What do you think about the different ways in which law firms run those sorts of systems?

on this defending your life now, as we call it, or my, you know, the phone book of what I did this year.

Reality is it's a nice piece of work and, you know, it gets looked at occasionally, but it isn't going to create a big impact.

Its impact is a lot less than what most partners I think it has.

To me, it's a proxy for an absent performance dialogue that happens before I get to compensation.

If I have a continuous conversation with my leadership team about what it is that I'm to do as an equity partner, and here I do distinguish a bit between equity partners and non-equity partners and salary partners, right? But as a co-entrepreneur, as an equity partner, I need to have a somewhat ongoing dialogue, not daily, but a periodic dialogue with my leadership team about, here is where the business is, what do I need to do to help move this along? If that's robust and strong, then I have a lot less of a need for my once a year phone book that I have to write about all the great things that I've done.

And if it's just self-directed, I can go out and acquire 15 gas station franchisees.

business for a managing

But it is...

I mean, it's a really complicated question because the first question that we want to ask is, okay, well, why is that partner unhappy? how long has that partner been unhappy? And depending on what that is, that will help drive the answer, right? So if the partner is unhappy because they simply think that they're getting financially a bad shake, you know, okay, my wealth and compensation, right? Profit sharing.

Then, you know, the question is, what do we do about that? But before we get there, let me back up.

So we've been involved in a lot of partner compensation reviews for firms after the firm has seen a series of exits.

of partners.

So there is always soul searching, oh geez, what went wrong? Why are all our good people leaving? We've got to do a partner compensation review because something has to be wrong with our compensation system.

When you then start talking to the remaining partners, you begin to get yourself into sort of the idea of the firm.

And the liability.