The Dumb Zone FREE - The Dumb Zone 3-11-24 - Lawyers Part One

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Are you ready for a story that captures the essence of determination and the fight for creative expression? In our latest podcast episode, join Dan McDowell, a seasoned broadcaster, as he takes us through his gripping legal battle against restrictive non-compete clauses.Discover the high stakes involved when one's career and passion are on the line, and the lengths to which Dan and his dream team of lawyers go to defend his right to speak freely. With a mix of intense legal discussions, personal anecdotes, and the occasional light-hearted moment, this episode is more than just a recounting of events—it's a journey through the heart of a legal storm.Don't let the legal jargon deter you; this episode is crafted to engage and inform, making complex legal concepts accessible to all. Whether you're in the industry, interested in law, or just love a good underdog story, this episode has something for you.So, press play and immerse yourself in a tale of law, life, and the pursuit of broadcasting freedom. It's a narrative that will leave you inspired and perhaps even more informed about the rights that affect us all.Listen now and join the conversation about what it truly means to fight for your voice in a world where contracts and clauses can dictate one's destiny. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Hello, I'm Dan McDowell, longtime professional broadcaster. Why subscribe to our Patreon podcast? Well, perhaps you support our struggle to get out from under the oppressive thumb of the man. Or, objectively, if you sign up at patreon.com slash the dumb zone, you'll get the two episodes per week that are available on all podcast platforms, like this one, plus an additional two episodes each week that are exclusive to Patreon. So subscribing on Patreon gets you four episodes per week. Oh my, what a bargain. Now, on to today's program.

The Dunza, Dunza, Dunza. You swear that the testimony you are about to give this committee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God. I do. Please take a seat. but the truth, so help you God. I do. Please take a seat. Senator Evis, it's your time. Gregory Hirsch, executive assistant to Tom Wamsgans, correct? Yes.

Yes, if it is to be said. I'm sorry? If it is to be said, so it is. Are you all right? Yes. If it is to be said, so it is. Are you all right? Yes. I merely wish to answer in the affirmative fashion. You can speak to us normally.

Thank you, sir. So I shall. All right, all right, all right, all right, all right. All right, all right, all right, all right, all right. I never listen. I'm going to listen. I want to listen to the drums. So the date this will be dropped, is that what we were saying? Sure. Yeah.

No, that's what the kids are saying. If you're listening to this on the day this originally is released it is monday march 11th correct and i'm in the sky over a sea don't you have to go over a sea to get to france yeah or an ocean you're currently getting lagged. Getting lagged up. Yes, by the jet. And who knows? I'm shredding pal.

You're vomiting from motion sickness again. I'll be driving this time. Okay. Oh, you're going skiing? Yeah. During the week? Not on the weekend? It's a lot cheaper during the week.

Okay. We leave, yeah, you know, half and half. So right now you're out skiing? That's right, right now. Yeah. Or plowing or doing something. Because you're going with the wife, right? Or are you just going alone?

Wife and daughter. Dude, there's going to be too many kids around. Oh, it's that. Okay. This is the one that I was telling you where there are literally like 60 to 75 people going. This is not a fun vacation. No. No, this is going to be...

You put yourself in this situation a lot. The thing about that is, and this has been a bit of a debate on the home front i don't really put myself in this situation well when you said those two words home front i do oh yeah way back then that's true yourself in this situation that's true it's uh it's not going to be fun for anybody and like when i did go on the boys, uh, ski thing, we're probably burning too much content gold, uh, right now, all of us were like, why are we doing this? Just anticipating like what things were going to be like a month out.

We were all like, all of us are going to hate this. Our kids are going to hate it. Our wives are going to hate this. Our kids are going to hate it. Our wives are going to hate it. We're obviously going to hate it. Yeah. You do it for the memories, for the pictures, for the gram.

Right? That's what we're doing it for, to show other parents that look at what we do with our kids. It's really cool. What are you doing? Just sitting there? You suck.

That seems a lot better, though. Yeah, that's what we did. But some people like to keep up with the Jakes, and so they will be upset about that. Interesting. So, yeah, people don't want to hear this right now because we've promoted this week as being a week where we have our lawyer roundtable, the four lawyers.

Actually, I guess five were involved in this roundtable, which we've already recorded previously. Mm-hmm. But even more than that reached out and helped, and you'll hear all about it. So we're not talking about what led to our leaving the tickets. And I might even say this in the intro coming up in a few minutes, but

because we recorded this like two weeks ago. It was a marathon sesh. Yeah. It was Pizza Friday and probably nearly six hours of talking back and forth with our lawyers. I don't even like talking about this stuff publicly at all.

Like, did you feel weird that night when you got done? Like, it's kind of like bringing it all back up, and it's like, man, we have, like, promised people we're going to pull back the curtain a little bit when we feel comfortable doing so, and that's kind of what we're doing. But it's kind of like I don't want to move forward, Jake, but, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit odd for me to hear you say that,

considering that's kind of been my whole deal the whole time. Yeah, I felt weird that night. Yeah. After we got done with six hours of talking about this again, it's like, okay, cool. Can we never talk about it again? Yeah, and then there are articles that come out. I mean, we're just too famous. Yeah.

That's the problem. But give the people what they want is what they say. That's right. So I did want to play one moment from what you're about to hear as kind of a tease. Because this was something, you know, I obviously kept up with the case really closely. But I learned something in this first episode that I did not know, and I only thought happened in movies, which there are a couple things that happened during this case where I feel like, oh, okay, so that's actually based on real life.

And the first one is I did not know that they tried to intimidate Jake. And it was a part of what handing you the subpoena? Am I saying the right terms at least? If we're talking about what I think we're talking about, it would be the cease and desist. Okay. Yeah. Well, let me play this brief clip because this was new to me at the

time. Any normal lawyer seeking to practice in a respectful way to their colleagues would pick up the phone and ask whether I was going to accept service. Again, it's egregiously bad behavior. Yeah, and that's especially true in federal court where if you don't waive, what you typically do in federal court is you ask the other side, will you waive service? If they refuse to waive service, you can tax that against them and get your money back for the service. So in federal court, there's absolutely no reason not to at least reach out to the other side if you know they have an attorney and ask them if they will accept service so the only thing you can take from that is it was intended to intimidate correct and i did not know about that well obviously i didn't either i just know that they came to my house did it work were you intimidated uh i was freaked out yeah Yeah, I would be too. That's for sure.

And the wife was definitely like, what is happening here? Like, why are there people coming to our house? And it sounds made up whenever I recount that story, but I literally was like holding Carter in a diaper. Why were you wearing a diaper? Yeah, no. Because I try to do this thing with like he and I vibe together. Yeah, yeah. Skin to skin. Yeah, no. Because I try to do this thing where he and I vibe together. Yeah, yeah.

Skin to skin. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. So sometimes I'll just Mother and daughter dress the same. Sometimes I'll just like suckle on a teat. So yeah, this episode is obviously you guys walking away from the ticket. Jake is intimidated. The team is assembled and like

Liz says here in a little bit, she was prepping for a trial. Some of their early preparation was for a long trial to be had. So this is a really good introductory episode, a lot of basics and fundamentals in this one. So it's a really good listen. All right. Good intro, Blake. Good job, Blake. Thanks, guys. Alright, well, here we are high atop my garage. And today, it is actually Friday, March 1st, when we are recording this live to tape.

And it is our lawyer roundtable. The highly anticipated lawyer roundtable. By us. Where, actually, the table is more rectangular, and we have a couch and that's where many of the lawyers are. But let us introduce the

lawyers. What we're doing today, so a lot of people obviously have questions about a lot of things dealing with the ticket and then once we left the ticket and then what's happened after the ticket.

We're not going to really deal with a lot of the behind the scenes negotiations that got us to the point where we met all these lawyers. We'll do that later. But today we're going to time shift it like Pulp Fiction. Great reference. We'll take you to

around the end of July when we actually got sued. Two little guys, two just guys skipping through the woods like Little Red Riding Hood get sued by the Big Bad Corporation. So our lawyers, Phillip Kingston is the first guy. He was actually working with us during our contract negotiations. Dude, I had a great job on that. Philip Kingston,

would you guys each like to just kind of say who you represent or who you work for and blah, blah, blah, give any statement? Opening remarks. There you go. I'm Philip Kingston. I work with a firm called Shields Winopst, which is the least friendly law firm name to spell or to market. We have some other partners named Utah and Andrews, which I think

would be a much better firm name. The check's clear. Yeah, the check's clear. It's all fine. fall fine and they handle my stuff um and i'm a former politician and trial lawyer and i do a lot of different things including try to help my friends in radio one time success one time we uh we block walked together indeed yeah went out and Went out and knocked on doors for another local politician. For the great Scott Griggs, who I don't think there's a single person, with the possible exception of Eric Johnson himself, who thinks that Eric Johnson is a better choice for mayor than Scott Griggs would have been. At this point, everybody who voted for that guy ought to have some regret. That's a left turn.

Can we say that we actually got in trouble for that? Yeah, but I don't think that's a story for today. Okay, I'm just saying. We were involved in that because of Phillip and TC. Always the two people you want to follow. Yeah, yeah. Follow their path. We got called into a room.

We've never gotten in trouble. And told, hey. No, it was for a video we made for Scott Griggs. It was a quick... Yeah, we were like, I don't know. We're dumb. That would have put him over the top. That would have been out there, yeah.

The course of history could have been different. So the second guy we worked with is another guy we've known for a long time. If that would have been out there, yeah. The course of history could have been different. So the second guy we worked with is another guy we've known for a long time. Matt Brunig joined us second in this whole thing. Matt joins us on the Zoom. Greetings, everyone, gentlemen, Liz. How's it going? Our labor attorney.

You want to give your bio? Well, you know, I'm a labor lawyer. I worked at the nlrb for a couple of years that's the national labor relations board and i'm a solo practitioner i represent unions and individuals in front of the nlrb and do some other random stuff um i'm also a think tank guy peoplespolicyproject.org and uh I have a podcast with my wife, the Brunix, patreon.com slash the Brunix. So I got lots of little things going. As you'll notice, in each case, they are solitary endeavors because I've not been successful inside institutions for long periods of time. Okay, you mentioned Liz. We have Elizabeth Griffin here.

Hi. Who's not Matt's wife. No, I am not. We have Elizabeth Griffin here. Hi. Who's not Matt's wife. No, I am not. Not Liz Bernig. Yeah, I'm a litigation attorney at Clark Hill. It's a full-service national firm in Dallas. Used to be Strasburger and Price. I do litigation and mostly appeals.

And do you want us to get into how we got involved, or are we going to come back to that? Do the disclaimer first. Thank you. Yeah, I told Jake, make sure I do my disclaimer. I just need to say at the top, I am speaking on my own behalf. These are my opinions. I am not speaking for the firm. I am not providing any legal advice.

Okay, I guess we'll get into it. I am not providing any legal advice. Okay. I guess we'll get in. Retweets are not endorsements. Everything I'm giving you is advice. You should follow all of it, by the way. Well, Matt, you should clarify that you are not giving advice to listeners. You are not creating an attorney-client relationship by anything that you say. Oh, we're so right back in the space. I love this.

Here we go. Oh, it's been so long. I love it. I love this. Here we go. Oh, it's been so long. I love it. I love it. Anyway, yeah, we'll get back to how we all came to be together. Matt left one thing off of his bio, which is that he is in the top 1.1% of internet trolls. Okay. You guys used to go at it.

That's how I got my notoriety from the beginning, actually. It takes one to know one. I was, yeah. No, for real. I got a big Twitter following from just trolling and stuff, and then I switched into more serious things. So there's some advice for kids who want to get a big following. That's how it goes, yeah.

Then we have Frank Colley was one of our Dream Team members who was actually in the courtroom. Yes, I'm Frank Cauley. I am a litigator. I've been litigating cases for over 25 years now. I've got my own firm, Cauley Law Group, original name. I'm not smart enough to be a think tank person or an office holder, just a plain old country litigator. And we found out you used to long ago be at the firm i met i did before i came i was at strasburger and price right out of law school

the firm that liz works for it's now a different name but it was once strasburger and price and i was a young litigator there in the late 90s. Okay. And a Baylor Bear fan. And a huge Baylor Bear fan. Sicken Bears. And then also a guy on our Zoom who is going to be popping in and out because he actually is in Houston. This is McCool Kelker. I've never said your last name, so I hope I pronounced it correctly.

You nailed it, Dan. That's exactly right. Okay. And McCool's a guy I had been talking to. I will at least, well, go ahead and give your bio and then I'll tell everybody how I actually met you. Yeah, sure, sure. So thank you, Dan and Jake and Blake. And hello, other lawyers and listeners. My name is McCool Kelker. I am, well, actually two weeks ago, I made partner at my firm. So that's super exciting. Yay! Yeah, you can clap.

Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm a partner at a law firm called Denton's. So it's like the city of Denton with an S at the end. We're one of the world's largest law firms. And I actually interviewed at Strasburger when I was in law school. And they said, thanks so much for coming to our office and drinking our fine sparkling water, but no thanks. But that's okay. I still love a lot of guys over there. I'd like to call myself a trial lawyer and litigator also. And not to get into the backstory, but I met Dan and Jake just

because I'm a huge P1. And I wrote to them one day when I was working on some non-compete work for work, and they were talking about it on the radio. And so that's how we met. But we can kick that out a little bit. Well, no, we'll address that real quick. Yeah, some have pointed out, hey, you guys did a bunch of non-compete stories this year. I mean, it was mentioned in the State of the Union address. True. But perhaps we might have focused on it a little more than others as our contract talks were happening.

And McCool was one of the guys that gave us the, I don't know, the thought that, yeah, we're allowed to do what we're doing. And this is now after we came to an impasse in contract talks with the ticket or with Cumulus, we decided to do a podcast and put it behind a paywall and not have advertising. We did a lot of things we thought that were saying, hey, we're really not trying to compete. We're two guys. We couldn't come to an agreement, so we're just going to do a podcast.

McCool was one of the guys who did look at our contracts and say, you know, I feel confident that, now I'll paraphrase and you could correct me if I'm wrong. I thought you said you felt good that, yes, legally you should be able to do this now you might still you know they might push back on that uh because that's what big companies will do um because they have you know they have the money and uh it's two guys who generally don't have the money for a bunch of attorneys uh is that right yeah that's exactly right. I mean, you can definitely see bigger companies sort of money whip or intimidate, you know, two guys trying to start a podcast as sort of the litigation strategy. And so it's, you know, I started as a prosecutor. And what we would say is you can beat the rap, but not the ride. and so even if you were going to maybe come out successful,

it was going to be a long journey should they decide to sue you guys, which is clearly what they decided to do. Okay, so that's how I met McCool. So I actually kind of knew him before really this all kind of got going. I knew Phillip very well through the years. We've known Matt Brunig very well. Matt might have been another one who we showed our non-compete and say,

yeah, what if we started podcasting? Certainly, Phillip. What if we, you know, and I think everybody kind of nodded and said kind of the similar thing that McCool did is, I'm not saying they won't come after you, but if they do, this is legally, I think this is legally sound in the state of Texas, you're going to be fine. Now, going to be fine didn't take into account, you might have, you know, high six figures to pay back a bunch of lawyers, which we do, but anyway,

But anyway, now let's go on, I guess, to – let's go chronologically, and I think this way we will get to – this is how we will get to where, you know, how Liz came in, how Frank came in. But chronologically, the ticket negotiations did end at a certain point. The ticket negotiations did end at a certain point. You know, we they oddly said, well, will you send us a resignation note? Like we were talking back and forth. They're throwing us out. They're throwing us out. And it got so far away from where we were talking that eventually we said, hey, I just don't I think we're at an impact.

I don't we're at an impact. We're not going to accept what you guys are saying. And they're saying, well, we're not going to give any more. Okay, will you send us a resignation letter? I thought it was odd just because our contracts had just run out. Like did Jason Garrett have to send a resignation letter to Jerry Jones or did his contract run out? Yeah. So we did on a certain day.

I can't remember exactly what day. Yeah, and for me, I had been out of contract for over two months. Yes, yours was April. Mine actually ended mid-June. And then they asked us on whether it was a Sunday or a Monday or a Monday morning, whatever it was, to send it in that day. And we're like, I mean, I guess. Yeah.

That's what you need. But we hadn't been at work for two weeks at that point. Yeah, it was mid-July. Yeah, and I think part of it was like we had some built-in vacation, like possibly that like ate up a little bit of that time. But for the most part, yeah, it was like we had some built-in vacation. Yeah. Possibly that like ate up a little bit of that time. But for the most part, yeah, it was like, well, we haven't been here. So it's pretty clear we're not.

Yeah. But I believe they did pay us through that period or whatever. For at least part of it, yeah. Yeah, so that would mean that, okay, we resign. But I don't think we quit. and I don't think they fired us. I think we just didn't come to an agreement. That's been my thought all along. So it's weird when you see it in print or something that's wrong.

It's probably June 30th is the day where I kind of heard in y'all's voices that you were done. Now, we fucked around with it for another couple of weeks, but as you recall, we were getting absolutely nowhere. But, yeah, we had a... I was confident we could get to an agreement, though. I thought we would. We would go back and forth day by day of how confident we were about that matter. Over that two weeks, yeah, but it was weird. It wasn't zero.

Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So now we stop working for the ticket on the day that... See, Matt, it's your fault, Liz. What? Now we stop working for the ticket on the Monday. I'm talking about the dog.

The dog is going to... I know. I needed my laptop. It was a very emotional week for us. Yeah. We, you know, talking to our friends there. You know, we had talked to our friends previous to that week, too. But then once, you know, you heard it on the ticket,

when now the hardline, the musers actually address it, then you know it's really real. So that was on Friday. The hardline could have been a Thursday. In fact, I believe that Thursday night is when we put out a YouTube 15-minute thing we recorded at Cash Soroy's studio, which was a ticket goodbye. And we had called our boss there, Dan Bennett, at the ticket and said, hey, we're going to release a video, just want you to know.

A lot of people had been emailing call whatever and we had not made any public comment on it sure so here we're going to put that out and uh he signed off not that he had to sign off on it but we thought it was our i don't know a common courtesy we certainly didn't have to do that but you know yeah i've worked with these people for over 20 years and i didn't want animosity i know and his his response was actually like you should do that yeah so so we did that and then over that weekend is where we came up with the brilliant idea of well let's do a podcast we've we're pretty sure that we legally can So we're going to You know, we named it the dumb zone

We have Dragon Den Productions We're going to set up an LLC That's where we're now like What is it? What are we doing? You know So now we actually recorded a podcast That Monday

So we put out a podcast or two And then we got a cease and desist letter when we got the cease and desist letter we certainly shared it with philip and we're very good friends with matt brunig anyway and uh shared it with matt brunig and i think that's where matt brunig's role in this stepped up a little bit. Can anyone jump in if I did something wrong? Let me say this real quick, though. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. Are you just doing a Gordo bit? What are you doing? Trying to. No, sorry. Sorry. It's a little choppy.

I'll say the way I got involved was when you quit on the 17th. I heard about it and I texted you. I was not previously like involved. I didn't tell you to quit or that you could podcast or whatever. I got the text here, like July 18th. Congrats on the quit. I'm sure you've got a plan in place already, but let me know if you want any help. I figured, you know, I knew a little bit about the situation. I thought, oh, my God, this could be a problem. But then, yeah, then you got the cease and desist and you contacted me. And the reason to, you know, even look at the non-competes ahead of time

while we're in contract negotiations was we've both had some some – I don't want to dive into this story, but we've had difficult contract negotiations in the past. We're told at certain times zero money, we have no raise, whatever, nothing. How about a pay cut after being successful here for a while? How would that be? I mean, that's just the way things are. And I'm not upset about that. It's sad maybe a little bit, but that's how life is.

I get it. Can I just throw in that you and Jake, and by the way, a lot of other people who've worked at the Ticket, have Stockholm Syndrome? Stockholm Syndrome. The idea... I remember prepping y'all and hearing the story with Frank and Liz were all in my conference room and hearing the stories that you guys told

going back. It's not normal. Yeah, I was floored. It's exceptionally abusive behavior by management. Well, that is your opinion. And I definitely think we'll get to the prep Saturday and Sunday more, but I think also part of it is just, you know, there is a qualitative effect to it where, you know, I grew up with it.

So I'm, like, pricing that in a little bit. I just thought it's the price of, I don't know, to me. You're just having a job that you like we're big look this is part of the big famous you're a semi-fant you know media guy you want to be in this game this is the way it is i mean nobody notices you but you're right that's true everywhere i mean yeah yeah no i know matt hates hearing that but for me the one thing i was going to say but i mean reading about major league baseball and their dealings and players and agents, and I'm like, well, this is how it is.

You want to be in this game? We can go do something else and not have this kind of a thing. But this is – I thought it was all just part of the game, and none of it bothers me to this day. So, sorry. No, I was just going to say, like, so we started that Monday, No, I was just going to say, like, so we started that Monday, and what really hit hard for me was,

I don't know that they hire, like, process servers that look like me, who have, like, Kermit Mantis arms. They hire big guys. And a guy came to my house on a Saturday at, like, 10 a.m. And at this point, Carter's, like, six months old. And at this point, Carter's like six months old. And, you know, it's 10 o'clock in the morning. Not a lot of people knocking on my door at 10 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday. Do you feel that's intimidating?

Yeah, yeah, it did. And you were like out of town or something? Or maybe like somehow they didn't have your address? I don't remember what happened. Yeah, I ended up getting it on the... Don't you have to pay extra for Saturday service? Well, I don't know if they did or not, but I know that they showed up. Yeah, so it must have been that weekend

after we first started. And there's just like a knock on my door. I've got the sun and a diaper. And they're like, yeah, you have to sign this now. You have to understand what utter horseshit this is. Like, they know who I am. They've sent me the cease and desist letter. What am I, give it to him.

Any normal lawyer seeking to practice in a respectful way to their colleagues would pick up the phone and ask whether I was going to accept service. Like, it's, again, it's egregiously bad behavior. Yeah. And that's especially true in federal court, where if you don't waive, what you typically do in federal court is you ask the other side, will you waive service? If they refuse to waive service, you can tax that against them and get your money back for the service.

So in federal court, there's absolutely no reason not to at least reach out to the other side if you know they have an attorney and ask them if they will accept service. So the only thing you can take from that is it was intended to intimidate. Correct. Yeah, my wife is looking at me like, what are we doing now? See, that's what I thought would happen. Truthfully, I thought. Well, it turns out right now I don't know. I thought there may be a problem.

I didn't think there'd be no problem. But I thought, okay, a phone call will happen, maybe to us, maybe to our attorney, but then it can be laid out, hey, we're behind a paywall. We're absolutely not going to, even if we're allowed to, which I think some of you lawyers, somebody looked at our contract and said you could accept advertising right now it says you can't solicit advertisers but we had actual advertisers call us and say i want to be a part of what you're doing and that was me and we said no we said no just because and maybe this is stockholm syndrome but i did not want to have even the appearance of that we are, air quotes, competing with the ticket.

Just being extra cautious. Yeah, sure. We were being... You get that, Liz. You get that, yeah. I'll wear a mask. I'll do whatever. An abundance of caution, I'm all for. And I just wanted to kind of do our thing. We're just doing our thing.

We're not trying to take down. That's one of the best radio stations in the nation. We are going to take it down or compete with it? That's silly. Anyway. Your theme from the beginning was be cool. We're going to be cool. We want everybody to be cool.

We want everybody to be cool. And that sounds really good, and it did not sell. I just thought they might have talked to us before sending the threatening letter. But, um... I still think I probably could have kicked the guy's ass. Well, you think that about everybody you see. And I think you might be able to. So I think Matt and I were talking in the middle of July, shortly after y'all did your formal resignation,

and we were trying to decide about the utility of filing an unlawful labor practice claim with the NLRB. So this is right after we got the cease and desist. Yeah. How do we react to this? And the specific question we were asking ourselves, which now seems very stupid, is, well, if they haven't done any, you know, if Susquehanna hasn't, like, done anything or, you know, been aggressive toward us, are we buying ourselves a fight if we go to the NLRB first? And so I've got an email from July 26th from Matt right after we got the cease and desist letter

that says, well, this makes the question of filing the ULP a little bit easier at least. Yeah, so we get the cease and desist. It says you're violating your non-compete and reminds you that you have a non-solicitation. And so the question we're presented with is, should we file an unfair labor practice charge alleging that those contract clauses are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act and just get that out before they file a lawsuit? And the problem with that is once you file it, as we'll talk about later, you can't really unfile it. And so there's some thought maybe that's just send this letter and they won't do anything. And that would be the preferred outcome, right? Is we'll just talk to them and

they'll just buzz off. But if we file the charge, that's it. Like we're going to have to fight them one way or another. And yeah, like that email shows, okay, well, they did eventually file the lawsuit anyway, so it didn't matter. Like, you know, we were wise to file the charge when we did. lawsuit anyway so it didn't matter like you know we were we were wise to file the charge when we did so you say the resignation letter that we sent was the 17th yeah okay because on the 18th is when i first got contact i'm trying to think otherwise why did i think that their lawyers would just call us this is when a guy from birmingham alabama contacted me yeah and said, you know, hey, we used to work for a Cumulus station in Birmingham, Alabama. We broke off.

Like, they did their whole show broke off. They even had a sales guy with them. They had all this stuff. We started our own YouTube. He just said, hey, I think there's a good model for you to succeed out here. We started our own YouTube thing. The second we started it, we got a letter from Cumulus,

a cease and desist letter. But then their lawyers and our lawyers talked. We worked out an agreement, blah, blah, blah. Now, after this all went down and we ended up getting sued, my Birmingham friend said, maybe our success is what caused them to not talk it out with you. Yeah.

That was all speculation. Yeah. But since they actually did prove a working model that they could be successful outside that, you know, world, they didn't want, like, it just to keep happening and keep happening keep happening hey maybe we shouldn't have let the Birmingham guys do what they did maybe the next guys that try something we need to go after them hard yeah all speculation on my part and like as as successful as those guys have been and I think they've been like extremely helpful and instructive to us, you're like a way bigger deal than them.

I'm not going to say us. I think you should say we. But it's true. It's the ticket. Yeah. They're not going to let somebody get away from something. Right, we had never heard of the Birmingham story. Ever, until it happened.

But yes, the ticket is the number one station probably in Cumulus. I mean, billing-wise, it's got to be up there. Yeah. So you're not going to let something that happens at AA happen at your big league ball club. And that's not to say that, like, I'm better than those guys. It's not what I'm saying. You are.

You've been around for a while. i'm so much better than most people so we uh we're at the point now we're still at just the cease and desist now matt you've have you kind of totally recapped i'm trying to remember uh that now you send a we file a... We file unfair labor practice charges alleging that the non-compete clause and the co-worker non-solicitation clause violate Section 881 of the NLRA. And that's both just a strategy in and of itself and also puts us in a... Maybe it could scare them away from filing their lawsuit,

or if they do file the lawsuit it's a good thing to have as far as defending ourselves in the lawsuit at least call at least they'll call us lang i thought you said there was language in the cease and desist also that was like hey this they can't say this oh well the cease and desist threatens you know so they yeah you're right so it's not just that the contract clauses are illegal it's that the cease and desist itself is illegal because the cease and desist threatens to take legal action against you as far as in the form of enforcing illegal contract clauses so you end up having essentially three unfair labor practices you have the two contract clauses

and then you have the cease and desist which is a third separate unfair labor practice can i say one thing too as far as like the stockholm syndrome thing um i didn't mean that to be insulting it's okay no i mean we were what came to my mind we did it uh every single attorney that i ever had look at my contracts outside of the one that uh was uh, was actually representing me was like, you should not sign this. Well, and then, and I, I love the guy. Like he was my agent for a long time. He was a super, super great dude, but he had like a pooled, uh, uh, interest of risk, I suppose, because he represented other people at the station. And in some ways that worked out for me in some ways it didn't, but like every single other attorney that i would have look at it it doesn't matter if they were like oil and gas if they were like

criminal if they were real estate like they would look at my contract and be like i don't know man right well that's like some of this stuff is not that's what helped lead us to this decision because i had the same thing and i think that's part of another discussion about our contracts and just how certain clauses in our contract. We heard that guy, like that national guy, that national, was he like an East Coast blowhard type guy, like talking about our case? Oh, on his podcast? It might have been a radio show, whatever. Yeah. And he's like, yeah, this is just the way that these contracts are written.

And it's written that way, I would imagine, because the expanse of where you can go work is very limited. Yeah. And I talked to people in other companies, and I knew what their contracts were. And not every radio company's got the same boilerplate contract. So there are things you can ask for. I've talked to guys who are – we may talk to them – that are CEOs of companies who have said, yeah, well, when you are in a position of negotiating, you can ask for this, you can ask for this. These are all – but I think that's part of the stuff that just kind of led us to here.

Yeah, yeah. Which we will definitely go over in the future. But now, we're at – okay, so now you file the unfair labor practice. And the next step, I think, is – and while we're trying to do a half-assed show, I got one piece of audio. We don't have an open. We have whatever. We're recording a show every day. Just because you really

wanted to just because it's what we do and we could just sit around talking about all this stuff all day or we could actually let's do two hours or an hour and a half and talk about sports and things we like just can get away from this stuff with

sure i think that's why we're doing it too sure for ourself we're very egotistical we think people need to hear us um or he more than me i'm fine with just kind of laying back in the shadows, but, you know, Jake. All right, so now, how soon after the unfair labor practice charge do we get a lawsuit? August 4th, I think. Yeah, so the charge is filed. The initial charge was filed on July 27th. So we had, what, seven days? And then they filed their lawsuit. Okay, so at first it was the cease and desist.

We did not cease and desist. We didn't do either of those things. And yeah, then the lawsuit comes down. And the paperwork on the lawsuit came to the House on my birthday. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was... You'll never forget. August 5th.

It was nice of them. Didn't one of those go to some prior residents? Yeah, we did joke about that a little bit, that somehow they had my Fort Worth address. So somebody in West Fort Worth over off Camp Bowie definitely got served either a cease and desist or a notification of being sued. I think you said it was some guy who was probably locked on TCU. Yeah.

It's definitely over by TCU's campus. Okay. So now we have a lawsuit. Could be a lady. I don't know. And we have Phillip and we have Matt Brunig on our side. And you guys are talking,

what is the reaction right then? We don't know Liz or Frank yet, correct? Correct. Well, I had literally just pulled into a condo building in Colorado for a vacation. This is totally like just hyper-privileged complaints, but every single time you guys have something bad happen to you,

you're on vacation. I'm on vacation. Yeah. I've noticed that actually. Um, so yeah, I just pulled in there. So I wasn't doing anything with it on that Friday. I think I did talk to Matt. I wasn't doing anything with it on that Friday. I think I did talk to Matt, and we were glad that we had filed the ULPs. But I think it was, I think it didn't really get media attention until maybe somebody had it on Sunday, but I think it mostly was Monday the 7th. And Monday the 7th, I spent, I think I spent the entire day drafting a response because they had nominally asked for a temporary restraining order and a temporary or preliminary injunction.

And we thought that their pleading was probably not meritorious, that they would have a hard time, but also we wanted to get a bunch of stuff in the record about how y'all had been cool and how you had not violated any of the terms of the employment agreements that you had. And so I think I drafted a long and according to the internet extremely bad and unlikely to succeed response

to the TRO where my choice of font was criticized a lot a lot of a lot more editing a lot more criticism than I'm used to from my legal work I I remember we hopped on the phone a couple days later. And I remember this because I was at Legoland. They have this giant Legoland in Goshen, New York. And it was burning hot. And it was just me and the two kids. And I was running around trying to talk to you guys about it. And what I was looking for was the other clauses because they had threatened to sue you on the non-compete and mention the co-worker non-solicit they end up suing you on both of those and then they added in a breach of the confidentiality clause a breach of a non-disparagement

clause a breach of a no recording rule some IP violations stuff like that and so I was looking at the other rules and saying oh well we need to amend our charges because these rules are illegal too. Well, and the pleading also had a verification. Basically, Dan Bennett swore under oath that all the stuff in the petition or the complaint was true, including some very specific allegations that you all had solicited ticket advertisers. Yeah. And later, as we developed evidence, we understood how he developed that idea, but it's definitely nothing he should have put his signature on. And that really shocked me because in everything, like let's say Matt had to get our statement for the NLRB charge or whatever, our responses to the lawsuit.

And I would tell you something and then I would get back to you a couple hours later like, I don't know, maybe it was July 17th, not the 8th. Like I wanted to make sure everything I say, like I thought it was kind of I was under oath if I sent that. Yeah, yeah. And signed my name to it. I would stay up, like, at night, like, am I forgetting something? That was the one that really bent me out of shape because I don't know anything about the other things Matt Bruning is saying. And, you know, I don't understand. I've recently been unfrozen.

So I don't get the— Frightens and confuses you. All the little clauses that Matt says this is illegal. Okay, maybe. I don't know. I'll believe you. You're Matt Brunig. You work for the NLRB.

I knew, though, we didn't come close to soliciting a sponsor. In fact, I had a couple sponsors call me directly that day when they heard about the news and said, what if I cancel my advertising? Will that help your situation? Will that help them come to the table and get you what you want or whatever? I mean, I think Adam Romo, I don't know if this is the time to bring in Adam Romo, I mean, I think Adam Romo, I don't know if this is the time to bring in Adam Romo, but I said, no, do not cancel your advertising. The ticket, with or without us, is a juggernaut, very strong, lots of people listen.

Your business will do well. And it's good for your business. That's my opinion. You can do whatever. I would seriously go through, like, I would go through my DMs, I would go through my emails and be like, dude, am I forgetting something? Yeah, did I? But I know I have a lot going on.

Did I intimate that? No. Like my text and be like, dude, am I forgetting something? Did I have a lot going on? No. And I said, don't cancel. I know you're mad. It was so weird to me. This is just business and it's fine. And then the next thing is, hey, I want to sponsor you.

No, I don't want to do that. I think I might have gotten one that I said we'll call you eventually. And that was it. So that's what, you know, a lot of this doesn't bother me. I think it's business. That actually bothered me because it was like a blatant lie. I mean, in my opinion, it was a lie.

But like Phillip said, I understand where they came up with that eventually. Like, oh, but our sales manager somebody uh canceled and then he came up with the opinion that these guys must tell me telling people to cancel yeah but you know and we'll continue to like introduce like the the timeline of how everybody was involved here i feel like they deal in this world where like sometimes you are just throwing things at the wall like for you and i, we're like, what the fuck? What, lawyers deal with throwing things? Yeah, and clients can sometimes just be like,

okay, well, let's see if you can disprove this. For you and I, we were like, that doesn't make any sense at all. We didn't do that. We were never involved in that. Whereas I feel like the lawyers in general are like, eh, well. Let me push back on the lawyers in in general are like yeah well let me push back on that just a little bit like it's one thing to put in a petition or complaint hey we we suspect that they're violating this non-solicitation provision because how else you know they they assume that's

how you want to make money or whatever to swear to it is an entirely different deal and we can we can discuss why it didn't kill them as bad as it should have later because i think i understand that also now but no it's like from the beginning when i saw that thing i was like uh we we're now holding a bunch more cards than we were before they made these really reckless sworn allegations. No, that's absolutely true. In petitions and other sort of contention pleadings, people put bullshit in there all the time. But once you sign it under oath and attest to it, especially in federal court, in support of a complaint,

that takes it to a whole new level of a big deal. And you've got to be pretty certain that you're factually correct when you make those kind of assertions. Well, but what they did was throw in that one phrase that, you know, raised the question of whether it was even a valid, you know, verification to begin with of saying, to the best of my knowledge. Not making it personal knowledge, not saying based on corporate records I've reviewed, just vaguely to the best of my knowledge. Well, you lawyers have tricks. All we got to do is say that, and we could kind of say anything. Maybe. Okay, so where are we?

We got the lawsuit is now filed. Is the lawsuit and the temporary injunction, you mentioned that, Phillip. Is that the same? No. It's all a part of the same deal. It's a complaint where they had asked for, they later filed

a separate application. They didn't call it an application. I can't remember what they called it. Emergency application for TRO. That's one of the first things I noticed is they waited from the 4th to the 8th to actually seek. And then said it was an emergency. Yes.

So is that a preferred method for obtaining a TRO? I am not getting any legal advice on this podcast. So usually you'll file those two together the same day, right? You'll file that complaint and that TRO, right? Yeah. Usually you'll file those two together the same day, right? You'll file that complaint and that TRO, right? Yeah, you're trying to convince a judge to give you an extraordinary remedy because the house is on fire. And it's got to be done right now. It's got to be done ex parte, meaning without the other side present. And you've got to do it now or else there's going to be hellfire,

brimstone calamity. And when you wait four days, that automatically cuts against that emergency order. To be fair, two of those days were a weekend, but I had the question when I saw the docket of, well, I filed a complaint on Friday if you're going to wait until Tuesday. It was also weird because the temporary restraining order, it would just rehash of the complaint. You didn't need any time to just copy-paste most of it.

Also, I just know this from message boards or whatever, wasn't there also something with that that they didn't inform you of it? Well, what they ultimately did is later that week... That's why it was summarily dismissed right wednesday wednesday or thursday they went down and tried to get an ex parte tro and again the level of bad behavior here is hard to explain to civilians they know who i am i've communicated with them since the cease and desist. My office has communicated with them since they served the lawsuit, and they made no effort to get in touch with me or any of your other possible legal counsel

and went down there to try to get relief without us being there. And ex parte relief, when the other side is not there is the most extreme form of extraordinary remedy and so it's it the judge is going to be asking them which she did have you tried to get in touch with these guys or their counsel do you know who their counsel is which at that point they had to admit they did um and so you know she the the order i think you can read on the docket sheet and it it's i think the language probably will inform most people that she wasn't amused see blake this was our life yeah and this seems stressful yeah they're like telling us all this stuff and we're like is this good yeah and we're idiots we don't understand most of it is it bad um well and the level of

work we had to do very quickly was large because when you when you go for a tro you're essentially saying the house is burning down and when the house is burning it down there's a whole lot of shit to do right so we were forced to get you guys uh under oath in in affidavit form to have as part of the response um to be able to explain to the judge you know very clearly the the be cool strategy that so that's a response to the temporary restraining order? Yeah, we filed two, actually. The first one we filed, we got on file before they went down to try to get the TRO, which, you know, may have helped us, depending on if the judge was able to review it or not. And then the second one was after Liz and Frank were in the case. And I think I'm a pretty decent trial lawyer, and I have certainly done some appellate work, but Liz specializes in appellate work. And so both her form and her method of putting together stuff is superior to mine.

So by the time we got that on file, which was mostly, I would characterize that more as a response to the application for a preliminary injunction. It's primarily to be used in that context. characterize that more as a response to the application for a preliminary injunction. It's primarily to be used in that context. We had a very, very good pleading on file. Now, I got some jokes in the original one that I think probably were pretty good. That I then removed. You didn't remove all of them. I really appreciated it. Okay, so Liz is involved now?

And then Liz had her own jokes. Should we clarify that? The temporary restraining order, preliminary injunction, they're trying to just get an order to stop the podcast. That's what that's all about. That's pretty much it. Is that we're doing irreparable harm. Yes. And that it has to stop now until

we... And they want to stop it right away, before the trial, before anything. Yeah. And it's a super big deal because what they were asking for is a prior restraint of free speech, which is the hardest injunction to get in U.S. law. That's not something that judges ever really want to do. Didn't they also try to get any money we had made thus far from the podcast, or is this later? No, that's in there.

That was in there. Okay. Yeah. And it wasn't that much. It's called disgorgement. Okay. I know you like words. Yeah, and they were going to have you pay all their fees, and it was a lot.

Right. And is there something called tolling that I remember? That's a different issue. Oh, that's a different issue. Okay, so anyway i think that the i think publicity started to really fire up on monday the 7th and i'm pretty sure that's when i met liz and frank no it was uh this following saturday so because here's my recollection of of learning about this i'd been very busy so i wasn't really listening to anything um but my husband knew that you guys had left, started a podcast,

and we went to dinner that Thursday, Thursday the 10th, 9th or 10th, with friends who also listened to it. They were talking about it. And I was like, some of that doesn't sound normal, just from the idea of how the TRO went and things like that. And so I went home and looked at the docket. And, yeah, it was that the TRO was denied on, let's see, on Wednesday, the day after it was filed. You guys filed your initial response on Thursday. And then Saturday, like Friday night, Saturday morning is when I sat down and I had just printed out everything out of curiosity, started looking at it.

And thank you for the compliment, but your writing is very good. Like you said, the house is on fire. I could just tell from looking at it that it was rushed and you guys didn't have like the resources of like a word processing department. And I had thought, based on listening to a couple of your podcasts from Thursday, when we went to dinner and learned about it, that y'all had a huge legal team. So I was like, oh, it's not worth me reaching out or anything. There's a ton of people on this. And when I start looking at the pleadings, I was like, there's only two people. One of them's in DC. The other

one is, I know who Philip Kingston is. And there's clearly no word processing department. So I'm betting there's no other big firms on this. I ran it, you know, by the people I needed to do to see if I could offer. And then I emailed Philip on Saturday. And I got a call or you either picked up or you called me back within like 15 minutes and said, yeah, can you get on a call in three hours? Well, I should clarify that I wasn't really doing a whole lot of work on the like district court stuff. So I think you had written a very large. I did. Right. Yeah, I actually did not intend that to go.

I was just like, let's throw this in there. You had written a very large part of the response. I did write, yeah. I actually did not intend that to go in. I was just like, let's throw this in there. Well, I think on the 7th, we did actually talk to some other lawyers. We started to get offers, essentially, of people who love you and want to help you come to aid us. It was a pretty easy conversation with the two of you to say, look, I can't afford to do all this for free. If we're going to get some help, you know, we it would be valuable. I think essentially in the week following y'all getting sued, we had. I mean, I think you had all of your friends reach out and offer support, but we had lots of lawyers who wanted to come help.

And so assembling a really good legal team actually became kind of easy. When did you come in, Frank? Same day. On the 10th. I don't know what, I just looked at my email. The first email I sent you was on the 10th. I don't know what, I just looked at my email. The first email I sent you was on the 10th. And I knew that you were going to be getting a lot of requests for help on the case. So I did mine a little, I sent you an email where I did it a little differently.

I actually briefed a little bit of the issues for you and sent it to you as kind of a, hey, here are my thoughts on some arguments you can make. And you'd also worked with my son-in-law. He's on the Dallas City Council, so I kind of name dropped. Because I really wanted to be involved. From the very beginning, when I read the complaint, you know, we've often used the David versus Goliath analogy. That's really what it looked like to me. And when I saw the big firms on the signature block for Susquehanna, I really thought my skills would be well suited for that type of a case.

And so I really wanted to be involved. Of course, I like the guys. But it was an opportunity for me, which was really appealing, to put kind of my two loves together, the practice of law and sports radio. And so it was really one that I wanted to be involved in. And so I made that, obviously, in hindsight, a compelling case for you to be involved. All four of us are in this because we're P1s. And of the four of us, you're definitely the biggest. Yeah, yeah.

And I was going to mention this a little later but here's as good spot as any it there was a little bit of a a paradox in my mind because the ticket was was the soundtrack of my young adulthood i set my alarm clock for the first day they went on air with skip bayless um you know so i had been listening literally from minute one of the start of the station uh and i even streamed it when i was in law school um and so you didn't leave with skip no no uh in hindsight maybe I should have. But it put me in an awkward position of advocating for you guys against the station I grew up listening to. And that was sort of hard. And that really came, I was going to mention it later because it really kind of hit home when we were in trial and I was cross-examining Jeff Catlin.

and I was cross-examining Jeff Catlin. But getting back to our timeline, it was August the 10th, I sent you the email, and you got back to me fairly quickly, and we got rolling from there. I think Liz came on the next day. We had a Saturday Zoom meeting to introduce ourselves. Yeah, that's right, because you were involved in my first notes.

I just want to know, and I don't know if I've ever told any of you this, but I reached out to Philip thinking, like, you know, I do appellate stuff. I know this is like a TI thing. Maybe they just need, like, some light help with briefing. That's all I asked you to do. Because it was the urgent nature of it, it quickly spun into something much more involved, which was great, but I had no idea. For me, I remember the first time that at least all three of us, if not all four of us were on a zoom call together. And Dan and I, you know, I mean, we, we play it up a little bit, but we are just not intelligent people.

And we just don't live in the world that you guys live in. We don't live in the real world at all. We've always, as I think groups used to say, like we shop in the candy aisle, like our lives are, we, we get to just entertain. And so I remember the first time that I was on a call with all of you and being like, this is real. Like these people are talking about real stuff. I needed to take notes. I couldn't sleep after that. It was just like, when all of you got involved, it was like, all right, well, these are like incredibly smart people who spend all of their time on stuff like this. And now this, that's when it became like super, super real to me.

Like when I saw Liz's Stanley Cup, I was like, oh, fuck. Like I'm no longer just like talking to Dan and Phillip who, you know, we've been in a bar together at 2 a.m. many times, and it's like, oh, wow, like, we're really, we're involved now, it felt, it felt way different, then Frank called me, and I think I somewhat knew you from Twitter, but it was just, within, like, a span of 48 to 72 hours, it just became very clear to me that it was like, this is going to be a way bigger deal than I thought it was. And the time we ended up putting into it all, I just remember, you know, we talk about,

or Blake says, well, I didn't know. It was every night. Going through all this stuff. But just like, just on the phone with Brunig and Phillip perhaps, responding, what's our response? Well, we wrote our own. Well, then they go through it. Now let's read line by line everything and make sure we double check.

It's just the amount of work you guys do is incredible. It's insane. It's just insane. And we would get the 11 p.m. email from Frank, the 12.30 email from Liz, the 2 a.m. email from Frank, the 1230 email from Liz, the 2am email from Phillip. I'd wake up in the morning and see Matt Brunig somehow wrote a four page whatever.

He did it last night after we got off. 3.30 in the morning. I'm just like, what is happening? How are these people people? They're just robots. We're not. We're lawyers. I did feel bad for you guys on the first call where i met y'all because i we talked once before about briefing and then and i i thought like you know

because i figured we probably wouldn't interact with you guys because you you know it's like philip will handle it we'll just be you know help as needed but then the next day we got on and it was like we don't have any time to mess around we have to talk about what our brief is going to look like and he said you guys were going to be on and so y'all got on we said hi but then yeah we did deep dive into legal discussions yeah so i didn't know this at the time but i formed this opinion as things were happening and then certainly by the end of it all. And I don't know if, Philip, you did this on purpose.

I know I've formed the opinion you're an excellent delegator, but also just that the mix of people we ended up with, everybody seems to have their own style, their own, you're just so different. But then it all blended so well. You know, you got your bulldogs, you got your hey, let's be cautious, you got your I don't know, the

you know, research attorney, peacemaker, you have your you know, yeah, there's just so many, I don't know, your analyst, your you know, I'll face this from a logical point, I'll face this from, well, Yeah, there's just so many. I don't know. You're an analyst. I'll face this from a logical point. I'll face this from, well, yeah, but this is the way it works when you're dealing with a judge. Dude, it's crazy.

Somebody made that meme, but my daughter, as I've told you, has recently gotten extremely into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The turtles work because there are four different personalities. And at the time, I was just like, holy shit. Like, all these four people are like the smartest people I've ever met in my life, but they're all so different. And I don't know. And I guess it's like a team or something. You don't want four of the same kind of hitters or the four, you know.

It was just cool. It was really, really cool to watch in person. Like the collective intellect. No offense, Phillip. You don't want four Phillips, right? You don't want four Brunos. It was just cool. It was really, really cool to watch. Like the collective intellect. No offense, Phillip. You don't want four Phillips, right? You don't want four Brunos. I don't want two Phillips. You need a mix.

I don't want two Phillips. And it's harder to do. I think Phillip did a great job. It's harder to do than anybody can really imagine because any time you get four lawyers in a room talking about an issue, you're going to get five different opinions and i thought i thought that was a worry at first with philip because

you're a very uh opinionated guy you know your way is right also bruning is very similar to that and you're usually you guys are right and i didn't know how you would if you would want other people interjecting their thoughts and opinions into what you already know is right but no you guys absolutely welcome that yeah no no i didn't no i don't welcome that at all and i hate it it's just that i've been trying cases for 25 years and if you got smart lawyers telling you something you know you're being an idiot if you don't listen. So it's not my personality. It's a question of having learned by doing the wrong thing. I think somewhere along the way I introduced you to McCool,

who I had talked to behind your back, and said, hey, I don't know if McCool, did you ask for the introduction? I don't recall how you ever got in touch with Phillip. Yeah, I come from a larger firm, a firm, you know, of equal size or greater than than the one that you guys were facing. And so I said, hey, look, I have certain resources, you know, extra manpower here. If you want to bounce off any ideas or bring in some other heavies. or bring in some other heavies. But what I loved about it is, yeah, I mean,

I concur with what everybody's saying, that it's really easy to have many cooks in the kitchen when it's a bunch of lawyers. Everybody is competitive, and everybody thinks that they're the greatest gift to the profession. Just ask them. They'll tell you. And whatever I saw from the outside looking in, it's just, there was, y'all four made some real magic here. When I think it's an interesting psychological experiment for, I don't know, for lawyers,

because usually when you do have four lawyers on a team, it's something where there's a clear chain of command and there's one person that's going to be managing things and you're just reporting up. And this was very unusual in that it's people you've never worked with before. There's four of them. You and Matt may have worked together before, but Frank and I hadn't worked with either of you. And Philip, your lead counsel, but in practice, it seemed it seems like we all, you know, we were all kind of equally heard. Well, I've managed legal teams before where everybody is junior to me, and, you know, that's a more directive type of situation. I don't think, if nobody tells Matt Brunick what to do, I can, I've already figured that out.

And I don't think I would have been serving our interests at all if I had been directive with you and Frank. Because of your experience level, because of your expertise, like, that just didn't seem like that was going to go my way. Yeah. And I think, yeah, you guys definitely benefited from that. I've never worked with another attorney on anything, but I was doing the NLRB stuff. Does not play nice with others. And if someone had come in and started opining about the NLRB stuff,

I probably would have slipped their throat, you know, but for the rest of it, everyone would seem very respectful of my NLRB stuff because it was nothing I had ever done before. I'm not sure I could have told you what NLRB stood for when we started this thing. And so I told myself at the very beginning, You know, I told myself at the very beginning, you know, I'll let Matt and Philip handle the NLRB stuff. I'll handle, you know, in courtroom litigation type things. And so I tried to stay in my lane. And I think most of us did that.

And, you know, I think that's why the team gelled so well is that we did our own thing and we didn't try to encroach upon the others. I made Philip hug me after the mediator left the room one day though, just to calm things down. Well, you know, in any certain scenario, like I said, when you get four lawyers together,

you're going to get five opinions. And there was friction at times. But, you know, we all, I think we all understood that we had one goal and that was to, to get you out of this morass that you found yourself in. And I think, I think we all did a good job of putting our normally large egos aside. Um, you know, most of the time there were, there were, there were moments of friction, but a lot of friction. I think the issue is that not everything you're dealing with is legal. Once it gets to strategy, that's where we don't have to find lanes. And so that's where I think we would rub a little bit. And there's no secret. Like Philip and I butted heads a lot. And I will say, I don't think, Philip, if it had been a different case, I would have had as different of opinions to you as I did in this case. But I'm not used to representing individuals,

especially individuals that do not have legal experience. So I just came into it once I was not just going to be briefing and I was directly going to be, you know, interacting with clients. I was just wanted to be so cautious about making sure you guys always knew, even if it's a 1% chance, there is the absolute worst case scenario from any given decision, and you guys decide what you want. And so, Phillip, since you tend to have a more aggressive approach, I was even more cautious in this case than I am in any other. But now we just sit on the couch next to each other. I know. Now we're best friends. Yeah, no, that was definitely, I don't know.

I mean, I probably tend more towards Liz's approach to life other than the fact that I guess I recently, like, nuked my career. But, yeah, like, she would tell us, like, hey, here's what could happen. And I'm like, damn, dude, that's probably what's going to happen. Well, it did seem like everybody had confidence that it was over 50% chance that if it went to trial that we would prevail. I don't know.

I felt like that felt like, at least, the prevailing thought. But, you know, the other thing about it that if it didn't you never know you got a judge you got this circuit all that certain judges and it could end up this could be a years-long process and that was a worst case scenario painted by you at times well and also yeah not and not and this is another kind of gray area of a lot of the advice that i felt like i was giving wasn't really necessarily legal. It was based on y'all's, you know, thought of, we didn't want to be in this position. We didn't want to be fighting a lawsuit. And so a lot of it was tailored to not whether you would win, but even if you win, what is your life going to be like for the next year, year and

a half in order to get there? Yeah it was it was tough for me too because i was just i was constantly like trying to remain dan's ally but also reminding him like dude i got a lot going on right now like the tom brady i'm 45 i got a lot of shit going on i was like dude i'm i don't know man like i gotta i gotta take both these kids to school every morning. We're going to court. We may have to keep doing this for another six months, 12 months, 18 months. And you know, I think everybody was really cool about it, but there were days where I would want to call Phillip and Matt and be like, I'm sorry, you guys think I'm a huge pussy, but... You did that three times. I feel like we need to kind of just count our winnings here

and feel good about what we did. There were just times where I felt... I don't know. It was a tough couple months for me. I think this is as good a time as any of letting your listeners know what the dynamic was because we're kind of skirting around the dynamic here but the dynamic was that um you know philip and matt were kind of scorched earth burn the boats fuck these guys

let's let's take these guys down well and yet at times Matt and I would be more aligned because we both have a pellet background. That was interesting. Liz and I had a separate channel of communication. And Liz was like the mom in the room of a bunch of kids.

Do you guys have any idea what you're doing? Yeah, she was the one that tried to drag everybody back to some form of reasonableness. And somehow, I just kind of landed in the middle on most things.

And I was sort of the Switzerland of trying to, you know, yeah, I see both sides, but maybe, you know. Well, this came from your mouth, Liz, so I don't think I'm go ahead i'm not this is

not something that sprung from my head i believe you describe yourself as having yappy dog energy oh i i am i have anxiety for sure yeah yeah that actually came in uh quite helpful for me uh in court yeah yeah jake is like because i can tell him like you are having a panic attack if you're having a full-blown panic and i was like you need because i know and he'd said it's stomach stuff for him and so i was like just tell the judge that you need to go to the restroom she'll let you go and he got up and went to go vomit that did happen twice you literally vomited in the courtroom i think you're not in the courtroom in the court bathroom yeah had to throw the the tie so it's probably over the shoulder yeah it's probably worth going into a little bit of like the actual law um governing

the case so i've been advising y'all for a long time and i've always thought that the the uh boilerplate susquehanna restrictive covenants in the employment agreement had some severe problems. Not maybe totally unenforceable, but essentially they were going to be tough to enforce. Now, you guys got a good dose of what McCool said earlier. You know, you can beat the rat, but maybe not the ride. They can put you through a lot of pain. But we felt really confident on the language of the contract we were going to litigate. And then I think that, you know, Matt's advice from the standpoint of the NLRA was that there was even a different way.

So under Texas law and federal procedural law, we thought we had a really good defense. And then Matt thought that the separate track of going to the NLRB was going to create a different defense, which it has and continues to. But then the actual lawsuit itself was so odd that it really boosted my optimism about prevailing because filing this in federal court is inexplicable. Texas state law concerning injunctions for violation of restrictive covenants and employment agreements is entirely more friendly to corporations than federal law is.

So they didn't need to file in federal court. And then beyond that, once they filed in federal court, you guys live in Tarrant County, which is in the Fort Worth division of the Northern District. And if they had directed their case toward the Fort Worth division, they probably would have gotten a judge that was more friendly to employers. And if they'd filed in state court in Tarrant County, we're probably, I mean, maybe there's no podcast. I don't know. Yeah, let me jump, if you don't, I'm so sorry. Let me just jump in for a quick second for

two things. One is I need to echo what Liz said about disclaimers also, especially when we're talking about the law. This is not legal advice. I'm here in my personal capacity. I forgot to say that at the very beginning about an hour ago. Too late. Too late. You haven't given any advice yet, so you're good. But to Philip's point, you know, I know you guys get a lot of emails from people saying that they're day one DFs and I've been listening from day one. But I think and I'll have to go back and look at my order confirmation. I became a paid subscriber probably within a couple of days of the complaint coming down for exactly the reasons that Philip was talking about. I mean, I just I read the complaint and, you know, I respect that firm was talking about. I mean, I just, I read the complaint and, and, you know, I, I respect that firm quite a bit. And, uh, if this, my guess is that this was, um, client

driven and the client was like, look, these guys represent sort of an existential threat to, um, our, uh, our, our radio host contracts and our dynamics. And so we got to throw the suit out there. But my optimism went up quite a bit. I think, like, Philip, like what you're saying, once I got into the meat of the complaint. So was I circumspect enough on that, Dan? I'm going to have to look that word up to figure out how to answer it. So where are we? frank and i got involved and then i don't think what happened next i mean essentially the the

next thing that happens is we're preparing for the preliminary injunction was that the next day was that that sunday it was pretty quick it was or was it a week we had a week we had a week to saturday right yeah yeah and uh so yeah that all during that period of time this is early august yeah this is the yeah i came in on the 12th and then i guess that next week we were doing the briefing mid-august i mean that whole week was us doing the briefing to try to get the judge up to speed on the legal issues. Now, we got very fortunate that this judge is somebody that I've practiced in front of for a long time. I think Frank also, because she used to be a state court judge, and I think she was actually an associate judge in the state court system when I first got licensed, she knew these these issues but then we you know we were coming down to trying needing to go to court and put Dan and Jake on the stand and so that involves

with people who have not done this before quite a lot of prep and woodshed weekend we we do call this taking the wood shedding or taking the witness to the woodshed. And I hope it's not as unpleasant as that sounds, but it's not great. And we spent two solid days getting you all prepped. That's where we had the whole going through your history at the ticket and all the things that have transpired, particularly in an HR context. The three of us were just looking at each other from time to time going, I can't believe that's real and it's going to sound so good on the stand. At the same time, all the things that were in your declaration, we're trying to get... I'm thinking of it of like of like well how do we get this in as evidence versus just it's great that that's the story but yeah and i i think it's

important to i i think philip kind of skipped over something what we're doing what we're really doing here is within a week week and a half period preparing a case for trial um because the the in this in this area of the law the outcome of the preliminary injunction hearing is likely the outcome of the case and so we're having to get our briefing in order because we had philip said they filed an initial brief but then we had to file an amended brief. So we had to get all the briefing in order. And then we had to marshal our evidence to get ready for the hearing and then get the guys ready. And so we literally the lawyers literally through the week of the 12th.

That's all we did was just hammer out a brief and then get our stuff together to prepare for the hearing and then get the guys in on Saturday and Sunday to woodshed them to prepare them for their testimony on Monday. All right, like Frank said, it was time to get Dan and Jake ready for the stand. That's a lot of the meat of the next episode, as well as how Dan's conscious shifted the entire case

and got the dream team in a little bit of hot water with the judge. Now the next episode is not free. You will need to sign up for our Patreon to hear about prepping Dan and Jake for the stand and we hope you do so. Until then, Adios, mofo.