How a Data Privacy Attorney and Extreme Athlete Goes With the Flow

John Reed [00:00:00] By definition, a Sticky Lawyer has a distinct area of practice. That's a given. But there's always an added element or two that makes them even more unique. Often, we can identify the characteristics before reaching out to a prospective guest, but sometimes it's only when we have a conversation that the X factor reveals itself. 

[00:00:24] That happened with today's guest. 

[00:00:26] Adam D.H. Grant is a shareholder with Grant Shenon in Sherman Oaks, California, where among other things, he focuses on cyber liability, digital privacy, biometric tracking, mobile app law, and other things that were once unknown, but are now part of our digital world. So, check the box on the distinct practice area thing.

[00:00:46] Outside the office, Adam is an extreme athlete, a triathlete, an ultra-marathoner, and he has found ways to blend his in-the-office and outside-the-office lives together. So, check off another box.

[00:00:59] But I believe Adam's X factor is his mindfulness. He has a clarity of purpose that not only makes him a better lawyer and competitor but also benefits his clients and the communities he leads and supports. 

[00:01:11] If right now you're imagining a hard-charging litigator / high-performance athlete, don't. Adam is no stereotype. 

[00:01:20] Adam, welcome to the podcast

Adam Grant [00:01:22] Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

John Reed [00:01:24] I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that you are discipline incarnate. You and I had the chance to talk previously and the structure and approach that you take to your practice, to your sports, your athletic life, and other parts of your life are aspects that I'd like to explore with you today if you don't mind. I'm going to try to be disciplined and take a different approach to our conversation. 

[00:01:47] I want to start with your triathlon experience. You had a unique kind of homegrown advantage when it came to swimming and running. Maybe you could talk about that. 

Adam Grant [00:01:57] Sure. I was blessed to have a mom who is actually a lifeguard. My parents met at a community center in Phoenix, and as we were growing up, we had a pool in our backyard. And so essentially my mom taught me to swim at the same time I was learning how to walk. So, it was pretty unique and made for some interesting times. When I finally went away to sleepaway camp and at the ripe old age of five, I had for the most part mastered all of the different strokes in swimming. So, it was a lot of fun. 

John Reed [00:02:36] When did athletic competition become a thing for you in your life? Was it that early? 

Adam Grant [00:02:43] Yeah, I started swimming competitively on a swim team by the time I was six years old. From the time I was six through high school. I swam competitively, and then it seems as if I somehow managed to be the fastest in my school, even when I was very young when I was running. Out on the playground for some unknown reason, eighth graders couldn't touch me, and I was only in third or fourth grade, and I was able to zip around. By the time I got into high school, I was in a large high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and as a freshman, I was running varsity track.

John Reed [00:03:20] When did cycling come into the mix? 

Adam Grant [00:03:22] Elementary and middle school. We lived about three, four miles from the elementary and middle school that I went to. And somehow my mom actually said, sure, it's okay for you to ride your bike. So, by the time I was in fourth, fifth grade, I was riding my bike on a main street in Phoenix to elementary and middle school, and it just kind of morphed from that. I never owned a car in college, and so I ended up riding from my house up and down hills to U.C. San Diego, then to Del Mar to study, and then back from Del Mar into La Jolla and up Mount Soledad. So, it just kind of came naturally to me. 

John Reed [00:04:01] I would imagine many marathons and running races before triathlons. Is that how it evolved? 

Adam Grant [00:04:09] Very much so. When I was in high school, in the off-season, when I wasn't running track. I would for fun, of course, just do 5Ks and 10Ks, and then from that it morphed into half marathons. The Orange County half marathon was my first with some running buddies that I had met. And then the first marathon was probably the most difficult. It was the big SIR international marathon, running from Big Sur to Carmel on Highway One. So, a few hills, a lot of fun, a lot of pain. 

John Reed [00:04:47] I'm going to go in a different direction here and not ask you about your best performances, but your proudest accomplishments, sometimes those are different.

Adam Grant [00:04:55] Yeah, that's a really good question. The proudest accomplishment came out of a failure. The first time I raced the Ultraman World Championships, which is a three-day triathlon event, it was the year that they had changed the course. It meant going up and over the middle part of the island on the second day when you're riding 171 miles. And I got to the point my legs weren't entirely there. Nutrition was just, it was brutal. It was a 40-mile climb in the middle of the race, and I got to the point where I literally could not clip into my bike, without somebody holding the bike, and I finally got to the 40 mile. The top of it where the, the volcano is in the middle of the island.

[00:05:46] I was delirious. I could not really think straight. I could not pedal. And the next thing in front of me was a 40-mile descent with 30 to 40 mile crosswinds. I decided that I'm going to live another day. And with tears, because it was emotional, I said, “I really, I don't think this is safe.”

[00:06:08] And despite doing that on the second day, they encourage you to continue on and even finish as a participant. So, I slept on it and woke up the next day, and ran the double marathon. Not because I was going to be an official finisher, but because I respected the sport and respected my other athletes there and ran a good double marathon and then came back the next year and finished the entire race and came in third in my age group. So, I was pretty darn happy about that. 

John Reed [00:06:42] What's the phrase? Is it discretion is the better part of valor or something like that? 

[00:06:46] So, there's 170 miles on the bike and then, as you said, two marathons. What was the swimming portion? 

Adam Grant [00:06:54] The Ultraman is a three-day event. The first day is a 6.2-mile ocean swim, and then a 90-mile bike, which the last 30 miles of it is uphill to the top of the Kilauea volcano on the south part of the island. 

John Reed [00:07:10] I have very, very fond memories of listening and watching Al Trautwig cover the Iron Man in Hawaii for all those years on NBC. And so, I have in my mind very vividly the lava fields and how hot those are. But more so, Adam, the people who are delirious, physically exhausted, who are stumbling their way over the finish line and don't want anybody to touch them because that would invalidate their performance. Right? So, I do not know firsthand what that must have felt like, but I've certainly seen people on TV that would give me some of an understanding. 

[00:07:45] What does a weekly training schedule look like for you?

Adam Grant [00:07:49] That depends a lot on where I am in my training schedule. One thing you learn when you do ultra distances is, there's different stages within your training where you have your base stage. You have, think about it as plateaus. You need to somewhat peak at a certain time, and then you need to taper off a bit getting up to the race so that your muscles are rested and you're really quite primed and peaked for it.

[00:08:17] But the most hours I spend training. There's a couple of weeks stretch where my wife essentially realizes I'm doing zero, but training, eating, sleeping, and working, and that's it. And they're about 23 to 25 hours of training in a week. And my recovery days are Monday where I only swim 5,000 yards in the morning.

[00:08:45] Saturday and Sundays are the long days. Saturday will usually be an eight-hour bike, followed by a two-hour run, and then Sunday is a four hour run. So, that gives you a sense. 

John Reed [00:08:58] I'm exhausted. I feel like I should go get a pouch of goo just listening to you.

[00:09:02] You and I had the opportunity to talk before, as I mentioned, and I learned so much from that, that I'm going to kind of lead the witness a little bit here and, and get into some specific areas.

[00:09:13] You talked a lot about flow, state of flow, which when you described it, I thought of the term dissociation. Can you help us understand flow? 

Adam Grant [00:09:27] I think your choice to lead the witness under the circumstances is likely good. I have never been known to be shy, and always willing to take that plumb pitch. So, thank you. 

[00:09:39] Flow has been written about extensively in many books, and it describes the condition that usually an endurance or extreme athlete drops into where time simply becomes irrelevant, and the activity takes over the body and the mind completely. Opens up to just being in the moment. 

[00:10:06] And a very dear friend of mine, a nonprofit attorney, had talked to me about this and I mean, this was a number of years ago because I just do what I do. And I really had not been exposed to that particular phrase. And he suggested I read a book about it, and it was very much of a "I know that" kind of a moment.

[00:10:29] With flow, I drop into it very easily when I'm on a run or when I'm swimming. I would say swimming is probably the easiest to drop into because there's less external concerns. You're on a bike, you have to watch for traffic. There's a lot of things going on. On the run, depending upon where you are, there are some externals, but the swim is easiest to. 

[00:10:54] It seems to be, for me, it's almost like going to sleep because you lie down in bed. Okay, I'm starting an activity, and you get into it. And there's always that first part of like, you're trying to go to sleep and you gotta get comfortable in it. Whether it's on your left side, your right side, on your back, and then you finally settle in. Then the next thing you know, you maybe wake up in the middle of the night or you wake up in the morning and it's seven, eight hours later or something. It feels very much like that because I think the first time I experienced it, I was on a treadmill and it was going to be a long treadmill run.

[00:11:33] It was starting at 4:30 in the morning and I had a couple of hours of a run and within about 15 minutes I had dropped into this particular state. And the next thing I know, I had about 15 minutes left on my workout. I really don't know where the time went. I was just completely in my head and being in tune with my body. And I happened to have one of the best workouts at that time. 

[00:12:01] Dealing with any discomfort in long workouts happens. Once you drop into this flow state, it just kind of washes away. 

John Reed [00:12:10] What you described just now is that it kind of happens to you, but one thing that you imparted to me is you've learned a way to use it. It's not an unconscious activity. Instead, you turn it into a conscious activity to focus your mind, your thinking in other ways. 

Adam Grant [00:12:31] When I get into flow in the work, the most flow I have experienced is in cross-examinations. It's in doing business development. It is in analyzing a case. I can't describe how it happens, but when I sit down and I look at a matter, and I start spotting issues and I start seeing ways, different avenues that people haven't seen before, it simply just flows. It clicks within me, and I've been frequently told by other attorneys, well, I've never done it that way. And I smile and I think, okay, well let's try it this way because it may get through the issue. Or, the other side when they say, you know, that's wrong. I've never done it that way. I always say, well entertain the possibility that there's another right way to do it. 

John Reed [00:13:25] Well, if it's the other side, don't tell 'em. Don't give 'em the opportunity. 

[00:13:30] But it was on one of your training swims, I think, that you conceptualized for the first time, this practice that's kind of become your signature.

Adam Grant [00:13:41] So the epiphany of the digital privacy practice occurred during an extremely long swim. During long sets, as I said, with the swimming is frequently where I go into both the physical and mental state. And when you're swimming it allows you to make the various connections. The iPhone came out in 2007, and in 2008 or so during a long swim, I started thinking about wow, iPhone mobile apps.

[00:14:09] And then I went back to personal jurisdiction. Privacy issues. What is going on on this phone? Is the phone really a phone or is it an advertising vehicle? And from that, I thought this is going to be an interesting area of law. I remember in law school thinking, the internet which was quite blossoming at that time. What are the issues? What actually constitutes the ability for somebody to have a website and get drawn into a lawsuit, and all over the country, and those were the synapses that started to fire when I was in that flow state. 

John Reed [00:14:47] So you get out of the water, you towel off, you've got these kernels that have germinated. Then what? How do you go about - and I'm kind of shifting into your practice now - how do you go about building a new area of law and turning it into something that you can act on and make commercially viable? 

Adam Grant [00:15:08] I think there's a story about Albert Einstein in which somebody asked him, what is your phone number? And he says, “I don't remember. That's why you have books. You could look it up.” And I'm fond of saying to clients, I will tell you what I know and what I don't know and what's my personal experience. And what I do when I don't know is I find out and that launches me into research projects, that launches me into talking to other people about it.

[00:15:39] And I literally started looking into that specific area of law as it was at the time. Because what I have learned is that literally daily, weekly, monthly, it changes with the technology. Because the technology is so far surpassing where the law is. 

[00:15:57] I just became a sponge and started to at the time write articles about it. I became a legal consultant to a mobile app magazine. I started attending and moderating different conferences, and different panels and immersed myself into something that really was quite cutting edge.

John Reed [00:16:19] When you moderate a panel or you become an advisor to a publication, yes, that is a means for you to acquire knowledge and share it. But you're also putting yourself out there as an expert for business development purposes. So, talk to us a little bit about how, then, you take what you're actively learning and then approach prospective clients with what you know and how you can help them identify their risks. 

Adam Grant [00:16:47] I think one of the best ways of doing business development is identifying for the prospect an issue that they don't know they have and then being their solution to that problem. Speaking and being a moderator, I often did that to small to medium-sized businesses. I'm in a room with 50 or a hundred business owners or IT professionals or HR people. That happened frequently. 

[00:17:17] And I would start off the discussion or the panel by saying, you have to grab them in some way. A usual grab would be, “I'm going to scare you like nobody's business.” They thought this was just going to be something about data privacy. And then I start discussing with them all of the issues that they expose themselves to on a regular basis.

[00:17:40] And at the end of the discussion, it's a usual question of, “How scared are you now?” And smiles happen. And then that's when they come up to me and they say, “Does this really happen? What do we do about it?” And therein lies the opportunity to develop business. 

John Reed [00:18:00] Of course, I never ask you to name names, but describe what your client base looks like. You mentioned different people in that room from tech to HR to ownership and operations and whatever. So, who are you counseling in terms of businesses and clients? 

Adam Grant [00:18:17] It runs the gamut. Any small or medium-sized business is the target. Most people hear about very, very large companies having data breaches. Well, the small to medium-sized businesses are really the low-hanging fruit for, as we call them, bad actors because they don't have the revenue to actually harden their systems and put in all the bells and whistles necessary to avoid the data breaches.

[00:18:44] It could be law firms. I've actually had quite a lot of clients who are law firms, medium to even large-size law firms, where they had data breaches. 

[00:18:56] It runs to virtually anybody who does commerce on the web. If you have a product out there, you are taking in personal identifiable information. Names, addresses, credit cards, and so forth. You need to have certain disclosures that occur. That's part of what I do. Various athletic associations, nonprofits, because they are taking in private information about the athletes, whether it be medical conditions, everything's on the web. So, you have the ability to, I mean, you have to disclose the things that you are, what you are doing with the information, how you are storing it. So, if you have a presence on the web, for the most part, you need to have somebody dealing with your data privacy.

John Reed [00:19:43] You are, by initial training and background, a litigator. In my mind, all that means is you're an expert on risk. And then you've parlayed that into, on the front end, policymaking, agreements, transactions, certainly regulatory compliance. You've evolved into the lawyer of all trades in these different areas. How was that evolution to you? How did you go about that? 

Adam Grant [00:20:09] I started my practice in 1990 when, and it was strictly litigation, as I gained experience in litigation and representing businesses. Part of litigating is you're litigating over terms and conditions and contracts, and what does this mean and what does that mean and how does that play out? Over time, my clients began to rely upon me to review their contracts because I litigated the terms. I told them what was best and then drafting various things.

[00:20:40] So I became — the nomenclature within the legal community is — a bit of a hybrid. Yes, I litigate and because of my litigation abilities, I know how to deal with the pitfalls of contracts and dealing with the more transactional end of it. That was the really, the foundation of going into the data privacy practice. 

[00:21:04] You have to be creative much in the same way you do in litigation, and you're uniquely situated to be able to address when there are administrative issues with the state or in data breach issues when you're dealing with bad actors. And sometimes litigation ensues from data breaches because of the people whose personal identifiable information file claims. 

John Reed [00:21:29] Let's do this. You've got a client, they've got a data breach. It's happening, it's active. Hopefully, they call you. What do you do? What happens next? 

Adam Grant [00:21:39] First thing I ask them is when and how. And then I ask them what have they done about shutting down their system entirely. Because you need to make sure that you poke as many holes as possible. 

[00:21:55] Then I talk to whoever they have as an IT professional. Many clients think that their internal IT person is the one who's going to be able to deal with this data breach going forward. It isn't, but I need the background on what they have done at that point. 

[00:22:14] My next call is to a forensic IT person who I've used in many different instances, and I have several of them. And we set up an appointment to go down straight to the client's office and really do a deep dive talking to people.

[00:22:28] Quite frankly, sometimes data breaches — many times — they are a result of the weakest link, which is the human element. Somebody has inadvertently given their password or written it down or... 

John Reed [00:22:44] And the password is usually password. 

Adam Grant [00:22:47] Yes. Or don't forget your password or, yeah. It's unbelievable. But yeah. 

[00:22:51] So, that's the first thing I do is interview, lock down, call the IT forensic, visit the client. 

John Reed [00:22:58] Probably more than any other lawyer we've had on Sticky Lawyers, crisis communications and crisis response is part of your practice. How did you develop that skill? Everything's running at a fever pitch. There's fear, there's all sorts of worst-case scenarios going on in your client's minds. Talk about counseling the client through that type of crisis. 

Adam Grant [00:23:22] It comes from personal experience. There's a significant amount of crossover between endurance racing and that skill that you just identified. Whether it be a very short race such as an Ironman. Tongue in cheek, of course.

John Reed [00:23:40] The joke was not lost on me, trust me.

Adam Grant [00:23:41] Thank you. When you have the short race of an Ironman versus a slightly longer race of an Ultraman, at some point during the day or one of the days there is going to be, for all intents and purposes, some kind of a crisis. 

[00:23:59] An excellent example: the second time I did the Ultraman World Championships and successfully finished it and came in third, I was descending on the south part of the island, going about 40 miles an hour when my handlebars — in this case, when you're dealing with these types of bikes, they're called arrow bars on time-trial bikes, the ones where you're leaning over and your elbows are actually on the pads and you're in a quite a position. It became loose such that I wasn't sure whether it was going to stay on the actual bike.

[00:24:36] I could feel it, so I had to have the presence of mine to slowly get my hands out of the arrow position onto what are called the brake hoods and slowly feather the brakes, so I didn't lose control. And I had to, at the same time, press my knees into the top bar of the bike to keep it stable as best I could, and then stop and get my crew to come over and help me. 

[00:25:07] And it was a matter of a couple of screws literally being loose on the bike, not my head and they were able to deal with it. And then get right back into it and trust the next descent at 40 miles an hour I was going to be okay. 

[00:25:20] Those types of mental shifts, of everything's going fine, something is really not going fine. And then getting your head back into it in a calm, cool, and collected way is very much how I manage to deal with my clients. I literally talk with them about, let's focus on, let's not focus on, let three days from now, two hours from now. Let's focus on the next five minutes. Let's do what we have within our control at this point. And then at the next point, and then I get to expand. First talking to them in a calm way and telling them methodically, we're going to do this and we're going to do this, and then we're going to do this. That helps them bring themselves down in a very centered context and really just focus on those minutes. That's the best way I have felt to really bring them front and center. 

John Reed [00:26:12] So have you had the opportunity to negotiate with any hackers and, uh, bitcoin ransomers?

Adam Grant: [00:26:18] In a couple of instances, yes. It's an interesting dance that you end up doing because you are quite sure that everything they're saying is not true. And you don't count on anything ever happening, but it has happened. 

[00:26:35] There was a particular instance where, I wouldn't say they were necessarily bad, bad actors. They were maybe not so nice actors. It was an organization that fancy themselves as protectors of digital privacy, and they hacked into my client's system and grabbed quite a lot of personal data of, in this instance, professional athletes' health information. 

[00:27:02] We were able to identify who it was using our forensic IT. They communicated with us, and then we were able to, to the best of our ability, get back the information and it was not disseminated. The issue was whether they were going to disseminate it to the public. They did not. 

[00:27:21] We ended up not having to actually pay out any money. What they wanted to do was actually have us harden the system. So, there was an expense associated with it, and we were able to do that, and fortunately, the client had taken my advice earlier on and had cyber liability insurance, so the cost of hardening the system was actually covered by the insurance. 

John Reed [00:27:45] We talked about your resourcefulness in terms of your skills, the calmness that you bring, and the analogy to your competition and how you bring that back to your clients. The other thing that impresses me is you truly live to be that first call for your clients. You place such a high value on that. How important is it to you that the client, whenever they face an issue, legal, business, or otherwise, calls you first and foremost? 

Adam Grant [00:28:13] The key to that is I tell my clients, I am your most trusted advisor. I am the person who has the absolute deepest Rolodex, to use an archaic term. Call me not just for these issues but call me. Do you need a contractor? Do you need an insurance representative? Do you need a commercial graphic designer? Feel free to. And that is part of what I consider myself just as simply a resource for the client.

[00:28:45] And call me when these issues happen. My clients’ businesses, when these issues happen, it's not nine to five. They happen at night. They happen in the morning. They happen on the weekends. 

[00:28:56] I think I shared with you an instance when it happened on a long ride, a bike ride. The clients understand that on the weekends, I have long training days and I will respond. Sometimes it takes me a little bit. In that instance, I was in the middle of a long bike ride, on Pacific Coast Highway, and I got the call. And then I rode to Ventura and dealt with everything, and then I rode back afterwards. So as long as the clients were fine with me showing up in my cycling attire and maybe not the most aromatic, I was able to fulfill their needs that Saturday morning. 

John Reed [00:29:30] That's what I was referring to in the blending of inside the office and outside the office together. You manage to do it quite well. 

[00:29:36] I wanna take this idea of being connected a little bit further. Your Rolodex. So, there's resourcefulness. There's the idea that I am your one-stop resource for finding you what you need, whether it is a business need, a personal need, legal need, whatever it may be. Do you use your deep contacts to connect clients and others to each other for their benefit? Not just simply because you are responding to an issue they have?

Adam Grant [00:30:04] Yes, I've had the unique opportunity in many instances to make those connections. The most fulfilling one resulted in a client telling another person, “My attorney is so great, he actually makes me money and doesn't cost me money.” I had the opportunity to connect a client who I had worked for who did a lot of buying and selling and operating aircraft and helicopters with a client who needed to have an expert testify about the value of a particular helicopter. When I put the two of them together, they became quite close, not just because of that, but friends as well.

[00:30:45] The client who essentially bought and sold these helicopters and airplanes knew the value of many things, and he was able to come in and say, yes, I've bought and sold these helicopters before. Given the market condition and wear and tear on this particular helicopter, it would be valued at this. It really was a nice connection to be made.

John Reed [00:31:06] To build a Rolodex that deep though, Adam, do you have some special level of curiosity in people that you're trying to understand who they are, the gifts that they bring, the skills that they have so that they earn that hallowed place in your Rolodex so you can connect them or go to them when you need to?

Adam Grant [00:31:25] When I approach networking and business development, I always reflect upon my past and the beauty of raising three daughters and the beauty of being in a relationship with my wife at my young age of 59 for about 43 years. Those four connections in my life have really allowed me to open up my communication skills, my empathy skills, my ability to really connect with people at a much, much deeper level than quite frankly, most middle-aged guys like me. And I, I am really comfortable in that zone. 

[00:32:05] So when I approach people about referring them or connecting them, I'll be vulnerable to them. I'll talk with them very much about their personal things, not just their successes. Because I think everybody could talk a lot about the successes, but what did you do when you had a failure?

[00:32:25] I really believe that what you do in those instances shows really your core values. Who did you reach out to? When I make those connections with people, that's how I gain the trust to be able to say, this person and this person, I think really will work well together. 

John Reed [00:32:45] When you and I spoke before, you mentioned the five love languages, and how you've made it not only a mission to understand each of them and commit to your own love language in your personal life, but you're also channeling that understanding in your business life. I've never met anyone — lawyer otherwise, frankly — with that level of understanding who has applied it in that way. Can you speak to that revelation and application? 

Adam Grant [00:33:16] Sure. So, the book, the Five Languages of Love, is a book my wife and I shared, and we made it a point not to read it separately, but read it together. As we read through things, we very much identified with which language of love we were using in our relationship and identified how we have other friends and family who we love dearly and how we communicate with them.

[00:33:43] In my desire to really connect with the people who work for me in the firm and with my clients in particular, I've learned they have their own languages. Some like the windup. Some really need a lot of background. It's a direct crossover with the connection I have with clients, and I frequently tell them initially in our meetings that I need to, in many instances, be quiet and open my ears, and open my heart up to listen to them. And I tell them, I need to know how to best communicate with you because in dealing with cases, they're stressful. So, I need to know the best way to communicate the ups and the downs of what's going to happen, so you really hear me. 

[00:34:36] It's my responsibility to learn that. And I tell them it's going to evolve over time. Some people love emails, some people love texts. Some people love me picking up the call. Some people love long explanations. It's the most important thing. I'm a communicator. In my job, I need to communicate. I need to be persuasive. And to be effective in doing that, I need to do it in a language that the client, opposing counsel, and the judge understand it best. That'll be my best opportunity. 

John Reed [00:35:08] What's interesting, and I'm not the expert in the five languages as you are, but one of them is the language of deeds. I'm sure it's phrased a different way. That's how I say it. So, actions. I'm wondering if that plays into your client care as well. 

Adam Grant [00:35:24] Acts of service. That's the phrase that you are searching for. Acts of service.

John Reed [00:35:28] Now you're leading me, which is great. 

Adam Grant [00:35:31] Yes. Acts of service, in my mind, go beyond words. Its tone. It is sometimes silence. Acts of service aren't always affirmative actions. Sometimes the most important act of service is really hearing your client and validating what they are saying. They're coming from their own place. They may have had a bad morning, they may have had a fight with their significant other, and they need to be heard and we need to deal with the task at hand in dealing with the litigation. 

[00:36:06] I think they need to be heard. And they need you in their corner. And some are really good at taking in the constructive suggestions, as I put it, then. Some are not, and that's okay. But listening to them as an act of service and validating where they are in the moment is really important. 

John Reed [00:36:26] Another part of your life, a big part of your life, is giving back and you do so in legal business and other communities. Can you talk to us about that? 

Adam Grant [00:36:36] Yeah. I— this really goes back to me as a child and I had some exceptional role models in my parents. Where my father frequently gave of himself, most notably, he would say he gives of himself through his checkbook. And then he would joke with the rabbi at my school, and he said, “The greatest gift I would ever give to the school is my wife.” And that was because my mom volunteered through all the parent organizations, and I remember them going to various charity events and fundraisers.

[00:37:13] From that, I learned the value of giving to your community. My parents allowed me the opportunity while I was a child to go to a sleepaway camp during the summers where I met my wife. It shaped me in such incredible ways that I wanted to give back to it. As I got older and got into my profession, I was on the alumni committee, on the board of directors, and then actually served as the president of the board, I think, more years than any other president. I was the president for about five years as it transitioned into its own independent nonprofit and still remain connected to this day deeply. 

[00:37:55] Being an attorney is a privilege. You do have the opportunity to give back. And my way of doing that was through the local bar association. Our firm had a tradition of being involved in the local bar association in the San Fernando Valley. So, I became a trustee, was on the board, and then was elected the president of the San Fernando Valley Bar Association and continue on serving on different boards now and helping out the camp in many, many different ways.

John Reed [00:38:29] Don't stop there. You are giving back through your sport. You are encouraging up-and-coming athletes, whether they're ultra-marathoners or low-life 5k'ers that I've occasionally done myself, as well as taken this, and I'm going to call it a gift, the insights that you have for business development and sharing that not only with other lawyers but also other people, not just in the legal space. Talk about that. 

Adam Grant [00:38:58] I love doing what I do. I love extreme sports. I love practicing as an attorney. In so doing, there's a certain gift and pleasure of giving back to young triathletes. I call 'em newbies. It's a certain culture within triathlon where there's a lot of camaraderie. There's a lot of friendliness. Frequently when I have friends who say, you have motivated me and I've had this, you've motivated me when I talk to you, and I want to start to do this. And I discussed with them, okay, tell me what you're doing.

[00:39:32] And I've, on many occasions, met friends at seven in the morning and given them swim clinics. I've volunteered for different nonprofits to help out with coaching for different activities and helping people kind of be in that spot and motivating them. 

[00:39:48] As part of networking, I'm involved in different organizations. When I get involved in an organization, it is with the intent of actually leading that organization. My, my kids and my wife somewhat—they know me incredibly well. So, if there's a group and somebody asks a question about this, I am virtually always the first one to say, “I have a thought.”

[00:40:10] And to them, it embarrasses them a little bit. But on the other hand, I look at it as, I'm a bit of a leader in that respect. And I want to break the ice. Everybody's a little bit nervous. Who's going to say what first, once you get the ball rolling, that helps? So, in joining various groups, I like leading groups. So, I developed a very purposed culture in one of the networking groups I have to really impart how you connect deeply with people and in so doing, in a kind and respectful way, generate business for them. And therefore, it ends up coming back to you. 

John Reed [00:40:47] I can sense from you, you're doing this to help people and that's the reward. Whether it's to make them better athletes or better business people or have healthier businesses or avoid risks or whatever. There's a joy that comes with that, and that's as much of a motivation as any sort of pecuniary interest you might have or profitability or anything like that.

Adam Grant [00:41:08] It's a part of flow. 

John Reed [00:41:09] What a perfect capstone to the conversation. It's like you planned a segue. 

[00:41:14] Adam. I want to thank you for letting us into your world and really breaking down what it means to be a trusted advisor to your clients and a mentor to others.

[00:41:25] I've used this term only once before on a podcast. This has been a kind of a masterclass and I appreciate you leading us through it. So, thank you for your time today. 

Adam Grant [00:41:32] You're welcome. I've enjoyed it tremendously. Thank you. 

John Reed [00:41:36] Listeners, I encourage you to visit stickylawyers.com to learn more about Adam, his practice, and his achievements. There is a lot there; far more than what we've covered today. 

[00:41:46] Whether you're a first-time listener or a devoted stickler, what we call our Sticky Lawyers fans, please go to wherever you get your podcasts. Right now. Go there. And click the “follow” button. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever. When you do that, you'll be sure to get new episodes and you'll be letting us know that you like what you hear and that you want to hear more, and we would appreciate that.

[00:42:09] Until next time, I'm John Reed, and you've been listening to Sticky Lawyers.