Addison Cameron-Huff

2In the work from home edition.

4Hello, Pulat. Good afternoon.

6I'm doing well enough. I mean, people ask that question, but

8things are maybe not going so well outside of my practice in life, but things are going well. My niche is crypto law. That's booming. Lots of projects going on, lots of interest there, partly due to the pandemic. Probably people see it as a bright spot. So things are going well for me, maybe less so for other people in the province right now.

10Thanks, Pulat.

12And soon YouTube star as well.

14Thanks to you, Pulat.

16Hmm, people love categories. They're easy, right? It's a good label. It makes people think they understand something, but I don't think of my own life in categories like that. I see them as being connected. And most of my clients do too. Like, the main reason people hire me is that I really understand technology. Yes, I'm a lawyer. I'm not the best lawyer in the world. I'm not the best programmer in the world, but there are not so many programmer lawyers that really understand the business issues people face too, and that's why people hire me. So for my business and professional career, the categories all blur. And they're the key to it. If I just had a single category, well, it'd be a lot harder because if you want to be the best lawyer in the world, good luck to you.

17That's a very competitive field. But you don't have to be because people don't need that. They don't really want that, right? They want someone who's quite a good lawyer, but also really understands their business and really understands the subject matter. So I've found that blurring the categories makes it hard to engage with other lawyers who are looking for that categorical view. It was certainly a problem for me looking for jobs a number of years ago before I gave up on that and just pursued my own things instead. Right. And along the way, I've worked for other people too, but not as an employee within a law firm or an employee in a large company long term where you have to fit inside those categories.

18That's how they operate. So it's a problem for dealing with some people, but it's a huge benefit for dealing with the kinds of people that I deal with.

20Sure, and I think that's what lawyers should try to do too. It's what people want,

22People want a lawyer who really, really understands what they're doing, because otherwise, are you going to do a good job of it? Now, some areas of law like litigation, maybe that's less relevant to, but for my kind of solicitor work where people are looking for advice, which is, what should I do for my business in these circumstances? If you just answer that from a legal perspective It's probably the wrong answer.

24Doing it.

26That's a really good point. I think a lot of people are saying they know technology as in they understand the idea of it or maybe what the benefits might be, but not how it works. And they wouldn't know how to make new technology. That's what I do. So I've started a bunch of internet businesses. Some of them kind of complicated, others more simple. When I was younger, I won a bunch of programming competitions as well. That's what I mean. Like really understanding it. Being able to architect programs, to know how they work.

28For sure.

30Actually being able to do it to change it, to make new things, to understand truly how it works, not to be able to read what somebody says the features are, or what the marketing brochure says. I don't think that's understanding technology. That's understanding technology the same way I understand manufacturing. I understand it exists and that good things come out the other side, but I couldn't tell you how you go about designing an assembly plant. And if I saw something manufactured, I couldn't look at it and have insights into that manufacturing process. I could only look at the manufactured product and say, well, that's good. I couldn't tell you, oh, this could be 50% smaller easily, because knowing that depends on knowing about plastic injection molding and the sizes of the tools and whatever else they're doing there, right?

31And you would say, well, how hard could it be to make it 50% smaller? And the engineers would say, well, it's impossible. It requires a different kind of factory and we don't do that.

3416 years ago, when I was in high school, Principal came to myself and another student in the computer science class, one of my really good friends today, he works at Facebook, and came to us and said, "Can you do a parent-teacher interview process online?" And myself and my friend, we programmed that system. And another friend of ours in high school, years later, got involved with that business, And it still exists. So very little of my original code probably is still a part of the code base. But that was the first commercial product I made that was used at that high school. It's still used at that high school, and it's been used with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of parents all over the world since.

35They now have customers in several continents. So that was one of my first real systems. PHP and HTML, CSS, like a pretty standard application with MySQL database.

37And I've made lots of other things since. Project I started in 2014, 2015 with an Israeli lawyer who was doing his PhD in law and regulation in Toronto Global Regulation, which I'm also not part of today but still exists, still the largest international law search engine. And that search engine, I wrote code to go out and index government websites, download all their laws, process them into a format that's somewhat structured, and then when they're not in English, translate them using machine learning APIs, bring them back into the system, and then make it searchable. So we wrote all that code for doing that.

39It does.

41Yeah. And

43I don't know the current customers, but

45When I was running it with my co-founder, and I assume today they still have them, like the Department of Justice in the United States. We had KPMG US be a part of it at one point. Lots of the top research universities in the world are subscribers to it. And the reason why is that there's no other service for it. There's nothing for searching the laws of 80-something countries And there's no other product where you can search in English across laws originally in Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Italian, all these different languages all merged into one. And you can see the original in the original language.

47Yeah, that's the last full-time job where I had a T4, which was architecting a new cryptocurrency wallet and rolling out new infrastructure for it, as well as the business and everything else about it. As the president of that company.

49And in that role, my job was to not write any code. I did write a little bit of it, but with a job like that, you shouldn't be writing code. You should instead be helping other people to write code and to do a good job.

51Also related to my programming career. So I summered at BlackBerry and then articled at McCarthy Tétrault, and then when that ended, it was, well, what should I do? Start a practice? Join a company. I still have the emails with Shopify with their COO about maybe joining that up-and-coming company in Toronto. I considered it. It's evaluating that one. I thought they had good prospects. No, I don't regret it. I've been involved in lots of things where lots of people have made far more money than I have. That's life. No, instead I went into another area that's done well, cryptocurrency. So I started my law practice and at the time And it's not much better today.

52Lawyers, even tech lawyers, they generally don't know much about technology and definitely not much about internet marketing. And back in 2014, I talked to tons of lawyers who said, yeah, well, nobody finds their clients on the internet. That's ridiculous. People get referrals, you know, from their trusted lawyers at the big firms. That is not true. I have the log data to show people checking my website from, you know, Ford Motor Company in the states, and you can see as people are reading this stuff, sharing it on LinkedIn, on Twitter. I don't hear this very much from people anymore. I think people know now that clients aren't stupid, and they do research like anyone else, and the internet is a part of their research.

53You can't ignore that. It's where people source a huge amount of vendors from. So I set up my website specifically to do well on Google, and within a few months of starting my practice, I was number one result for Toronto technology lawyer. And then that's where most of my business came from originally. And that led me to working with the co-founder of Ethereum, which was just starting up at the time, and then the other Ethereum people. And that's where my law practice shifted ever more into the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, partly because it's the most interesting, partly because this is the area that scares other lawyers the most because they have no idea how any of this stuff works.

54And a lot of people really value having a lawyer that doesn't just know what the business of that is, but actually understands how it works and that it's not magic. And that's where my law practice today came from. And I still enjoy that the most. It's still the most interesting. And my clients are always coming up with new and interesting products and projects. And it's incredibly challenging to work with them on some of the stuff. But that's what makes it rewarding. I think that's one of the best things you can do with a law career is to try to help people to bring new things into the world.

56Some of them hire me because they've had terrible experiences with large firms. Those are some of my favorite clients. Because it's usually an easier conversation with them about some things with law, and they usually have low standards. No, I'm being a little facetious about that, but what people want from me is they want somebody who's really involved. They want somebody where that's just not a file for them amongst 200, and you know, a little toggle where they're clicking a timer. My work with people, I've abandoned hourly as a model for almost all of my work, So I'm essentially like a part-time employee for my clients. I'm a team member. Like, I'm in their Slack channel.

57I'm helping them with things where there's fast turnaround, where you're really involved and embedded into the business, and you have a much better understanding of what's going on and can give people better and faster advice.

59Yes.

61Everything. And real advice, fast turnaround stuff. Some deal comes onto the table, people want help with it right now. My clients are pretty rapidly advancing their businesses in general, often high-growth companies. They need to do things quickly. That's part of the model. Giving people real advice. Now, within the last year, that's ranged from a 60-page memo for a client about a complicated topic of their business, all the way to the 2-paragraph email. And what form that takes depends really on what I think is the best way to help them. And on the contract drafting side, a major reason why people hire me, or why they keep hiring me, is that I'm usually given very vague ideas about what people want in a contract.

62They give me some really high-level concept of what they want, and they say, Addison, you know everything about our business, you know about this industry, you know about this deal, you tell us what should be in this contract. And that's a service that's quite hard to get from lawyers. And by handling quite a lot of that myself, where it's really, okay, I'll put in what I think based on what you say, and then you can review, that better fits with how a lot of executives want to be doing business. Where people can't imagine what terms might go in there, and it's too painstaking for them to think about that. But given something back to them and what the choices are and how this could be, that's a lot more actionable.

63So that kind of trust in drafting contracts, I'd say, is one of my advantages too. I don't approach it as a pure lawyer and say, okay, you give me the term sheet with everything thought through, and then I'll find a template on the internet and edit it a little bit to what you said.

65Hmm?

67Some of them do. One of my clients right now does.

69Yes.

71I don't think many people want that. Mm-hmm.

73I think that's an important feature, but I think nobody cares about that. Probably because most small businesses don't have lawyers at all. And a lot of people do deals without the benefits of lawyers. And startups just know that everything they're doing is risky, and they say, well, what's the real difference here of me doing it myself versus paying a bunch of lawyers or a lawyer to do this work for me? Most Canadian small businesses have no legal representation. There's no one to help them, right?

75No, in my niche, and most of my clients have investment money behind them, that makes sense. They need that. They're building new businesses. They need new templates. They need new ways of working. But surprisingly, that's not really in demand. And I think the reason for that is just most people realize lawyers are too expensive and the benefit is often rather limited.

77Oh, all risk. Legal risk is just a dimension.

79And they understand that there's question marks next to all of those risks.

81Sure.

83I doubt anyone's considered that. Nobody asks why we have lawyers, same as nobody asks why we have a Ministry of Labour, right? It's just somebody imposed that on you. I think most entrepreneurs recognize that, like, they didn't create the system. I often have people ask me, oh, well, what's the reason for this? Well, there is no reason. It's not based on reason. Somebody just decided to do that a long time ago and did that. Like, there's no comprehensive system of things based on principles and reason in Ontario, right? It's just a grab bag of random laws and institutions and things you have to deal with. And I think very few people actually stop and consider, what's the role of lawyers?

84But I think if they did stop and ask that question, they'd probably regard lawyers mostly as racket, which is a little unkind to lawyers, but you know, there's a bit of truth to that. And certainly that's the perception of lots of tech entrepreneurs. I think they don't have a good view of lawyers, and many of them have had direct bad experiences with lawyers too, where their experience doesn't live up to what the lawyers promised.

86Not my clients.

88No, because most of the things I'm working on are positive business deals. They're not really defense. There's a little bit of that, but usually it's building new things. But I don't think many people view lawyers like that. Like you can see the value. If you're not getting lawyer value, you drop them, right? Like this is a business and they do. People have a choice of counsel and they switch if they're not satisfied.

90They just know it's gonna be a lot better.

92And they can quickly see the results.

94For sure. Nobody would pay my fees if they didn't think they're gonna get great results. And they won't continue paying my fees month after month unless they're seeing good results. Well, most of my clients are keenly aware of what things cost.

96New good quality policies and procedures, new good quality contract templates, less risk, faster deal execution time, a more organized business, a business more compliant with laws, with lower risk of the government doing something something to them in all dimensions. And as a lawyer, I— especially advising smaller companies, I think it's incumbent upon them to try to do that. Lawyers have a lot of value to add for businesses, and they should try to help people in all of those areas. I think some lawyers prefer not to do that. They'd say, well, I don't really want to get involved in these areas. But if you see something you should tell your clients about it. And I lost clients.

97They hear about some issue, they say, well, that's interesting, maybe, you know, I understand what you're saying here about the risk, but why don't we do that one in 2 months? Why don't we do that in 3 months? We have priorities. That's a major part of my work. There's a million things to do as a startup. What's the list? And then how do you prioritize that to get the best results out of it?

99better quality deals. Definitely without my work, clients would have a lot more challenges in dealing with other companies and making sure that their deals are reasonable deals that will work out well.

101You can't.

103Ken, no one tries, amazingly. No one considers the economic risks involved, really.

105For sure, but you, you can't, right? There's no way to properly estimate that because the things are unknown and law is just full of basically myths about things, right? On indemnities and warranties and these kinds of things. And people will insist on all kinds of stuff. They have no basis to insist on that. They have no idea. What the actual statistics are. They have no idea how commonly these terms are litigated. They don't know how commonly these terms lead to disputes. And I think it's impossible probably to do that because almost everything is private about these contracts. Like, there's never going to be a database that has that, but you can deal with it in other ways.

106So usually what I'm trying to do is to come up with the simple deal that best reflects what the parties want to do. That might sound like very trite advice, but for me that does not mean a 40-page, you know, standard term template. Lots of people will be much better served with a 1 or 2 page agreement that captures exactly what they want, and other people, maybe they need something longer. I try to eliminate as much as possible, ruthlessly, legalese form parts of agreements, you can dramatically cut things down and also have an agreement that's far more likely to be signed by the other side.

108Oh, I don't think that's true. They resort to not reading it.

110No idea what's in their template. That their lawyers are supplying.

112But if you try to tell people that they should have an agreement with less legalese and that should be shorter and written in simple English that everyone understands, there are quite a few people who push back on that idea. They say, well, shouldn't it be longer? Isn't longer better? Yeah, because there's a culture of this. Yes, there's a culture of just making 20-page form agreements that go on forever and explain the same thing 5 different ways in 3 different parts of the agreement, and to review and edit these things and slows things down. And very few people stop and think, are all of these terms necessary? All of these terms are really what the clients want?

113Is this an agreement that anybody wants, or does this just reflect something from a book that might be applicable to many people's circumstances?

115Nobody litigates contracts. Contracts are never litigated. And you would say, well, that's not true, I've litigated contracts, Addison. Sure. Almost all contracts, 99.99% or something, they're never litigated.

117very few clients appreciate my sales pitch to them on this, where I tell them, you know, they ask me about litigation. So, well, my job is to make sure you don't litigate. My job is to make sure you never have to talk to a litigator, and I consider that to be success. Good quality deals that explain what the parties want, they're not likely to litigate that. Giant agreements where nobody understands what's in it, and later somebody, when there's a dispute, pours through all of it and says, oh, hey, look, Section 1623. That one is a maybe. I can see how that could mean now.

119Sure.

121But more importantly, are the agreements really what they wanted? Where an agreement reflects what the parties actually wanted to do in their deal, they're very unlikely to litigate that. Most business people are committed to the deals they do, even with no paperwork behind them.

123Lots of these people have repeat interactions with the same people. You're not going to litigate against them because they're your business partner.

125They don't? They never do. Almost everyone in Canada, if they have a problem, they just get screwed. They never get to talk to a lawyer. There's no one to help them. I see a ton of stuff all the time of people cheating people on business deals and investments and things like that. It's common. And no one will do anything about it. So long as it's within the context of a business. If you try to call the police about something, they'll say, "That's a civil matter, not our problem." Is it? A ton of things now in modern Canada are basically laundered through companies where they do things that would be illegal, but in the context of a business, it's suddenly not illegal.

127Right? Not even give up. No one will help you at all.

129Almost every dispute people have in Canada, there is no one to help you. It's a mirage. All these systems, right? Like the court system is largely for rich people, whether that's rich companies or rich individuals. And the tiniest fractions of things are dealt with like that. If you look at the statistics for things like anti-fraud hotlines that the government has or complaints about things, first off, almost no one even knows you can complain because it's rarely the case in Canada that regulated businesses are required to put up signs that tell you how you can complain. That's something we don't really do in English Canada at least. And the result is nobody knows they can complain and when you do, no one does anything.

130Virtually all complaints to the government about aspects have anything to do with businesses, go nowhere, and no one will help you with your problem. Lawyers are like the last resort of desperate people who've been stonewalled and are usually very angry. I've had tons of people reach out to me over the years for their various problems, lots of them egregious. No one will help you with them. That's the thing that nobody really wants to say about the legal system in Canada and our structures of government, We have all these ministries set up and they claim that they deal with all the problems in this area, but they don't help people. They deal with only a tiny percentage of it.

132Lawyers are the fallback of people where everyone has told you no, right? If people could get real results through the government, they would. That's why I'm always annoyed when I hear particularly litigators being demonized by people in the news as if they're somehow the cause of these problems. When lawyers help their clients to win, it's because they had a good case. It's because the other people were wrong and no one would help you. If you see anything involving a consumer, no consumer's first choice is to hire Pulat Yunusov to sue somebody for some problem. They've complained, they complained to the government, they might have complained to the police, and no one will help you.

133And then legal system is where you look as your last resort.

135Rich people, you mean?

137No, sorry, no, not that. It's for everyone as long as they can pay $15,000, $25,000 up front for a 50/50 shot at maybe having somebody give them a good outcome.

139I've had tons of lawyers tell me that they couldn't afford to hire a lawyer to deal with their problems.

141For sure.

143Is it a mistake for people to assume that all the legal rules they've been told about by all the experts about what the laws are aren't true? Why shouldn't somebody be able to assume that when they do something, that the other people will be held accountable, and that they will be forced to follow the law? I think it's a very cruel worldview to say, well, that's on them for not knowing that the legal system's not there to help you, or that's on them for not knowing the government doesn't enforce their laws, right? Like, who would expect that? Only lawyers who've really seen how the sausage gets made, right? And they would say, well, you should know no one's actually there to help you.

144But I think that's very mean to say to regular Canadians because is it really so stupid to think that all these things people say about the legal system are true? I don't think that. I think people should be able to know that when they deal with people, that the laws are there and they're enforceable and that they will act on your side. And I think we need a drastic overhaul of how we do law in Canada in order to get to that point. Because the people you're talking about, that's most people. Most people think that they will be protected by the law.

146But it's just not the case. And instead lawyers turn around and say, well, you should have known the law is not there for you. But that's what I mean about the mirage of justice, right?

148No regular person makes that differentiation.

150For example, I would think that if I buy something from a store and they don't give it to me, I would think the law is there to force them to either give me back my money or give me the thing I pay for.

152it's not the case. No one will do that. Your credit card might, but there's no one else. Try it. Try complaining to Ministry of Consumer Services in Ontario. See what they say about that. Good luck. No one will help you.

154I don't really put it like that. I would say actually— How would you put it? I would say that you're distilling the business deal between the two parties. Down into a reference document that they can look at later to say, oh yeah, that's the deal we made and that's how we're going to do things.

156More like a treaty.

158Oh, it is. Most people can't do that. Most people are unable to consider all of the things something could go wrong. People, and if they weren't, they probably wouldn't be doing the deal. But people don't have that experience, right? It's the same as anything. You hire people who are specialized in doing that particular thing, and when you've done 1,000 of them, you'll be quicker at it. You'll probably do a better job of it. And perhaps more importantly, I know more than the clients do about how other people do things too. So you're taking advantage of lawyers' knowledge of what's going on in the commercial space that they operate in, more knowledge than the clients have.

159Because lawyers see so many more deals and they also have a better idea about the sorts of things people will commonly agree to and the sorts of mechanisms that businesses often pick in order to deal with certain situations which the clients might not consider.

161I wouldn't say better, but specialized in a certain aspect of their business. And I would hope I know more about those aspects than they do, otherwise why are they paying me? I mean, I might be a force multiplier for them by helping to expand their company quicker, but that's not really why people hire me. I also do a fair bit of structuring work for people's businesses and products too, about helping them to design a product that's more compatible with law.

163Only to people within my clients' companies, really.

165No, the people who work for the company if possible.

167No, usually I deal with one or two people and they would direct the other person to do it. But some of what I do is triaging work like that. A little bit of my work is directing other lawyers. That's usually fairly minimal though. It's simple stuff. Task them with the work, get the price on it, get them to do the work, follow up on it. I don't delegate within my firm because the firm is just me, but also it wouldn't really be what most of my clients are looking for because they want that expertise and the other person wouldn't have it. And I'm quite efficient at doing lots of my own work anyway, and a lot of what I do is trying to squeeze out, you know, busy work and junk paperwork.

168Out of my clients' practices to help them to streamline how they're doing deals. So I have a strong emphasis on creating templates for people and doing things like creating marketing guidelines so that the clients and their BD people can then know how to go out and carry out those deals, what they should or shouldn't say, and to try to get them to be able to do it. Because I think that's the best role for somebody who's a specialist. You should be trying to help people to build a workflow that they can repeatedly use without you. And because I'm paid on a monthly basis, I have no reason not to do that. Although when I was paid on an hourly basis, I did this too.

169It's just because it's the right thing to do, not because I had any incentive to do it. But then I realized if I'm helping people to streamline things and I'm doing it as efficiently as possible, while other lawyers maybe aren't, well, probably hourly, so a good way to go there. And it's not. My practice in switching to monthly, it's much easier dealing with clients, and people have a lot more faith that when I recommend something, it's not because that's gonna drive up their cost this month.

171No.

173So it's to have someone available on demand to get stuff done at a reasonable pace.

175I'm fully booked.

177And a lot of lawyers have asked, oh well, aren't you worried about people just consuming all of your time? They don't because they don't want to read all the things I send them. And legal can only take up such a percentage of executive time in a company. Nobody is spending all day every day coming up with busy work for their lawyers to do. That's only something that lawyers would imagine. In my work, you do things efficiently, you get things done, you get on to the next deal. That's what people want. They see the results and they keep paying you.

179Some of my emails are kind of long, but not theirs. They're in a hurry. They've got a business to run, right?

181Who wants to spend 5 hours talking about nothing?

183In theory there's two. In reality, all of my clients are just on one deal.

185And $6,500 right now. Although, hey, this is a public YouTube channel, but I don't even mind disclosing my secrets here on pricing. I'm fully booked and not actually taking on clients at the moment, so that $6,500 is actually rather theoretical. And my clients pay $5K a month. Which was what my old rate was. I upped it to $6,500 because I'm maxed out for work and not taking on anyone at the moment. And my strategy since I did contract programming work many, many years ago was when you're fully booked for everything, raise your price.

187Raising your price if you're maxed out and raise it to the next level up on that because that's the best way to find out what kind of value you're really providing to people. If people will pay a higher price for it, and maybe you were underpricing it before. I'm not so concerned about that. I'm one person. I'm not a large law firm trying to optimize everything about what I do. And with my clients, I often help people who stopped being my clients years ago for free, give people advice. I try and be there for people, and my work is not exactly a business. I know lots of these people. I want to see them succeed.

188I really want to see the startups I work with succeed. That's fun for me. This is an interesting job where I get to work with smart, interesting people, and that's why I keep doing it. There's lots of things you can do to make money. Many of them are not so great for the world. Many of them are not so fun for the people doing it. I get to help people who pay their small business employees well, they treat them well, they're building great new things, they have good business practices. I help them make them even better. I enjoy that. It's the kind of work I like doing.

190before you go, the standard should be high and people should scrutinize their lawyer's work. I've come across a lot of people who've done work very quickly or not that great for their clients, and the clients don't know any better, right? And they don't stop to ask. But lawyers are different, and people should really be questioning their lawyers on these things and make sure their lawyers are doing the right job.

192Thank you, Pulat. Have a good afternoon.