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Are you a category creator in business, entrepreneurship, and tech? Do you aspire to be one? Hear from experts and get your questions answered on our new webcast series: The Definers.
Welcome everybody. This is The Definers webcast and podcast and we have Sarah Kroll Rosenbaum of Grove Law and we're gonna start shortly, but if you are here to hear about legal strategy, litigation risk, and business decision making in high stakes environment, you are in the right place and I am Chris Gale, co founder of Gale Strategies, and your host today together with Nicole Kaptson who's in the background, and Sarah. I think this is on a number of our past episodes, but as a past supervisor of mine used to say, don't punish the prompt. So let's get going. Sarah, we're so excited to have you on, As everybody knows who follows us, this is our part of our Definers Series where we talk to folks who are defining an aspect of their industry.
Chris Gale:There tends to be a technology aspect of that and I feel like and we feel like what you're defining within the legal industry which we think has applications beyond the law and business of law, is almost like a returning to a sort of fundamentals of sort. That's our impression, but yeah, if we could hand it over to you, can you share with the audience a little bit about your background, where your practice focuses, and we'll start off there.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Wonderful. Well, you so much, Chris and Nicole, for inviting me to join you. I am honored to be on the show. I am a co founder of Grove Law LLP, which just celebrated its first birthday last month. Grove is a mission driven law firm.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:We're based in Los Angeles and New York City. And our mission is to provide optimal client service through authentic lawyering rooted in integrity.
Chris Gale:And tell us a little bit more about some of the other partners and how you came together, shared backgrounds, but a Yeah, leading
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:no, okay, great. Well, can dive in here. Well, Grove is a beautiful combination of a long time shared dream that I've had with my co founding partner, Hannah Scholl, who has been a dear friend and colleague for almost twenty five years, more than that in friendship. My team of my close, close partners, Anthony Spartalotti and Nancy Sotomayor, with whom I have worked here in California now for many years. And we brought our worlds together, if you will.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Anthony and Nancy and I were partners at an MLAW one hundred, and Hannah was in house at Visa. And part of our mission, of course, as I said, is to provide optimal client service. That's something that Anthony and Nancy and I had a lot of experience trying to do from the outside, right, as outside counsel. And Hannah had experience receiving or having opinions about receiving as the client Visa. And so by sort of prioritizing that idea, together we are trying to bring to market a really client driven approach to how we solve problems.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:You're on mute, Chris.
Chris Gale:Again, thank you. So litigation is a hot environment, high pressure, and you get to see in real time where disputes originate, how companies are responding, which patterns lead to better or worse outcomes. So from your vantage point, what are the most important trends that you're seeing in litigation and legal risk right now?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, I mean, just to say sort of an interesting vantage point. So I'm very interested in vantage point. What would you, you mentioned sort of the focus on Definers and Technology and how we are in a way coming back to sort of first principles. We'll talk much more about, I think today about sort of the modeling and framework of how we look at things.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:But I'm very interested in vantage point and from where within a system, a participant observes the system, right? And so meaning I'm a litigator, I'm a complex litigator, I was trained to be a complex litigator as were my colleagues, right? However, over the years of our practice, all of us have had experience sort of saying, okay, wait, does the litigation itself solve a problem or does the client really need something else? And so we see the intersections, if you will, of the legal system through litigation, the egos of lawyers, which I think everyone listening to this will probably have some experience with, meaning we wanna be good at what we're doing. We wanna say, I'm smart and I'm capable and look at this cool trick I can do and this highly competitive, very pressure filled legal experience, but then we have clients who are like trying to do business, right?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And so we also have very, you know, no one is a stranger to major economic change, major technological change, major political changes, right? And so, the law almost always is retrospective, right? It's always about what happened before, whether it's litigation about something that already happened, whether it's about regulations that are new in response to what was already happening. So we see a lag. And I think what we are seeing generally is, I mean, certainly there's lots of litigation, there's state regulation where federal regulation maybe has changed or waned for businesses.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And there's a tremendous amount of economic pressure on companies. And so, just to be clear, like we represent companies, 99% of what we do is represent companies. And so there is a lot of legal work to be done out there right now. I think we can talk more about that
Chris Gale:for sure. One thing I think I'm hearing is that, at least in the area of law where you're situated and your clients are situated, state law might be a little bit on a relative basis less impactful, that the economic pressures of the businesses themselves are creating sort of a dynamic in the courtroom, am I hearing that right?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:So I think state law is actually very, is increasingly impactful. And what we're seeing is increasing state regulation. So where there may have been sort of, maybe under prior administrations, more federal regulation or more federal enforcement, there may have been less state law and regulation, right? And I mean, this is in gross terms, but there's always a sort of a rebalancing, so the regulation doesn't ever disappear, right? We see very significant regulation in places like California and New York and Oregon, in Illinois, for example, in certain areas.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And so in an example, I represent staffing companies, I represent a lot of staffing companies, and we see a lot of state regulation in that area. And a lot of that is about tracking economic trends. For example, following In the healthcare staffing market, for example, the pandemic, during and after the pandemic, states said, Wait a second, we're gonna regulate healthcare staffing companies because they're coming into our state and doing a ton of business all of a sudden, right? Likewise, there's antitrust regulation. This is at the federal level, but not only states too, looking at the way what we call MSPs are operating.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:When we have the economic relationships between staffing companies in order to provide their clients with better service. So we see that business drives and law follows, right? And what I'm interested in is trying to help my clients do more business, do better business, do smarter business with less friction in the legal world, by understanding how the law can support what they're doing and how they can understand where the obstacles exist, because they always exist.
Chris Gale:That's fantastic, and it reminds me of I'm over on the other side of the Atlantic than usual, and as I was talking to someone over here about about this webcast, and they were talking about increasing fragmentation in jurisdictions, so there's a lot more that we had to do to get through airports and across borders than there was in the past and there's talk in the country I'm sitting in at the moment about there being more of a fragmented environment within which this country and its companies exist. That's interesting of hearing it also from the healthcare perspective. Could we dip into where flashpoints come up, where litigation comes from, where it originates? Yeah.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Sure. I mean, I would say litigation doesn't always come from one place, right? But I'm reminded of, well, I think that, so I, you you and I have talked before books and great books, I love borrowing from other industries. So we, one of the books I've really appreciated is Charles Duhigg's book on super communicators. And he talks about the difference between, you know, it says, which conversation you have?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Are you having a feelings conversation, an identity conversation or a logistics conversation? And so it's relevant for my work so much because we see litigation arise because feelings, big time feelings, right? Logistics, like we are two companies, so let's talk about feelings. Company A is super pissed at company B because company B took their market share or won the contract or whatever it is, or took some action because somebody was upset and violated the contract knowingly, right? Whatever it is, I'm making these things up, but we have underlying tensions that are legitimate human tensions that result in legal problem and litigation, right?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And by the way, that's so much of what our job is, is to deal with legitimate, to solve problems, if you will, between people through the legal process. That's why we have the rule of law, right? My point is not to say everyone needs to go sit down and, know, come, you know, try to, they should drive, we've tried in the legal system to come up with, you know, early mediation and efforts to try to have resolution, but oftentimes we have feelings driven conflict. We have a lot of logistics driven conflict. Like we're just trying to do something in the world.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:We're just trying to do something in the market and our operations don't allow it, or our operations are making mistakes. And this is something that I think we will see increasingly around technology and around AI adoption at companies, because some companies will do a better job than others at laying that out, right? And it'll make mistakes and we're still gonna be responsible for it, right? So there's a lot of underlying logistics to that, right? And then we certainly have identity too.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:I'm the one who should have this and therefore I'm going to sue you to keep that right, right? And so it's a really, from the sort of, where do these problems arise for me, the way I've developed, and I think this might be an appropriate time to talk about how I think about integrity as a framework, because it's the way we look at, the way I like to with my clients, at problems, right? So integrity is a nice framework. I've developed something called a SWRL, a systems wide integrity risk lens, which is simply I talked about vantage points before, how do we take our vantage points and from wherever we sit, whether you're the CEO of a company, whether you're the CTO of a company, whether you're the general counsel, a board member, or a guy who works in operations, you take your vantage point and say, look across the system and say, where's the risk? And this is where we're here to help because you're gonna need help from somebody, many different people, many different people with advice and expertise to say, let's look across this whole system, get out of fragmentation and look for where the risk is.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And it's not to be formulaic, but it's to try to be holistic in its impression. So when we talk about integrity, when I talk about integrity, I'm looking for two things at the same time, okay? Using both definitions of integrity, one is about truth, about which for me is about purpose. So is it genuine somebody has integrity if they're a truthful, genuine person? And really what it is, is like, are they true to themselves, right?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Are they true to their own purpose? And structural integrity, does the house hold up and not fall down? Does the boat float without springing leaks? And when you can do both of those things at the same time, you have integrity, okay? Now I like that as a framework because it allows us in complex systems to say, how can this whole thing align, right?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:We've got from a business perspective, maybe several different entities that are set up working together. We've got money flowing from different directions through different companies. And our purpose is to be of service in the market, right? So how can we do that in as frictionless a way as possible? From a legal perspective, we've typically, we've got in The United States, we've got federal law, constitutional, statutory, regulatory, case law, court driven, court interpreted law, same thing on the state side, all piled up on top of each other.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And 90% of what we've got in business too, just commercial agreements, just layers and layers of commercial agreements. And so what it's, to go back to basics and this is like the original technology, do those things align? Or are we tying our shoelaces together in our purpose? So is our feeling, going back to that, clear in our purpose and driven out through all of those different structural measures, right? Are we, know, is our identity clear?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Are we clear in our identity about what our purpose is? And if we have strong feelings about certain things, which if you're a mission driven organization, if you are trying to do a very specific, you may, right? And is that mission, are we being true to that purpose at every stage throughout our operations, our relationships, the systems in which we operate? And so that's how I use integrity in the work and it's replicable. The way I think it relates to your point about technology is that all technology is rooted in some original system that works.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:It works here and then we can scale it. Integrity as a model works as a simple concept that allows for scale.
Chris Gale:I was writing it down because sometimes we feel the technology isn't necessarily rooted in a particular system that is scaling and our own personal view within our firm amongst a number of our clients is that typically means that the technology is going to have a lot of difficulty. So you mentioned feelings, logistics, and identity. I don't know if those were if that's a sort of exclusive, like, particular
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:three Those are Duhiggs themes. Right?
Chris Gale:That's right.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:I'm borrowing his idea and applying it, but, you know, those are Duhiggs ideas.
Chris Gale:So is there more that you can say about feelings? Because feelings can be used pejoratively, which is to say, oh, well, you feel this way, and there's a separation between that, and let's say, you know, the facts or what what have you. Yeah. Yeah, say more about feelings and the importance of feelings.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Sure, so, I mean, I think, look, I think feelings are really important. And I mean, I've helped, I don't know how many C suites make decisions. When we are, like one really interesting thing about being a lawyer is that my client is the company, it's not the people who are the actual humans I'm interacting with. And their client is also the company, right? And so it's this interesting idea that we live with that we have fiduciary duties to an idea, to an entity, and that entity has a purpose, okay?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And that purpose is what we're trying to support in this integrity model. And I am very interested in helping my clients distinguish between their reactions, which are often very much feelings based, and their calculated, educated, thoughtful response, okay? And, you know, Viktor Frankl is famously misquoted, because I don't think he actually said it and it's not actually in his book, but, you know, talking about the space between, you know, reaction and responses, opportunity to find freedom or whatever the quote is. But, you know, people like, are people and we have strong reactions. We have strong like, yes, more, more.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:I wanna go get this. I'm excited about it. I'm having like a giant dopamine hit from winning right now in whatever this thing is. And, or I'm so angry and like, or I'm so scared. Like, I mean, how many CEOs have I advised where like, they're like, are you kidding me?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:I have to go tell my board that this guy sued us again, like really? I am like, you know, and so we have feelings as humans, like we are not AI, you know? And so we have feelings and we need to, I think it's so valuable to have them and have a space to be like, okay, I can look at them and have them and feel them and see them and distinguish from the reminder. And this is again, why integrity is a useful tool. Because it's like, oh, I can actually like put on my whiteboard or wherever I'm putting it, I can write down purpose.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Like this is the purpose, this is what we're trying to do. This is how we're trying to be of service in the world. This is how we're going to market. This is how we are going to improve market systems for millions of people, right? And you can write that down.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And then when you get sued, when you witness yourself or your colleague flipping out because you're like, Oh, come on, make this go away. This couldn't be the worst timing, right? Or we're gonna go get them, now is the best time, right? You can witness that and say, does that swear with our mission? Because what we want is long term, long term repetitive successive growth for most companies.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Certainly there are those out to be like, we're gonna go out and pop in five years and then sell and that's it. Maybe, but like that's their purpose, right? But again, you got to say, there's an opportunity to say, again, vantage points, there's a vantage point of feelings and there's a vantage point of purpose. When we're making decisions, we got to go back and look at the vantage point of purpose.
Chris Gale:So in terms of decision making in the current environment, is there, and I'm wondering a little bit from our script here, but is there such a thing as a bad win in medication for instance?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Sure, I mean, sure. I mean, think that I think where you're going and I appreciate it and I'll hit that outside ball. As you know, I like a good baseball metaphor. I mean, needs to be about allowing that purpose to succeed. And so if your lawyers or you are, if we got a litigation and the whole thing is about winning that case or winning the motion or winning the appeal or whatever it is, like, you don't wanna forget about winning the battle or lose the war is not worth it often, right?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And so the reminder to go back to purpose and say, how can we focus on what really matters? And it allows us to say, hey, egos down, lawyers, outside counsel, lawyers down, go and do we settle or do we litigate to the death and litigate for twenty years and had that too? We make different decisions when we're purpose driven. And so instead of somebody coming from the outside and saying, Chris, here's what we're gonna do to litigate your case and here's what we're gonna win and how I'm gonna win this case. If you hear that, you say, okay, good for you, but how am I, Chris, gonna win that case?
Chris Gale:And how do you uncover, I think you're talking about purpose, if I recall correctly, How do you determine purpose with a client? And I'll stop the question there because I have a follow-up, but I wanna hear the answer to this. I think
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:it's a great question. I think, I mean, the answer for me is like that client being them, doing them, getting paid to do them successfully in the world. So like, how are they being of service? So this is an authenticity question. Like, how are they being authentic?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And which is, are they bringing themselves? Are they bringing to the world? When we see, in my experience, I mean, I've supported hundreds of companies, when they are doing them, when their machine is working and they're being well led in this is who we are and this is what we're doing, it goes well, right? If we're just going out to kill the other guys to be the last one standing, often doesn't go as well. So my point as a lawyer is not really to give business advice, cause I'm not qualified to do that, let's be clear, maybe I've been around a few meetings within the last twenty five years, but it's my point here is to help say when you're making decisions that are impactful, that are about millions or billions of dollars.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Right? When you're making decisions about how you lead with your board and your advisors and your team, how do you do it from a place of saying, okay, everybody's got a lot going on, but we're gonna come back to our authentic purpose as a company.
Chris Gale:But are there is there any particular method or questions you ask that you think are particularly successful in unearthing that? I asked for instance, you know, we hit open this up, as a public relations, you know, marketing firm, sometimes we will have clients in a contentious media environment or maybe they will see it as a as a competition potentially with a reporter. It's hard to in our place, because we're serving the client, and I think you're focusing on the client, it's sometimes hard to come to an understanding with clients of ours for instance about when it is and isn't a zero sum game and how there can be wins on multiple sides. So if I retreat back for a second, are there particular questions or ways that you set up the conversation with clients to uncover that purpose, or is there a different alternative where you prefer to find clients that are more predisposed to being able to do that?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:I think it's both. I mean, I think that the relationship between a client and their lawyer is very specific. It's got to work, right? It's got to feel right for the client. It's got to feel right for the lawyer because it can be, depending, look, there's small things and then there's like big long things where I've got clients where I'm handling 25 litigations for them, and that those are real relationships where we're really sitting together and figuring out how are we gonna do this.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:And so I'm very upfront with my clients that what I'm here for is for them to make decisions about what they want, and not for me to tell them what they want. But I need to be able to be clear about doing that, sort of my boundaries, if you will, are that we believe in the rule of law, we will act within the rule of law, we believe in the integrity of the rule of law, and that it's capable of supporting quite a bit of business right now. I mean, people can go out to market and do a lot, And we want to be yes lawyers and not no lawyers. And what I mean by that is to say to our clients, yeah, here's, if you wanna do whatever you wanna do in the market, here's either how you can do it or here's how you can do it, but here are the risks. By the way, some risks are parking tickets and some risks are prison sentences.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:So like you choose, you're adults. Like, I'm not gonna help you commit a felony, but like, this is what your risk is. So it's always about their choice. It's always about them understanding what the law requires of them in order to do what they want to do in the market.
Chris Gale:So if I hear you correctly, you're not deciding what their purpose is, you're asking a lot of questions and allowing them it almost sounds like therapy in a very productive fashion, which is okay, so ask the questions that allow them to explore that in the case of where they have multiple options.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Business needs to drive the purpose and the legal, right? So I think a lot of times people get really scared about lawsuits and they just try to call, the paternalistic thing, come in and fix it, make it go away. And then, you know, some knight in shining armor shows up and says, I'm gonna go get them, you know, and like, okay, good, good for you. And have that skill. Like for those of us who grew up in the big leagues know that like, yeah, we have that skill, we can go out and do those things.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:The better thing is to say, what are you really trying to accomplish here? What does it really look like for you to succeed? And if we need to go play that card, like fine, but that's not, it's an option. It's one of many, many, many, many, many options in the giant arsenal of the integrity tools to say, how do we align the systems? How do we align the opportunities and try to reduce the friction so that you can do more business that is more suited to what you want to accomplish in the world.
Chris Gale:This is gonna be my last question. We're a little bit over time. You alluded to the amount of business that is out there. What evidence can you share with us about you're a Definer and we wanted you to come on to share this approach and this vision. Can you share more about some of the success that you're seeing at Grove and the founding of Grove that has provided evidence of what seems like this long view and the immediate returns and rewards you feel?
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:Look, think part of what we're trying to do at Grove and we're not alone, I mean, there's several, many, many company, many firms, law firms that have launched in the last several years to try to provide an alternative to big law. So we are we were very, very, very grateful and humbled to be included in in our first year in the chamber's recognitions, which is, you know, for whoever cares about, you know, the lawyer contests. It's nice to show that we've got the chops, but we do, we wanna provide an alternative that allows for really creative, different approaches to litigation and to not just litigation, but how we combine litigation, regulatory compliance, looking at transactions, this stuff together, right? And that's what we're trying to do. And we are trying to lean into technology and not just our own, but our clients to understand how it's going to advance our cause or hinder it and how we can help avoid that.
Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum:But we've seen clients, I mean, just in terms of the numbers, what we're doing is, knock on wood, working really well. We came in strong and we've doubled the number of clients we have. We have prevailed on, I don't have the exact count, but almost every major motion that we have filed for clients or resolved cases at better than market approaches. So it's working, and it is a true thrill to be able to do this and really looking forward to We love working creative businesses, and this is certainly a time when the world is calling for innovation and entrepreneurship and new ideas, and we are really here to take part and help that happen.
Chris Gale:Thank you very, very, very much. Thank you for those that stayed on with us, and we can't wait to share this further with our network because boy, does it mesh really well with what we're seeing in the space. So thanks very, very much. Thank you all. A great day.