Keeping Your Online Business Legal – Interview with Attorney Richard Chapo – Small Business Show 155

The Small business show episode 155 for Wednesday, January 24, 2018. Greetings, folks and welcome back to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co the show by, for and about small business owners. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm doing all right, man. How are you? You sound like you might have a little something going on.

I'm battling a little something something that's been going around out here. But we shall endeavor to persevere, as we always say.

That's right. The good news is it's not just you and me today, so we don't have to do all the talking.

Yeah, that's awesome. Couldn't schedule it better. Hey, so we're joined today by Richard Chapo. Richard's an attorney specializing in online businesses. He's been providing legal services and GU for 24 plus years to small, large businesses, keeping everybody up to date and compliant with laws and regulations. And we talk about that a lot on here. So welcome to the show, Richard. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me on.

That's awesome. Did I pronounce your last name correctly?

Close enough.

That's awesome.

That's good.

We're really happy to have you. We recently just did a show about what to do after you get sued. So we're happy to talk about legal stuff and compliance and all that kind of things with you today. So can you share some of your background with our listeners, how you got started and when you began to focus on online businesses?

Sure. I was out of College in 1989. I was looking for some job that would allow me to travel internationally. So my theory was I was going to get into international law. I went to law school. And the irony of course, being that I came out and then didn't do international law. I did litigation defense work with a boutique firm here in San Diego, where I'm located, for about 10 years, doing wrongful death and things of that sort that weren't particularly great but paid the bills. Took a year off when I was sabbatical in Russia. Came back and had a friend who had become CEO of an Internet company. This is in 2000. If you remember, way back then, most people were still on dial up modems and what have you. And so the, the legal area, the legal field around the Internet was very, very new. And so it was an interesting area. And so I ended up doing their legal work. And next thing I knew, I was doing Internet law and I've been doing it ever since.

Wow, that's cool.

That's great.

I like the one year sabbatical. That sounds awesome.

Articles are always good.

Yeah, absolutely.

So let me.

We'll start off. Is there one single common mistake that. And when I say online businesses, I mean it's pretty. Not just folks that are online, but have some sort of online presence, I would imagine. Is there some common mistake that they all make or is it a combination of things that usually trip up fol.

You know, I think the biggest mistake at the outset is most people don't sit down with somebody, you know, really you want to do two things. You want to sit down, one with an accountant just to make sure that you have an idea of how you're going to handle taxes. Because often how you set up a business or how you organize your business, you know, can have a huge impact on that. And then second, for example, just consider the recent tax changes. You know, there's a 20% deduction, they're going to pass through for pass through entities. So if you're an LLC or a partnership, you know, you could take advantage of, but if you just formed a C corporation for some reason, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of that. The second area would be sitting down with an Internet lawyer. I know that sounds like a pitch, but actually what you really want to do is just sit down with somebody. They'll usually give you an hour for free or at least an initial half hour free consultation and just sit down and show them what you're doing. The point isn't so much to run up legal fees, doing all kinds of little esoteric things. The bigger point is to make sure that they look at and say, oh, you know, this thing that you're doing here, you know, it violates a major law and you could have problems. You know, you built this program that goes out and you know, scrapes, you know, content from other sites. Maybe you, you know, you're going to have legal issues here. You know, where did you get all these images? Do you have the rights to use them? You know, there's just a whole variety of rights. So most businesses start, you know, they launch and a lot of times they don't know what the legal issues are that they're going to face. And so, you know, if the business takes off, it doesn't really matter. Say you look at like Uber, you know, Uber's always had a huge issue with our drivers, independent contractors or are they employees?

Right.

And you see that they're spending God Awful amounts of money litigating that issue in practically every state and now in other countries. And it's just a huge issue. And maybe it eventually takes down their business model, maybe it doesn't. But hopefully they had somebody sit down with them at the beginning and maybe plan for that issue. It doesn't sound like they did.

They probably just did what everybody does, which is just blaze a trail and ask for forgiveness or pay a fine, which I suppose is the same as asking for forgiveness. It just costs a little more.

So, yeah, I mean, the old joke about, you know, you can pray to God and ask for a bike, or you can steal a bike and then ask for forgiveness and, you know, which one are you going to go with? But. And I think people should charge ahead. To be honest, even as a lawyer, I'll say that I think you should charge ahead. One of the biggest problems with opening an online business, particularly if it's a new business, that you're just focused online so you can get so overwhelmed with information, six months later, you haven't done anything, you know, and you see this kind of, you know, coma because people get so, you know, think they have to do all these different things. So charging ahead is great, in my opinion, but just take the time. Do a search on Google for Internet lawyer, run the results through Yelp, and go find somebody in your area and just sit down with them and show them, you know, hey, here's what I'm doing. Is there anything I'm going to go to jail for?

Is there? To kind of ask Shannon's question, perhaps another way, when you do sit down with those people, when they come in for that first consultation, is there a sort of almost guaranteed most common kind of thing that people just don't think about?

Yes. Well, the most common problem that you see with anybody that comes in is they know that they need terms and conditions and privacy policies. They don't really know what those documents do or what they are. And they either get a free copy somewhere online or they borrow from some site or they get a generator. And it's very much, you know, an area where you get what you pay for. I'll give you an example. I'm in San Diego. I had a guy call me the other day. He's in Georgia. He's in a panic because he's being sued in New York. And I'm looking at it, telling him, I can't really help you. I'm not licensed in Georgia or New York. But I was looking at his terms and his terms. You Know, they have what's called a choice of forum clause and says there's any dispute between the users of the website and the website has to be heard in New York. And it's like, well, why'd you put that there? And then, you know, it became pretty clear that, that, you know, he didn't put that there, that those terms were just copied it somewhere else.

Yeah.

So you run into. Yeah. So you can have those situations. The other thing you see really, really common problem. Probably the biggest introductory problem that you see with websites is privacy policies. People include a phrase that says, you know, we will not sell, share, rent, your personal information, which sounds like a really great idea until, you know, a couple years down the line somebody offers you a lot of money for your website. How are you going to sell it? You just promised all your users that you're not going to sell their information. Let me see. Yeah, we see these transactions crash all the time. There's the famous examples. True.com is a dating site and their parent company went bankrupt and they got sucked into the bankruptcy and plenty of fish and other things. They tried to buy their database and, you know, the court shut them down and it ended up, you know, terminating a $700,000 transaction because of that.

I never thought about it that way. Right. Because the, and this is sort of the beauty and the curse of the law is that the law essentially, I mean, there's ways around it, as you know, but the law essentially goes by what you said, not what you meant. And I'm sure when those people put those privacy policies in place, what they meant was, while you are our customer and we are your service provider, we're not going to sell people your name to use as a mailing list. But they didn't intend it to mean we won't ever sell our business, right.

Yeah, no, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. What you're seeing with the laws right now referred to this age online as the Empire Strikes Back. In the aughts, the last first 10 years of this century, we didn't really have a lot of Internet rules and a lot of Internet laws. And what you're seeing is countries and states and what have you are now passing all these laws that are catching up to this point. You're seeing court decisions and things of the sort that are really a surprise for a lot of people and not a good way.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Now, I even hate to tell you that I run a website called MacObserver.com because, I mean, we've been doing it 20 years. Things are going just fine. But I have no doubt. And I'm a pretty good hack lawyer as hack lawyers go, but, you know, I'm a hack lawyer and certainly we've consulted with attorneys over the years and all of that, but a lot of these things we probably have not run by our attorney over the years because just sort of happened all very quickly and was bootstrapped. So. Huh.

Yeah, that's crazy. Good to know.

I think that that's exactly, I mean, you're exactly hitting on what everybody does. I mean, you're right in that regard and I don't really have a problem with that. I think what people need to do is, I mean, usually you sit down with your CPA once a year, you be, you know, trying to proactively plan for taxes because it'll save you money, you know, I mean, if for no other reason than that, it'll save you money and you should do it with your lawyer too, once a year. Just sit down with them and say, you know, here's how our businesses change. You know, the web changes quickly and you need to be focusing on the future, not now. And, and that's all fine, but you just, just make sure, you know, you run it by somebody. And in a lot of situations, I'll be perfectly honest with you, the answer is going to be maybe. Oh, you know, yeah.

Those are the answers I always get from my attorney. But maybe, and don't take any offense to this, please. Or do maybe. And here's a bill for my time.

Yeah, right. Well, basically what happens in those situations to defend my honorable profession and disregard the photos on the buses, you know, what's going on there is, it's risk assessment. And to be honest with you, that's just a lot of business, even the non legal aspect of it. And so you could say. So for instance, now we have, you know, this giant European privacy law coming out called the General Data Protection Regulation. It's ugly, ugly nightmare. And the question for a lot of the US companies is, you know, do they have to comply with the law or the regulation? Yeah. In the eu, which sounds like it would be a strange question, except the regulation in the EU says, the new one says that if any business, regardless of where they are, is offering services or products to people in the eu, even if they're free services or products, then you have to comply. Wow. And so there's going to be two decades or more of litigation over what exactly does that mean?

Yeah. How can you force someone in another country to comply. Right. I mean, that's a valid, it's a valid question. I mean, there might be a valid answer to it.

But if you remember, you know, 250 plus years ago, we had a small little war in this country. Yes. Over the whole, you know, taxation without representation. So, you know, this is regulation without representation. And, you know, but the question is legitimate. How do you, how do you address those issues? And even if they were to find the fines are up to 20, roughly $24 million or 4% of your gross worldwide revenue, and so how do they actually enforce those?

How do you collect on that? Yeah, right, right.

You know, because I can imagine an EU regulator coming into the US and, you know, you can walk in there with, you know, flag high and what have you. And I imagine most judges are going to be very leery about. Yeah, sure, yeah.

I'm not going to award you money based. Our laws.

Yeah, right. So there's. Yeah. So it's, it's all. But, you know, as a business, what do you do?

Yeah, no, yeah, that can turn into a major headache. Even, even if you can sit here, we, or we can sit here, you know, in the abstract and say, well, I mean, you know, not our laws. Don't worry about it. Well, maybe if you got to the end of it, a judge or whatever authority it might be, depending on where you're, you know, this case is being heard, might say, yeah, don't worry about it. But to get from, you know, point A to don't worry about it might cost you years of time and many thousands of dollars, and that can be detrimental enough for your business.

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. It's the hidden trap with the fair use defense and copyright. Everybody likes to scream and yell, fair use. Fair use. And I say, okay, well, you realize that's a defensive trial, right? So we're going to need 100 grand. It's going to be a year of your life. And even if we win, you're not going to get your 100 grand back in most cases. So let's go get them.

All right. Hey, I want to take a quick minute and talk about our first sponsor today. And I'll take the lead on this one. Shannon, since you're under the weather, we'll save your voice and I'll do this. But our first sponsor today is smile@smilesoftware.com podcast, which is, yes, the correct URL. And you can go there to learn about one of our favorite tools here at, at the Small Business show, which is PDF pen it truly is the ultimate tool for editing PDFs and going entirely paperless. You can use it to organize documents now that it's the new year, new workflow. Right? You don't have to stick with those piles of paper anymore. And PDF Pen makes it easy, let alone possible for you to do all this on your computer. You can split and combine PDF documents to send just the right things to your accountant or your lawyer. Richard, you can fill in PDF forms, whether interactive or not. Like, sometimes you get those PDFs that have interactive forms. That's great. Sometimes you don't. And PDF pen lets you fill those in anyway. You can just put text right on any PDF. It's really cool. You can add page numbers, you can redact things like account numbers. Like maybe your attorney doesn't need to know your bank account number in order or your accountant doesn't need to know your bank account number to do stuff. You can redact that out that way in case that PDF winds up, in case you fat finger the email and send it to the wrong person. You know what? You're good to go because you've saved at least that information. It can also perform OCR on your scanned documents. So you know, if you're going paperless, you're scanning things in. Well, sometimes you want that data in there to be searchable. You don't just want it to be a picture that's been scanned in. And so optical character recognition OCR is there inside PDF Pen to do all this for you. And then you can step up to PDF Pen Pro to create your own PDF portfolios collection of multiple PDFs and related files. It's really great for presenting all your year end documents. So it's one that I. It's a piece of software that I use and have used for over a decade. I know, Shannon, you use it too. It's really something that is stellar and I couldn't live without it. You gotta check it out. So go to smilesoftware.com podcast. That's where you're gonna learn all about it. And yes, that's the correct URL. I know some of you have asked. Nope, that's the right one. I'm not screwing it up. Smilesoftware.com podcast, please go ahead and visit that. See if PDF pen is gonna be right for you. I think it probably will be. Our thanks to Smile for sponsoring this episode.

Yeah, so on that copyright topic on your website, you mentioned the DMCA a number of times. Can you talk about give us for folks that are Listening that may not know what the DMCA is. Tell us what it is, and then how can it help or hurt your business?

So the DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It's a federal law. It was enacted in 1998, and it was enacted partially because of some treaty issues. But basically what it tried to is there are different parts of it. The part that's relevant to most online websites is section 512. And it tries to address the issue of our websites liable for copyright infringement based on content uploaded by their users. So the classic example. Think of Facebook. Facebook is beautiful business model, because if you really think about it, Facebook doesn't actually create anything. They just create platforms for you to post content.

Well, they do. They actually create data that they homogenize and sell off. But, you know, that's true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. But for end users, they don't.

No, they don't. Yeah, yeah.

It's a pretty simple. But it's a brilliant business model. You know, I mean, that's totally ucg, right?

Totally. User user or UGC user generated content. Right, that's it.

And so then the question is, is Facebook liable for any infringement by users? And under the dmca, what the federal government decided was the answer is no, so long as Facebook is not the party posting it. And they're not, you know, obviously making money off of it when it's a really obvious infringement. But in most cases it's no. It's just. There's just immunity for that. However, a certain process has to be followed. It's called the takedown compliance process. And you have to go through these various steps. And for a lot of websites these days, I mean, you almost always are going to allow your users to post something, even if it's just comments. So you really want to comply with the dmca, so you'll have that immunity. And then there's a process, you know, in exchange for that, you have to go through. So if a complaint comes in, you have to review the complaint, as long as it's general, in the right format required under the law, you know, you're going to go ahead and take down the contested content, whatever that is, and then at that point, you're going to send an email or a message off to whoever posted it saying, hey, we received a copyright infringement complaint, you know, balls in your court. And at that point, that person can either do what's called a counter notice or just drop it. And 95% of cases, they just drop it because they didn't realize they were creating, you know, they were doing copyright infringement. They didn't have any kind of malicious intent. They just posted something because they thought it was interesting. And then at that point, you know, it's over. Or if they do file a counter notice, you then serve that back on the copyright owner and those two parties can go to court and hack it out. But you're not.

But you can stay out of it.

Right, Right. So the advantage of that system is that. So Google, I think, received something like 8 million infringement complaints. It's either a month or a year. Whichever it is, it's a lot. And so you're keeping all those potential lawsuits out of the court system.

I thought you were going to say 8 million a day. And I would have been like, yeah, that sounds about right.

I think it's a month. I'm not. It might be a year. But they receive a ton, you know, and you can think of forms. Receive a ton. Google, you know, these kinds of groups, they all receive a ton of these. And, you know, that's a difficult process for them. One of the big changes in law for this year that people need to know about, particularly small businesses, is to get that protection. You have to designate an agent to receive complaints. So if you've ever formed a corporation or an llc, you know, you have to designate an agent for service of process, because these are, you know, kind of just entities out there. There's no real person. You have to pick a person to be that with the DMCA agent, what they're going to be listed on your website, and they're also going to be listed with the registered and listed with the US Copyright Office in an online database. And the cost is an outrageous $6. So, you know, once you go ahead and file them. The catch with this whole thing, though, is that under the new rules that the Copyright Office recently released, the agent has to list their physical address or the business has to list its physical address, phone number. And. And so the problem is, if you work from home, you know, you may not want some of your more enthusiastic fans showing up at the front door and what have you. So some people use independent agent services. If you have a lawyer, your lawyer will often do it for free. If you don't have a lawyer, there's a site called dmcaagentservice.com It's a tremendous service providing agents. I should know, I own it. Yeah. So let's talk.

So you spun that out, you know, focused on this particular requirement. And I mean, that's awesome. It's like looking again, what's the problem these folks are having? And you kind of make it a seamless, easy process. It just happens. Very inexpensive. And they just kind of re up every year and they have that agent.

Right, right. And then, you know, eventually if they grow to the point where they have an office or something of that sort, then they don't need us anymore. Because obviously, you know, if you have an office, you're not too worried about people showing up in the middle of the night and that kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

I do. I want to say one thing just while we're talking about the DMCA is. And you mentioned this sort of in passing, with the dmca, you as the, the website owner or publisher, I should say, are effectively, it's a guilty until proven innocent scenario. Meaning when you get that takedown notice, you have to take it down right away or risk having perhaps your provider shut your entire site down or more and kind of going further and further up the chain there. And like you said, if you didn't post, if it was one of your users, you can sort of step out of that mix once you take it down, but it is on you as the publisher to take that down. It's a weird sort of corner case of US Law in that. That sense that you don't get to fight first, you fight later. Yeah.

And it is an area that causes a lot of confusion. So people get just violently angry when sites take down their content.

Oh, yeah.

What the law says, and you're absolutely right, is it doesn't say, evaluate the complaint and determine whether there's copyright infringement. The website or the app, whatever it is, has to take down the content.

Yes.

And if they don't take down the content, not only can they have to worry about their own site, but they lose the immunity under the dmca.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

You're complicit at that point. Ye, yeah, yeah.

A real world example where this can become a problem that people don't think this through. A lot of people go out and they develop social media lists or followers and you know, they're trying to get Instagram followers or whatever it is, as many as they can. While there's a part of the dmca. I mean, we can talk about the DMCA all day, but part of the DMCA is called the Re Repeat Infringer section. So the Repeat Infringer deals with the situation where you have somebody who just keeps posting infringing content. Well, After a certain amount of time, you know, they should have their accounts terminated. And so under the dmca, they're required to do that. So what happens is a site sets up its policy. So let's say it's. Well, let's say it's Tumblr, because I know Tumblr does this, and Tumblr says maybe it's, you know, if you get three complaints in two years, three valid complaints in two years, you know, we have to terminate your account. And, you know, you build up 50,000 followers and then every once in a while post something that's copyright infringement and somebody files a takedown notice. Well, at that point, Tumblr has to take down that content. When they do, if you don't counter notice, that's a successful copyright complaint against you in the view of Tumblr. And if you get two or three of those, they close your account and.

You lose access to all those 50,000 followers. Sure. Yeah.

And you're not getting back.

Nope. Yeah, that's right. I dealt with a DMCA thing. We had a guy that worked for us, so this was content that we published, and he actually worked for the business we acquired that turned into our business. So we didn't have any of these work product contracts for any of this content that we had purchased, although we had a business, you know, purchase and sale agreement for the business. One of the authors came and sent a DMCA notice to our web host, and the web host, of course, passed it through so that they were, you know, no longer liable. They get their immunity. But we had to take the content down, even though, you know, by all rights, he was paid for it by the previous owners. We paid the previous owners for all the content. We should have been able to keep it up. But nope, we had to take it down because we couldn't. We had to take it down first. Then we had to look to see if we could prove that we were able to put it back up, and we couldn't. So instead we replaced. Because the guy said he was worried about people finding these articles that he had written 15 years prior when he knew less than he knew now. And instead of being a nice guy about it, he just did it this way. So what I did is I replaced the articles with. With text that said, hey, you know, this guy came to us and filed the DMCA notice and basically said, this guy's a real jackass for doing this. And he didn't do it the right way. But, you know, that's why this content's missing. So anybody searching for his name might actually find that instead, you know.

Hey, did you talk to your lawyers before doing that?

I actually. I did, yeah, I did, I did, yeah. Yeah. They were like, well, is what you're saying true? And I said, yeah. I mean, I didn't call exactly. I didn't call the guy a jackass. I, I just laid out the path so that anyone reading it would naturally come to that conclusion.

I was gonna say defamation.

No, there was no defamation. No, no, no. There was just a path. I just, I laid out the facts. That's it. That's it. He was pissed.

Yeah. Dealing with it. Yeah.

Hey, I want to jump into one thing too, because I know copyright stuff we can talk about forever, but I want to talk about getting paid. We talk a lot about on the show about effective methods to and getting paid right after you do your work or even before work that you're completing. One of the things that popped up when I was looking at your info, Richard, up on your site was some issues with recurring billing and what kind of legal requirements are in place for that because we promote on the show. Hey, if you're going to be doing consulting or whatever it is, recurring billing is awesome and just happens. Can you talk about that bit a little? Sure.

If you're doing recurring billing online, what we're talking about is, you know, let's take an example like a dating site where you pay a monthly fee. There is no federal law that prohibits that and there's no state law that prohibits that. But there are about 30 plus states now that have laws that require you to make certain disclosures. You know, if you're going to bill somebody online on a reoccurring basis, whether it be monthly, yearly or whatever. Now, the genesis of all this is not the legitimate businesses. The genesis of all this is, as you may remember, particularly in the more wild, wild west times of the web is there were a lot of sites, particularly adult sites, that would offer three day free trial for 7.99 or something like that. And you get billed $39.99 a month after that and you say, well, okay, that sounds like a great deal. And you sign up, you slap your credit card down and you go onto the site, whatever it is, and you look around and day three comes around and often you've forgotten or if you want to cancel, it is slightly impossible to find a link to actually do that. And so you had massive abuse. And what was really happening was some of these companies were there were fronts for the Mob or other groups like that who didn't care about chargebacks. What they really wanted was your, your name, your payment information and a credit card number.

Number, got it.

That's invaluable in the real brick and mortar world. You can do all kinds of things with that and it has real value. It's kind of a precursor to all the hacking that you see today where people are trying to get that information. So that was kind of what was going on there. So anyways, the states and their hackneyed approaches, they now require these disclosures. They're different for each state. But the general idea is that when you have that page where people are going to sign up and they're going to hit submit, before they do that, you have to put up a notice that says something and again, check with your particular state. But it says something generally along the lines of, you know, this is what you're going to be charged, this is what you're going to be charged after the free trial or you know, if there's a free trial after the free trial, here's how you contact us. And then you know, depending on that information, they hit submit, they sign up. At that point you should send them an email saying, hey, great, welcome to the site. And in that email there also has to be be pretty much the same disclosure saying, you know, somewhere at the bottom in the actual text. Now you can't bury it down in the footer, but in the actual text what I tell my clients is use, use it as a positive, say hey, we just want to make sure you remember you're being charged, you know, monthly. If you ever want to cancel, you know, here's a link and da, da, da, da da.

Yeah, you can do that in a way that, that actually makes you look good.

It builds trust.

Builds trust. There you go.

Yeah, yeah, I think, absolutely.

And I think the thing, and that's, I mean you point out a perfect thing with a lot of these rules, particularly the FTC regulations on affiliate disclosures and things of that. Don't fight them, don't fight them. You know, use it as that because you're talking about to build credibility. Hey, we want to let you know, you know, unlike other sites, you know, we want to let you know we're getting, you know, something free or whatever it is. Yeah, exchange for this and people will, you know, people will appreciate that. And you know, that's a pretty time tested model on the web, you know, to get to build a favorable brand. So yeah, definitely try to be positive.

Yeah, that's awesome. Hey, so I want to talk about your own business for, for a few minutes here. So if listeners the show know you, Dave and I are big fans of mistakes primarily. Well, because we've made so many. But since they teach us so much, so we always ask our guests, what would you say is your best mistake that you've made with your law practice over the years? That something that really struck you and sticks with you to this day?

I think law is kind of odd because it's a pretty static profession. Laws are not, but the actual practice of law is. And so when I started out it was, you know, this is pre Internet and the way that firms build was primarily based on time. They bill, you know, 0.1 increments an hour and there were 6 increments and they would bill you for mail and for everything basically. And that was the model that I learned. And when I went online, you know, when I first went online, I was in a unique position that this, the company that the friend of mine was, the CEO, was a resource site, huge one for the adult industry of all things online. And so I was like the only attorney. And so it was, you know, just moment to pick up clients because if you're the only choice, you know, no matter how bad your pitch is, you tend to pick them up. Sure. And I had all kinds of problems with clients over the billing, you know, and, and soon realized that, you know, that model, while it may have worked for large corporations and insurance companies, you know, sure as heck wasn't going to work with clients. And so I went to more of a flat fee basis. I try whenever possible, you know, with clients, unless they're ongoing, you know, I try to give them a flat fee because at this point, after 20 years, I have a pretty good idea what the time that it's going to take.

And I bet your clients appreciate that too. I mean, coming in with the idea of, I don't want to say a fixed cost, but a predictable cost is much better than that. Like you said, that classic. Well, I don't know how much it's going to cost. It depends on how often I talk to my attorney.

Right. Well, and I do have clients that are on billing, but those tend to be larger clients. But yeah, definitely for the smaller clients or the new clients, they definitely appreciate because then they know what it is. And to be honest, it's helpful for me too because, you know, then they're less likely to be hesitant to talk to me or to pick up the phone when you're talking to your Lawyer. Here's a helpful hint. I don't care about the strong points of your business or your life or whatever the issue is. I care about the weaknesses. You know, when you get up on the stand and trial, nobody's going to ask you about, you know, the perfect A's you got in college. They're going to ask you about, you know, getting arrested naked in the van with five other people. You know, that's, that's, how did you know?

Funny we both said that.

If you haven't told me about that and I'm standing there going, hearing it for the first time in court, you know, that's bad.

Yeah, I, I was looking happy, I was looking at an email that I sent to one of my attorneys almost two years ago about this thing that hopefully is wrapping up soon. But, and, and I, I, it was a follow up after a conversation and I wrote to him, I said, look, I, I just want to tell you all these things I said, because the, the even worse than lying to my attorney would be omitting things accidentally, you.

Know, like, so it could come back to haunt you.

Yeah.

So I'm just going to brain dump this stuff at you, man, and you know, do with it what you want. But at least now I know I've told you everything that I think is that I did wrong here, you know, whatever it was.

Yeah, well, and in litigation, you absolutely want to know that, right? Absolutely. And just to be clear, you know, the information is protected by the attorney client privilege. Not going to share that with anybody else.

Right.

So. So you would definitely want to know the weaknesses. Now in business, it's a situation where for my clients, some of my larger clients, it's mostly trying to figure out if the other party actually knows what they're doing or not. There's some different issues there, but yeah, no, absolutely. If there's some weakness to the business or something, don't hide from it. Because if you tell me or you tell your attorney, then we can try and figure out solutions. If you don't tell us. And a letter comes from the FTC one day, like with VTech, just recently received a letter. We want $4 million in fines for failing to comply with a child privacy law. Well, at that point it's too late. Right.

And I think that with a lot of entrepreneurs and business people that are kind of plowing forward and we talk about it here a lot, creating their own reality and I mean, it's great and it can help you make you very successful, but it's often it can cause you to overlook those weaknesses. And if there's one person you need to talk about that stuff with, it's your attorney. For sure.

You don't want to obsess over them. In fact, you want to let your attorney obsess over them, folks.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Well, Richard, I think.

Go ahead. I'm sorry.

That's why I think, you know, meeting with them once a year, even just for half an hour is good. Just tell them what you're doing, what your plans are, and that is going to take care of a lot of the potential problems.

That's great. Well, you know, I've definitely learned a lot of stuff here today, and we really appreciate you coming on the show. What's the best way for our listeners to learn more about your firm and the services that you offer?

You can always reach me through my website, SoCal, like Southern California SoCal, Internet lawyer dot com. You can always do a search for me online. Richard Chapo, C H A P O. Unfortunately, there's a Mexican drug lord. He went by the nickname El Chapo. That's not me.

Not related.

So if you see search results mentioning the FBI and things of that sort. Yeah, Richard Chaplin should be able to find me.

That's great. And we'll, you know, of course, we'll have you linked here on the show. Notes, notes. And, you know, thanks for hanging out with us and talking about the small business legal issues. It's been great.

Feel better.

Awesome. Of course. Keep plowing through.

Thanks, folks. Yeah, keep doing what you got to do. Visit us at businessshow.co. keep living that charmed life. And thanks for joining us, Richard.