Creative Competitors, CNBC and Zeek Rewards

Hi.

We're here in Cool Springs at Corporate Center 7 today for our latest episode of Creative Competitors. And we're actually in Thompson Burton's new office space.

It's exciting. This is our first video shoot in the office. Currently we have. Well, actually, you're looking at the only furniture in the office, but we're in the process of furnishing it. We should have the place populated by, well, here within a few days. And so it's exciting.

And luckily we hired a designer to actually pick the furniture and buy it for us, so hopefully it's going to actually look good.

I've learned that your strengths and my strengths, nowhere in the mix is office decor. Quick plug for Kelly Spalding. She's done a great job helping us out furnish the place. She's with Perfectly Placed, and she's based out of Franklin, Tennessee. She has made the pain go away. Again, choosing office furniture is not our strength, and we're really happy with what we've gotten.

Yeah. And it'll be exciting. Hopefully in a few weeks we can have an office opening party when we actually got some furniture in the office and, you know, celebrate the opening of the office.

That'll be fun. So the next item on the list was Zeke Rewards for all you at home. I don't know if you all are following this, but this is arguably the largest consumer fraud case in history. If you measure it by the number of investors involved, there's possibly 2 million investors, and they've been pretty much wiped out by this scheme.

Yeah. And, you know, and most people are familiar with the Madoff Ponzi scheme, which was a huge dollar number. But what makes this Ponzi seem so interesting and so difficult, I think, to administer is the sheer volume of investors who have lost anything from $100 to maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars. So it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. And we actually created a website for that.

Well, you did. I wrote some articles dealing with the scheme because Zeek Rewards held itself out as a network marketing company. And that's an area of law that I specialize in. And so we've created some content that sort of explained what happened with Zeek Rewards. And we've gotten a lot of feedback from some victims. And so what Walt and I did, we put out a form. We said, hey, submit your information, and we'll see if we're able to help you out, to stay informed and possibly help during the claims process. And we've been pretty much blown away by the process.

We've got 20,000 submissions so far.

We got over 20,000 submissions in about a one week period.

That's right.

So Walt and I were thinking of ways to help these people out. And we conferred with multiple attorneys all across the world that specialize in these sorts of issues. And where we landed, we decided it would be best just to provide a free resource for people, just a website for free, to help people stay informed, to make sure they don't miss deadlines, to educate them as far as how long this might take. And we've been pretty successful with that effort.

Right. And it's www.zekerecovery.in fox. And I think we'll be talking a lot more about that in the next few episodes, probably.

Right, right. We've got a lot of feedback. There's a lot of activity on the website. Eventually what we might do is we might be able to help some of the victims with the claims process. But right now we're just keeping people informed. And again, 2 million investors, this is a really big case.

So we've got another. Some other exciting news going. I think you just made an offer to a prospective associate to work with you.

Absolutely. Yeah. We had a guy come in town, a really good prospective hire that could help the firm out. We had a lot of fun with him, took him out, took him to Franklin and made him an offer. He got a competing offer at a big firm. And it's fun. It's fun to compete with the big firms over talent.

No question. It is. In fact, I guess he solicited a little more information about our offer. Our offer was very simple. Here's what you'll make and we'll provide benefits.

Exactly. It was a salary plus benefits, plus.

Lifestyle, plus the fun of working at the firm.

So there's a lot of intangibles that I put in there. You and I, we both worked at a big firm. It's not a terrible experience. Right. We're both grateful for our experience.

Absolutely.

If this person goes to a big firm, it's not going to be a mistake. Where I think we compete and where we have more value to add is that we offer more flexibility. We don't track vacation time. We focus on results. Lifestyle's better, as proven by the Zeek recovery effort. We've got more creative lifestyle.

Well, you're just. You're not as limited. Now, granted, that can be dangerous because you can get out in areas that you don't know as well. But I think it keeps you sharp, keeps you fresh, and certainly makes practicing Law more interesting.

And another benefit of having the prospective hire Is that now we actually have.

To create some benefits to fill up this office also.

Right. To populate the office. So that's exciting.

And I think the most exciting news from the last six or eight weeks is Kevin thompson was on cnbc as a special contributor with.

Jeff. Herb greenberg. And I was very honored to be on the program. It actually has not aired yet. It's going to air likely in late september, maybe even early october. And I was honored. Herb contacted me and won some feedback regarding the laws in the network marketing industry. And so I got to fly to new york with my wife, sharon. And we had an amazing time. Met with some friends up there, did the interview. And I'll tell you, it was pretty intense. It was an intense experience. I was in the waiting room. And I sort of expected a warm up period. I expected somebody to tell me what was going to happen. Essentially, I walk in the newsroom, I'm sitting down in a chair much like this with you, and I've got lights on me. And herb starts talking to me. And before I realize it, I. They were filming. So I had to, like, call timeout, you know, get in the zone to do the interview.

How's that? You like that?

Yes. You know, get. Get in the zone. Get in business mode. And we Talk for about 45 minutes. He might use 10 seconds of content.

That'll be exciting to see what happens. Should come out in the next few weeks.

It will be exciting. And specifically it was. What prompted the story was herbalife, which is a publicly traded company. The ticker is hlf. There was a short seller or a man that's notorious for short selling on an earnings call. His name is david einhorn. David asked a few questions. People inferred that david was going to be short on the stock. Even to this day, we don't know if he's short on the stock. But just by him asking questions, people made that assumption. They sold the stock. Herbalife's value dropped 25%. And so herb was sort of poking at the laws in the industry. As far as, you know, how do we know if a company like herbalife. Is legitimate legal network marketing business? And so we'll see how the story turns out.

Yeah, and we'll link, obviously, when it comes out, we'll link it on the website.

Absolutely, we'll link it on the website. I think it's good for Thompson, burton that we're having fun, doing fun things. We are. And building the business. Right.

So I guess we'll do this again next time once we have another. Another update.

Absolutely. And closing thought my partner here, Walt Burton, has had his second consecutive record month. Congratulations to you. Thank you. Which that will make the cut. You're doing really well. I'm proud of you.

Although we keep those sorts of facts confidential.

Yeah, except for the whole Internet. Alright, well, so Kevin Thompson here. We're out. It's another episode of Creative Competitors. Stay tuned. Sam.