Domenic Romano 10:59
Yes, but But the written content is still very important. And, you know, taking time to taking time to speak to reporters, you know, being quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The New York Times Time Magazine, The Independent all that stuff. And I’m amazed that so many professionals don’t take the time to make themselves available when they have a common event. Something Yeah,
John Corcoran 11:24
yeah, it does require some, some hustle, though, to, right? Because if there’s a report, you need to know the rhythm, you need to know if a reporter needs a quote, if they’re on deadline, you got to be prompt you got to be articulate. How did you learn all that stuff? Or is it trial and error?
Domenic Romano 11:41
It’s watching other people who’ve done it successfully, and just asking them Hey, wow, I noticed this takes up a lot of time. Does it pay off? And hearing? Yeah, cumulatively? Absolutely. It does. You know, I, yeah. One criminal lawyer told me that, you know, the judge was, would certain judges would stop him? Or I’d break and say, hey, you know, I saw you on CNN last night. Yes. You know, I like what you said about that. Completely unrelated to the case. But Right, right. gaining visibility. Yeah, it’s a bit of thing, right reasons can be helpful. Yeah,
John Corcoran 12:16
yeah. Yeah, I experienced a bit of that, too. My father growing up was a TV news reporter. So he’s on TV five nights a week. And it’s just interesting to see the reactions of people like, particularly people out in public that recognized him, you know, a quote unquote, celebrity, minor celebrity and kind of the way that people interact with you. I have a question. So you, you know, like, for example, one of the media appearances was on CNN talking about the Alec Baldwin shooting situation, tragic situation on the on a film set. How did you ensure when you do these media appearances, because you probably start getting these invitations for all kinds of different topics,
Domenic Romano 12:56
and you don’t have a lot of time to prepare? Usually? The personnel and that’s why so many attorneys say no, oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve got a booked up while making some times maybe moving things around in your calendar and making it a priority.
John Corcoran 13:10
So how do you ensure that you are going to be able to respond in a meaningful way and answer the questions that they ask you?
Domenic Romano 13:17
Preparation? So putting every book putting, you know, maybe rescheduling, if you’ve putting time aside, and getting up to speed on what the story is, and you know, what the angle is that might not be obvious to the to the ordinary viewer and, and avoiding legal easily legalese available upon request, like what is it in a way that, like someone sitting at home somewhere, can understand why it’s relevant? Why this person is not likely to go to jail over what happened? Yeah,
John Corcoran 13:51
yeah. Yeah. It’s, that is really challenging. I will say, my high school classmate of mine, Lisa Rubin, now is been commenting on a lot of the different litigation against for President Trump, and she’s been following this stuff. I follow her on social media, and she follows it so closely. I mean, you really have to read every brief. She’s in the courtroom much of the time to answer these questions. Just really be you have to be versed on it. You know, frontwards backwards, just like you’re gonna go before a judge.
Domenic Romano 14:28
Yes, but a judge is going to want legal citations is going to want to understand the legal underpinnings where I find if you’re giving a quote to a magazine or a newspaper, or if you’re on the air, I find that Einstein go very helpful. If you can’t explain something simply, you can’t if you don’t understand it well enough. If you can’t explain something simple, you don’t understand it well enough and just getting to an understanding to the point where you can explain it in a way that’s digestible. That’s worth investing some time.
John Corcoran 14:59
What were some of the so it sounds like media, getting media has been a success for you in terms of that publicity. What were some of the challenges in the early years of growing the firm hiring, scaling up that sort of thing? What What were some of the challenges you experienced?
Domenic Romano 15:18
Yeah. So I thought that, you know, we should focus on initially, and this is Entrepreneurs Organization. perspective, that changed for me, that it was all about growing a professional services firm was all about finding and retaining larger clients, bigger clients, better clients, came to through the journey came to discover that that’s important, but that’s secondary. The most important thing is finding and retaining great talent, what I call A players, and I came up with a kind of a, a point of view, and I call it ABH. Always Be Hiring, always be hiring that A player, because you and I know A players don’t come around every day, let alone every week, every month, sometimes not every year in different categories, right. So when you see an A player, in my view, try to aid but no one ever lost money hiring and a player, especially, you know, in a reasonable arrangement, right. And so the focus on talent first, not just on the legal, but also on the back office, then that’ll, that allows professionals more time, and me more time to focus on the bigger picture. Yeah.
John Corcoran 16:35
Talk about March 2020, of course, COVID hits, hits in New York, first year in New York, it was going through your brain, in in those early days in mid March between 20. Oh,
Domenic Romano 16:52
we all thought, if we remember that it was only going to be a few weeks, or a month or two at most. And I thought, wow, you know, losing a week or two or a month or two of revenue, how bad is this could be bad, right? And also say nothing of the health risk and everything. So we we we moved almost immediately when I partner suggested we test our remote systems in late February, when there was word on the street that something might be happening in China. So fortunately, we were able to on that Friday, that first Friday, when the shutdown occurred to plug and play and move remotely. But I remember getting on his zoom all hands meeting and saying, you know that phrase, every crisis is an opportunity. We don’t know how long it could be a week, it could be two weeks could be a whole month. Let’s make let’s try to make some lemonade. And to the point to circle back said look, if it gets slow in terms of work, if if deals get slow, and they might get you know, the economy might slow down for the next few weeks or several weeks. Let’s double down let’s write some content. Let’s be helpful. Let’s, let’s take advantage of what might be idle time to bring value in the future. And I made a commitment. I said, Look, we’re going to try it. We don’t know how long it’s going to last. We’re going to try to keep everyone on the ship onboard. But let’s roll up our sleeves and see what we can do to make some lemonade. Because it looks like you know this could be bad. And it gets worse than we thought. But surprisingly, and not just our law firm but most law firms in New York and I suspect elsewhere, actually did actually grew during the year, we had years of successive growth, in fact 1920 2122 And a lot last year, and I think a part of that is because people took the time business owners took the time professionals took the time, you know sitting at home, working remote or thinking remotely or thinking in isolation with their families. Hey, what do I want to do and took time to maybe address those legal issues that they hadn’t addressed? The partnership business partnerships reevaluating? Hey, is this business partnership serving me just like you saw a lot of matrimonial? Yeah, you saw a lot of business shakeups to reevaluating their their relationships capitalizing on opportunities because they had time to reflect. Yeah, it
John Corcoran 19:27
wasn’t just the great resignation. It was affected business partnerships as well. business deals as well. Yeah. No.
Domenic Romano 19:34
People doing deals and getting out of deals that create a lot of time to think. Because they weren’t out and about.
John Corcoran 19:40
Yeah, and of course now there’s, I don’t wanna say an exodus. But a lot of people from New York moved to other places, including South Florida, you end up opening an office in South Florida. Yeah. Like because of the pandemic. Yes. Was that a reaction to the need, like clients started saying like, hey, you know, we We’re in South Florida now and you realize, okay, or maybe it was from team members who moved relocated from New York to Florida. How did that community
Domenic Romano 20:06
had people abroad work in the back office, but really, it was a couple of partners that I had one relocated to Florida. And we started seeing a number of clients relocating to Florida. And a number of Manhattan in New York City residents, law entrepreneurs. In fact, even in the entrepreneurs authorization chapter, we had quite a few members relocate to South Florida. And Austin, I thought, Well, maybe it’s now it’s time. Yeah. And so far, that’s worked out very well.
John Corcoran 20:42
Yeah. Now, you mentioned that you have some back office support that’s abroad. I remember one big firm I worked at during a summer in law school, you know, is in a downtown San Francisco, high rise all the support staff was there, do typical old school, think about it now. Talk about for you. How that change came about was that because of COVID, that you started embracing remote hiring, because there’s still a lot of law firms that can’t envision how they could use remote staff. And I would submit that they’re going to be challenged because their competitors are doing it. And they’re going to be able to beat them at a price point, or deliver it to deliver a higher caliber of service.
Domenic Romano 21:26
Yeah, surprisingly high caliber of service. So I’ve had someone in Managua, Nicaragua for over five years. But we have several people in the Philippines, Nigeria, Jamaica, find great talent, wherever, right? And it’s a question of not being ethnocentric. People with great English skills, living all over the world, great new numerical fluency, living in different parts of the world. And seeing where, where the team can expand with a players no matter where they happen to live.
John Corcoran 22:12
Yeah, yeah. Now, we were talking a little bit beforehand about why so many lawyers are not entrepreneurial. Obviously, you as coming off the presidency of Entrepreneurs Organization, New York, have clearly gone down a different path, embraced entrepreneurship. But why do you think one so many lawyers struggle with being entrepreneurial and just can’t make that switch from lawyering to being entrepreneurial, whether it’s in building their own practice, or whether it’s doing something in another area of business? Let’s start with that. And then all of a follow up?
Domenic Romano 22:45
Yeah. John, great question. I think the challenge for most lawyers is to stop thinking like a lawyer. When you’re not practicing law. Stop thinking like a lawyer when you’re not practicing law. Here’s what I mean by that. I think lawyers is group are amongst generalization here, the worst business people probably second only to doctors. And B, why is that because they are taught we are taught in law school, to restrain any entrepreneurial impulse. In other words, to be extremely risk averse. Law school is all about developing skepticism and caution. Unfortunately, excessive caution, and skepticism are business killers, you can talk yourself out of almost any business opportunities by thinking like an attorney, right? Going to tamp down the struggle, that’s to rip, that’s there’s some risk there. I gotta get rid of it. And entrepreneurism is about the opposite is about finding a calculated risk and exploiting it somehow. Making making something of that. Yeah, I’m in a smart way. Yeah, yeah. Exposure,
John Corcoran 23:48
I often say you pay a lawyer to dream up nightmare scenarios, you know, to assume that nothing is going to be rosy to assume that everything’s gonna go wrong. And so when it comes to entrepreneurship, you know, it’s a tightrope walk a lot of the time, you know,
Domenic Romano 24:04
and by the way, John, I really avoid practicing law that way, like to tell clients what the risks are. But, you know, never say you should not do that. Look, if you do that, here’s what can happen. Yeah, yeah. And
John Corcoran 24:19
it’s a great way to get your clients to go after someone else if they if they disagree with it do right. Yeah. And so then the follow up question is, in spite of that, you’ve you’ve powered through, you’ve been attorney for 30 years or so. Why do you think three years this month? Yeah, congratulations. Why do you think that you’ve managed to embrace two different instincts?
Domenic Romano 24:42
I really enjoy the client counseling, the corporate the business counseling and professional legal counseling, part of the law, helping clients navigate through challenges, right. That’s, that makes me feel frankly, satisfied gives me some satisfaction, right helping a client navigate a maze of potential legal opportunity or risk. And I also like the negotiation part of practicing law, as as a transactional attorney, trying to fashion some kind of a win, win, and win, it’s a win for the client, oh, not a win so great that the client can never live up to that deal, right? reasonably good deal so that everyone’s happy, ideally, in the clients reputation or business flourishes because it’s good, but it’s reasonable. But everything else, I mean, the drafting the research, the being in the weeds of it all. I liked that we built up a team of people who are really passionate about that stuff that I can delegate to, and the rest of our senior people can delegate to. But what I enjoy even more than the client counseling and negotiation, fashioning that win win, is trying to figure out the Rubik’s cube of how to scale a professional services firm, availa, deeply satisfying and creative. And I find maybe you find the same thing, John, that a lot of business is about trial and error. You can’t do trial and error in the law, you got to get it right. To do bit of trial and error and business and double down on what’s working and stop doing what isn’t.
John Corcoran 26:24
Yeah. So as we record this, we’re recording this. Heading into summer of 2023. The last few months, there’s been a lot of talk online about AI, ChatGPT new technologies coming along. What are your thoughts on the impact of technology on the profession?
Domenic Romano 26:42
Yeah, another good question. A lot of the Luddites are saying, oh, you know, the pointing of that situation a couple of weeks ago, New York Times that that lawyer that cited all those elucidated cases, oh, this is why we shouldn’t you know, we shouldn’t use AI. We shouldn’t ever use that. I think the opposite. I think, you know, use AI or die. It’s coming. It’s coming. And it’s going to be a giant tsunami, I mean, a wave that most law firms and most lawyers have no idea what’s going to hit them. And we have to, obviously, without excessive reliance without blind Reliance without, obviously we need to we need to verify and not trust without verifying that the technology, but I think it will be the equivalent of being in the mid 90s and saying, Oh, this internet thing there. There could be false information over there. So we shouldn’t use it. Yeah. I once had a bob way back in the day, one of my first jobs who he was General Counsel, really smart guy who refused to use email. He was really skeptical of email. He’s like, I prefer a fax. I prefer FedEx. Why is that? Oh, this might someone could be reading my emails. Yeah, it’s true. But it’s not a reason not to use email, right? Yeah. Just eventually, there’s encryption. And there’s other so I think AI is going to be crucial. I think most law firms and attorneys should learn to leverage it, to use it in a smart way. And I think it’s inevitable.
John Corcoran 28:05
Yeah, yeah. I remember when internships in the 90s, where I had bosses that would require us to print out their email so that they can write on the email, like completely crazy,
Domenic Romano 28:18
because they wanted a tan. They wanted to feel it. For some reason. It was more real. Right, right. Pretty cool. Yeah. The AI in its current iteration, hallucinates, but I think it’s like, Okay, remember, we’re talking about the mid 90s. Remember, when you were standing in front of an image, you know, whether you were getting on the internet, by using CompuServe, or AOL, as it then was, and you would wait, sometimes 345 minutes for an image to show up. And it wasn’t if it was grainy, is that and I’ve always thought, I can’t tell I’m still waiting for it to load. But it took like 10 or 15 years to get from that stage to high def streaming. But with AI, it could be two or three years we go with from this on relatively unreliable hallucination, to perhaps the right answer every single time. It might not be long, and leveraging those tools for law firms and lawyers will be very helpful. One of the publications said, of the top 10 jobs most likely to be eliminated by AI. I think paralegal came in at number three. Well,
John Corcoran 29:25
yeah, I definitely think it’s going to affect things, you know, for sure. Well, so I want to wrap things up. This has been great, Dominic, I love hearing your story. But I want to wrap things up with the question that I enjoy asking, which is my gratitude question. I’m a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude to those who’ve helped you along your way in your journey. So if you look at your peers, contemporaries, maybe mentors others in your industry, however you want to define that maybe others through your world of EO, who do you who would you want to shout out Who do you respect and admire and so on? When you would want to just, you know, give them acknowledgement publicly for helping you.
Domenic Romano 30:05
I, you know, my, my colleagues at Entrepreneurs Organization, past presidents like David Sherman, like Amin Siri, entrepreneurs in my forum in my EO Forum. I’m thinking of Sam London, Greg Bovis. Brian Loma. These are business leaders that have shaped my thinking. And and I’m indebted to them. And I’ve learned quite a bit from them.
John Corcoran 30:38
Yeah. And that’s a fun group because I know Sam London, and we’re friends on Facebook. And you guys have been on some cool trips. So that’s a good, good forum to be in town. It has been so great. Thanks so much. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more about you?
Domenic Romano 30:52
Yeah, RomanoLaw.com.
John Corcoran 30:55
Excellent. All right, Domenic. Thanks so much.
Domenic Romano 30:57
Thanks, John.
Outro 31:01
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