Troubled Project Rescue, High Stakes Negotiation, and the Value of Being Wrong with Rob Pattison

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I'll be hosting Rob Pattison. Very excited to speak with him, to talk about his business, his career. He has a JD from Osgoode Hall. He studied a Bachelor of Arts. at Western University, but his career has been very varied and has had so many incredible twists and turns, if I may say it that way. So thank you so much for making the time to be here today. Great to be here. Appreciate it. And to start us off, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit about your career path? You know, how did you start? I know that you've been in private practice, you've been, you know, leading complex infrastructure projects. You've been a little bit of a, in the regulator side, in consulting work. Can you tell us a little more about your background? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a lawyer by training and temperament. It's funny, my father was a lawyer at Osler's, which is a big firm in Toronto. And growing up, of course, I had no interest in doing what the, what the rents do. But when I flunked out of high school and then went back, completed it. Got a degree where I just studied a bunch of different stuff. And one of the things I encountered was American law and constitutional politics. And that just really seized my interest. That was just around the time that Canada's new constitution was repatriated. And so I went to law school expecting to be a constitutional lawyer. Turns out I was terrible at constitutional law, had no feel for it at all. But I really loved contracts and ended up becoming a construction lawyer, as many do. Starting with construction liens and then moving into performance bond claims and errors and omissions, and and then you know the broader things. And and construction law is super fun because there's you know I think other than admiralty law, there's no area of law I haven't touched on in one way or another in my career. Started in private practice, went in-house in in 1998, where I started doing more front-end stuff. Up till that point in my career, it was it was all disputes and troubled projects. Bought the four. which is a toll highway here in Toronto, or just outside of Toronto. And in 2006, I joined Infrastructure Ontario, which was newly created at the time to deliver infrastructure projects here in Ontario. And I switched to a non-legal role leading transactions for P3s and did some in the social space and then moved into transit in 2009 and led the UP Express spur connection to our airport, the Ottawa LRT, the Eglinton LRT, and some other projects. In 2018, I could see that P3s were about to face some difficulties, and I believed that we were about to see a wave of claims. So I returned to legal, started up a group we called Commercial Resolutions to help to avoid, mitigate, manage claims and disputes on on big projects. And then about a year ago, I left Infrastructure Ontario and I started up Rob Pattison Consulting Inc. for all of your Rob Pattison Consulting needs. And I provide troubled project rescue, high-stakes negotiation, and project due diligence services in, primarily in the infrastructure space. That's amazing. What an incredible career you've traced so far. Very excited to hear a little bit about what you learned along the way. And you just mentioned construction liens. I'm just finishing up my articling and I'm actually doing commercial real estate right now. So I do get to see a little bit of that every once in a while with developers and all of that. And it's really a fascinating area of law in a way. But it's also funny because I feel like I've heard you cracking some jokes in other shows before, you know, about the other day you just wake up and what you're doing is construction liens, right? I think there's a joke about that. Yeah, exactly. I was, I was 35 and doing construction liens and there was an article in the Toronto Star saying you should pity your lawyer because they're 30, they've had this great life, and then all of a sudden they're 35 and they're doing construction liens. And I thought, wait a minute, I am that. And I do enjoy it. Construction liens are a phenomenal puzzle. They're very intricate. The stakes are very high for the people that are involved in them. And I got involved. The reason I became a construction lawyer specifically is because the first time I encountered liens, I was handed, I was handed a lien file the night before a a motion in court. Somebody was bonding off a lien, putting security into court for a lien. And it was being opposed by the lien claimant, which never, ever, ever, ever happens. It was a really goofy thing. And I had to learn the Construction Lien Act between 5 in the afternoon and 10 o'clock the next morning. And then about 3 o'clock in the morning, I realized anybody who understood that act would never miss a meal except from overwork. And that was certainly my experience. I really went into it as many people do when they choose a career for the for the most prosaic of reasons and that was it. But it's fascinating work. It's a great small bar that knows each other, practicing law, practicing construction lien law. When I started out in construction law generally, even in downtown Toronto, it was a small town. People knew each other and it made it, you know, you're protecting your client. The client always comes first. But you learn that it's a long road and you're going to see people again and again and again. You've got to be sensible and you've got to, you know, not be a jerk and all of that good stuff. Amazing. Those things you learn in kindergarten, right? They come to be very effective in the legal practice as well. But Rob, you did mention P3 operations and projects, and most of my audience here are law students. I just don't want to assume that people know what that means. So I do know it's public-private partnerships and you worked in quite a few of those. So I wanted to hear a little more about that. What happens maybe behind the scenes on deals that are, you know, that big or that really bring in stakeholders who might be kind of interested in different ways? Are there a few things, you know, that you have to work behind the scenes for the legal standpoint that maybe most of the lawyers out here don't even get to see? Yeah, sure. And I think, I think this applies to any type of project, quite frankly, but So for people who don't know what a P3 is, in a traditional construction contract, typically the owner goes off, hires an architect or engineer, designs the project, and then they hire a contractor. They pay monthly as they go along through for progress. And that structure can lead to a lot of problems. It can lead to finger-pointing between the contractor and the architect and the owner if anything goes wrong, a lot of debates about whose fault it is, and so on and so forth. In a P3, and in fairness, sometimes those debates, and this is one of the main things P3s are aimed at, sometimes in those debates, the contractor will take a position that isn't really supported by the contract, but they just have a money problem and they'll use their leverage because it's very hard to replace a contractor to ask for, you know, additional money. And I should say owners do their own stupid stuff and terrible stuff as well. So, you know, there's bad behavior on all sides of the industry, but the case for P3s is— Right. than monthly payments. The contractor funds the construction during construction. And in a pure P3, either the owner pays them on completion or actually in a pure, pure P3, like the Highway 407, the owner never pays the contractor a cent. The contractor builds the asset and then uses it to generate revenues in the case of a highway from tolls. And so the key point is That P3 is about transferring risk. It's about using a contract to say, contractor, all of anything that's to do with the performance is your risk, and we are prepared to see you go bankrupt if you don't do that. The challenge with that is, and I think in the early days of P3s in Canada, when everybody was afraid of them, the contractors really, really understood what the risk that they were taking. They would price in that You know, there's, there's 20 things that can go wrong on an infrastructure project. You'd never price all 20 of those going wrong. If you're smart and if you're funding this thing and your only chance of getting paid is to complete, and if it's been scoped properly so that all the risk is the contractor's, then the contractor's going to price in contingency for 1 or 2 of those things going wrong. And then when those 1 or 2 things happen, great, you still make money, you still make your profit, even though you've spent some of your contingency. The problem is that for that to be effective and for people to show up and bid those jobs, the owner has to do a lot of due diligence. They've got to ask themselves uncomfortable questions. They've got to think about the risks of the job the way a contractor does. And they've got to really set the table so that somebody can bid it without crazy contingencies and just know that they really control their own destiny. And I think one of the things that, that's been seen around the world, and I think that in Ontario it's been seen, is that as a couple of things happen. One, as certain frequent flyers get used to, you know, bidding these things and winning them very frequently, it starts to become a big part of their business plan. Contractors and engineers, when they report their financial status, One of the things that they report on is called backlog, and it's the value of contracts that they've signed. And it's a crazy thing for them to report, but it's, for some reason, it's accepted in the industry. And the problem with backlog is that if you sign a billion-dollar contract where you're going to make $200 million, your backlog's a billion dollars. If you're— if you sign a billion-dollar contract where you're going to lose $200 million, Your backlog is $1 billion. Backlog doesn't tell you anything, but it just creates another, another target that you might miss. So contractors sort of ended up getting in the same mode, I think, in P3s as they did in traditional projects, which is their pricing got too aggressive. Second, I think that the asset classes got much more competitive or much more complicated. So a lot more of the risk was out of the control of the contractor. And, you know, a bunch of those things happened. So to answer I think what goes on behind the curtain on a lot of projects on the owner's side and on the contractor's side, and this is traditional projects, it's P3s, it's alliances, it's you name the model, is a lot of wishful thinking and a lot of what psychologists call motivated reasoning. If you ask the question, you know, if your boss asks you, can you deliver this project for $1 billion? The answer is likely to be yes for a bunch of reasons. Even if, well, it's highly unlikely, there's a 1% chance, but yes, I can do it. Yes, sure, I can do it for $1 billion. Right. Bureaucracies work this way. People in organizations, people who have bosses, people who defer to authority. There's a bunch of psychological mechanisms that drive that behavior. Whereas if you ask somebody, how much will this cost? You get a very different answer. And so I think throughout my career, the one thing I've seen in the early days of projects across asset classes is wishful thinking. And then when things don't go well, there's a lot of finger-pointing and who to blame and us versus them and all of that stuff when things go bad. If I'm capturing it correctly, I understand that you're saying that there's a lot of power in how questions are framed. And to be quite honest, I think that I don't hear that a lot from lawyers who do a lot of transactional work. I often hear that from lawyers who are, you know, in court litigating all the time. So it's very nice to see. I see that you also expect that people will always act in good faith regarding regardless of which, you know, side they are. But it's fair to say that you'd need a lot of the law knowledge, but also you need to know a lot of the reality of the business. So I can tell you, you know, you've seen it all, like from the inside, from negotiating, from seeing what goes wrong as well. And after spending years then on both sides of the table, so to say, how do you, do you think that this shapes your approach nowadays when it comes to negotiations, when it comes to high-stakes both negotiations, but also any situations that arise after that? Yeah, it's, it's, it's a great question because the, I think, and you don't have to be on both sides of the deal to recognize this, you know, everybody has a legitimate role in these projects. You know, the contractor is there to build, they know their business. They, you know, again, for, for people who don't know construction, in, in construction, there's this thing called means and methods. And so when the owner or the owner's architect gives the contractor a set of plans, that's, that tells you what you have to end up with. It doesn't usually tell you how to get there. And one of the reasons that owners hire contractors is because they really do know the things that you need to do to build the thing. And so when you build a wall, you know, and I saw this very early in my career, actually, here's an example. You're building a wall for a building, you know, you're building a building and you start with the first wall and you build one outside wall. the first day and you're making great progress, and that night a giant windstorm comes through and blows over that wall. Well, you know, most contractors learn, and this isn't in the plans and specs from the architect, but, you know, most contractors learn, well, you've got to brace that wall for exactly that problem. Maybe there's a big wind, or maybe somebody bumps into it, or there's a, there's a bunch of things that can go wrong. And so the contractor is there for their knowledge, and they're there for their ability to build. And they've got to make a profit. And contractors don't make much in most construction, even in these giant projects. They're typically making a net profit of somewhere between 4% and 8% of the cost of the project. You know, it's really pretty narrow. And when you put that in context, the architect or engineer who doesn't bear any of those costs, you know, they're not agreeing to build the thing for a price. They make a profit Maybe of something on the order of 1%. It's probably less than that now, but something on the order of 1%. And so for a vastly more complicated risk, the contractor, you know, earns 4 or 5 or 6 times as much as the architect or engineer. So, so they're the meat in the sandwich. And on the other side of the table, you know, you've got the owner. The owner is, you know, unless it's somebody doing a home renovation, Your owner is a company or they're a government agency, you know, that is filled with people who have individual roles and accountabilities. And it's very easy in that sort of environment to go, well, we've signed a, we've signed a contract, it's got a price in it, and that means I've got a budget that's been approved and I've got to stick within that budget. Well, your budget constraints on the owner side or your need to make a profit on the contractor side have nothing at all to do with what your obligations under the contract are. And one of the, you know, one of the worst things that happens when people act in bad faith is they take a position under the contract that's driven by their financial status, not by what the words of the contract say. And that's, you know, that's one of the biggest problems in construction. And, you know, every construction project, there's this— somebody won a Nobel Prize a few years ago in economics with this notion that All contracts are incomplete. It can't address every eventuality. And so when we think that the contract defines the entire relationship, we get into trouble. And if you think about your life, you know, you walk through life and you interact with people every day without signing contracts with them. You know, you walk into a restaurant, you sit down, you order dinner. There's a menu, there's prices, there's these social conventions. About how we treat each other. And, you know, and we all have interests that might not make it onto the page in the contract. And so the big thing I've learned is the contract's important. It's a really important piece of the context of your relationship when you're building a project, but it's only a piece of that relationship. And people have to be able to step back and look at their interests and What's right and wrong and what reputation do they want to have? Not just what the words on the page say, but that's very, very difficult for people within an organization to do. I love that you mentioned all the details on it. Can you tell me a little bit more about where are the lawyers in this process? So do we usually have, you know, both the contractors and the other parties, each of them have, you know, some kind of in-house team following the whole lifecycle of this project? Or do we have lawyers who will come in in the initial phase for contract negotiation and then they, that's their work and then they will just be hired, you know, afterwards if things go south? What is more common? I'm sure there's different scenarios. And also, you know, if or when these major projects start going off track, are there a few early signs that people might ignore and that maybe legal turns on the alarm? Yeah, that's so, so first of all, as you say, it's all over the map how these things are. Companies that have in-house lawyers, might very well have them more involved throughout the project. But, you know, lawyers tend to fall into the category of either a transactional lawyer who negotiates the deal or litigation or claims lawyers who take a dispute to have a third party decide it, right? And again, this is another one of those how you frame the question questions. And one of the really, you know, there's a lot of criticisms of the profession about, you know, lawyers are so legalistic and, you know, they just think about winning. and losing and all that stuff. But it's very important to remember lawyers are a regulated, insured profession. You are not allowed to give commercial advice, theoretically, although the great ones all do. And in-house lawyers in particular do it every day. Although they typically don't carry insurance and, you know, the rules are, the rules are somewhat different for them. And so in a very real sense, you can have love for lawyers who say, look, all I do is give legal advice. And if you want commercial advice, You know, talk to an MBA, right? There's, there's actually a very legitimate reason to do that, particularly if the lawyer does know the law and doesn't know anything at all about the asset class or about the business that they're going into. And, you know, lots of, lots of civil litigators do, you know, a patent case one day and a construction case the next. And, you know, you name it. I don't know what patent cases mean. But, but, you know, they do, they do a variety. And, you know, transactional lawyers tend to work from templates. They don't really think about, is this the best form of agreement? I think, you know, one of my obsessions right now is, is technical writing and contract design. The notion of writing a contract for the user, the person who's going to read it, the person who's responsible for delivering it. That's just not how it's done. Contracts are written for lawyers by lawyers. The back part is written for engineers by engineers. None of it's really written for the project managers and the executives and the people who have to administer the thing. And that, you know, I think that causes a lot of problems. And the litigators, again, you know, litigators are there to litigate. And litigation is war, right? It's about winning and losing. It's about, and, you know, there's this amazing sort of notion. There's rules of court that are meant to ensure that somebody tells the story, they tell it once, they can't rethink it, they can't open it up, you know, in the, in the interest of efficiency. And there's rules of evidence about what can and can't in and can't get in. And under the rules of court and the rules of evidence, there is relevant evidence that gets excluded every single day. And so what you're always presenting is a cartoon of what really happened. You're not saying what actually happened. You're presenting a version and you are there to win. And that's quite properly it. But what that leads to is because litigation's expensive and because people don't understand it and because they have to trust their lawyer. The lawyer's job is to win, and they're focused on that. And that's very, very, very different from saying, now, what's this case really worth? How much should I offer to settle? And good lawyers are good at thinking about those things, but there's a lot of phenomenal litigators who are despicable at trying to resolve the case. They're there to do what they're great at, which is to kill or die. And the settling becomes an afterthought. It becomes a tactic. It becomes a lever. It's not really what it's about. And so those 2 roles for lawyers can be a problem. I, it's funny because I remember when I went in-house after 8 years in private practice and started negotiating contracts after only fighting over them for 8 years. I remember thinking, I have no idea how you could responsibly write a contract without having fought over a contract. I just, it's amazing to me that anybody's allowed to do that because unless you know what people do and don't fight over. How on earth can you write this thing that you are writing, as most lawyers are, to be defensive? So it's, it's, it's, it's a funny business. Absolutely. No, it really is. And, and as I was getting ready for this podcast, I read a little bit about you on your website, on your LinkedIn. And I think that it, it says that one of the things you do or research or consult about is related to fixing broken contracts. So I appreciate we kind of naturally flowed into this area. And how do you go about fixing broken contracts, rescuing troubled projects? Are there, you know, a few mistakes that parties often make when they're trying to resolve those disputes? When I talk about a troubled project, not every claim is a dispute. Not every dispute reflects a troubled project. People can disagree in good faith every day. And I've seen very healthy, constructive relationships with principled debates about what the contract says whether a design met the standard or whatever. And you can have very, very fruitful relationships with claims and disputes and even with litigation lawsuits. You know, it just all depends. Can you think of it as just business? What happens in some projects, and this is typical of troubled projects traditionally, and we see a tremendous amount of it since COVID is that the— and I'll talk about design-build type projects where the contractor is the one who hires the engineer who does the detailed design, or they hire an engineer architect. The owner sets requirements that are usually conceptual, and then the contractor hires the one who does the detailed design. And so there's a couple of things that happen. One is the contractor is losing money. They either didn't bid enough or the project is more complicated than they thought. And this is a problem with design-build. You, you have to give your price before you've actually figured out what all of the challenges of the project are, and you're bidding competitively and all all those things happen. And particularly post-COVID, execution is a problem. There was a, there was the great retirement. A lot of companies that were really good at bringing up their staff and training people and bringing along the next generation, a lot of companies have struggled in the post-COVID era to maintain those cultures and that culture of teaching and learning and mentorship. And contracts are getting more complicated. A lot of the stuff in them, you know, in linear projects and in, you know, around the world, you see this more The more complicated a project is, the less it's within the control of the property. So contractor is losing money. Let's say they're losing a dollar because of all of those things. And 20 or 30 cents of that dollar is something that the owner's actually responsible for under the contract. And a pattern that you see again and again and again is the contractor's got a valid claim for 20 or 30 cents, and they've got a loss of a buck. And so they say, owner, you owe me a buck. And they come in guns blazing. Pound the table, and you owe me this money, and how dare you not pay me, and you're acting in bad faith, and da da da da da. Which which does a bunch of bad things. It it it puts the owner's team on the defensive, puts their it puts their character and their professionalism and their jobs at risk. So it puts them on high alert. And when they know that any part of what the contractor is saying isn't true, then you know they have a fiduciary duty to their boss or to their company or to the taxpayer to now be on high alert because well I know now this person. Might not tell me the truth. On the other hand, from the contractor's perspective, owners, there's a real problem with competence, confidence, governance. Owners have the same problem contractors do. It's really, really hard to find good people. And even good people who are technically highly qualified have a difficult time with uncertainty. And they have a difficult time saying, look, this is, this thing's a coin flip. You know, we can win, we could lose. Yeah, I see their point. Why don't we offer them some money to settle? And so that piece happened. The other piece, and this is the complement, and this is part of what makes a troubled project a troubled project, but it's also the seed of its recovery, is that in these design-build projects, for all the reasons we— that I think we talked about a few minutes ago on this sort of people being optimistic and not thinking things through before they go out the door, very often because engineering's a commodity business, architecture's a commodity business, People don't communicate with each other very well. And what makes it onto the page isn't necessarily what the contractor or their stakeholders want or need or expect. Contractor's losing money and the scope and the spec have holes in them, right? It's like software. You know, every software system in the world has exploits, right? Every single one. It's impossible to get rid of them. It's a basic premise of language and of thought and communication. And so, The contractor has the ability to use gaps in the contract as leverage and to cut corners and to do this and to do that. And, you know, many times they're very, they're entitled to it if the owner doesn't make decisions in a timely fashion, or if they don't engage in the part of the claim that is valid. So that's what a troubled project looks like. The beauty of a troubled project and the way, the reason that for me, these things are like playing with Barbies is because The the solution is in the problem because the scope and the spec probably can be improved, and because actually even when the scope and the spec are right at the beginning, you know the contractor is building or prepared to build what the what the scope and specs say. Very often the owner when they start to see the detailed designs, they go well that's not quite what I had in mind. I wanted something better. I wanted something bigger. I wanted something. That my stakeholders will be more proud of. And so, at the same time as it's hard to settle the claim because it doesn't fill the hole, there's often an opportunity to say, look, let's just rethink this thing. You know, maybe between the 30 cents that the claim is worth and the buck that the contractor's lost, maybe there's a business case for changing the design and exceeding what made it onto the page in the contract and giving the owner something that's really going to surpass their expectations and delight their stakeholders and perform for the long term in a way that what's in the contract won't. And I've seen a lot of projects where that negotiation happens. And, you know, once you get that close to filling the hole, then the contractor can go to their subs and their suppliers and say, look, I don't have a buck, but I've got this much. Can you help me out? And they have that same discussion all the way down the line. And that buck drinks at the same time as you're filling up, you know, figuring out a way to fill it. So, so that's kind of the, the rise and fall or the fall and rise of a troubled project. And, and, you know, there, there's, there's usually a great opportunity to do that. Thank you. Thank you so much for, for explaining that. And if I understand it correctly, what you just mentioned is basically what, what It is also called the interest-based negotiation. If you read Getting to Yes and you read the classic negotiation books, and everybody should read these because, you know, all of interest-based negotiation is really important. But I think it's also important to remember that rights actually do mean something, right? For people who care about contracts, and I do, I think contracts have a great romance to Contract law is the only area of law where people control their own destiny, right? The Highway Traffic Act and the Criminal Code and the law of negligence—they're all imposed on you by the state without your agreement. With a contract, you can decide what you want to do. And so I think it's easy to become cynical, and it's easy to say, "Well, you know, we should just throw out the contract." Contracts do mean something; they have to mean something. And the promises people have made. And the way people have changed position because of those promises are very important factors. But they go alongside— they're one piece of thinking about what's in your interest. Because at the end of the day, the Contractor and the Owner might hate themselves by the end of the project, right? That sometimes happens. But whichever seat you're in, you shouldn't care whether the other person wins, you know, In quotes, at your expense. You should never ever care about that. What you should care about is, how did I do out of this deal? Did I end up okay? Did I get what I wanted? Did I pay a reasonable price for it? Or, you know, did I make a profit if I'm the contractor? What you really need to look at primarily is what's good for me. And part of what's good for you is thinking about relationships, thinking about your reputation, you know. And as a party that enters contracts in the world, you want 2 reputations. I mean, it's all one reputation, but there's 2 sides to the coin. One is a reputation for not being a fool and for not being taken advantage of. And the other is a reputation for being fair and being reasonable and understanding that, you know, there is such a thing as the law of gravity and things don't always go the way people want. And, and, you know, people have to live another day. And, and so all of this is hard. All of this involves soul searching and character and, and quite frankly, courage. You've got to be prepared to tell your boss bad news. You've got to be prepared to tell your boss, no, actually we should do the right thing here. And the beauty of this industry is that an individual with courage can have a— who knows the business— can have an outsized impact because there's a lot of people in this business, as in others, there's a lot of people just cashing a paycheck and not going out on a limb. And, and it's, you know, it's the people who can be trusted to go to decision makers and say, look, this is a hard decision. And, you know, you could argue it either way, but I think we should do this. It's the people who do that who are going to excel in an organization in any sort of job I'd ever want to have. And there's people who love the other kind of job and good for them. But if you're the sort of person who wants to have an impact, that means taking risks. To be a professional means to be prepared to be fired for doing your job. What an incredible lesson. really appreciate you mentioning this. And I think it comes a lot into terms with what I read that you've put out there. People sometimes have to admit that they're wrong. And I think that you mentioned something about, you know, being wrong 55% to 60% of the time. So I wanted to hear a little more about this mindset. You know, how has it influenced your decision-making? And you've taken quite a few leadership roles as well. How has that influenced your leadership over the years? Yeah. I learned this early in my career, and I was lucky to a couple of with, you know, with cases where there was a dispute and it looked like it was really clear, and then you get better information and you learn, no, we're not the ones in the right, we're the ones in the wrong. And I, you know, I can't tell particular stories because they're privileged, but I've seen that happen often enough with good people and, you know, business owners and so on who had the power and had the authority and had the interest and started off genuinely believing they were right and wanting to protect their position and wanting to show that, you know, know, they couldn't be taken advantage of. And the moment that they learned, no, there's this fact I didn't know. In fact, they don't owe me money. I owe them money. They could just turn on a dime and do the right thing. And so I learned from that, that, and by the way, I've also seen people go into court over confidentiality. If the only question you ask yourself in litigation is, how do I win this case? What are my great arguments? Then you're going to get, you're going to be exposed to a surprise, You have to ask, how do I lose this case? What are their best arguments? What's the one thing that's really been the key to whatever success I've had? It's in a dispute, I'm much more skeptical about my team's story than I am about the other side's story. Like, yeah, sure, my job is to beat them up. And so great. That's easy. Look at poking holes in their story. Fantastic. But then you've got to really understand, you've got to love their story. You've got to think about the arguments that they might make. to make and haven't thought of yet, because that often happens. You know, they'll— they, they won't run their best arguments during settlement negotiations. They run them on the last day of the trial when you're not expecting them. And so you have to be constantly asking yourself, are they 1% right? Are they 10% right? Are they 50% right? Are they 100% right? Am I 1% wrong, 10% wrong, 50% wrong, 100% wrong? And I'm writing a book right now, and it's, it's It's about how every science tells us we're wrong about everything all the time. We're wrong about what words mean. We're wrong about what we remember. We're wrong about what we see and what we perceive. We're wrong in predictable ways that are driven by what we want to be true. And so the ability to have humility, you have to walk through this world being prepared To be wrong. One of the greatest lawyers I've ever seen in a case I inherited was just wrong about something. And he'd been advising his client for years, and it was an area that he wasn't an expert in, and he was over his head. And somehow the people I inherited the file from hadn't realized he was literally just wrong. He thought he was right, but he was wrong. He wasn't taking a position. And I found a way to to educate him. And we settled that case within 3 weeks. And that's someone who had to go to his client and say, I've led you down the garden path and I've been in error, and we just need to get out of this thing right now. And I, I think that's one of the greatest professionals I've ever seen. And, and he served his client. He put his client first. It was embarrassing. It must have been awful for him, but that's what he did. Again, that's to be a professional. One of the things, and I don't know if this is the case in every jurisdiction, In Ontario, a lawyer has a positive duty to inform their client if they believe they've made an error that's led to a loss for the client. I'm not sure what the precise formulation of it is, but, you know, lawyers have a positive duty to say, oops, I might have caused you a problem, that I don't believe any other profession has. And that's a beautiful and special thing, and it's one of the reasons I'm proud to be part of this profession. So yeah, humility. The ability to be wrong, the ability, you know, people will share with you when you're vulnerable. They will work with you and share with you in ways that they won't if you're right about everything all the time. And, you know, if you're the client, but if you're a witness, judges hate the person who's right about everything. They do not buy that because we, none of us are perfect. And the person who pretends to be perfect is a fool. What a masterclass. I really appreciate all the thoughts you've been sharing. And looking back at your career, looking back at all the things you've done and accomplished and learned along the way, what is maybe one or two pieces of advice you often give to young lawyers that reach out, that chat with you about, you know, their careers, the next steps, or maybe even if there's anything that you'd like to tell your younger self, if you could share those with us. Yeah. Well, you know, I wouldn't tell my younger self to change a thing. I've had I've had such a great career and I play for love of the game. And this is a career with ups and downs and lots of, you know, late nights and tears. I wouldn't change a thing about my career. Look, I think my message for young professionals, my message for anybody is do what only you can do the way only you can do it, right? If you're a commodity, you will be treated as a commodity. Now, being an individual, it's high risk, high reward. And, you know, we all live within systems And you do have to provide something that people want. But I think, I think figure out what you're good at in a way that other people aren't. That's the heart of strategy, right? Strategy is accepting your weaknesses, accepting your limitations, accepting where you are failing or would fail if you tried to do something, and focusing on your strengths. And the decision should be painful and embarrassing and terrifying. But if you can be replaced, you will be replaced. And I, you know, I think you can't have a conversation these days without talking about artificial intelligence. And I hate the term artificial intelligence. You know, I call it predictive computing or stochastic computing. There's a great many things that the robot can do that have been done by people who are prepared to be commodities. The suffering for your art, the really thinking that having an insight and connecting this this point and this point and this point together for a bunch of reasons. That still requires a human. I think it's going to require a human for a long time. I would never bet that somebody won't invent a thinking robot, a conscious robot. You know, it could happen, you know, create the right substrate and you might do it. I think it would be spectacularly cruel to do it. Yeah. But LLM plus compute, is not AGI. Like, I'm here to say that. And the stuff that LLMs can do in particular, some of it is great drudgery saving. I use it a lot for saving drudgery, but to do the thing I do, I'm gonna do. And, and I think people who make themselves reliant on it to do the thing they do are gonna get in trouble. I think, I think people who rely on it to help them do the stuff that burns more time than it's actually worth compared to other more productive things you can do. I think those people will succeed. It's a miracle. You know, it is. Arthur C. Clarke said a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think that's the way this stuff is, but it's magic like the Sorcerer's Dilemma. It's chaotic. And who knows? Do what only you can do the way only you can do it. That's my advice to you. Thank you so much for making the time to be here on the podcast. And thank you all for tuning in and listening to this Thanks a lot. This was super fun. Thank you.