What Worked Episode 40: Rethinking the business of divorce with Christopher Anderson
In this episode of What Worked, Tyler interviews Christopher Anderson, Founder at New Leaf Family Law and host of the Un-Billable Hour podcast. Christopher talks about divorce and its effects on business.
Christopher shares his insights about:
- Why his clients focus on the future and not fighting
- The invention of the billable hour and the incentive issues it creates
- How AI and technology are changing the industry
We'd love for you to connect with us:
Transcript edited for clarity:
Tyler Rachal
Hello there and welcome back to another episode of What Worked. I am thrilled to welcome to the show today Christopher Anderson, which by the way, Christopher, it is totally throwing me off. One of my groomsmen is Chris Anderson. And so I just keep seeing your name and I think I'm talking to my buddy Chris. We won't have that type of conversation. We're gonna have a completely different one, but…
Christopher Anderson
Cause well, just for the record. So everybody knows I wasn't invited. Just saying, you know.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, exactly. But also for the record, I have yet to meet a Christopher or Chris Anderson that I didn't like.
Christopher Anderson
Well, there you go.
Tyler Rachal
So I think today's episode is going to be great. I am very, very happy to welcome Christopher Anderson, not Chris Anderson, Founder of New Leaf Family Law, onto the show. As is customary here, Christopher, I usually like to let our guests give their own introduction rather than me give my poor man's version of who you are, what you do, and who you do it for. Those are the three questions we usually like to ask you.
Christopher Anderson
You're gonna have to do them one at a time. So my name's Christopher Anderson. I'm an attorney, I'm a business owner and have really spent my entire legal career bringing the concepts of business and law together. And I just love practicing law, I love trying cases. I'm a trial lawyer at heart. I started my career as an assistant district attorney in New York City. And I love nothing better than to be in front of a jury. But business has always fascinated me since I started my first snow blowing business at 14 years old, clean pools at 15 years old.
Tyler Rachal
Love it.
Christopher Anderson
Yeah. And so I always tried to bring those two things together and I was a computer nerd, right? And so like all these, all these methods of efficiency just seemed always to call me and to figure out a way to bring them into the law kind of before it was cool. What was the second question?
Tyler Rachal
I mean, you started to get into it, but I guess, you know, what do you do and who do you do it for? That was questions two and three.
Christopher Anderson
Okay, perfect. Yeah, so what I do is I run several law firms, including New Leaf Family Law, and actually help about a couple dozen other law firms outside of the ones I own because of my passion really for bringing business and law together and helping other owners do that. So that's who I do it for also. At New Leaf Family Law, we run a firm that was I think now I'll say an experiment in a completely new business model on how to bring family law services and really conflict resolution services to individuals in a unique and new way. And so that's who I do that for. I do that for families who want to be able to make the best decisions for themselves and their families without focusing on conflict, without focusing on the fight, but with a big focus on their future.
Tyler Rachal
Very cool. And you say innovative and new way. How are you changing the model from another sort of family law office?
Christopher Anderson
Yeah, which I've done, right? So I started my first family law firm, gosh, 2004, that sounds about right. When I left the DA's office, that's the next thing that I did and ran it the traditional way. And then, as I said, I was constantly combining business and law, went out to build software with LexisNexis, ran the nation's leading law firm business advisory business, so coaching hundreds of law firms on how to improve their businesses. And then the pandemic. And during the pandemic, my wife, who is my co-founder and I sat together and she runs a wage and hour business. So she helps workers get paid the wages they should have been paid in the first place. And we sat during the pandemic and she had experienced family law in a very negative way. We're second marriages, we're both divorced. And I had experienced family law in a very positive way. And we sat there and said, what gives? Why is family law, for the most part, most people do not speak highly of their family law experience. And so we talked to each other about why is that?
And we kind of got the notion during the pandemic that wouldn't it be cool if instead of running our own separate businesses, if we did something together. And so that's what she wanted to do. That's what we wanted to do. But I wasn't willing to go back and just do it the old fashioned way. And so I said, so if we're do this, let's do it right. And let's answer the question, what makes it so damaging? What makes the experience so negative for so many people who go through it? And we sat and noodled on that a long time. I am personally a student of the Toyota way among other things at the lean startup methodology. And so I said, if we're going to talk about that, let's, let's do the five whys. So why is it so challenging? Why is that? Why is that? Why is that? Why is that? And we spent days on this and we finally came up with two core problems. One is the billable hour because it was never meant for this.
People think that lawyers build by the hour since the beginning of time, and it's not true. You don't have to go back much farther than my grandfather, who was not a lawyer, but my grandfather's time. I'm the first lawyer in my family, bizarrely. But go back to my grandfather's time and look at a legal bill from the 1940s or the 1930s. And you'll see a single page usually,
with a long block description of all the things that were done that gave value to the client, at the bottom of which would be written for services rendered and a dollar amount. And that's how lawyers billed. And they build based on bringing value, which is the way we all should bill, for everything.
Tyler Rachal
Interesting. Sure.
Christopher Anderson
And then, you know, in the 1970s, along came the insurance companies. And the insurance companies wanted to figure out a way to be able to tell their shareholders and their bean counters that they were getting value for the legal work that they were paying for. They couldn't figure out a good way. So they came up with, let's just log the hours. That's how we pay our burger flippers, and that's how we pay other things. Let's just log the hours. And so it was invented there. It was not meant for family law or lots of other areas of law. But everybody started to adopt it, including the bars. And so it became.
But to us, what it does is it sets things up in a way that puts the lawyer's interests at odds with their client. And I just want to be absolutely clear because people kind of take this conversation the wrong way, 99.9 % of family lawyers and other lawyers I know are upstanding ethical people who want the best for their clients and for their practice. They really are. And something bad happens when you set up a really powerful financial incentive to behave differently. And so what do I mean by that? In a family law case, if you create more drama, more conflict, in a case, more fight, you make more money in that case. And that's a powerful, powerful incentive. I'm not saying anybody acts unethically in that incentive, but we find lawyers doing things like, well, I don't want to leave any stone unturned. And so I'm going to do all the motions and all the things and all the discovery and all of that. And the bill just goes cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, because we're looking at the whole, that's the things that we should do to do everything right. But it also happens to be the things that we do to make the most money. And that powerful incentive, whether you act on it consciously or not, or whether you act on it at all, it is impossible to miss the fact that that's not in the client's interest.
Tyler Rachal
Right.
Christopher Anderson
At least not always.
Tyler Rachal
Completely. I mean, as you say that, just keep on thinking about, I always butcher these, but I think it's the Warren Buffett quote, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome.
Christopher Anderson
Yeah.
Tyler Rachal
It is that simple. In my world, Hireframe is a staffing business and I kind of come loosely from the world of outsourcing basically. So these large business process outsourcing companies, call center companies, whatever you want to call it. The interesting thing is that so many of them have branded themselves not outsourcing companies anymore. They're customer experience companies, right? But the interesting thing is that their incentive, similar to a lawyer with a billable hour model, it's the same thing with most call centers. They're billing you based on the person and based on the billable hour. So they really actually don't have a ton of incentive to specifically improve the customer experience. Sometimes the best thing in improving or the lowest hanging fruit in improving the customer experience is actually not people related at all. If there is a policy that is driving your customers nuts, if 70% of your customer tickets are related to one policy, if you were to change that policy, that could actually have a much greater impact on your customer satisfaction score.
But for outsourcing companies that brand themselves as being CX specialists, digital transformationists, et cetera, there is very little about their business model. It is changing a little bit, but for the most part, the old business model is incentivized to do everything but that, essentially. So I totally agree with that. I totally get where you're coming from.
Christopher Anderson
Yeah. So our reaction was, okay, step one, we're ripping the billable hour out by the roots. We will not do it. Verne Harnish has a great quote and it has to do with core values, I don't know if this is a core value, but he says it's not a core value in your business if you're, unless you're willing to be punished for it. And we're willing to be punished. We have some prospective clients come to us and say, well, I'll only work with you if you bill by the hour. And we just say, we have a…
Tyler Rachal
Right. Well, and the other punishment too would be to your bottom line for over staffing. If you were to do this model or how do you kind of take that into consideration because you're doing like a flat.
Christopher Anderson
Yeah, well, we can talk about them. I tell you what, the answer is actually it's less profitable.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah.
Christopher Anderson
It is less profitable to not do it by the hour. But that's okay. This was our decision. Right.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, sure, absolutely.
Christopher Anderson
So we, yeah, we ripped it out and the only time we actually do bill by the hour is when we have another lawyer or firm join us and we will grandfather their original agreements in. And then we give their clients the option. But the funny thing is that even though these clients signed up for an hourly business, more than 80 % of them immediately choose to switch to a non billable hour model which we offer. So that was was root cause number one for misery.
Tyler Rachal
Okay, got it.
Christopher Anderson
Root cause number two was me or whatever I represent. And that is that most, if not all, family lawyers are trial lawyers. And I certainly was, you I came from the district attorney's office. I tried hundreds of cases during my time there. And I love trying cases. I love the courtroom. I love the arena. And so that's kind of in our DNA. so we bring into the into the representation, this notion of a win, winners and losers. I think having the information that we had of having been through divorce, we understood that that is not a good methodology, that's not a good philosophy to go into family law. Everybody loses in family law, right?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, I was gonna say, right?
Christopher Anderson
At some point in time, you looked at that person and said, I want to spend the rest of my life with that person. And whether they are the most abusive son of a - is this a family show?
Tyler Rachal
No, say whatever you want.
Christopher Anderson
Son of a gun and you really need out of that marriage or not. Regardless of how bad it is and how much getting out is a good decision, you still lose something, right? You're still losing a dream. Maybe the dream's already kind of dead, but you're still losing. And so we decided that we had to start the relationship and run the relationship from a completely different perspective. And so we said, well, if we're not gonna be about winning, and it's like, I don't want people to go like, wow, Anderson's law friends, nobody wins.
Tyler Rachal
I was going to say, I'm envisioning you doing like an intake call and you're like, listen, just to set expectations, you're a loser. And they're like, what?
Christopher Anderson
Yeah. So we figured that wasn't the right perspective. So the right perspective for me is, is, and really for our clients is to start the conversation with the future.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah.
Christopher Anderson
You've lost something. It's you don't we're not losing it. You've lost something. And what you've lost is the definition of your life. And so we start every representation with what do you want your new life to be? And we ask in a very specific way two years from now, when we're done representing you in this matter, what do you want your life to look like? And we get detailed. And then we set that up, and that's what we've trademarked this, it's called our Polaris Process. And we set that up and we say, okay, from now on, every decision we make will be based on this question. Does that help move you towards your end goal, end state, future life or not? And if it's not, then we're just not gonna do it. Now, you client, have every right to change your mind about your future, but until you do, that's our guiding principle.
So basically we take these trial lawyers and we say, you're really more of a coach now. Now, do some of our cases go to court? You bet. Do we try to get the best outcome for our clients? You bet, and we love doing it. But we take the whole thing by a different approach. And those two things, make a completely new business model and one that we've been really excited to bring to market.
Tyler Rachal
Very cool. And I get all that, by the way, of course, like anybody else on this planet or guess in this country, I of course know several people that have gotten divorced. And so I've sort of lived those experiences vicariously through them. And I really appreciate, I mean, of course, the billing model makes sense, because I've been the friend or the sibling who's been like, are we sure about this attorney? It seems like they're, you know, just running up a pretty big bill here and then what's going on. And then I've also been the friend trying to keep the train on the tracks. What I think is really, really hard from a completely uneducated perspective, but just being around divorce is it's so extremely emotional that I feel like it's very easy to get sidetracked on, I mean, just the emotional battles. It's like, I really wanna win this specific point because I wanna stick it to them and that sort of stuff.
And as being the friend, like I said, you straddle a fine line where I wanna be extremely supportive. I wanna be that cheerleader in their corner, but I also want to be like well what are we really trying to do? You told me that you would be infinitely happier if you just weren't married to this person, so how much does fighting them over this one thing? You know what I mean? Like who gets the Palm Springs rental house or whatever it is. How much, to your point, does that achieve that end goal which is to not be married to this person or whatever that might be.
Christopher Anderson
Right, well, and the thing is it feeds on itself. Because most lawyers don't ask that question, where do you want to be? What they do, you come in and you see them and they say, okay, tell me what happened. All right, good, I got it. Here's what we're gonna do. And you're off to the races. And yeah, everybody's in the conflict, right? And they don't look to the future, they look to the present or the past. This is how he screwed me, here's how we're gonna make it right. You're not gonna make it right. I once did a hearing when I was very young lawyer over a George Foreman grill. Half day hearing, four hours.
Tyler Rachal
Hey, collector's items. Yeah, I hope it's a special edition one.
Christopher Anderson
It was, I found one on eBay.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. my goodness. Unbelievable.
Christopher Anderson
I wrote a check, put it on the table and I said, whoever wants that one on eBay, that check is, I will not bill this check, I will not seek reimbursement, this is a gift from me to not earn, at the time I think I was billing $350 an hour, so $1,500 from you guys this afternoon and we could all go home and I'll be $1,500 plus one George Foreman grilled poorer and you guys get to go home and not have this fight. They had the hearing because it was in the fight.
And honestly, what happens is people, the conflict becomes part of their identity and they're not sure what life is without the conflict. Okay, the marriage might be over, but they sure have got the fight. And that's why we spend so much time talking about the future so we can replace that with something else. And that's why it's different.
Tyler Rachal
Makes complete sense. You're an entrepreneur and so when you tell me this, especially the bit about finding the right billing model, as a fellow entrepreneur, I get what you're saying. This makes for a much better customer experience, and that's fantastic. And that in itself is a growth driver for a business because it leads to happier outcomes, happier customers, happier clients. Usually what goes along with that is thinking about on the back end, how can I utilize technology to maybe make up for some of that margin? And you said you have a background in technology or a passion, all the above. Within your businesses, within your law firms, how do you see technology? What are the current opportunities that you're sort of capitalizing on? And as you gaze out into the future, obviously a lot of the hubbub is around AI right now, what do you think the role is of technology within law?
Christopher Anderson
Yeah, so well, within law, mean, so let's talk about that writ large. I was just at a large, the largest law firm technology conference in the country last week. And AI is everywhere, right? But people are sweating because I mean, one person in the audience actually asked this question. I do this thing, I won't tell you what the thing is, but I do this thing and it takes seven hours that I bill. And then you guys think this person was like one of these lawyers who probably bills about, let's say $600 an hour. So 4,200 bucks. I do it all the time. You just showed me a product that will help me do that in 15 minutes.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. Uh oh.
Christopher Anderson
I'm not excited, right? You're just like this will decimate my business. And a lot of people are thinking this way. Me, I'm thrilled, right? I've got this subscription model. My clients pay a certain amount based on the value we bring to them. And so if I can reduce the amount of hours it takes to put into a case altogether by half, that does two things for me. One, it obviously would make everything more profitable. But two, one of the driving forces behind our business is our big goal is to change the way Americans, and eventually the world hopefully, but right now the way Americans resolve conflict among each other, with each other. And the reason we went to the subscription model we've already described for you, but the result of it has been that even though we're not like hugely less expensive than other firms, on average, I think our billable, our total caseload, our case value runs 10 to 15% less than those who are billing by the hour. But it's the fact that the client knows exactly how much the bill is going to be month after month until the case is over, it makes it affordable because that's how most people live. They live month to month and they can budget for it. And basically to afford us, if you're really strapped to take a part time job, you can afford the case.
You bring efficiencies to bear. Yeah, my profit might go up, but I also might be able to lower our prices. And the answer is hopefully both. And that just means more and more people will be able to access conflict resolution services, which from my perspective, you look around this world that we're living in right now, affordable, approachable, accessible conflict resolution for the people means that people don't need to take the resolution into their own hands. Means that people have a means of resolving disputes through law, through courts, through negotiation, through mediation. In a big way, I see us as preserving civilization, preserving democracy. We give people this route, that's what it means to me.
Tyler Rachal
No, that's great. I totally get that.
Christopher Anderson
Yeah, and your question was about technology. So I kind of avoided it by getting all philosophical.
Tyler Rachal
No, I appreciate the philosophy. That's awesome.
Christopher Anderson
Yeah. But technology. What have we done up till now, we've invested heavily in automation of everything we can. Document automation, onboarding automation, we've written, your audience probably knows Zapier, but we've written Zaps. So different applications that aren't supposed to talk to each other, talk to each other so we can build in all those efficiencies. And we've done that and we keep investing in that but now AI is a whole new ballgame. We're able to do value added work for our clients in a fraction of the time that we used to be able to. And quite honestly, we were only scratching the surface, but we are heavily, both arms deep in figuring out how we can bring AI to, to use your words, the customer experience. But to improve the customer experience, get things done faster, better, cheaper for our clients, but yet keep that human involvement. And a lot of people are like, it's gonna eliminate so many jobs. I don't think so. I think what's gonna happen here is we're gonna be able to do things we never thought we could afford to do for our clients. We're gonna be able to go deeper for them, do more for less, and just make this whole customer experience of going through this awful process a lot better.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, I sincerely appreciate that that resonates with me and my business. I have a staffing business. So, of course, I get the question all the time, people say are you afraid that AI is going to basically kill your entire business? And my thought is very similar to yours. I think that the greatest opportunities are actually in helping both sides of the equation. It's helping the customer communicate better with you, your talent communicate better with the customer, and there's these things that AI can do when it actually can execute at a scale and a speed that's just not possible with people. And it takes my staffing firm and it gives me kind of the resources of a Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 business. We all can get the same access to the openAI, chatGPT agent kit. So very cool. And I totally get it. You paint a clear picture.
I want to be mindful of time here and I want to get onto an important topic, a somewhat taboo topic here, which is divorce. And divorce specifically, it's funny, it's a thing that I talk about all the time. When I started Hireframe with my business partner, I was married. He wasn't married yet, I don't believe. But he had been in a relationship for a really long time with his now wife. Something that we commonly talk about is the experience that we had before we started our business, we were trying to acquire a small business. If you've heard of search funds, entrepreneurship through acquisition, ETA is becoming very popular. So that was an eye-opening experience for me for many reasons. But one of them is probably one that most people wouldn't guess. And that is that I got to witness firsthand the impact that a divorce has on a business. There were two instances where I saw businesses being sold as basically fire sale, sold completely unwillingly in the worst possible state possible. And one was death and the other one was divorce.
Christopher Anderson
Sure.
Tyler Rachal
I just learned firsthand, I would walk the warehouse with a business owner who was going through a very messy divorce. And it just left such an impact on me because, the saying that had been said to me was, this is your business partner. Your life partner is your business partner, because in most states, it's 50-50. So whatever your ownership interest is, and I'm sure as a lawyer, you're probably going to be like, there's certain ways to do this and that. For me, someone who entered into a very normal marriage and didn't do anything special legally, my wife, I always tell her, say, you own 50% of this thing. Whether you wanted it or not, whether you think about it or not, you own 50% of my 50%.
So yeah, I guess that's a long-winded way of saying, if you were to talk to an entrepreneur about divorce, things that maybe they hadn't thought of, they should think of, or your perspective on divorce and how that relates to being a business owner. I would love to hear your two cents, because you're both. You're an attorney, but you're also a business owner. So you're all the above. You get it.
Christopher Anderson
And been through a divorce while a business owner. So yeah.
Tyler Rachal
And there you go. Exactly.
Christopher Anderson
So I'm gonna first of all just say like, there's so much, there's so much.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, sure. Pick a lane. Yeah, sure.
Christopher Anderson
Yeah, but the answer is to think about it, right? The answer is to not be ignorant of it, which is sometimes, you some people are like, I can't tell you how many people come to our firm, and they're like, but what do mean? I built this. He didn't build this, I built this. He was off driving his truck, doing whatever, doing his own thing, had a job. I built this. He had no involvement in this. What do you mean? He says he owns half. You're not gonna let that happen to me, are you? I'm like, let me ask you about what you thought about.
And so let's help your listeners think about this. People think that prenups are like the least sexy thing going and or buy sell agreements and or business agreements, however you want to set it up. But they're not. And you said something really important, like when you were walking your wife through it, you were saying like, whether you like it or not, you own half of my half. Well, what if she doesn't like it? Right?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, right. Yeah, totally.
Christopher Anderson
And what if your business partner doesn't like her? Right?
Tyler Rachal
Right. Well, yeah, we talk about that. My business partner, I say, you know, this is, we're all partners here.
Christopher Anderson
Right, you're suddenly gonna be in business. And you also talked about, nobody likes to talk about this either, but everybody sells. An unfortunately large number of people sell unexpectedly through divorce or death. So should something untoward happen, your business partner might be 100% partners with your wife and you're out of the picture altogether. So how do you handle that? Since we're talking about divorce here, we'll talk about that context. We'll let an estate planning person talk about the other one. You handle that, first of all, through a marital agreement. Everybody should have one, or prenup, most people call them in Colorado, they're marital agreements. Everybody should have one. And to me, you know what? I think they're the sexiest thing ever. I don't care if you're 20 years old, head over heels in love, you don't own anything. Because you said something, you said something when you were talking, you said your partners, your business partners and life partners. You're a business partners and life partners from day one. Everything you build is for both of you. Unless you say otherwise. And what, you know, because like you said, what if she doesn't want to be? Well your marital agreement could say Tyler owns a business and you get the 401k, right? Or you get whatever. It doesn't have to be unfair. It just can align with your values. Like she doesn't wanna be a business owner, so why would you make her be a business owner? And why would she insist on being a business owner when she doesn't wanna be?
And so a marital agreement to me is two mature people, let's say mature enough to make the decision to be married, sitting down and saying, here's everything I've got. And here's everything you've got. And here's what I want to do with my life. And here's what you want to do with your life. And knowing everything we know now, should, for whatever reason, we no longer wish to be married, here's what would happen. And you know what this actually ends up doing in a marriage? It removes friction.
Tyler Rachal
Totally, yes.
Christopher Anderson
Because people are in a marriage going I'm stuck or I gotta get out now because I don't know what's gonna happen. But you can define what's gonna happen. And now you can actually spend the rest of your marriage being in love and have this whole uncertainty not being uncertainty.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's, that's so great, what you were saying. You really struck a chord. You mentioned having a mature discussion and my wife and I have two young kids. So we're having a lot of very mature discussions right now because we need to plan for our future and theirs. It is really interesting because I think the most common thing, and I'm sure you probably heard this all the time with your various clients, is that you don't have these conversations because you're afraid to. You think, well, they'll think that I'm thinking about getting divorced, or they'll think that I want to leave them with nothing, or I want to have an affair or whatever it is. These are kind of in your mind when actually when done in the right setting, I find that these conversations sometimes you're avoiding to have them bring you together. I love that question you posed, do they want to be a business owner? Do they want to own 50% of your shares? Because maybe they don't, and you've kind of answered that question for them. So yeah, very, very smart.
Christopher Anderson
So rather than leaving them with nothing or wanting to leave them with nothing, what you're actually doing is having a conversation to make sure that you each leave each other with what you want. That's a very loving conversation.
Tyler Rachal
Yes, we're getting deeper here on this episode of What Worked and I would ever thought with an attorney here. And I say that lovingly, but of course, all the attorney stereotypes, not necessarily known for warm and fuzzies, but we're getting them. I do want to round out with here with one more question, which is, what is the sort of what are some of the most common misconceptions that you get when you do have that first call? I don't know if you have it call it like an intake meeting or whatever it might be. What do you find are the most common misconceptions about the divorce process?
Christopher Anderson
Well, let's start with the one you did. I'll call it out because you said most states are 50-50.
Tyler Rachal
Yes, that's probably a misconception. Yeah, what is it?.
Christopher Anderson
Totally. Yeah, because people misunderstand, again, I want to be sure I'm not giving legal advice here.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. Disclaimer, no legal advice, everybody. Just a couple of entrepreneurs talking about our own stuff.
Christopher Anderson
I'm not barred in 47 states. But so people hear that the word is that most states in a divorce seek to divide property and debt equitably. And people skip over the “tabl” and hear equally. But it's equitably. And so it's not 50-50 at all. Equitably means in a very real sense, fairly. Now it doesn't mean the other comment that I said like, I built this, it's mine. No, that's not fair. Your spouse supported you in some way, you were together, you were partners. So whether you built it with your hands or not, it will be divided, but it'll be divided equitably. So what can equitably mean? And why is it some very often not equally? In a marriage, in this partnership, as in a business partnership, one spouse might have wasted assets. One spouse might have done something to damage what we call the marital estate, all the assets and debts in the marriage, and the other one didn't. And so we can look at that, behavior during the marriage can have an effect. And so we do try to do it equitably, and you don't go around with a cleaver cleaving things in half. You try to do it equitably so that people have things and are able to start this new chapter of their life in a way that is equitable and that is fair to both sides. And so that's a big misconception is that everybody's just gonna go dividing everything 50-50. mean, can, equitably can mean you get the house and she gets the 401k. Equitably can mean that you get this income producing asset and he gets this hard asset that's just sellable. It can mean many, many different things.
And in that, and people often ask like, well, you this all seems pretty simple. Why can't I just get out the forms and do it myself? And this is because this is where the art is. This and children is where the art can be. And if, again, if we start the conversation with "where do you want to be in two years when this is all over?.” it's a very different conversation than Solomon cutting the baby. It is a conversation about what do you need to get started and what does your spouse need to get started so that you both can move on. So that's one very serious common misconception. The other one is what I said earlier is like, built this misconception that that's a really, really dangerous one. But yeah, those are the ones that jumped to mind.
Tyler Rachal
That makes complete sense. And I love this reference. I think you said Polaris is what you referenced it earlier as.
Christopher Anderson
Yes. TM.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, trademark, exactly. I say it all the time within our business. say, what's our North Star? What is the thing that we are trying to head towards and is this in support of that? If it's not, we should ruthlessly scrutinize and question everything that is not heading in that direction.
So interesting, this has been amazing, Christopher. I have really enjoyed our conversation. I always like to ask as a last customary question here on What Worked: Where can our listeners or anybody else who stumbles upon this episode, where can they find you? What's the best place to reach out to you? And I know you mentioned, you've mentioned a couple of things, being a business owner and of course having some law firms. But it sounds like you're just generally interested in business as well. So I don't know if you take on investment opportunities or that sort of thing or advisory positions for tech companies. But what would you like people to reach out to you for and where?
Christopher Anderson
Sure. Well, so first of all, there may be some listeners who are going like, hey, that sounds like a better way to get divorced. And I don't know why you're thinking that. They could always contact us at newleaf.family or directly to me, Christopher at newleaf dot family. But you're right, I think I mentioned at the top of the show, I do work with lots of other law firms and businesses, helping them. And that's through a different business called Sunnyside Services and then they can reach me Christopher at Sunnyside law dot com or they can check out our website Sunnysidelaw.com. And yes, I have advisory seats on several businesses, law firms and otherwise, and always interested in talking with folks about how I can help them grow their businesses and achieve the same thing that I was talking about with divorce but achieve what they see as their North Star. Because I failed enough along the way to have a few ideas how to avoid those pitfalls and help folks achieve their dreams.
Tyler Rachal
Failure is the best teacher.
Christopher Anderson
Oh man, it's taught me plenty.
Tyler Rachal
So fully believe in that. Yeah, nothing like the 22 year old on TikTok or Instagram selling some sort of course. And I'm like, listen, I'm not discounting any way how smart you must be, but I need to see some failures. That's what I really, that's the value there. That's the course. I want to hear from someone who really messed it up because they figured out how to not do that.
Well, this has been great, Christopher. I really do appreciate your time. And I think that this episode will be inspiring to people in many different ways. Yes, if they're considering maybe contacting a family law attorney, they should definitely reach out to you. And just in general, you've got some incredible sort of life advice. So thanks for coming on What Worked. For anyone else out there listening, if you enjoyed this episode and you think you would make an amazing guest like Christopher, I would highly encourage you to reach out to myself. This is Tyler Rachal. I’m the founder of Hireframe. You can find me on LinkedIn, tyler at hireframe dot com. And otherwise we will catch you on the next episode. Thank you everybody.
Fresh sales operations insights and content delivered right to your inbox.
Get notified anytime we publish new articles and content. Fill out the form below to stay in touch with Hireframe.
