Good morning. Path to Warren podcast. This is Matt Warren. It’s episode 338. It’s a beautiful Tuesday morning. About 7:56am headed into work. I wanted to show share with you. We had two cases that came in, and we got word that the LOA and the retainer are on the way in. I wanted to share with you a little tip that I shared recently with our newest fire protection engineer. She had talked to this client last week, and he seemed interested in her work or in hiring her on this case. So she got the information for a conflict check. And we sent the client a letter of agreement and the retainer request of $2,000. Well, here it is, Monday. And she asked me what she should do because the client emailed her Sunday night, wanting to meet and talk with her on I wanted to talk with her on Monday, not meet yet, but just talk with her on Monday. And she was like, well, she was asking, well, I haven’t gotten the letter of agreement back, and I haven’t gotten the retainer check. So what should I do? Should I talk with him? And I said, yeah, in this situation, yes, this is a major, large loss. And he has obviously liked what he heard the first time, but he probably has thought about some things that you’ve said, and he wants to ask you some more questions. He might have some more information. And I said, but what I would do is I would just provide value. I said, you provide as much value as you can on the phone. And she was like, oh, yeah, that’s a good idea. And I said, well, maybe there’s a code that he needs to know, or maybe there’s a standard. 1.2.7.6-H whatever the standard is, maybe there’s something like that that you can share with him that he can go and look and find. Yeah, you’re kind of giving it to him for free right now. However, there’s a fine line because he has to have an expert the attorney has to have an expert to speak to the issue. So just because you’re sharing with him everything that you know about how this works and how that works, and this is the standard, and that’s the code that he violated or whatever, just because you’re sharing that with them doesn’t mean that he is not going to hire you. So my dad told me this story one time. He said, whenever you go to the doctor, he’s not going to hold back information. The doctor is going to sit there and say, yeah, when I do this surgery, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to go right here and I’m going to cut and I’m going to cut right here, and I’m going to pull this back, and I’m going to sew this up right here, and I’m going to put this in there, and I’m going to put that over there, and I’m going to move this out of the way, and then I’m going to put you on this medicine and this medicine. And he shares everything, all the steps that he’s going to do and everything that he knows about the issue he’s going to share with you. And when it comes time for the surgery, what are you going to do? You’re going to still call the doctor. You’re going to go to the doctor and get the surgery. So let’s treat our client the same way. Let’s don’t hold back any information. Let’s share with them everything that we know about the case or the situation and don’t hold back anything. We used to have a person working with us who was hesitant about sharing how he takes photos of his cars. He does car wreck cases. We call it collision reconstruction. And he was hesitant on sharing how he takes photos. He starts on the left side, then he goes to the front, then he goes to the right side, then he goes to the back, and then he goes at angles and all the angles of the car. And I was trying to get him to write a blog about that. I think that’s a neat technique. It’s content that our clients would like to know, and it was like pulling teeth. He didn’t want to do that because he felt like he was giving away his trade secret. He was giving away too much information. Competitors would find out how he takes pictures of cars and the client could take the photos that way. But that’s not the truth. There’s nothing proprietary about how he’s taking photos of cars. So the lessons here provide value first. Give all the value as much as you can. First upfront. That way, you’re not holding anything back. And the client feels comfortable when it comes time for the case to happen or when it comes time for trial or to write a report or do an inspection. They’re still going to need your help because they can’t testify that it was done this way or it should have been done that way or somebody didn’t maintain it properly. They need help. Just because they haven’t sent in a letter of agreement or the retainer doesn’t mean we need to hold back information. Now, there are situations where we have what’s called a desk review. And in order to get paid sometimes on that, we need to get money upfront before we are going to do the work and disclose our findings and our experts opinions. That’s different. This is a large loss case where she would essentially be involved for many hours looking at many, many documents and looking at depositions and things like that. It’s totally different than the case where they’ve got three photos from a machine that hurt somebody four years ago and the machine is no longer available. And they want to know our opinion on if this has subrogation potential or not. That’s totally different so we could talk about that later but I hope you have a wonderful day. It’s going to be a beautiful day today. I had just a great time last night. My wife had dinner plans with some of her old high school friends and so Maddie and I, we had a nice little dinner and after dinner she wanted to go and dance with her new ballet point shoes. She wanted to dance and she didn’t want to get in the shower. She wanted to keep dancing and I was cleaning up the dishes and so I just kept saying, Maddie I’m so proud of your grades. I want to give you ten more minutes. Okay, she said, oh, wow. Thanks. She just kept dancing so just a good time. Life is good today. I hope you have a wonderful day and remember mom always says make your contribution. Thanks for letting me share. Bye.