Emerging Litigation Podcast

Why a Big-Law Litigator Went Fractional with Jonathan Sablone

• Season 1 • Episode 119

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The conversation in this episode starts by discussing a post-pandemic practice pivot and how one litigator chose a new path, which led to establishing a new business at the intersection of law and finance. 

For a long time, the need for in-house counsel meant the company had crossed a certain size threshold: enough contracts, enough regulatory touchpoints, enough disputes and enough litigation to justify building a legal department. But an alternative has emerged — companies keeping their core teams lean while bringing in senior legal judgment on a part-time, flexible basis. 

In this episode I enjoyed catching up with Jonathan Sablone, founder of Sablone Advisory LLC, about why that model works and what it looks like when the lawyer is, in his words, a “fractional general counsel” and a litigation manager.

Sablone’s résumé reads like a tour through the high-end litigation market. He spent roughly 25 years at global firms including Nixon Peabody and DLA Piper, where he held leadership roles and built practices focused on complex commercial and private funds disputes. His work has spanned the financial services world—private equity funds, hedge funds, institutional investors—and often had a cross-border component. 

Thanks to Jonathan for sharing his insights, which should give comfort to litigators who might be asking themselves: Is there anything else that is just as fulfilling? 

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Thanks for listening! 

If you like what you hear please give us a rating. You'd be amazed at how much that helps. 

If you have questions for Tom or would like to participate, you can reach him at Editor@LitigationConferences.com.

Ask him about creating this kind of content for your firm -- podcasts, webinars, blogs, articles, papers, and more. 

From Big Law To New Work

Tom Hagy

Hello and welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Hagey. Today we're going to have a conversation about a post-pandemic practice pivot. That's four feeds in a row. So it's a pivot in how litigation as project management as needed, and what companies without in-house litigation council are missing. So for a long time, in-house meant a company had crossed a certain size threshold. That means they had enough contracts to deal with, enough regulatory touch points, enough disputes or threatened disputes to justify bringing in or building a legal department. But an all but an alternative is emerged. Companies keeping their core teams lean while bringing in senior legal judgment on a part-time flexible basis. In this episode, I get to speak with Jonathan Sabloni, founder of Sabroni Advisory LLC, about why that model worked and what it looks like when the lawyer is, in his words, a fractional general counsel and a litigation manager. Sablone's resume reads like a tour through the high-end litigation market. He spent roughly 25 years at global firms, including Nixon Peabody at DLA Piper, you've heard of them, for he held leadership roles and built practices, focused on complex commercial and private funds, his work to expand the financial services world, private equity funds, hedge funds, institutional investors, and often he was involved in cross-border matters. And for the record, his background, his educational background anyway. I'm not going to talk about his Italian background because that's just wrong these days. He studied government at Harvard and earned a JD from Boston College. And with that, here is my interview with Jonathan Sabloni. Hope you enjoy it. You know, I've known you for years and I'm like, but I've never really thought about how to say your last name. So and I am half Italian, so I I go between Jonathan Sablone, which I think is what you do, or Sablone, that requires me to lift my lips. Sablone.

SPEAKER_00

Sablone?

Tom Hagy

Yeah, almost like an I. I do people do like to hear what other things that lawyers do and end up doing. And you you have a uh an interesting path, I think. And so I just want to spend just a couple minutes on that. So what did when I knew you, you were uh litigation, big firm. Now you're doing something completely different. So talk talk to me about that path. Sure.

Why Zoom Broke The Model

Moving Into Litigation Finance

SPEAKER_00

And first of all, Tom, thank you for the opportunity to spend time with you and your audience today. I appreciate it. Okay. I spent 25 years at large global law firms, uh, at Nixon Peabody and then at uh DLA Piper. And I had leadership roles in both of those firms. I was the co-chair of the commercial, uh complex commercial disputes group at Nixon Peabody, which was the largest practice group in the firm. We had about 180 lawyers across the various offices, geographies. Um and then when I went to DLA Piper, I founded and co-chaired uh the private funds dispute team there. We had a uh quote a cross-border uh team in all the major financial markets in the world doing um financial disputes, uh particularly private fund disputes. And it was great. I enjoyed my practice, I loved my clients, I loved the work I did. Um and then COVID hit. Right. Um, and uh I'm trying to think it was March of 2020 when I was at the LA Piper. Uh we all got unceremoniously kicked out of the office and told we can't return. Um we we had one day where we could show up and steal all of the uh technology we could carry to take home. Of course. Sure. And you know, people forget. I mean, we didn't do Zoom before that, really, or at least I didn't. You had these conference rooms with these tricked out, you know, ridiculously expensive multi-million dollar cameras and microphones if you had to do a video. And I did that, that was March of 2020. I did it for another year and a bit. Um, and what I discovered is as much as I loved practicing law, I despised practicing law by Zoom. Uh, it was not for me. I I tend to, I'm a people person. I like to read people, I like to be in the room with them, I like to in the courtroom. Um, I want to see not just what the judge is doing, you know, how is the court officer reacting to what you're saying? That oftentimes gives you a lot of insight into what whether what you're saying is makes any sense. How are the other participants reacting? How's the if the other clients in the room, how is he or she reacting? And you know, uh you you need to read that room to, in my view, to be an effective litigator, an effective trial lawyer. And so um I had a trial by Zoom, I had oral arguments by Zoom, depositions. The thing that finally did it in for me is I had a 12-hour Zoom um mediation. Um, and if you've ever been in a mediation, most of the mediation time is spent sitting with your client waiting for the mediator to come back. And believe me, awfully long time on Zoom. Um, and around that time, this is in the now you know early 2021, I had so I've been doing it about a year remotely. I really wasn't all that happy. And uh one of my clients uh was a private equity fund that did litigation finance, uh Delta Capital, and they came to me and said, Hey, we just closed on our first fund and uh we're looking to raise our next fund, and we'd love you to come over and be our global head of originations, you know, go out and find deal flow for the fund. And in this case, deal flow means litigation, go find cases we can invest in, um, which really melded well with my network because you know I was I had a pretty large practice at the time, and uh I was, you know, I don't know if we still use the word rainmaker, but that was a big part of my job was go out and develop business. And I'll tell you, Tom, almost any other time if you had asked me if he'd asked me that question, you know, do you want to come over? I would have said and have said in the past, no, I'm no way, I'm happy doing what I'm doing. But I remember that conversation because I said, well, well, let's talk about it. Um, and you know, let's talk about it as the road to perdition, usually. You know, it's it's at that point you know that you're you're not happy. Um and I went to, so we started talking, and it was an opportunity I decided I'd take a chance on. I I it was something different. I was looking to do something different at that point in my career. Uh, I remember very well I went to the head of the DLA Piper, who's a friend uh and a former partner of mine at Nixon, and I said, I I was kind of scared of this conversation to tell him because you know I I didn't want to look like I was abandoning them, and he was said, Oh, you have to go do it. And I laughed and I said, gee, I thought you were gonna try to convince me to stay. Here's a box. Yeah, exactly. And uh I remember his words quite well, Frank. It was Frank Ryan, and he said, Um, who's still the uh the global chair at DLA, and he said, you know, these opportunities don't come along very often, and they don't come along very often for litigators. And then he said, uh, and besides, what's the worst that's gonna happen? If it doesn't work out, the door is always open, you can come back. And, you know, that resonated with me in a way that I can't quite explain. It was a safety and a security in a statement like that that made me feel like I want to take this risk. And I did. So I went over to Delta in May of 2021. I spent the first couple of years as the global head of origination doing exactly what I just mentioned, which is originating deal flow. Um my uh responsibility shifted around the summer of 2023. Uh, I became the chief litigation officer for the fund, and my role was then to um uh monitor the litigations that we'd invested in um and try to monetize them. So essentially working with the lawyers and the claimants we had funded, um, and it was a blast, you know, being in court. Uh it's it's fun being in court at trials and other things where you're not the one having to do all the work. Uh yeah. Getting through mediations, working on strategy, you know, we we couldn't control the litigation, but we could certainly try to help. And, you know, working through strategy, working on settlement concepts. I had a lot of fun doing that. Probably did my job too well because by the two summers later, so this past summer, you know, that that fund is, you know, basically almost done. Um, you know, there's bits and pieces of it, but certainly there was not the need for me to stay there and continue to do the work I had been doing. So I transitioned out uh last summer and I did something I've never done in my life, which is I took some time off, uh what the Brits might call a sabbatical if you want to be fancy about it. Um and uh, you know, I come from a very working class background, first generation college graduate. Um I fathered in graduate high school, so first generation high school graduate, I guess. Um and um I I'd always worked and it it hit me like my first reaction was I have to do something right away. And then it hit me, you spent, you know, 25 years at global law firms as an equity partner. You spent almost five years now, you know, at a major private equity fund. You've done well for yourself. You can afford to take some time and decide what what the next chapter is gonna look like. Um, so I did that. Uh it's a wonderful summer. Uh you can only golf and you know, go to the beach so often though. And by the fall, I realized I I need to do something. Like this is right. Like I I am not I am not retiring. This is this is I I don't know what people do when they retire. I would be I don't know. I would probably end up in a hostage situation.

Tom Hagy

But yeah.

Sabbatical Then A Solo Launch

SPEAKER_00

Bored out of my mind. So um I thought about staying in the funding industry, and but the right role just wasn't there, and the industry is in flux right now. Um I thought about going in-house, but um, you know, one of my very good friends who's still at DLA made a comment to me that stuck, which is he said, Do you really want to report to somebody? Right. That's a very different thing. Yeah, he's like, you know, you spent 30 years doing this, so you wouldn't have to report to anybody. Um and then I thought about going back and practicing. And what what I finally came to is that whole situation where I said I had a blast in the courtrooms and you know, working with the trial lawyers, it made me realize that's what I enjoy doing. That's what gets me up in the morning. So I thought about going back uh to a large firm. Um the the the reason I didn't is pretty straightforward. When I left DLA Piper in 2021, so five years ago almost to the day, um, my billing rate was$1,200 an hour, which I thought was obscene and still think it's obscene. It is. But rates of the last five years at major firms have doubled and tripled. So my rate today would be somewhere around$2,500 an hour if I were in a global firm. And I had a nice practice. I could go out and rebuild it and I could find cases that would support that rate structure. But as a practical matter, I would be very limited. I would have been very limited in what I could do. Um, what types of matters you can take on, what types of clients you can take on, you know, how your everyday world is going to be shaped based on that entire structure of the case has to have a certain value. It has to support not just your fee structure, but younger partners who are very expensive, associates who are very expensive. Um and again, I met with a whole bunch of people and uh friends, colleagues, networks, people in my network. And I I to a person, the ones who are at large firms, the ones who had left and done their own thing were absolutely ecstatic about it. Um and the ones who were in, I was surprised that almost to a person they would tell you, I have a two-year plan, I have a three-year plan, I have a five-year plan to transition out, you know, people in my sort of age cohort. Um, and not transition out into nothing, but go do my own thing or go do something different. Um so I put some thought into it and I said, why not, you know, launch something on your own? Um, I couldn't do the work I did before, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, but I certainly have the same experience, the same brain, the same personality at now, today, in a one-person shop at a much lower billing rate than I would have at another place billing at$2,500 an hour. So, you know, I took it took a few months to launch to get it set up. I wanted to do it right. I mean, it takes longer than people think. You wanted the right business plan. I wanted to make sure I could have a client base to support it. I, you know, you got to become an IT expert. You got to just create a website, you got to deal with domain names, you got to deal with a banking and finance expert, create a accounts, operating accounts. It takes time, but I put it all in place and I launched at the very beginning of March, uh, just last month. It's been just over my month anniversary, and I gotta tell you, it's been the best thing I've ever done. It's I I'm ecstatic about it, I'm enthusiastic. I get up every morning excited to actually do work. Um I haven't had in a bit. So uh that's how I ended up where I am today, and I couldn't be happier how things are going, at least in the first month. Um, I had created benchmarks for myself, and uh, you know, in month one, I already hit the benchmark I had set for month six. So I'm ahead of schedule and I'm really excited about it.

Defining Fractional General Counsel

Tom Hagy

So you you you know, so there was a there was a global catastrophic event that made you um you know take a look at everything. And sometimes it takes something like that. Sometimes it takes a sledgehammer to like, wait a second, what path? I didn't know I wanted to get off this path. And um, and then you you know, you pulled together your various experience and your network, and you had resources that you could you could do this. And you know, taking the time off, I think, you know, is head clearing. But so there's a lot of good lessons in there, but also I I hear you know what you said about having a plan. Um, you just don't go out and hope for the best. But uh the fact that you've got a plan, you're sticking to it. I think that's that's great. So any for any any lawyers out there thinking about you know doing something different, you're still but you're still lawyering in it in a very different capacity. Now, you mentioned litigation financing, and that's something we can talk about another day uh on another podcast. But what we're gonna talk about today is you know kind of kind of the your services, which I think are interesting um when you talk about being a fractional, a fractional GC. And the word fractional, I don't know where nobody was ever that before. It was usually a contract so-and-so, but fractional seems to be the the hip thing to to do rather than saying part-time. But um, so being a fractional GC, what what is what does that entail? I mean, tell me about how how that works. You also use the word litigation manager when we when we spoke before. So how do you um what do you do and how does a company know uh they need one?

Litigation Management And Invoice Control

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, let me let me um let me provide a little bit of context before I answer the direct question. Um and what I'd say is a lot of the work I've done over the years um were for you know private funds. That was my primary area. So hedge funds, private equity funds, um, some institutional investors, liquidators, all the rest. Um, and then I also did a lot of work for companies that weren't gigantic, you know, that were more mid-market uh corporations. And a lot of those entities, if not the vast majority, uh do not have in-house legal groups. You're working directly with, you know, the fund managers, the CFOs, um, you know, the business executives within the companies. Um, and even if they do have an in-house legal group, you know, we're not talking, you know, you're not, you're not, you're not representing Amazon. You know, we've got teams of lawyers internally. A lot of them might have one person, might have a general counsel, might have a small team. And in most cases, that team very rarely includes a litigation attorney. Uh, they're usually former corporate attorneys, deal attorneys, uh, or you know, attorneys who have specific experience in that industry in the regulatory space. And so um it was just a different practice when you're working with people who are not lawyers or who are not lawyers that understand the skill set of litigation. So that was the context. And I all I began to realize, you know, these funds, these companies, they're not gonna go out, it doesn't make sense economically for them to go out and hire uh a litigator to be in-house. They don't have enough litigation to make that worthwhile. In most cases, they don't have enough legal work to make hiring a full-time lawyer worthwhile. So I began uh to think through how does it, how would it work? Uh, how can I provide value outside those entities as opposed to being in-house in those entities? And um, I have some experience doing that. I did have a few clients where I essentially acted as general outside counsel. They would come to me with all their problems, and I would, you know, if it was litigation, I could handle it. If it was something else, I would farm it off to somebody else on the firm, or if we couldn't do it, I'd find them a lawyer to do it. Um, and so um what it allows the companies to do is to retain me or somebody like me on on to handle a host of issues on the litigation front. If they have litigation, and if we'll just talk about litigation for a minute, um you really they really do need in many instances somebody to manage that litigation for them because non-litigators and non-lawyers, um, this isn't a world they swim in, and and nor should they, um, and nor would they. It's it's they don't always understand the advice that's being given by the lawyers. They don't know enough to question some of the advice that the lawyers are giving them. And they may be getting great advice, but but anybody who's been a business executive knows knowing the right questions to ask uh can often change the direction of what uh the advice looks like. Knowing where to push back. I mean, when your lawyer says we have to do X, we have to do this type of discovery to get to this point, um, most clients say, okay. Um, but you might knowing to push back, say, okay, what's the cost point of that? Um, what if we did it this way? Or what if we changed this slightly? Or what if we took fewer depositions? What if we what if we tried to limit our our production to this subset of issues? Um, that can have huge cost savings and in many cases not impact the overall strategy. And it's not that the outside lawyers are missing it or they're trying to you know generate fees for fee generation itself. It's just they have a view of the case, and again, if it's not pushed back on, you're gonna go with that view. So I think that managing litigation generally um is something that's not a good idea left to a non-lawyer or even a non-litigator in in a in a fund or a company. On that point, I'd say um the other thing we can do, or I can do, or somebody like me can do, is also monitor the legal spend and the and the invoices that are issued. You know, most corporate executives they might look at a bill and say that looks high, that looks large, or that looks small, that looks right, or it doesn't look right, but might not have the skill set to say, okay, an associate worked on this for 12 hours. Um, that's not the appropriate amount of time. Or maybe that's the appropriate amount of time for an associate in year two or three at a lower billing rate, but it's not the appropriate amount of time for an associate in year seven or eight at a much higher billing rate, then that that can be a sign that either the case isn't being handled efficiently internally in terms of who's doing the work, or it could be a sign that the attorney, him or herself are not being efficient. So knowing the right questions to uh to ask about bills and billing and monitor the spend and make sure you're on budget and that your your your legal spend is aligning with your strategy is something that is hard even for a CFO to do. Uh, because again, the money aspect is one thing, but the skill set that's being brought to bear is something a little different. So I'm doing that now for a couple of clients, and it's it's really working well. Um I'll just say this I've been talking about litigation, it goes beyond that. I mean, you can you can hire people like me to do other things for you, you know, contract management, contract review, um, you know, contract drafting, uh, corporate governance, compliance. Um you know, even though I was a litigator for, you know, basically 30 years, um there was obviously a lot of legal work I did and and I worked with other partners in my firm on that touch those other areas, and I know enough to be able to, you know, help in those areas. And I know enough, uh I know what I don't know, right? If you don't know enough about an area, you know enough to bring in somebody else who does. So um I think that what that does for these companies or these funds is it gives them the ability to uh dedicate a certain amount of money towards their legal spend. It gives them effectively an in-house general counsel or in-house lawyer where they wouldn't have had one. And they can pay for that or the fee structure can be whatever they choose. Uh they can, you know, they can pay purely by the hour. Um, the nice thing about having your own firm is I'm a fee committee of one. Uh, I can, I can, I can approve whatever fee I want to approve. You know, I can do project-based billing, I can do blended billing on cases, depending on what side of the V you're on. We can do mixed, you know, mixes of contingency and lower billing rates or all of one, all of the other. So it gives you the flexibility to sit down with a client and say, here are your legal needs. What do you want to spend on it? How do we structure a fee agreement that works for you? And when you're talking about litigation, you're taking that role, even if it's especially if it's a large case where you're using one of the firms we've been talking about, say 2,500, 3,000. An hour, you're taking that management function from a lawyer who is going to bill you at that rate and putting it on somebody like me at a much lower rate. And that alone saves money. And it frees those lawyers up to just go do what they've been hired to do, which is go try the case, go handle the case, don't worry about project management. I'll stop there, other than to say that's kind of the in-house GC piece. It's a little bit different. And it's when you're dealing with multi-jurisdiction litigation, especially big cases or cross-border cases the clients might have. And there's a different value set to add there. But in terms of the fractional GC piece, that's that's where the value is, and that's what I've been doing since I launched.

Tom Hagy

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it's a it's a less expensive way, as you say, rather than hiring a litigator in-house, you're bringing this big law firm experience and then all this litigation experience, and you've you've billed, you have billed and managed teams. So when you see what another firm is doing, you're bringing a lot more to the equation. As you said, they don't necessarily know even know what to ask or where to push back. So I would think that would be incredibly valuable. And then um, you know, you mentioned being uh a what'd you say, a fee committee of one. Um we had talked about our uh our Italian heritage. My grandfather was an Italian, uh, was a he was from Calabria, Italy, came to the United States, became one of the first lawyers, Italian American lawyers in Ohio. He said that. I don't know. But um but he could have been, I don't know. I have to look it up. But um, yeah, he would he worked in a small town practice, he and his son, and uh the the one of the fees sometimes they would just he would he would barter, he would accept fruits and vegetables. Um, and it's it's how my family ended up with a chihuahua. Um that chihuahua is a whole is a whole other story, but he's um we would never have picked a chihuahua, but he was a he was a badass. Uh I have to say that. He didn't he punched way above his weight. And and uh he had many, many near-death experiences. But anyway, that's a that's another story. But I could see uh you know the value that it would it would you would bring to to another organization. So so tell me uh just about um so you also said there are other things just besides having litigation, they could have an increased need for uh litigators' experience or just a general uh attorney's experience if they have increased compliance and regulatory uh needs and things like that. So some aspect of their legal uh their legal needs increases, you know?

Flat Fees That Prevent Disputes

SPEAKER_00

Right. It's not just litigation. It's not just litigation. I mean, I I you know, I'll give you an example, but well, on the litigation side then generally, um when we say litigation, it doesn't always mean there's an active case that's been filed and you're fighting against it it it's a lot of it is pre-dispute uh resolution. So for example avoiding litigation or yeah right. So for example, one of my best clients over the years, um, I had a fee deal with them. Uh we used to call it the all-you-can-eat bucket. Uh, they paid me a you know, a flat fee every month. Um, and I made myself and my team available to their team uh to answer legal questions. Um and what here's why that was important. Um they had a group, this is a it was a fund, they had a group of asset managers who would encounter problems along the way. And the problem would be every time one of the asset managers would call the lawyer, uh, the lawyer would send a bill. Uh and over time, you know, uh you begin to realize that's not gonna work because every now now you know the legal the the management's getting these gigantic legal bills going, why are we calling the lawyers all the time? So it discouraged the asset managers from calling the lawyers. Well, when you discourage people from calling lawyers, they make decisions that get them in trouble and uh end up in disputes. And those disputes end up being much more expensive uh than if they just called the lawyers. So the concept was with the all you can eat bucket, it it now encourages your team to seek legal advice because the cost is the same whether they call or they don't call. And it got them to a point where suddenly the number of disputes drastically was reduced. And if they still had disputes, they weren't as massive or as or as big or as damaging as they could have been. So that's just an example of where you know you can limit your legal spend, but absolutely mitigate your risk of being in a problem situation down the line. Um that that same model can apply not just to litigation and disputes, but can apply to corporate governance. Governance can apply to contracts, can apply to um regulatory issues, compliance issues. So you know, the price points might be a little bit different depending on what you're looking to do. Uh and it doesn't have to be all you can eat necessarily. It can be, look, I'll give you, you know, you'll get X hours of time, you know, for this price, or uh whatever you want to do. I mean, you can you can there's a million different ways you can slice that, those fee agreements. But the the point being, you want your core you want your client to be able to reach out to you without worrying that every time they pick up the phone, they're gonna get a bill for a thousand dollars or three thousand dollars. That's right. Yeah.

Coordinating Cross-Border Litigation

Tom Hagy

It's like going to the doctor for a checkup. You know, I'd I'd like to get this taken care of early. Well, but speaking of litigation though, or or I guess just a complex dispute that before litigation, because you had talked too about handling, you know, it gets really complicated when when a dispute is cross-border. Um, and so and then and then so you talked to me a little bit about that. And then so say, say how do you how do you assist companies in that regard that's beyond what you've already said.

SPEAKER_00

So uh you're right. When you're dealing with cross-border, it's a little bit different. And as background, a very large piece of my practice was cross-border when I was at Nixon Peabody in DLA Pipe. Um, a lot of that work came in from the UK, and a lot of it came in from the offshore jurisdictions that have applied Commonwealth law, you know, the Cain the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, the Channel Islands. And so it it changes the dynamic a little bit in that first of all, they tend to be larger disputes just by definition, because you know, people aren't filing cross-border disputes over smaller matters. But also, um in most of those cases, there are multiple uh most of those matters, there are multiple cases going on. And and that's by the way, that's not just cross-border, it can be in the US as well. You know, when you have a dispute, sometimes it spawns other disputes that are related. So, for example, I might have uh I might have handled a case where there was a liquidation in the British Virgin Islands, but it spawned litigation in the US and the UK and Ireland, wherever. And you might have three or four matters going on around the world, or you might have one or two or three matters going on in the US, and it's a domestic case, where you file a lawsuit, someone else, they decide they're gonna sue you in a different jurisdiction. And the problem there is you have multiple sets of lawyers uh who are um doing what's right for the client in the jurisdiction in which they reside. But what they're not doing is they're not necessarily effectively coordinating with everybody else. So you don't want to be in a position where your lawyer in the US takes a position, say, on a discovery matter that impacts the disclosure they have to do in the UK. Um and I've seen this happen in the in the e-discovery and the discovery world where you know, lawyer in the US makes a decision or has to do something, and suddenly you have to collect data from the UK, and collecting that data from the UK implicates, you know, privacy regulations uh in Europe or in the UK or wherever. So um having you want somebody to manage that that process, or as the Brits would say, process. And you know, uh by the way, I speak I speak British English quite well.

Tom Hagy

Uh yeah, because you've brought it, you've you've lapsed into it a couple of times.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So I appreciate that. Just get me wound up. I'll start saying, I'll start saying K-Man. Yeah. Instead of K. I'll put that in my diary. Um, but no, so the the the the the point of it all is to say the client can't always manage that because in many cases the client's not a lawyer, or even if the client is, and usually not, they don't have that experience. So, and you can have one of the law firms try to do it, but again, you're paying an awful lot of money for that essentially case management function. Right. You do that, or somebody like me can do that. And what it does is it ensures that there's an overall overarching strategy uh to resolve all the cases as opposed to just doing what's right in one case and making things worse for another case in a different jurisdiction. Gotcha.

Tom Hagy

Well, Jonathan, we've we have actually covered everything I wanted to cover. Is there anything else you wanted to say? Uh I think I'm looking at my notes and you just naturally went into just everything. That's fine, which is great.

Billing Rate Inflation And Market Split

SPEAKER_00

I used to um sometimes a deposition I'd ask that of a deponent. Is there anything else you want to say? Yeah. Or um, you know, on the witness stand, do you want to leave it like that for the jury or do you want to add to it? Yeah, yeah. Um, no, I think I think that mostly covers it, Tom. What I what I would say just to to close it out is, you know, um the the the the services we've talked about today have always been necessary, have always been uh in need. What's what's really changed and it really has changed over the last five years is the billing structures. Um it it it uh it is unusual for billing rates to increase to 2x and 3x in a period of just a few years. Um now I will say this. I have been hearing since the day I began practicing that the billable hour is dead. Um my first billing rate was$95 an hour, and I was I was told that you can't sustain this. Um so I don't think the billable hour is dead. I think the billable hours arrive and well, I don't think it's ever going to be dead. I think it's wishful thinking. Well, it it's it's what you hear constantly. No idea. But what I will say is this that the the numbers have gotten so large that there's a huge segregation in the marketplace. You have the top firms who can command that two, three thousand dollars an hour for their top lawyers. Um, and they're doing great work and they're doing really interesting work, but it's at the absolute zenith of the profession. And then you have, you know, um really super specialized lawyers like I was for a while doing, you know, say hedge fund litigation in certain niche areas, and they don't have to be a big firm, but they have a niche area. And then you've got everything in between, and it's everything in between that's all shaking out. And so I do think what I'm doing, and what people who are like me who are doing what I'm doing, um, it is now much more necessary given that segregation and billing rates from the highest to the lowest. And so it it has made the product, the service much more in demand, as I've seen from my own experience, and much more desirable than it would have been five or 10 years ago. So I do think the billable hour isn't dead, but I think the concept of hiring somebody at a more reasonable price point or on an alternative fee basis, even if it's a a fixed fee, um, is now much more in demand than it was just a few years ago. Yeah.

Show Outro And Listener Invitation

Surname Debate And Dialect Stories

Tom Hagy

Well, I think there's so I've got notes. I'm gonna bother you for uh a couple more episodes. One will be on litigation financing and the other one will be on fees. I think that's I think that's very interesting. Jonathan Solone, thank you very much for talking to me today. Thanks, Tom, and thanks for the Emerging Litigation Podcast is a production of critical legal content, which owns the awesome brand HB Litigation. Critical Legal Content is a company I founded in 2012. That was a long time ago. But we do it simple. We create content that's critical on legal topics for law firms and legal service providers. I believe we even have a catchy tagline, which is your legal content marketing department. That kind of content can be blogs, papers, it can be podcasts, webinars, and we have a good time doing it. And that's for HP Litigation, well, that's the name under which we uh publish. Interesting, at least interesting to me. Legal news items, webinars, articles, guest articles, all on emerging litigation topics. That's what we do. Once again, I'm Tom Hagey with Critical Legal Content and HP Litigation. If you like what you hear and you want to participate, give me a shout. My contact information is in the chat. You know, I've known you for years and I'm like, but I've never really thought about how to say your last name. So I am half Italian, so I I go between Jonathan and Sablone, which I think is what you do, or Sablone, that requires me to lift my left shoulder. Sablone.

SPEAKER_00

Sablone? Yeah, almost like an I. Or you are saying Sablone. Sablone, yeah. I'm glad I asked. You know, my brother used to have this whole theory that um there's a there's a town in Belgium called Sablon, and he thinks and my father's family is from Abruzse, and my wife. He thinks they came from Belgium, went down and settled in uh Pescada, and therefore became Sablone E, Sablone, which means from Sablon. Um, okay. I had a partner, Victor Million, and there's this whole issue where do you pronounce the E? Do you not? Uh a lot of times the E got washed out so that you wouldn't sound Italian back then. Italian, right. So uh yeah, you can look the shoulder though if you need to to say yeah, no, the shoulder helps me.

Tom Hagy

I'm not, but uh no, Sabloni is not okay. That's that's even easier. I didn't I didn't know because I do know because my my wife's family's from uh Abruzzi. Also, my family's from Calabria, and and I swear when I would meet a northern Italian, you know, typical American, it's like, oh, I'm half Italian, you know, and then I meet an Italian and they're like, and I'll say certain words and they're like, I don't know what that means. And I swear they're being snobbish. Uh, because I'll say like uh, you know, I think in Calabria you say proschute rather than prosciutto or whatever. And I'll say that word and they'll say, I don't know what proschute, what's proschute? And like, you know, proschute. And oh, you mean prosciutto? I'm like, okay, come on. I think it's I think it's northerners always making uh blade of southerners.

SPEAKER_00

There's a guy, um uh you wouldn't know him, but he he runs a uh a wine shop and a restaurant here in outside of Boston. Great guy. Uh, you know, parents emigrated from Italy, so he speaks fluent Italian, but they're from Naples. And uh he speaks and he went back, he said when he was like a teenager, because he grew up speaking Italian. You know, he was they used to go every summer to back to Naples and he had some trip they went to Milan. And he's like, people kept saying to me, I don't know what you're staying, I don't know what you're saying, go back to your southern Hubble or whatever. Yeah, like that. So it's right. Yeah, it's it's cultural as opposed to linguistic, to be honest.

Tom Hagy

But I know you're right. I was buying, I was buying this late woman had a pizza shop, but I was buying pizza from her, and she was still treating me that way. That's okay. She was very nice. Paola. Not nice, so go to Paola's in uh in Wayne, Pennsylvania. It's a great place.

SPEAKER_00

Awesome.

Tom Hagy

If you're gonna speak Italian, just do it right. I'll keep that in mind.