing the end of our time together, what are some misconceptions that you think people have about either law firms in general or your firm in particular, or misconceptions that are perhaps true about the broader industry that are not necessarily true about your firm? So what comes to mind when I talk about misconceptions that folks may have?

Chris: Well, we’re always dealing with being the brunt of the lawyer jokes. There are no CPA jokes out there. It’s just lawyer jokes. So I think from a macro standpoint, the industry, there is some cynicism or skepticism about lawyers in general. So we certainly deal with that. I certainly would hope, based on some of the things we’ve talked about previously today, that the way we go about our business, our firm has dispelled those misconceptions as it relates to working with Boyer Miller.
Generally, I do think there’s a misperception, and it kind of goes to the last question you and I discussed here, is that some people think that they either can’t afford good legal service or legal service at all, or they don’t need it. And I think that’s another kind of misconception that one, if you’re starting a business, you do, I believe, need some good legal counsel to get it off the ground right, for reasons I previously discussed. And I think a starting business can afford it, again from the mindset of it’s an investment. And you should take time to meet more than one lawyer and figure out what drives the person that you’re going to hire because you’re forming a relationship with that person. And make sure do they really have the skill and expertise that you need?
Some of that dovetails into some people are scared off by a lawyer’s hourly rate. Well sometimes, someone that may charge a little bit higher hourly rate than the other person you interviewed, they may be able to do it more efficiently and more effectively. So I would say a misperception is sometimes the consumer of legal service gets caught up on the rate versus what is the value delivered. So, someone may charge a couple hundred dollars less, but they may spend five more hours, and you end up spending the same or more, and maybe not getting as good a product as you would have gotten with the person with a little bit higher rate.

Dave: Yeah, I witnessed that.

Chris: Yeah. So at the end of the day, I think it’s about delivering value to the client and the client feeling like they got something of value in return.

Dave: Yep. I agree. Well, I tell you what, why don’t I see if I can summarize and recap our conversation. We’ve covered a lot of stuff. I’ve made some notes here, and so please confirm or correct. I would say my biggest takeaway from our conversation today is that you and your colleagues are really entrepreneurs who scratch their entrepreneurial itch, if you will, through serving clients as it relates primarily to their legal matters, but also in other types of counseling. Your primary focus is on your employees and your colleagues, with the idea that southwest approach, if you’re your team is happy then they’ll go take good care of your clients. You have a passion and enthusiasm for serving entrepreneurial clients, and to try to be a longterm resource, and have more of a relationship focus than a onetime transactional focus. And you really enjoy what you do. Did that summarize it accurately?

Chris: I think so. The only thing I might add somewhere kind of, I think it fits between entrepreneurs in the legal industry and focusing on our people and passion is that we’re committed to our mission and values that of the firm, which but I think that’s an overarching view. And I think the four points you summarize here kind of details under that.

Dave: Okay. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. So if an entrepreneur is listening to this podcast and he thinks, “Hey, Chris, and these folks at BoyarMiller sound like someone I should talk to,” what’s your process if somebody is interested in exploring a relationship with you all? How does the process work? How would you suggest people reach out to you? Do they get a bill starting at the first minute of the first call? How do you guys work in that way?

Chris: So they don’t get a bill in the first minute of the first call.

Dave: Okay.

Chris: Let me get that out there really clear is that if people were, if they were listening, then that may be something they were interested in knowing. It does. It starts with some outreach to someone at our firm. So sometimes it’s an email. A lot of times it’s a phone call. Obviously, people find us through our website at boyarmiller.com, and it’s B-O-Y-A-R-M-I-L-L-E-R.com. And it’s a conversation about what it is, why they’re seeking legal service. It’s usually a conversation on the phone. I always try to set up an in person meeting so we can go further to hear the issues, explain how we work. And then the client decides whether they want to retain us or not. And they’ll sign an engagement letter if they decide to. And then we start doing the work. I tell clients all the time, we only do work that you ask us to do. So we’re not going to do anything you don’t ask us to do.
So you sign the engagement, and we move forward on a particular project. And then yes, invoices follow from there, et cetera for work that’s performed. And we expect payment, but I think the best way to find us if you’re not familiar with us is to go to our website and you’ll find my bio as well as every other lawyer here. And there’s contact information, direct line email, et cetera. And we do a lot through LinkedIn as well. We’re both on our website and LinkedIn. We have a firm page. We’re continually updating the content on those two sites with information that we believe business owners might find useful. And so people can learn more about us, certainly on our website about who we are, what we do, and how to contact us.

Dave: Well, that sounds great. Well, like I said, I’ve enjoyed the relationship with the firm, and I would encourage any entrepreneur, especially a Texas based company who has an interest in exploring the relationship to reach out to you, or one of your colleagues. Well, thank you again for being on the show, Chris. I really appreciate it.

Chris: Well, it was my pleasure. I really appreciate the opportunity. And as I’ve said before, we at BoyarMiller definitely value the relationship we have with you, and look forward to that continuing in 2020 and beyond.

Dave: That sounds great. Hey, you have a great day, Chris.

Chris: You as well. Take care.