← Emerging Litigation Podcast
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- [00:03]
A
Hello and welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Hagee. Today we're going to have a conversation about a post pandemic practice pivot. That's four P's in a row. So it's a pivot in how litigation as project management as needed and what companies without in house litigation council are missing. So for a long time in house meant a company had crossed a certain size threshold. That means they had enough contracts to deal with, enough regulatory touch points, enough disputes or threatened disputes to justify bringing in or building a legal department. But an alternate but an alternative has emerged. Companies keeping their core teams lean while bringing in senior legal judgment on a part time flexible basis. In this episode I get to speak with Jonathan Cebloni, founder of Cebloni Advisory LLC about why that model works and what it looks like when the lawyer is, in his words, a fractional general counsel and a litigation manager. Cebloni's resume reads like a tour through the high end litigation market. He spent roughly 25 years at global firms including Nixon Peabody and DLA Piper. You've heard of them, where he held leadership roles and built practices focused on complex commercial and private funds disputes. His work has spanned the financial services world, private equity funds, hedge funds, institutional investors, and often he was involved in cross border matters. And for the record, his background, his educational background. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about his Italian background because that's just wrong these days. He studied government at Harvard and earned his J.D. from Boston College Law school. And with that, here is my interview with Jonathan Sabloni. Hope you enjoy it. You know, I've known you for years and I'm like, but I've never really thought about how to say your last name. So I am half Italian, so I go between Jonathan Sablone, which I think is what you do, or Sablone. That requires me to lift my left shoulder.
- [02:18]
B
Shoulder. It's, it's Sabloni. Sabloni, yeah. Almost like an eye.
- [02:25]
A
People do like to hear what other things that lawyers do and end up doing. And you have a, an interesting path, I think. And so I just want to spend just a couple minutes on that. So what did, when I knew you, you were litigation, big firm. Now you're doing something completely different. So talk to me about that path.
- [02:47]
B
Sure. And first of all, Tom, thank you for the opportunity to spend time with you and your audience today. I appreciate it. Of course, I spent 25 years at large global law firms at Nixon Peabody and then at DLA Piper. And I had leadership roles in both of those firms. I was the co chair of the commercial complex commercial disputes group at Nixon Peabody, which was the largest practice group in the firm. We had about 180 lawyers across the various offices, geographies. And then when I went to DLA Piper, I founded and co chaired the private funds dispute team there. And we had a cross border team in all the major financial markets in the world doing financial disputes, particularly private fund disputes. And it was great. I enjoyed my practice. I loved my clients, I loved the work I did. And then Covid hit, right? And I'm trying to think. It was March of 2020 when I was at the La Piper. We all got unceremoniously kicked out of the office and told we can't return. We had one day where we could show up and steal all the technology we could carry to take home, of course. And you know, people forget, I mean, we didn't do Zoom before that really. Or at least I didn't. You had these conference rooms with these tricked out, you know, ridiculously expensive multimillion dollar cameras and microphones if you had to do a video. And I did that. That was March of 2020. I did it for another year and a bit. And what I discovered is as much as I loved practicing law, I despised practicing law by Zoom. It was not for me. I tend to, I'm a people person. I like to read people, I like to be in the room with them. I like to, in the courtroom. I want to see not just what the judge is doing. You know, how is the court officer reacting to what you're saying? That oftentimes gives you a lot of insight into what, whether what you're saying makes any sense. How are the other participants reacting? How's the, if the other clients in the room, how is he or she reacting? And you know, you, you need to read that room. In my view, to be an effective litigator, effective trial lawyer. And so I had a trial by zoom. I had oral arguments by Zoom depositions. The thing that finally did it in for me is I had a 12 hour Zoom mediation. And if you've ever been in a mediation, most of the mediation time is spent sitting with your client waiting for the mediator to come back. And believe me, awfully long time on Zoom. And around that time, this is in the now, you know, early 2021. So I've been doing it about a year remotely. I really wasn't all that happy. And one of my clients was a private equity fund that did litigation finance, Delta Capital and they came to me and said, hey, we just closed on our first fund, and we're looking to raise our next fund, and we'd love you to come over and be our global head of originations. You know, go out and find deal flow for the fund. And in this case, deal flow means litigation. Go find cases we can invest in. Which really melded well with my network because, you know, I was, I had a great large practice at the time, and I was, you know, I don't know if we still use the word rainmaker, but that was a big part of my job, was go out and develop business. And I'll tell you, Tom, almost any other time, if you had asked me, if he had asked me that question, you know, do you want to come over? I would have said, and have said in the past, no, I'm. No way. I'm happy doing what I'm doing. But I remember that conversation. I said, well, well, let's talk about it. And, you know, let's talk about it as the road to predition. Usually, you know, it's, it's at that point, you know, that you're, you're not happy. And I went to. So we started talking, and it was an opportunity I decided I'd take a chance on. I, I, it was something different. I was looking to do something different at that point in my career. I remember very well, I went to the head of the dla, Piper, who's a friend and a former partner of mine at Nixon, and I said, I was kind of scared of this conversation, to tell him, you know, I didn't want to look like I was abandoning them. And he said, oh, you have to go do it. And I laughed and I said, gee, I thought you were going to try to convince me to stay.
- [07:06]
A
Here's a box.
- [07:07]
B
Yeah, exactly. And I remember his words quite well. It was Frank Ryan. And he said, who's still the, the global chair at the la. And he said, you know, these opportunities don't come along very often, and they don't come along very often for litigators. And then he said, and besides, what's the worst that's going to happen if it doesn't work out? The door is always open. You can come back. And, you know, that resonated with me in a way that I can't quite explain. It was a safety and a security and a statement like that that made me feel like I want to take this risk. And I did. So I went over to Delta in May of 2021. I spent the first Couple of years as the global head of origination, doing exactly what I just mentioned, which is originating deal flow. My responsibilities shifted around the summer of 2023. I became the chief litigation officer for the fund. And my role was then to monitor the litigations that we've invested in and try to monetize them. So essentially working with the lawyers and the claimants we had funded. And it was a blast, you know, being in court, it's fun being in court at trials and other things where you're not the one having to do all the work.
- [08:22]
A
Right? Yeah.
- [08:23]
B
Getting through mediations, working on strategy. You know, we couldn't control the litigation, but we could certainly try to help. And, you know, working through strategy, working on settlement concepts. I had a lot of fun doing that. Probably did my job too well, because by the two summers later, so this past summer, you know, that that fund is, you know, basically almost done. You know, there's bits and pieces of it, but certainly there was not need for me to stay there and continue to do the work I've been doing. So I transitioned out last summer and I did something I've never done in my life, which is I took some time off, what the Brits might call a sabbatical, if you want to be about it. And, you know, I come from a very working class background. First generation college graduate. My father didn't graduate high school, so first generation high school graduate, I guess. And I'd always worked and it hit me like my first reaction was, I have to do something right away. And then it hit me. You spent, you know, 25 years at global law firms as an equity partner. You spent almost five years now, you know, at a major private equity fund. You've done well for yourself. You can afford to take some time and decide what the next path is going to look like. So I did that. It's a wonderful summer. You can only golf and, you know, go to the beach so often though. And by the fall, I realized I, I need to do something like this is right. Like I, I am not, I'm not retiring. This is, this is. I don't know what people do when they retire.
- [09:54]
A
I would be, I don't know, I would probably end up in a hostage situation.
- [09:58]
B
But, yeah, bored out of my mind. So I thought about staying in the funding industry and the right role just wasn't there. And the industry is in flux right now. I thought about going in house, but, you know, one of my very good friends who's still at DLA made a comment to me that Stuck, which is, he said, do you really want to report to somebody?
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A
Right. That's a very different thing.
- [10:22]
B
Yeah, he's like, you know, you spent 30 years doing this so you wouldn't have to report to anybody. And then I thought about going back and practicing and what, what I finally came to is that whole situation where I said I had a blast in the courtrooms and you know, working with the trial lawyers, it made me realize that's what I enjoy doing. That's what gets me up in the morning. So I thought about going back to a large firm. The reason I didn't is pretty straightforward. When I left DLA Piper in 2021, so five years ago, almost to the day, my billing rate was twelve hundred dollars an hour, which I thought was obscene and still think it's obscene.
- [11:03]
A
It is.
- [11:03]
B
But rates of the last five years at major firms have doubled and tripled. So my rate today would be somewhere around 2,500 an hour. If I ordered a global firm and I had a nice practice, I could go out and rebuild it and I could fund find cases that will support that rate structure. But as a practical matter, I would be very limited. I would have been very limited in what I could do. What types of matters you can take on, what types of clients you can take on, you know, how your everyday world is going to be shaped based on that entire structure of the case has to have a certain value. It has to support not just your fee structure, but younger partners who are very expensive, associates are very expensive. And again, I met with a whole bunch of people and friends, colleagues, networks, people in my network. And I, to a person, the ones who are at large firms, the ones who had left and done their own thing were absolutely ecstatic about it. And the ones who were in, I was surprised that almost to a person they would tell you I have a two year plan, I have a three year plan, I have a five year plan to transition out people in my age cohort and not transition to nothing, but go do my own thing and go do something different. Right? And so I put some thought into it and I said, why not, you know, launch something on your own. I couldn't do the work I did before and we'll talk about that a little bit later. But I certainly have the same experience, the same brain, the same personality at now today in a one person shop at a much lower billing rate than I would have at another place billing at 2500 an hour. So yeah, you know, I took, it took a few months to launch to get it set up. I wanted to do it right. I mean, it takes longer than people think. I wanted the right business plan. I wanted to make sure I could have a client base to support it. I, you know, you got to become an IT expert. You got to, yes, got to create a website. You got to deal with domain names, you got to deal with banking and finance expert, create operating accounts. It takes time, but I put it all in place. And I launched at the very beginning of March, just last month. It's been just over my month anniversary. And I gotta tell you, it's been the best thing I've ever done. It's, I'm ecstatic about it. I'm enthusiastic. I get up every morning excited to actually do work.
- [13:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [13:19]
B
Feeling I haven't had in a bit. So that's how I ended up where I am today. And I couldn't be happier how things are going, at least in the first month. You know, I created benchmarks for myself and, you know, in month one, I already hit the benchmark I had set for month six. So I'm ahead of schedule and I'm extending. Really excited about it.
- [13:38]
A
So, you know, so there was a, there was a global catastrophic event that made you, you know, take a look at everything. And sometimes it takes something like that. Sometimes it takes a sledgehammer to like, wait a second, what path? I didn't know I wanted to get off this path. And, and then you, you know, you pulled together your various experience and your network and you had resources that you could, you could do this. And, you know, taking the time off, I think, you know, is head clearing. But so there's a lot of good lessons in there. But also I hear, you know, what you said about having a plan, you just don't go out and hope for the best, but the fact that you've got a plan, you're sticking to it, I think that's, that's great. So any, for any, any lawyers out there thinking about, you know, doing something different, you're still, but you're still lawyering in a very different capacity. Now you mentioned litigation financing, and that's something we can talk about another day on another podcast. But what we're going to talk about today is, you know, kind of your services, which I think are interesting. When you talk about being a fractional, fractional GC and the word fractional, I don't know where nobody was ever that before. It was usually a contract, so and so. But fractional seems to be the hip thing to do rather than Saying part time, but so being a fractional GC or what, what, what does that entail? I mean, tell me about how, how that works. You also use the word litigation manager when we, when we spoke before. So how do you, what do you do and how does a company know they need one?
- [15:10]
B
Yeah, let me, let me, let me provide a little bit of context before I answer the direct question. And what I'd say is a lot of the work I've done over the years, work for, you know, private funds, that was my primary area. So hedge funds, private equity funds, some institutional investors, liquidators, all the rest. And then I also did a lot of work for companies that weren't gigantic, you know, that were more, you know, mid market corporations. And a lot of those entities, if not the vast majority, do not have in house legal groups. You're working directly with, you know, the fund managers, the CFOs, you know, the, the business executives within the companies. And even if they do have an in house legal group, you know, we're not talking, you know, you're not, you're not, you're not representing Amazon. You know, we've got teams of lawyers internally. A lot of them might have one person might have a general counsel, might have a small team. And in most cases that team very rarely includes a litigation attorney. They're usually former corporate attorneys, deal attorneys, or you know, attorneys who have specific experience in that industry in the regulatory space. And so it was just a different practice when you're working with people who are not lawyers or who are not lawyers that understand the skill set of litigation. So that was the context. And I all I began to realize, you know, these funds, these companies, they're not going to go out. It doesn't make sense economically for them to go out and hire a litigator to be in house. They don't have enough litigation to make that worthwhile. In most cases, they don't have enough legal work to make hiring a full time lawyer worthwhile. So I began to think through how does it, how would it work? How can I provide value outside those entities as opposed to being in house in those entities? And I have some experience doing that. I did have a few clients where I essentially acted as general outside counsel. They would come to me with all their problems and I would, you know, if it was litigation, I could handle it. If it was something else, I would farm it off to somebody else within the firm or if we couldn't do it, I'd find them a lawyer to do it. And so what it allows the companies to do is to retain me or somebody like me to handle a host of issues on the litigation front. If they have litigation, and if we'll just talk about litigation for a minute, they really do need in many instances, somebody to manage that litigation for them. Because non litigators or non lawyers, this isn't a world they swim in, and nor should they, and nor would that. They don't always understand the advice that's being given by the lawyers. They don't know enough to question some of the advice that the lawyers are giving them. And they may be getting great advice. But anybody who's been a business executive knows knowing the right questions to ask can often change the direction of what the advice looks like. Knowing where to push back, I mean, when your lawyer says we have to do X, we have to do this type of discovery to get to this point, most clients say okay. But you might knowing to push back, say okay, what's the cost point of that? What if we did it this way? Or what if we changed this slightly? Or what if we took fewer depositions? What if we tried to limit our production to this subset of issues that can have huge cost savings and in many cases not impact the overall strategy. And it's not that the outside lawyers are missing it or they're trying to generate fees for fee generation itself. It's just they have a view of the case and again, if it's not pushed back on, you're going to go with that view. So I think that managing litigation generally is something that's not a good idea left to a non lawyer or even a non litigator in a fund or a company. On that point, I'd say the other thing we can do, or I can do or somebody like me can do is also monitor the legal spend and the invoices that are issued. You know, most corporate executives, they might look at a bill and say that looks high, that looks large, or that looks small, that looks right, it doesn't look right. But might not have the skill set to say, okay, an associate worked on this for 12 hours. That's not the appropriate amount of time. Or maybe that's the appropriate amount of time for associate in year two or three at a lower billing rate. But it's not the appropriate amount of time for an associate in year seven or eight at a much higher billing rate. Then that that can be a sign that either, you know, the case isn't being handled efficiently internally in terms of who's doing the work, or it could be a Sign that the attorney, him or herself, or not being efficient. So knowing the right questions to ask about bills and billing and monitor the spend, make sure you're on budget and that your, your, your legal spend is aligning with your strategy is something that is hard even for a CFO to do because again, the money aspect is one thing, but the skill set that's being brought to bear is something a little different. So I'm doing that now for a couple of clients and it's, it's really working. Well, I'll just say this. I've been talking about litigation. It goes beyond that. I mean, you can, you can hire people like me to do other things for you. You know, contract management, contract review, you know, contract drafting, corporate governance, compliance. You know, even though I was a litigator for, you know, basically 30 years, there was obviously a, a lot of legal work I did and I worked with other partners in my firm on that touch those other areas. And I know enough to be able to, you know, help in those areas. And I know enough. I know what I don't know, right. If you don't know enough about an area, you know enough to bring in somebody else who does. So I think that what that does for these companies or these funds is it gives them the ability to dedicate a certain amount of money towards their, their legal spend. It gives them effectively an in house general counsel or in house lawyer where they would have had one and they can pay for that or the fee structure can be whatever they choose. They can, you know, they can pay purely by the hour. The nice thing about having your own firm is I'm a fee committee of one. I can, I can, I can approve whatever fee I want to approve. You know, I can do project based billing, I can do blended billing on cases, depending on what side of the V you're on. We can do mixed, you know, mixes of, you know, contingency and lower billing rates or all of one or all of the other. So it gives you the flexibility to sit down on the client and say, here are your legal needs. What do you want to spend on it? How do we structure a fee agreement that works for you? And when you're talking about litigation, you're taking that role. Even if it's, especially if it's a large case where you're using one of the firms we've been talking about, say 2500, $3000 an hour, you're taking that management function from a lawyer who is going to bill you at that rate and putting it on Somebody like me at a much lower rate. And that alone is money. And it frees those lawyers up to just go do what they've been hired to do, which is go try the case, go handle the case. Don't worry about project management. I'll stop there. Other than to say that's kind of the in house GC piece, it's a little bit different and it's. When you're dealing with multi jurisdiction litigation, especially big cases.
- [22:30]
A
Right.
- [22:30]
B
Cross border cases the clients might have and there's a different value set to add there. But in terms of the fractional gcps, that's, that's where the value is and that's what I've been doing since I launched.
- [22:41]
A
Yeah, I mean it sounds like it's a, it's a less expensive way. As you say, rather than hiring a litigator in house, you're bringing this big law firm experience and then all this litigation experience and you've, you've billed, you have built and managed teams. So when you see what another firm is doing, you're bringing a lot more to the equation. As you said, they don't necessarily even know what to ask or where to push back. So I would think that would be incredibly valuable. And then, you know, you mentioned being, would you say a fee committee of one. And we had talked about our, our Italian heritage. My grandfather was an Italian, was a, he was from Calabria, Italy, came to the United States, became one of the first lawyers, Italian American lawyers in Ohio. He said that. I don't know but, but he could have been, I don't know, I have to look it up. But yeah, he would, he worked in a small town practice, he and his son and one of the fees, sometimes they would just, he would, he would barter, he would accept fruits and vegetables and it's how my family ended up with a Chihuahua.
- [23:52]
B
I can't wait to hear this story, Tom.
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A
Well, that Chihuahua is a whole other story. But he's, we would never have picked a Chihuahua. But he was a, he was a badass. I have to say that he didn't, he punched way above his weight and he had many, many near death experiences. But anyway, that's it, that's another story. But I could see, you know, the value that you would bring to an organization. So tell me. Just about. So you also said there are other things just besides having litigation. They could have an increased need for litigators experience or just a general attorney's experience if they have increased compliance and regulatory needs and things like that. So some aspect of their legal. Their legal needs increases, you know.
- [24:42]
B
Right.
- [24:43]
A
It's not just litigation.
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B
It's not just litigation. I mean, I, you know, I'll give you an example. Well, on the litigation side, then, generally when we say litigation, it doesn't always mean there's an active case that's been filed and you're fighting.
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A
Right.
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B
It, it's. A lot of it is pre. Dispute. Yeah. And resolution.
- [24:59]
A
So, for example, avoiding litigation or.
- [25:01]
B
Yeah, right. So example. One of my best clients over the years, I had a fee deal with them. We used to call it the all you can eat bucket. They paid me a, you know, a flat fee every month. And I made myself and my team available to their team to answer legal questions. And what. Here's why that was important. They had a group, this is a, it was a fund. They had a group of asset managers who would encounter problems along the way. And the problem would be every time one of the asset managers would call the lawyer, the lawyer would send a bill. And over time, you know, you begin to realize that's not going to work. Because now, now, now, you know, the legal, the, the management's getting these gigantic legal bills going. Why are we calling the lawyers all the time? So it discouraged the asset managers from calling the lawyers. Well, when you discourage people from calling lawyers, they make decisions that get them in trouble and end up in disputes. And those disputes end up being much more expensive than if they just called lawyers. So the concept was, with the all you can eat bucket, it now encourages your team to seek legal advice because the cost is the same whether they call or they don't call. And it got them to a point where suddenly the number of disputes drastically was reduced. And if they still had disputes, they weren't as massive or as, or as big or as damaging as they could have been. So that's just an example of where, you know, you can limit your legal spend but absolutely mitigate your risk of being in a problem situation down the line. And that, that same model can apply not just to litigation and disputes, but can apply to corporate governance. Governance can also apply to contracts, can apply to regulatory issues, compliance issues. So, you know, the price points might be a little bit different depending on what you're looking to do. It doesn't have to be all you can eat necessarily. It can be, look, I'll give you, you know, you'll get X hours of time, you know, for this price or whatever you want to do. I mean, you can, you can, there's a million different ways you can slice that those fee agreements. But the point being you want your, you want your client to be able to reach out to you without worrying that every time they pick up the phone, they're going to get a bill for $1,000 or $3,000. That's right. Yeah. Right.
- [27:27]
A
Yeah. It's like going to the doctor for a checkup. I'd like to get this taken care of early. Well, but speaking of litigation, though, or I guess just a complex dispute before litigation, because you had talked too about handling, you know, it gets really complicated when, when a dispute is cross border. And so, and then, and then so you talk to me a little bit about that. And then, so say, say how do you, how do you assist companies in that regard? That's beyond what you've already said.
- [27:59]
B
So you're right. When you're dealing with cross border, it's a little bit different. As background, a very large piece of my practice was cross border. When I was at Nixon Peabody in DLA Piper, a lot of that work came in from the UK and a lot of it came in from the offshore jurisdictions that have applied commonwealth law, you know, the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, the Channel Islands. And so it changes the dynamic a little bit in that first of all, they tend to be larger disputes, just by definition, because, you know, people aren't filing cross border disputes over smaller matters. But also in most of those cases, there are multiple, most of those matters, there are multiple cases going on. And that's, by the way, that's not just cross border. It can be in the US as well. When you have a dispute, sometimes it spawns other disputes that are related. So for example, I might have handled a case where there was a liquidation in the British Virgin Islands, but it's spot bond litigation in the US in the UK and Ireland, wherever. And you might have three or four matters going on around the world, or you might have one or two or three matters going on in the US in this domestic case where you file a lawsuit, someone else, they decide they're going to sue you in a different jurisdiction. And the problem there is you have multiple sets of lawyers who are doing what's right for the client in the jurisdiction in which they reside. But what they're not doing is they're not necessarily effectively coordinating with everybody else. So you don't want to be in a position where your lawyer in the US Takes a position, say on a discovery matter that impacts the disclosure they have to do in the UK And I've seen this happen in the, in the e. Discovery in the discovery world, where, you know, lawyer in US makes a decision or has to do something, and suddenly you have to collect data from the uk and collecting that data from the, the UK implicates, you know, privacy regulations in Europe or in the UK or wherever. So having you want somebody to manage that, that process, or as the Brits would say, process. And you know, by the way, I speak. I speak British English quite well.
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A
Yeah, because you've brought it, you've. You've lapsed into it a couple times.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So I appreciate that.
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B
Just get me wound up. I'll start saying. I'll start saying Cayman.
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A
Yeah. I'll put that in my diary.
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B
But no. So the point of it all is to say the client can't always manage that because in many cases the client's not a lawyer, or even if the client is, and usually not, they don't have that experience. And you can have one of the law firms try to do it, but again, you're paying an awful lot of money for that. Essentially case management function. You do that, or somebody like me can do that. And what it does is it ensures that there's an overall overarching strategy to resolve all the cases as opposed to just doing what's right in one case and making things worse for another case in a different jurisdiction.
- [31:00]
A
Gotcha. Well, Jonathan, we've, we have actually covered everything I wanted to cover. Is there anything else you wanted to say? I think I'm looking at my notes and you just naturally went into just everything that's fine, which is great.
- [31:16]
B
I used to sometimes a deposition, I'd ask that of a deponent. Is there anything else you want to say? Yeah, or, you know, on the witness stand. Do you want to leave it like that for the jury or do you want to add. Yeah, yeah, no, I think, I think that mostly covers it, Tom. What I, what I would say just to close it out is, you know, the, the, the services we've talked about today have always been necessary, have always been in need. What's really changed, and it really has changed over the last five years is the billing structures. It is unusual for billing rates to increase 2x and 3x in a period of just a few years. Now, I will say this I have been hearing since the day I began practicing with the bill. Billable hour is dead. My first billing rate was $95 an hour. And I was told that we can't sustain this. So I don't think the billable hour is dead. I think the billable hours arrive and Well, I don't think it's ever going to be dead.
- [32:22]
A
I think it's wishful thinking.
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B
Well, it's what you hear constantly.
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A
No idea.
- [32:27]
B
But what I will say is this, that the numbers have gotten so large that there's a huge segregation in the marketplace. You have the top firms who can command that two, $3,000 an hour for their top lawyers. And they're doing great work, and they're doing really interesting work, but it's at the absolute zenith of the profession. And then you have, you know, really super specialized lawyers like I was for a while doing, you know, say, hedge fund litigation in certain niche areas. And they don't have to be at big firms, but they have a niche area. And then you've got everything in between and everything in between. That's all shaking out. And so I do think what I'm doing and what people who are like me, who are doing what I'm doing is now much more necessary, given that segregation and billing rates from the highest to the lowest. And so it has made the product, the service, much more in demand, as I've seen from my own experience, and much more desirable than it would have been for five or 10 years ago. So I do think the billable hour isn't dead, but I think the concept of hiring somebody at a more reasonable price point or on an alternative fee basis, even if it's a fixed fee, is now much more in demand than it was just a few years ago.
- [33:45]
A
Yeah, well, I think there's. So I've got notes. I'm going to bother you for a couple more episodes. One will be on litigation financing, and the other one will be on fee, because I think that's. I think those are interesting. Jonathan Subloni, thank you very much for talking to me today.
- [33:58]
B
Thanks, Tom. And thanks to your audience for listening as well.
- [34:08]
A
The Emerging Litigation Podcast is a production of Critical Legal Content, which owns the awesome brand HB Litigation. Critical Legal Content is a company I founded in 2020. That was a long time ago. What we do is simple. We create content that's critical on legal topics for law firms and legal service providers. I believe we even have a catchy tagline, which is your legal content marketing department. That kind of content can be blogs, papers, they can be podcasts, webinars, and we have a good time doing it. And S4HB litigation, well, that's the name under which we publish. Interesting. At least interesting to me. Legal news items, webinars, articles, guest articles, all on emerging litigation topics. That's what we do. Once again, I'm Tom Hagee with Critical Legal Content and HP Litigation. If you like what you hear and you want to participate, give me a shout. My contact information is in the show notes. Thanks for listening. You know, I've known you for years, and I'm like. But I've never really thought about how to say your last name. So I am half Italian, so I go between Jonathan Sablone, which I think is what you do, or Sablone. That requires me to lift my left shoulder.
- [35:40]
B
Shoulder. It's. It's Sabloni. Sabloni, yeah. Almost like an eye, or.
- [35:45]
A
You are saying Cebloni.
- [35:47]
B
Yeah.
- [35:48]
A
I'm glad I asked.
- [35:50]
B
You know, my brother used to have this whole theory that there's a. There's a town in Belgium called Sablon. And he thinks. And my father's family is from a Brutze, and my wife. He thinks they came from Belgium, went down and settled in Piscata, and therefore became. Which means from Sablon.
- [36:15]
A
Oh, okay.
- [36:16]
B
Oh. I had a partner, Victor Milone. And there's this whole issue. Where do you pronounce the E? Do you. Not a lot of times the E got washed out so that you wouldn't sound Italian.
- [36:27]
A
Back Italian, right?
- [36:29]
B
Oh, yeah. You can work the shoulder, though, if you need to.
- [36:31]
A
To say, yeah, no, the shoulder helps me. I'm not. But no, Sabloni is not. Okay, That's. That's even easier. I didn't. I didn't know, because I do know, because my. My wife's family's from Abruzzi. Also my family's from Calabria. And. And I swear when I would meet a northern Italian, you know, typical Americans, like, oh, I'm half Italian, you know, and I meet an Italian, and they're like. And I'll say certain words, and they're like, I don't know what that means. And I swear they're being snobbish, because I'll see. Like, you know, I think in Calabria you say pursuit rather than pursuit or whatever. And I'll say that word, and they'll say, I don't know what.
- [37:06]
B
Pursuit?
- [37:06]
A
What's pursuit? And, like, you know, pursuit. Oh, you mean prosciutto. Like, okay, come on. I think it's. I think it's northerners always making southern.
- [37:16]
B
There's a guy, you would know him, but he runs a. A wine shop and a restaurant here and outside of Boston. Great guy, you know, Parents immigrated from Italy, so he speaks fluent Italian, but they're from Naples. And he speaks. And he went back, he said, when he was like a teenager, because he grew up speaking Italian, you know, he was. They used to go every summer to. Back to Naples and he had some trip. They went to Milan. And he's like. People kept saying to me, I don't know what you're. Basically. I don't know what you're saying. Go back to your Southern hubble or whatever.
- [37:49]
A
Yeah.
- [37:50]
B
So, I mean, it's.
- [37:51]
A
Right.
- [37:52]
B
Yeah, it's. It's cultural as opposed to linguistic, to be honest. But I know you're right.
- [37:56]
A
I was buying. I was buying. This white woman had a pizza shop. I was buying pizza from her and she was still treating me that way. That's okay. She was very nice.
- [38:03]
B
Paola, not nice.
- [38:05]
A
So go to Paola's in. In Wayne, Pennsylvania. It's a great place.
- [38:08]
B
Awesome.
- [38:09]
A
If you're going to speak Italian, just do it right.
- [38:11]
B
I'll keep that in mind.