2020 Book List and Practice Update

I. INTRODUCTION

Like the last few years, in 2020 I set out to read another 52 books, publish an article on my key takeaways from each one, and provide an update on my legal practice and business pursuits to friends, family, colleagues, clients, and prospective clients. Then 2020 happened. Failing to reach 52 (or even get particularly close with 37), I contemplated skipping this annual post. However, I really look forward to the responses and comments about others’ reading pursuits and professional and personal developments. It also serves as an annual launching point for edifying conversations throughout the year with as many of you as possible, sharing creative ideas and ambitions, and potential ways we can work together in 2021 or any of the years that follow. This year I added some Closing Thoughts on compounding. Nothing earth-shattering, but maybe you will find it instructive on where to invest your 8,670 hours of 2021. 

In short, I hope you will bless me with 10-20 minutes of your 2021 by reading this year’s article.  If you’re feeling extra generous, please share a sliver of insight with me into your 2020 past and 2021 future - reading, professional or family updates, or side projects – either via email, in the comments to the article (never know who else might see it and impact your life), or someday soon when we can meet in person. 

In years past (2018 and 2019) I outline why and how this project came about. I won't duplicate those efforts here. Before getting into the Book List, Practice Update, Business Ventures, and some Closing Thoughts, there were 3 main reasons for my failure this year.

• NYU Tax LLM. Starting a Masters in Taxation program 12 years after law school and 3 years after becoming a Shareholder is a somewhat atypical career choice, but after my first semester I am even more convinced of its utility. As grueling as it was and will be to try to consume 10-20 hours/week of tax while handling billing and client development requirements, family responsibilities, and (of course) my sport allegiances, it is an investment for my next 30 years of practice of representing real estate investors, business owners, and family businesses. Since the program will last all of next year, I expect my reading output to be even less than 37 in 2021.
• The Pandemic Malaise. Reading pre-pandemic never seemed like a chore, regardless of what genre the book. I always had an urgency and excitement to spend one hour a day reading a book and then recording my takeaways (usually took 7-10 hours per week for 350-500 page books). I'm just wired that way. In 2020, the health, business, family, and client considerations of the pandemic occasionally left me drained and pre-occupied by the time my usual 9-10p “reading hour” rolled around. Like most extroverts, I feed off of social interactions with friends and colleagues, and was (and am) affected by their prolonged absence. Zoom doesn't cut it for me. Hopefully this pandemic is over by the spring.
• New house renovation and maintenance. At the beginning of the pandemic, I fell in love with a bargain-priced 14-acre property of secluded woods, grassy fields, and a stream-fed pond seen above (No, I have not yet re-read Thoreau's Walden, but it is on my list). While secluded, it also shortened my commute to 4 minutes by car, 8 minutes by bike, or 30 minutes by walk. The house itself needed a little work, and since we figured 2020 was a wash, we elected to complete that work prior to move-in while cramming our boys into a short-term apartment for 3 months (which, despite a great general contractor, became 6 months with COVID supply chain delays). If I could count the instruction manuals for chainsaws, tractors, snow blowers, utility trailers, power washers, geothermal heating/cooling systems, pond fountains, etc., I might have gotten closer to 52, but alas...

II. BOOK LIST

I organize into Business, History, Fiction, Legal, and Faith; but, many of the books could fit in multiple categories.

A. Business

• Give and Take – Adam Grant (268 pages): Grant describes Takers, Givers, and Matchers, and persuasively illustrates how the “nice guys finish last” maxim doesn’t hold even in the cut throat business world. This was a refreshing book to read for a [self-proclaimed, at least] nice guy. I've had colleagues say I'm too nice and who have urged me to ask for a potential client's work weeks, months, or years before I'm comfortable doing so. It may be my patient approach has caused me to miss out on some potential clients, as it did in some of Grant's examples in the book. But Grant reaffirms my experience to date, which is that giving of my time, brain, and heart to enough people pays off in the long run. Grant also challenged me to move from Matcher to pure Giver. When I talk to people (new or old), I always like getting past the small talk into who they really are, what they're passionate about, why they do what they do - and I relish being a "connector" (e.g. if you're doing X, you need to meet Y at some point - he could help you). But I have to admit that while my primary motive is the dopamine high of helping someone, there's sometimes been a tertiary motive in the back of my head of potential reciprocity down the road. Intentionally letting go of any expectation of recriprocity and just giving freely (with appropriate protections against the "takers") was a focus of my 2020 and beyond.
• Chocolate Wars – Deborah Cadbury (330 pages): Meticulously researched history of Cadbury, Hershey, Nestle, Mars, and how these chocolate conglomerates developed, competed, and prospered. I expected that, though. What I did not expect was the insight on how some 19th/early 20th century Christian founders used their gift of financial success to build better communities, families, and economies, and whether that potential impact is eroded in today's private equity/IPO world (you can guess which way the author leans, and tough to disagree). 
• The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey of Self-Discovery - An Enneagram Journey of Self-Discovery (230 pages): I had no idea what an Enneagram was until this book with the corny title. There's essentially 9 types of personality with various links and "wings" between them, but the concept is that everyone essentially fits into one of them. I have enjoyed thinking about where my friends, co-workers, and family members fall, and have benefited from the knowledge. I am married to a quintessential One (perfectionist), and this book helped me understand her (and our challenges) better. Funny enough, she read it about six months later and told me she could not have described herself any better. Don't get me wrong, we still disagree about plenty, but at least I know it is baked into who she is.
• Mind Your Own Business: The Small Business Owner's Relentless Pursuit of Multigenerational Wealth - Paul Marrella (160 pages): One of the benefits of publishing a 52-book post each year is that some people mail me their books to read (6 or 7 in 2020, including this one). Paul takes great care of one of my family members, and also wrote an excellent book for small business owners for making/keeping/transferring wealth. Don't let the golden goose die with you!
• Traction - Gino Wickman (236 pages): One of the more insightful business books I've read that gives you a clear blueprint of what to do to improve that bottom line. How easy is it for lawyers (maybe more than other businesses) to get caught up in the day to day and forget about the big picture functions required to be profitable? To suggest to some attorneys that it would take 100 hours/year to think deeply about his or her plan/strategy to grow and then to fine-tune with a team to help get the "right people in the right seats," is really challenging. I wonder how many attorneys or other professionals are investing in that "non-billable" time that is not captured by any billing software and takes a long time to generate returns. It is so easy (and - in the short term - rewarded by most firms) to spend that time "billing" instead. But the long-term reward for building a business right (a law practice or otherwise) is so much higher.

B. History

• We Still Hold These Truths - Matthew Spalding (250 pages): I have rarely agreed with an author more on every point than I do with Mr. Spalding. I wish there were a way to quickly determine which political candidates agree with him the most, and then I would know who to support (note: it is not as easy as Republican v. Democrat). This is a great book for anyone who thinks the power of the President and federal government has far exceeded its usefulness, or that the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence contain certain inalienable rights that should not be abridged. It's also a great book for anyone who doesn't think that, so you can at least learn about the other arguments. This book energized me during a year that my frustration with politics and political discourse reached an all-time high. Also to be clear, it is not a technical analysis of the US Constitution - you certainly do not have to be a wizard constitutional law scholar to grasp any of his arguments. Joan Larsen, my wonderful con law professor and on the short list of Supreme Court nominees, could attest that I am not one (though she would have to look back at 2006 grades for such attestation because I am sure she does not remember me).
• Pioneers - David McCullough (260 pages): This is my 4th David McCullough book - I'm a big fan. He captures the struggles of 1780s-1860s period of New Englanders setting off to form new towns in Ohio from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to the Civil War. The perils of disease, Indians, War of 1812, starvation, and poverty along the Ohio Rivers, as well as just how close Ohio came to being a slave state (one vote) and the campaigning of key abolitionist required to swing that vote. It was a good book to read during the quarantine to compare what risks our forefathers encountered on a daily basis compared to the risk of corona that shut down our country.
• Billion Dollar Whale - Tom Wright and Bradley Hope (391 pages): Mind blowing story of a Malaysian Wharton grad who stole billions of dollars from different funds using Asian, Middle East, and Goldman Sachs connections. Could not believe the irony of his bankrolling the Wolf of Wall Street movie while living that type of life. That our justice system can't find a way to put him in prison for life, yet we have poor people doing decades of time for stealing some groceries, is incredibly frustrating.
• Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare - Giles Milton (320 pages): If you read last year's post, you know I wanted to learn more about Churchill. This is a fascinating saga of all the sabotage efforts Churchill promoted behind enemy lines during WWII (while most British military leaders hated these tactics). I would have liked to hear more directly from Churchill, but it was very interesting and action packed.
• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the World - Robert Coram (462 pages): This book is great for anybody with a tendency to want to do things differently than they've always been done in the past. If Boyd can change the Pentagon and Air Force, then there is hope for us all in improving how our company does things. Boyd's innovations in military strategy and fighter plane engineering took a massive amount of focus, time, reading, and accuracy. He was brash, abrasive, and did not fit in with the politics at the Pentagon, but he was proven right repeatedly. Anybody interested in the interplay between the Air Force, Navy, Army, and the Marines from end of WWII to Iraqi War, and how the different departments competed for the same resources for new planes, would also enjoy this book.
• A New History of the American South - Edward L. Ayers (12 hours): A fantastic, articulate, engaging lecturer who was a pleasure to listen to (especially if you like southern accents as much as I do). I have read a fair amount about the founders and the colonial period, but Mr. Ayers introduced me to several new facts, theories, and explanations about how the American South developed from American Indians to the beginning of 20th century. The different policies and political decisions that altered human history in America forever - I love playing the "what if" game and thinking about how things would be different in many different contexts, and Mr. Ayers engages in that exercise multiple times (e.g., what happens to slavery if the colonies lose the Revolutionary War or The War of 1812?) He explains how much of what we think about the confederacy was a history invented - not inherited - in the 1890s-1910s, a full generation or two after the Civil War, and touches on the confederacy monument controversies. He explores music, literature, religion, and art of the south alongside the "invention" of segregation. He has a lecture on Booker T. Washington that is worth the half hour even if you don't listen to the whole course.
• The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us - Douglas Lynder (12 hours): This is one of those courses you don't want to end. As a litigator, I could listen to Professor Lynder's voice, cadence, and content for hours as he takes us through trials of Socrates, Salem Witchcraft, Boston Massacre, Amistad, Oscar Wile, Joseph Shipp, Scopes/Monkey, Scottsboro Boys, Nuremberg, Alger Hiss, Mandela, Mississippi Burning, Chicago Eight, and of course OJ.
• Understanding Russia: A Cultural History - Lynne Ann Hartness (12 hours): Ms. Hartnett was a pleasure to listen to. So many stories about Russian history that I never knew. I knew 1917-1945 fairly well just because of American involvement and overlap, but a lot went down over in Mother Russia in the prior couple centuries. Definitely makes me want to read Tolstoy, Gogel, Dostoevsky in the coming years and listen to some Russian symphonies on long car trips to drive my boys crazy.
• The US and the Middle East: 1914 to 9/11 - Salim Yaqub (12 hours): Salim is articulate, organized, and objective on Middle East history. He takes us from Wilson and the Ottoman Empire breakup, through Truman and creation of Israel, The Suez Crisis, Six-Day War, Yom Kipuur War, Iranian Hostage Crisis, The Gulf War, the Oslo Peace Process, and bin Laden. Would definitely listen to an update on the last 20 years and more important where he sees the next 20 years going, but the problem with courses like these is that each lecture could be a whole course.
• Capitalism v. Socialism: Comparing Economic Systems (12 hours): I listened to this course during the pandemic as the government flooded the market with a couple trillion dollars, prohibited evictions and foreclosures, instituted more protective tariffs, and kept interest rates historically low. This course analyzed the last two centuries of economic systems with Great Britain, Russia, Germany, China, the US, and several former Soviet bloc countries getting detailed analysis. If we consider the sprectrum from completely free market deregulated capitalism with no safety net whatsoever to total state-owned and directed socialism, this is the type of course that would probably cause anyone at either extreme to move a little bit closer to the center. It is not the type of course that is good for 140 character tweets or 10 second soundbites, which explains why most of our political candidates push farther to opposite extremes. Nobody has time for nuance anymore.
• Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became Extraordinary (262 pages): I first read this book on spring break of my freshman year of college, 18 years ago, so my favorite part of the book was actually how ambitiously nerdy I was with my comments in the margin 18 years ago. D'Souza was on Reagan's staff. He offered great descriptions of how Reagan handled the many disagreements of his cabinet. Most interesting to me as an 80's baby was how uncertain the Cold War and economy was at the turn of the decade with high inflation, high taxes, high unemployment, and fear of the Soviet Union. My contemporaries tend to underestimate Reagan's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the turn-around of the American economy. That he could do it with such wit and clarity of purpose, despite lacking the decades of political experience, stood out to me. Also, it just makes one think how much more prior generations had to be fearful of than today, even during a global pandemic. If social media existed in the 80s, during the World Wars, during polio outbreaks, etc., nobody would have ever left their house. Factfulness, a book on last year's list, addresses this concept as well.
• Killer Angels - Michael Shaara (374 pages): Another one of my favorite books from high school that I chose to re-read two decades later. I know it's technically "historical fiction", but the fiction part is some of the dialogue - the actual battle descriptions and strategies are accurate. Still one of my favorite books ever, and another that put into perspective the "risks" from something like coronavirus and the risks incurred to save our country during wars like these. I combined reading this book with a couple trips to Gettysburg with my boys when nothing inside was open - biked up to little round top and climbed on the boulders there and at Devil's Den; balanced on the walls that Picket's charge attempted to control. I am sure they won't remember it, but I always will!
• Underdogs: The Philadelphia Eagles Emotional Road to Super Bowl Victory - Zach Berman (250 pages): I read this with Jackson since he became obsessed with the NFL and Eagles during the past year (despite the pathetic 2020 Eagles campaign). An enjoyable look back at the most magical season of any Eagles' fan's life. Includes a lot of detailed stories about the players and management, and conversations between them, which I always find interesting. Jackson and Grady are 4th generation Eagles fans, so it will always give me pleasure knowing that my granddad, who was in the stands of the 1960 Championship Game, and with whom I attended dozens of Eagles games as a kid, survived long enough to see this one before he passed.
• US History 101 - Kathleen Sears (281 pages): My high school US History teacher, Mr. Heed (one of my favorite teachers ever), used to say that every paragraph in our textbook has been or could be turned into a book. I used to doubt him, but twenty years and many history books later, he's right. If you find yourself losing the forest for the trees reading about very narrow parts of our history, as I sometimes do, it's nice to take a few hours and check out the whole forest again. Presented in 63 chapters, and usually there was at least one tidbit in each chapter that I never knew or had forgotten.

C. Fiction

• Rules of Civility - Amor Towles (330 pages): Like a Gentleman in Moscow, this book's descriptions of different scenes of NYC in the 1930s made me feel like I was there. I would enjoy Towles writing about anything and am anxiously awaiting his third novel, supposedly out in 2021, which marks the first time since Rowling was working on Goblet of Fire (Volume 4) that I have so eagerly anticipated an author's upcoming release.
• 1984 - George Orwell (340 pages): If you haven't read this book since high school, it is more than worth picking up again in 2021. Just amazing that he wrote this in 1950 before Google, Apple, and Amazon made some of his dystopia come to life. The loss of individuality, turning man into automatons, scrolling through their Facebook newsfeeds.
• The Giver - Lois Lowry (180 pages): I read this one with Jackson. This was one of my favorite books in 5th grade, and like a lot of the re-reads the last few years, there are more layers to unpack as an adult that skipped way over my head as a kid. The biggest is how they assign each 12 year old to their career with no input or possibility of change. This reminds me of the current trend of choosing a child's sport at such a young age, at the exclusion of all other sports and priceless childhood memories. Also it is a good reminder that we all struggle through sadness, anger, and other negative emotions (especially during a pandemic!), but a worthwhile tradeoff for the joy, happiness, and love we get to feel at other times.
• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (375 pages): One of those classic novels I always see referenced, finally checked it off my list this year. I am glad I did, as reading about 18th century British gentry is comically engaging, especially with such great writing as Austen. I stand in awe thinking about books like this from hundreds of years ago, particularly from women in 18th century Britain given their status. How did Jane Austen develop the ability to write so well? Which books did she have access to? How did she support and promote her work? All fascinating to me.
• Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens (368 pages): A few years late reading this popular novel. Owens has a gift for describing all five senses to make you feel like you are in the North Carolina marshlands. I love novels of immersion that you can feel the setting, the characters, the tension. She does not have the same gift with dialogue, particularly the trial, but still a good read.

D. Legal

• Corporate Tax - Joshua Blank (200 hours): My first semester of my Tax LLM came during the home renovation, the pandemic, and to top it off my wife was hit by an 18-wheeler during finals week (she and the boys were unharmed). After spending 200 hours reading, learning, and listening to Professor Blank, I looked forward to the final exam. As I sat there for three hours doing corporate tax problems, all I could think about was how fun these problems were and how I really want to get some clients in the coming years to help them with their distributions, dividends, redemptions, liquidations, etc., because these problems would be even more fun to do if I were getting paid to solve them.
• Taxation of Trusts & Estates - Sean Weissbart (200 hours): This was a great course that got me thinking about how to build a client base in Central PA to help them with their Trusts and Estates legal taxation questions. Obviously, a lot of this course reviewed the steps that accountants would typically do but that are required for attorneys to understand during the planning and structuring of the entities.
• Survey of Tax Procedure - Joshua Blank (100 hours): With 12 years of litigation, part of my future tax practice I hope to build the most involves taxation disputes. This course provided all of the key rules, considerations, and strategies for audit practice, tax and refund litigation, and avoiding tax penalties and interest.
• Pennsylvania Landlord-Tenant Law and Practice - Ronald Friedman (754 pages): I made the biggest leap in my career in landlord-tenant cases, and this tome was a big reason why. Friedman has been doing it for decades, and includes many examples of some of the unique and difficult problems that arise. This is the type of text book that is really challenging to read in law school or on a theoretical basis, but once you see it translate to acquiring clients and actual legal advice and strategies, the motivation to read and understand every sentence was easy to find. I was a PBI lecturer on two occasions and gave multiple presentations to groups of landlords. Given all the different restrictions on evictions, it was a challenging year to be a landlord (or a landlord's attorney), but also led me to develop a new venture, Landlord Protect, identified below.
• Business Owner Disputes – Planning and Strategizing the Business Divorce - Pennsylvania Bar Institute (277 pages): Have you seen that Venn Diagram about finding the sweet spot of what you really enjoy, what you're really good at, and what you can be paid for? The legal theories, the factual support, the high stakes and emotion, and the financial aspect of these cases are my favorite type of litigation case. I’ve been blessed to counsel a handful of these owners in 2019 and 2020, and hope to do so more in the years to come. 
• The Lawyer's Guide to Family Business Succession Planning - Gregory Monday (137 pages): Don't let the 137 pages fool you into thinking this is a quick read. This is a dense book in which each paragraph takes time to digest. It took me longer per page than any other book this year, but mostly because the content was so critical and so timely for where I want my career to go. I have talked about breadth of expertise in other posts, but investing in gaining expertise in multiple specialties is required for this type of work. One cannot only know Trusts & Estates, or only Corporate, or only Real Estate, or only Litigation, or only Tax, or only Employment to effectively handle succession planning. One needs to know it all well enough to identify issues and to ask the right questions of other experts.
• The How to Buy a Hotel Handbook - Jim Butler (140 pages): Over the last two years, I have relished the opportunity of working with a partner, Tony Foschi, who has been buying and selling hotels for decades. Litigation spins off of these hotel deals (especially around COVID), and I find the business of hotels fascinating in many respects. This handbook, authored by an attorney, helped accelerate that learning curve.

E. Faith

• Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis (178 pages): This had been recommended to me for years, and I wish I had read it sooner. If you like thinking about life and its purpose and your role in it, whether as a believer or not, I recommend spending a few hours with C.S. Lewis. So many great passages, but my favorite is the popular view among non-Christians that Jesus was not God, but was a great moral teacher. I had never thought of it this way, but Lewis basically says Jesus did not leave open that option as just a paragon of morality - he is either God or a total psychopath!
• Junkyard Wisdom - Roy Goble (140 pages): This was another book that someone mailed me after last year's article, and I am glad he (an internet stranger!) did so. It hits you in the soul, particularly if you are a Christian in process of working your way up the professional ladder while processing what it means to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love thy neighbor as yourself. Goble was raised in a literal junkyard, but went on to enormous fortune in the real estate world while devoting time and money to ministries in Thailand, Belize, Oakland, and others. This is NOT, at all, a "give away all your possessions" or a "money is the root of all evil" type book. If you've been blessed to be a "wealth creator", like Goble, it's about utililizing that ability for God's kingdom. It's about acknowledging that the checks you might write to worthy causes before going back to your day job, your big house, and friends (who mostly have big houses), are definitely helpful, but the dirty work involves relationships, involves "cultural translators" to help forge those relationships. Like I said, it hit me in my soul because how easy is it to get caught up in our careers, in our own families, our own financial plans, our own friendships, our own comforts (for me, reading is a huge comfort), and then click a few buttons to send some donations and think we are good?
• 3D Leadership - Harry Reeder (196 pages): A quick read about defining, developing, and deploying Christian leaders not just in the church, but throughout the world. Numerous scripture passages to provide guidance for executing on these plans, but as with many Christian books, the concepts are universally applicable.

III. PRACTICE UPDATE

A. Real Estate Investors

Building this practice to represent real estate investors has been an extremely rewarding part of my career, and it is - relatively speaking - just getting started. 4 years ago our firm had zero real estate investor clients and my only relevant experience was the 25,000 hours I had invested in litigation skills. I decided I could use those skills to break into the residential and commercial landlord-tenant dispute business. The first 2 years I primarily focused on reading landlord-tenant statutes and cases, learning the MDJ rules, following dockets for landlord-tenant appeals to the Court of Common Appeals, and making sure when we did get that landlord-tenant dispute, I'd be ready. Obviously, there were no "clients" to bill that education time to, so it made for many late nights. The last two years, while I have kept building the landlord-tenant dispute client base and expertise, I have focused on building the expertise to represent these investors in other legal areas: Agreement of sale negotiations and litigation arising from the same; upset/judicial tax sale counsel; corporate entity formation and structuring; syndications (capital raising) and real estate venture formulations; hard money lending documents and counsel; IRA investments in real estate; estate planning for landlords (trusts, wills, powers of attorney); and taxation of property transactions. Getting my Tax LLM in large part was to be able to help real estate investors navigate the various tax issues unique to their situations.

B. Trusts and Estates

The other large impetus for my Tax LLM is because of my trusts and estates business. The federal gift and estate tax exemption is $11.7 million per person in 2021, above which the tax rate is 40%. Biden is proposing reducing that exemption to $3.5 million per person and increasing the rate above the exemption to 45%. In Central PA (or really in most places), there are only so many married couples with a net worth exceeding $23.4 million. But if that number is $7 million for a married couple, the market for clients willing to spend money for creative or complex estate planning increases.

Last year I debuted my online estate planning tool because I was (and remain) convinced that there is a subset of the population, particularly those comfortable with typing/computers, who would rather study and assess the key questions on their own time at their own home or office, rather than making arrangements to drive into a law firm office and paying for an hour of an attorney's time to have that initial conversation. Once that information is submitted, I review and ask follow up questions over email or video-conference, create some initial drafts of the wills, healthcare and financial power of attorney documents, and determine whether any trusts would be advantageous. Then we schedule an in-person meeting for execution and any other questions. Of course, there is a subset of clients that do not want to use the online tool, but I was impressed by how many clients - even high net worth individuals and even clients in their 70s and one in his 80s - preferred to start with that process. Give it a click here and cross off that New Year's Resolution of creating your estate plan.

C. Litigation

2020 was the year of pandemic-related litigation. Buyers wanted out of their agreements to purchase hotels, houses, or businesses because an asset with a 10% profit margin suddenly had a 90% drop in revenue with no clear end date on the bleeding. Business interruption insurance became a common insurance coverage dispute (and is still playing out in the courts). Landlords wanted their tenants to pay rent; banks wanted their landlords to make their mortgage payments; and the various government entities made well-intended policy decisions that often had unintended consequences. Not counting all the landlord-tenant issues, I handled several "commercial" (broadly defined) litigation matters over transactions gone awry.

The biggest (by amount of money at issue) and most impactful (by amount of people it would impact) litigation matter of my 2020 is still pending, but involves representing the trade associations of Pennsylvania nursing homes in their fight to get the Commonwealth to pay to the nursing homes what is statutorily required (about $150 million in 2020). You can read more about that case here.

I continue to spend a lot of my time on the bread and butter of healthcare litigation, something I have done for 11 years, something I am still passionate about, and something that is still the firm's primary specialty (while it is down from the 100% of our attorneys when we started, it is still over 1/3 of our attorneys). With all the trials postponed from 2020, 2021 sets up to be a massive trial year for healthcare litigators.

D. Tax

This does not really warrant its own section one semester into my Tax LLM, but if you're reading this far, you are probably more interested in where I am going than where I am now. God willing, I will graduate in August 2022 at the current pace (a pace twice as fast as recommended by NYU for anyone with a full-time job, but who has time to wait until August 2024 to graduate? Could not be me.) I know there are tax attorneys at the big firms in NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, etc. who focus on one small (and profitable) niche within the tax code. This will not shock those who read this annual article, but I think there is more value in Central PA to knowing the breadth of the tax code and getting deeper and deeper in each area the longer I practice. Corporate Tax, Partnership Tax, Taxation of Real Estate Transactions, Trusts & Estates Tax, Taxation of M&A/Private Equity Transactions, and Civil Tax Controversies and Litigation are all areas I will become proficient in during the next few years. We will build a tax team, but in some 2020 irony, part of the reason the firm financed and supported my NYU matriculation is because recruiting a Tax LLM to a 60-attorney firm was hard and we had not found the right fit in two years of searching. Of course, shortly after I started, a PWC alum LLM/CPA combo, who is a perfect personality, expertise, and (maybe most important) sports-team allegiance fit with me, came on board in our Malvern office. If anybody wants to go to Eagles, Flyers, or Sixers games (post-pandemic) and/or talk some tax, Rick and I will be ready for you.

IV. BUSINESS VENTURES

A. CourtZip

There is nothing like launching a software start-up to the public a year ago only for the various government entities to prevent the very filing for which the software was created. CourtZip was designed to help landlords, property management companies, debt collectors, and any small claims plaintiff to navigate the MDJ system more efficiently. By selecting your county and typing in your address, it automatically finds which of the 550 MDJ's is the proper venue for your Complaint. By paying online and submitting to the court electronically, it modernizes a process that is still in the 20th century. Fortunately for the founders, we also obtained funding from Ben Franklin Technology Partners to accelerate our growth in 2021. Once the government entities permit filings without restrictions again we hope to be state wide quickly. With COVID, it actually adds an even bigger benefit than the time and convenience savings because it limits personal interactions with staff in each of the 550 offices.

B. Landlord Protect (or some other name yet to be decided)

All of this CourtZip and Landlord representation has made me want to launch a company in 2021 that protects landlords from the 1% of truly problematic tenants - not just the ones who don't or can't pay, because frankly those are relatively simple and the overwhelming majority of those either leave voluntarily or do not appeal the MDJ judgment. But the ones who know how to manipulate the system, extend their tenancy through appeals, and require landlords to spend several thousand dollars in attorney fees - these tenants torpedo a property's net income for months (or in some cases a year or more). These tenants invariably want the landlord to pay them "cash for keys" to avoid their court games, not only forgiving the back rent but also paying them thousands of dollars. The landlords either have to succumb to the tenant's blackmail or pay me or a similarly qualified landlord attorney money to get the tenant out (which can range from $500 all the way up to several thousand if the tenant appeals and knows the system). In the heat of the moment, their property held hostage, some landlords understandably pay the tenant, creating an incentive for more tenants to take similar hostage tactics.

What if we eliminated negotiating with hostage takers? What if we instituted among our landlords a "no cash for keys" policy statewide, so that the 1% knew their conduct would not be rewarded by cash-strapped and frustrated landlords wanting to reclaim their property quickly? I'd argue the tenants would be better accommodated by landlords, we would have better overall landlord-tenant relationships, the MDJ courts would actually see a dramatic reduction in Landlord-Tenant Complaints, and the mom & pop landlords - the backbone of many neighborhoods - would be able to avoid one tenant causing significant financial and emotional damage.

What is the solution? Landlord Protect (name still to be determined). Pay, for example, $50 per year per unit (volume discounts may apply) and if your tenant breaches their lease, your landlord attorney fees are covered from the MDJ to the Court of Common Pleas appeal, to the Superior Court appeal, or however long it takes to get your final judgment. Pay, for example, $100 per year per unit, and not only are your landlord attorney fees covered, but if your tenant is not removed within two months, your rent is reimbursed each month into the future (with a couple well-defined parameters).

Is this a good idea? If you are a real estate investor, is there a price you would pay on your units to never have to cover any future landlord attorney fees and to guarantee your maximum rent loss would be two months? I want critical feedback, but the feedback I have gotten from my landlord clients so far has been good enough to warrant my putting together a business plan and sharing this idea with all the people who read this. The idea isn't really profitable until we get to about 5,000 units in the program, so I will probably need some bigger landlords or property management companies to enroll.

V. CLOSING THOUGHTS ON LIFE AND ITS CHOICES

I come away from 2020 obsessed with the concept of Compounding/Exponential Growth, not just in finances, but in all aspects of life. You have all seen the investment charts about the power of compounding interest over time. Someone who starts investing $500/month at 25 years old at 6% interest is a millionaire from that habit alone at 65, while someone who waits until 45 only has $225,000 at 65.

The key with compounding is the rate of growth/satisfaction/happiness increases despite the same amount of annual investment. In the 25 year old's 40th year of investing $500/month he earns over $50,000 because the rest of his money is put to work. I thought of some other areas where this happens.

• Knowledge/Reading. This might not be immediately obvious, but knowledge absolutely compounds. The more you know, the faster you learn. The more "growing pains" you endure to learn something new, to broaden your knowledge base, to connect various silos, the more valuable you will be to any business and the quicker you will learn the next level of responsibilities. If you learn one foreign language, you will learn the next one quicker. If you read 52 books per year for 10 years, you will benefit the most from what you read in year 10. If you already invested 20,000 hours in healthcare litigation, it takes way less time to become equally competent in real estate/commercial/fiduciary litigation.
• Friendships. Friendships compound in two ways: existing friendships strengthen and those existing friendships lead to new friendships at a compounding rate. Existing friendships are fundamental to our happiness, our sense of belonging and purpose, and our humanity. I am blessed with some good friends from childhood, from high school, from college, from law school, from Chicago law practice, and from my last decade in Lancaster, all of whom hopefully clicked on this link and read this far. Friendships require investment, and rarely can we invest the same amount per month over 40 years like we might be able to with money. But the power of compounding is that even in a pandemic year, our friendships can be strengthened due to all the investment we've put in over the years. Our existing friendships compound a second way by introducing us to new friends. It is rare in our 30s to just meet another man on the street and strike up a friendship (though funny enough I did meet someone that way 8 years ago when his bike had a flat tire on Fruitville Pike and we have remained friends). Most of my "adult" friendships have resulted from one of my existing friends introducing me.
• Clients. Similar to Friendships, only instead of compounding by being a good friend, they compound by doing really good work at a fair rate and the clients' recommending you to others. Unbeknownst to me when I started representing real estate investors a few years ago, real estate investors talk to each other all the time. They have meet ups. They have message boards. I represented 50 new real estate investor clients in 2020. Over 3/4 of them were referred to me by one of my existing clients. 4 years ago I was doing exclusively healthcare litigation jury trials and had zero clients of my own. Invest a few thousand hours in learning the legal issues real estate investors might have, charge a fair price, and be obsessively responsive and accessible, and it can start to compound even in a pandemic. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty of failure mixed in there and while 50 new clients can be deemed a success, these are mostly small matters. This has a lot of investing and compounding to do yet.
• Training People. This is like Knowledge, only it's other people's knowledge. How many people in your field are truly excellent mentors? I think it is one of the rarest traits among attorneys because the initial investment to train an associate or a paralegal is so high and the opportunities to get the greatest experiences are often "non-billable", as many clients don't want to pay for a newer associate to sit through a deposition, a trial, or an expert prep meeting. But the value of training an associate or paralegal doing 80% of a shareholder's tasks 90-100% as well as a shareholder is enormous and continues to compound annually.
• Recruiting. Saxton & Stump started 6 years ago with about 15 litigators all practicing exclusively healthcare litigation. 4 years ago, we were up to 20 litigators, all still exclusively practicing healthcare litigation. Then we got an employment lawyer who recruited his construction litigator friend. The next year, we recruited a corporate and trusts and estates expert. That made it easier to recruit an IP group, Judge Stengel, Real Estate, Hospitality, and Corporate the next couple years to grow to 45. Those recruitment efforts resulted in another 20 attorneys joining us in a pandemic year, all of whom know one or two great attorneys at other firms and could turn us into a 100-attorney 3-state firm in the foreseeable future.
• Traditions. My dad and I have gone to about 100 Eagles or Northwestern games together in 10 different states. My boys know from 6a to noon every Saturday, pandemic or no pandemic, we are biking, hiking, swimming, skiing, or doing some strenuous activity outside the house. Every Thanksgiving we host a breakfast and flag football tournament. My parents used to videotape my four sisters and I walking down the steps each Christmas morning before opening gifts and now we do that with our own kids. My friends make fun of me for planning ski trips at least a year in advance. All of these traditions take time and/or money to execute, but all of them compound and get better with each tradition.
• Fitness. When I was over 10 years younger and 50 pounds lighter, I trained for (and completed) an Ironman (slowly) while in law school. It took two years of training, but I went from gassed at running one 8 minute mile to a 5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon, half ironman, and ironman. 3 hours runs and 6 hour bike rides are probably behind me, but I'd love to put a few good months of fitness together because it is one of the best examples of compounding. I went for a run about 3 weeks ago and got so tired after 10 minutes it really wasn't worth suiting up for and then haven't run since. I know if I just ran 10 minutes each day for a week, I could do 15 and then 20 and then 30 and then would be back running 8 miles in an hour by next year at this time. Stay tuned (yes, I say this every year).

This is a non-exhaustive list, but maybe you have other areas of life in which investing time or money results in exponential growth in your desired outcome. We are all blessed with 8,760 hours each year, none of which are guaranteed regardless of age. We sleep 2,000-3,000 of them, but even the deepest of sleepers have 5,760 hours of awake time to conquer their world. Instead of fretting about finding the mythical "work-life" balance (family and friends will always want more of your time; your boss or clients will always want more of your time), I try to focus on maximizing the percentage of my awake time that is invested in an activity that compounds. Throwing a football with my boys every morning undoubtedly compounds (the out-and-up remains undefeated, by the way). Video-conferencing with someone doing really innovative things, regardless of his or her industry or geographic location, undoubtedly compounds. Investing in reading three new published cases per week about one of your specialties undoubtedly compounds. Going to lunch with co-workers to hear about what cases they're on, what they want to do this year, next year, and five years from now - undoubtedly compounds. All those compounding activities are really hard to cram in with normal work responsibilities (and for attorneys, your billable hour goals). But if you don't do them, your only potential for growth will be either billing more hours or increasing your rate, both of which have their own downsides.

With love and wishes for a happier, healthier 2021,

Brandon