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Veterans know how to lead. The lessons we learned in the military form the foundation for bigger successes in business, entrepreneurship and community.
Host John S Berry, CEO of Berry Law, served as an active-duty Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army, finishing his military career with two deployments and retiring as a Battalion Commander in the National Guard. Today, his veteran led team at Berry Law, helps their clients fight some of the most important battles of their lives. Leading successful teams in the courtroom, the boardroom, and beyond, veteran leadership drives the firm’s rapid growth and business excellence.
Whether building teams, synchronizing operations, or refining tactics, we share our experiences, good and bad, to help you survive, thrive and dominate.
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Leaders that I've worked for have really
given me, I would say,
space and responsibility.
The space to solve the problem myself and
not be told what to do or how to do it,
but also put the weight of
responsibility on my back.
Welcome to Veteran Led.
Today's guest is Emery Wager.
Emery graduated from Stanford University
with a degree in mechanical engineering
and began his career as an engineer at a
startup in Silicon Valley
before joining the United States Marine
Corps and earning a position
as an infantry officer.
Emery spent two combat tours in
Afghanistan, one as a platoon commander
and one as a company executive officer.
He left active duty and wrote a novel
called How to Name a Generation.
After almost a decade in the financial
technology sector, Emery developed a
concept for Confido Legal, where
he is the co-founder and CEO.
Confido Legal focuses on finding ways
to help law firms succeed as businesses.
Through Confido, Emery has personally
worked with hundreds of law firms, helping
them optimize their financial health.
Welcome to the show, Emery Wager.
Thank you.
I'm very excited to be here.
The great thing about...
We got a Marine, Stanford
degree, Silicon Valley, and now
is working in the legal industry.
As a lawyer, I know that a lot law
firms are horrible with their finances.
They don't understand.
Usually, they're really good with their
trust accounts, but beyond that, they're
horrible at running their businesses.
Tell me, how did you come up
with the concept of Confido?
I worked in financial technology and
payments for about a
decade, as you mentioned.
One of my side roles at the company I
worked for was managing all of the
relationships we had with the various
law firms that the business worked with.
I was basically a business
client of half a dozen law firms.
And after paying millions of dollars over
the course of 10 years in legal
bills, being in payments, I saw the...
I'd never experienced an industry that
was so far from e-commerce best practices.
You think about
the effort that Amazon puts in to optimize
that checkout page and the
value that they get out of it.
Of course, the benefit is not as extreme
in the legal case,
but it can be life or death in terms of
cash flow, taking the friction
out of that experience.
We wanted to bring best-in-class financial
tools to law firms and make sure that they
could still comply with their ethical
obligations and get best-in-class
digital payments technology.
Yeah, and this is where
the huge opportunity is.
I mean, obviously, you
come from Silicon Valley.
People are hungry for opportunity.
But what you see is lawyers are great
about managing their trust accounts.
They are all over it.
You mess up your trust account,
you're going to lose your license.
You're going to lose that ticket.
You will not practice law.
So no monkey business
with the trust account.
You got to keep that clean.
And also, lawyers usually do a
phenomenal job working their cases.
The good lawyers do, right?
They are so laser-focused on the law and
getting the best result for their clients.
They are zealous advocates.
And yet when it comes to running their own
firm, their own business,
they are horrible.
And I know this because
that's who my father was.
My father was a legendary attorney.
He tried cases in 24 states,
three different foreign countries.
He was well known for the Green Beret
Affair where he defended the
Fifth Special Forces in Vietnam.
Well known lawyer, horrible businessman.
And so a lot of it is because
they're trained to be lawyers.
They're not trained to run a business.
And they leave law school
and they start a practice.
And then the old guard is like, Well,
this is a practice, not a business.
And so for some reason, they think that
the legal industry is the only one that
shouldn't have market or sell
or be financially responsible.
It's all about a practice, but it's not.
It is a business.
If you don't run it as a business, you do
a disservice to
your clients because you need your best
people doing what is the highest and best
use of their time, which is
solving the legal problem.
But you also need people in the business
space to make the firm profitable so that
you can get the best lawyers, the
best paralegals, the best technology.
Take us on that journey.
When you're going through there seeing how
jacked up the legal industry
is from this perspective.
These great professionals
who do everything for their clients seem
to be incompetent at
running their businesses.
Tell us about that.
Yeah.
So if you and I were not doing a podcast
right now, but we were actually doing
legal work in your average hourly
firm, hourly practice area,
the work that we're doing today, we would
get paid for, and this is average, we
would get paid for in June sometime.
So you think about, that's basically a
four month, three-and-a-half-month loan
that you're giving to your clients.
And you just think about
as the firm grows, the amount of cash that
is outstanding there is
just, I mean, it's huge.
And not to mention the impact
on the likelihood of payment.
So it also hits your revenue.
It hits your profit in a big way because
you've already done the legal to
get that money.
So all of that,
collections, revenue that's coming in
drops straight to your bottom line.
So we think a lot about cash, profit,
and revenue, and
I am personally, given how I came to this,
passionate about the client experience
and making that just way, way better.
There's a lot of
challenging things for the client when
they're dealing with a law firm, and we
believe that experience should be better.
Absolutely.
Let me just tell you something.
There's nothing worse than when a lawyer
provides outstanding service for a client,
wins the case, and maybe they're asking
for a five-star review, and the client...
But the billing is screwed up.
The client is mad because
they got an inaccurate bill.
They feel they got ripped off or they
didn't get the billing for three months,
and now it's like, all of a sudden, wait a
minute, you've been
charging me the whole time?
There's ways we can really screw up the
client experience if we don't
understand the financial piece.
Now, that being said, you
brought up a great point, too.
AR.
Man, I used to suck at AR.
I wouldn't bill the clients right away.
And for some lawyers, they
have head trash around that.
But I wouldn't bill them right away.
And then I found out that the longer I
waited to bill them, the less I get paid.
Then I figured out, if you don't get paid
within 30 days, then you
might not get paid in 60 days.
If you don't get paid in 60 days,
you might not get paid in 90 days.
And if you don't get paid in 90 days,
you're not going to see that money.
Right?
A hundred percent.
I mean, I've probably talked to about
2,000 law firms in my time here, and
it's amazing how you say,
what is your collection rate at the firm?
And they say, well, my
collection rate is 100%.
B******.
We collect everything.
And then you say, well, how much
do you have in 90 day plus AR?
And it's like, well, they have five years
of revenue sitting in in
that aging report still.
It's like, you probably
won't be collecting on that.
Yeah, there's nothing more
disgusting than aging AR.
You know that the more it ages,
the less likely you are to recover.
And of course, you never
want to sue a client.
Sometimes people have to do that, but then
you end up terminating the
attorney-client relationship.
And especially in a large transactional
firm, you don't want to be...
I've seen that happen where someone, their
great client is the one that's bleeding
them to death because they're paying the
least revenue, they're carrying the most
AR, they're not paying them for months.
And I got to tell you, back when my dad
practiced law early, back in the days
in the '80s, before you could get...
Now, today, you go bankrupt, you'll get
a credit card in the mail by Friday.
But back in my dad's day, there
wasn't all this cash out there.
People would then hire
them, they'd pay them.
And when you did criminal defense, they'd
pay them with cars,
guns, whatever it took.
Everybody had something but my dad always
had a saying back when he had criminal
defense, because if you would win a
criminal case, people would be like, Well,
I shouldn't have had to hire a lawyer.
If you'd lose a criminal case, they'd say,
Well, what good did you do for me anyway?
My dad would always say...
When I first started, and I started
criminal law, now I do Veterans
disability, personal injury,
and some other things.
But when I started, that was
where I learned how to try cases.
My dad would say, You got to get the money
when they come to you with
the tears in their eyes.
Get paid up front.
I'm going to remember that one.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things
that totally we preach that,
a collect early billing model.
Even if it's just grabbing the...
Storing, securely the client's payment
method, so at least you have, maybe you
don't have the money in the trust account
to work against, but at least
you have a way to bill them.
So they don't need to take any action to
pay you because that's what they're used
to on Amazon, Uber, all these places where
it's so easy to click and
pay or do nothing and pay.
Absolutely.
And I think that's the challenge is that
we're not competing
against other law firms.
We're competing against Amazon, FedEx,
Uber, all these instant payment.
Those are the people who are getting the
money because they're We're
getting the money right away.
For firms like ours, we're a
contingency-based firm, mostly now.
That means when we do personal injury
cases, we don't get paid
unless our clients win.
In our Veterans disability cases, we
don't get paid unless our clients win.
Our clients don't pay us money up front.
It's really important not only that we
collect the money and we're smart about it
and we get our clients paid right away,
but also that
file can't just sit on a desk.
Every day that that file sits on
the desk, it costs the firm money.
The lawyers need to work the cases and
work them quickly in order to, number one,
get our clients paid who are oftentimes
maybe facing bankruptcy or they're worried
about whether they're going to be able to
pay their medical bills,
they're not working.
We need to get them paid right way, but
it's also really good for the business
when you can keep that cash flow going
because there's nothing worse than not
being able to meet payroll
or worse, going bankrupt.
No, it's amazing.
I'm looking at the top
contingency-based firms like yours these
days, and just that that model
is the incentives are so much more aligned
with creating a good business, creating a
good client experience, because you do
want to move it quickly, be
efficient, create a great experience.
On the hourly side, the incentives are all
jacked up, where it's actually
better to draw it out.
And of course, there's
a few bad eggs out there, but
most attorneys are doing a good job.
They're doing their best.
But at the end of the day, the incentives
are totally misaligned on that side.
Yeah, divorce attorneys, right?
Divorce attorneys.
Hey, let them fight for six hours, what
each attorney is billing them $1,000 an
hour, let them fight over the
$300 drapes for six hours.
All of this, it's just it's insane.
A lot of times with a divorce or even
transactional, it becomes personal.
People say, it's not about
the money, it's personal.
It's like, well, but it is.
There are times like criminal defense.
Now, you served your country, you swore an
oath, you understand what it means to
support and defend the
Constitution of the United States.
There are times when our liberty is at
stake, where there is no amount of
money that's going to fix the problem.
Either the government will dismiss the
case, or we will defeat them at trial.
That's the attitude.
But because our clients don't want to be
convicted felons, they don't want to lose
their civil rights, they don't
want to lose their Civil Liberties.
They will fight till the end, and
then they need a lawyer to do that.
But when it comes to money,
it's always interesting to me.
People are fighting over their
principle, and it's insane.
I'm going to fight them
over the principle.
I mean, look, maybe we
should have trial by combat.
I don't know if you want
to fight over a principle.
Otherwise, it's just money.
At the end of the day, if you have a
problem and you have enough
money, you don't have a problem.
Let's get into that.
Tell me all the ways that you help law
firms now with their money,
which is the lifeblood.
Cash flow is the lifeblood of
a law firm or any business.
How do you help?
We basically built our entire business on
the non-contingency practice areas and
helping those firms that need to get paid
from their client, eliminate all
of the friction in that process.
So obviously, if a client doesn't want
to pay, that's outside our purview.
But any client who wants to pay but is
busy, whether they're a business client,
an AP person or a consumer client,
we want to take all the friction out for
that client so that the law firm, instead
of being the 10th bill to get paid,
they're the first ones to get paid.
And so we think a lot, like I said, about
shortening that AR cycle to
impact cash, profit, and revenue.
So that's how we've built our
business for the last five years.
Something I'm very excited about, we
launched earlier this year, is a outbound
a digital payments solution to
allow contingency-based firms to
really improve their workflows.
But more importantly, as you mentioned,
speak to that next generation of
plaintiffs who grew up
on Venmo, Cash App, Amazon, all these
digital options, and they don't want to
wait for the check to show up, and they
don't even know what to
do with it when it comes.
And so, again, coming back to that client
experience and giving that Amazon-esque
experience to law firm clients and just
making it instant, easy,
and really improving that experience.
Yeah, I find it crazy.
I've been involved with
some other law firms.
As a lawyer, look, I don't
handle my own stuff, right?
So I hire lawyers for stuff,
and it's always amazing to me.
It's like, Okay, look, why are you
making it hard for me to pay you?
This doesn't have to be hard.
You got LawPay and these other companies.
It's like, Look, let me
click a button and pay you.
I'll sign the agreement, but you can't get
me a digital agreement to sign and
let me click a button and pay you?
What's wrong with you?
It's like, Hey, take the money, because I
know if you don't take the money, you
can't run your operations to represent me.
So I lose confidence in you if you can't
control your cash,
I don't think you can control your firm.
And if you can't do that, you're
not good enough to represent me.
It basically says to the client, I think,
I didn't care enough to
make this easy for you.
And that is the area where a lot of people
are looking at a bill that's
bigger than they expected.
And those little things, those little
moments, just have a huge difference.
That's how we got into this in the first
place, seeing that from the client side.
What we didn't know initially, and now we
live and die by this, is the massive
financial impact that
optimizing that has on the on the
underlying cash and profit
position of the firms.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, look, it's good for the
firm, it's good for the client.
Just stay on top of it.
I found also, give your client the dignity
of allowing them to pay
for the legal service.
So many times it's like,
Well, the client is behind.
Why not?
Pick up the phone.
How do we help them work through this?
Because sometimes our clients do go
through difficult times, whatever it is,
whether it's a divorce, they lost
a job, they've been laid off.
I think any time the client is struggling
and we can help them work through
that payment process, it's important.
Sometimes it is giving them grace, and
other times it's saying,
Look, this is an agreement.
We have to have this conversation.
I realize that you may want to,
whatever people waste money now on, I
don't even want to know,
on Prime or whatever.
But hey, your legal bills,
this is your future.
What is a more important
investment than your future?
If I'm hiring a lawyer,
I'm investing in my future.
That lawyer is supposed to protect my
future, and I'm not going to go cheap.
There's nothing more
expensive than a cheap lawyer.
But you see these lawyers, and if they
can't control their finances,
where else are they broken?
Where else are they going to fail you?
And what are you paying for as a
client that isn't that quality service?
You're basically paying for
them to run a s**** business.
Yeah.
And where else are they dropping the ball?
And that's, excellence in the practice
of law, excellence in business.
We expect both as consumers.
So you don't work with
contingency firms now.
It's all mostly hourly-based?
Well, now we are, yeah.
As of this year, with the
outbound digital product.
We're starting to work
with contingency firms.
Frankly, it's been very fun because of
that, what I mentioned earlier, where the
incentives are so aligned to
really think about the business in
strategic ways and move cases
through and be efficient.
It's really been enjoyable to work with
that area of law that we haven't
really focused on in the past.
That's great.
I think that's probably how we got
connected because we are mostly in the
contingency space, and we're pretty
tech savvy and somewhat business savvy.
But I had a paper route
since I was 10, 10 years old.
That was my business lesson.
I learned all about collecting
money, people bouncing checks, AR.
It's amazing when you think about it, how
people used to write checks at the grocery
store, and the grocery store was basically
taking the risk on that payment
that you were good for those checks.
So we think about credit cards and
whatnot as airline miles and whatnot.
But there's amazing...
That instant authorization is an amazing
tool for the business that used to be
hoping that you were good for the money.
Yeah, that's great.
And you know what?
We still take checks in some cases, but
yeah, it's a lot better
when we can do it digitally.
So I want to talk a little bit about
your novel, How to Name a Generation.
I mean, here you are, a Stanford
grad with an engineering degree.
Now, my brother went Navy.
He's a Stanford grad
with a systems degree.
He worked in my business, so he
worked in the law firm for a while.
But tell me, how is it that
you came to write a novel?
I mean, you're an engineer, so
why did you think you could write?
I had actually always enjoyed writing, and
it was in college, I was choosing
between English and engineering.
Engineering won out, but I've
always enjoyed writing on the side.
When I got out, I took a little time to
decide what did I want
to do with my life next.
And I was fascinated by two things.
One, I went to a
prestigious private high school.
It was the same high school that Bill
Gates and Paul Allen met at
and developed Microsoft.
And so the MO there was like, no,
you're going to graduate from here.
You're going to go to the best college.
You're going to get the best job, and
you're just going to be on this path.
And I was on that path, and
it was really hard to get off.
It was a major mental shift for me to make
a decision to say, oh,
I can join the military.
I can be a Marine.
I can get off this path.
It took me a while.
I went through college, and I started
working before I made that shift.
But I thought it would be fascinating, A,
to write about someone who is in that
situation and made that decision to enlist
right out of high school
in that situation.
That was the first piece of it.
The second piece of it, I was fascinated
as I was getting out
a lot of the Marines that
were in my platoon, in my company, my
battalion, they
had done four, eight years.
They were getting out, and now they were
going to college for the first time.
And I thought,
wow, it would be so fascinating to write
about their experience meeting the me's in
college without that experience,
without that maturity.
What is it like for them to go back
to college and be with those younger kids
who don't have that experience in combat
in the Marine Corps or
in any of the services.
Those were the two topics that I really
thought were fascinating to explore.
And, in the novel, the main character
grows up, goes to a prestigious private
high school, through
a series of events, decides to
enlist right out of high school.
It's about his experience
juxtaposed by that of his or those of his
classmates who go on to top-tier colleges,
high-powered careers and everything.
At the end, he gets out
and goes back to college.
It's about his experience interacting with
those classmates that are
five years younger than him and
don't have those experiences.
Really, really fun experience just going
through the process of writing it.
Did you ever read Once an Eagle?
I love that book.
When I got out, actually, three people had
given it to me, and I drove back across
country and listened to it, and
it took me almost exactly...
I was basically hitting the Pacific
Ocean when it was wrapping up.
It's amazing.
It really is an amazing book.
Yeah, I see some similarities there.
The guy doesn't get into West Point, and
so he enlists to fight in the war and then
becomes an officer, and then he's
dealing with the careerist officer.
I mean, it's an interesting...
A little bit long for my taste, a little
bit too much on the romance
side and all that garbage.
But I thought it was a very well-written
book, and I loved it when, especially I
believe he's in when he
went to China, right?
And he's there and he's talking to the
former Emperor who's now
leading the resistance.
And I thought that was
just such a great moment.
All right, well, we will move away
from literature and get to leadership.
All right, let's talk about this.
So you've been a Marine Infantry Officer,
but you've also led tech teams in Silicon
Valley, and you're leading a startup.
Let's dive in.
Of all of those,
just mesh them together whatever, your
three best examples of leadership and
the three worst examples of leadership.
And name names or don't, I don't care.
All right.
So best examples, I think, are the times
when either
I or leaders that I've worked for
have really given me, I would
say, space and responsibility.
So the space to operate
autonomously, to solve the problem myself
and not be told what to do or how to do
it, but also put the weight of
responsibility on my back for
success or if we are not going to be
successful owning the
failure, learning from it.
So I would say a big thing is that space
and also that responsibility.
I've really done well in those situations,
and we really try to make that...
We really try to instill that in our
folks and in the culture of the company.
One of our core principles is,
everyone's an owner.
We do provide legal ownership, but that's
not the important part.
The important part is everyone's expected
to think and act like the owner of the
business, not like they're in their little
silo and they're only thinking
about their one little part.
They need to understand the economics,
the customer acquisition cost,
the customer lifetime value.
If you don't understand those things,
how are you going to
spend money to solve a customer problem?
You won't know how much to spend,
and you'll have to be told what to do.
That part of our culture is huge.
I would say on the negative side, you can
tell when a leader is out for themselves.
And the toughest leaders that I've worked
for, tough in a negative
sense, where I really didn't feel like
working hard for them,
was when you can tell that they're
really in it for themselves.
When they're talking to you, it's not
about the best interest of the unit,
the best interest of the company.
It's how can I advance,
and I want to be in charge.
You don't have to say anything specific.
You can just feel when that's there.
Those are the worst examples.
Fair enough.
As we wrap up, and I don't think I nailed
this, Emery, but what is
your title at Confido?
I like to use co-founder, but
I put CEO on the contracts.
All right, fair enough.
Emery, where can our audience learn
more about Emery Wager or Confido Legal?
Confidolegal.
com is the best place to get
in touch with the company.
You can reach out on our contact us page,
a bunch of different ways to get in touch.
And then for me personally, LinkedIn.
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn
and check those messages.
So please send me a note.
Love, especially working with Veteran
entrepreneurs and helping out where I can.
Our lead investor at Confido specializes
in Veteran-led startups,
and so we're really deep into that
Veteran entrepreneur ecosystem.
But you don't have to be a Veteran.
Hit me up on LinkedIn.
I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks so much for your time, and thank
you for your service and your continued
service to our community
and to our Veterans.
Thank you.
Thank
you for joining us today on Veteran Led,
where we pursue our mission of promoting
Veteran leadership in business,
strengthening the Veteran community, and
getting Veterans all of the
benefits that they earned.
If you know a leader who should be on the
Veteran Led podcast, report to our online
community by searching @VeteranLed on your
favorite social channels
and posting in the comments.
We want to hear how your military
challenges prepared you to lead your
industry or community, and
we will let the world know.
And, hit subscribe and join
me next time on Veteran Led.