Speaker: Welcome to The Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism.

So buckle up and let your heart guide your business journey.

Tom Jackobs: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of the Heart-Led Business Show. Today we're diving deep into the dynamic world of law and leadership with the incredible Jane Muir. As the prominent Miami business attorney and managing shareholder of Jane Muir and Associates, Jane dances through the complexities of litigation with grace and gusto, bilingual and busting with passion.

She balances high stakes with heart. Serving her community like a cheerful champion and bilingual and busting with passion, she balances high stakes with heart. Serving her community like a cheerful champion.

Get ready to hear how she weaves compassion into every case while conquering the legal landscape.

Jane, welcome to the show.

Jane Muir: Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored.

Tom Jackobs: I'm really honored as well because I think you are the first attorney that I've had on the show. I know lots of attorneys that have big hearts and I can't wait to dive into your story and your heart-led business as well.

But of course the first question I always like to ask is, what's your definition of a heart-led business?

Jane Muir: I would say a heart-led business is one that prioritizes the needs of the people who are part of the team and the needs of the people who support the team as clients or customers over profit necessarily.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah. Yeah that's a great definition. But in practice, it can be very difficult.

Jane Muir: To be honest, I don't think so. I find it very simple and lawyers, we have the concept of fiduciary duty.

That's a legal concept designed to describe the duty a person owes to a company that they are a leader of, or majority shareholder of, the duty of a lawyer to the client, and it means utmost care, loyalty, and prudence. So care and loyalty are obvious, meaning you have to invest your effort toward the thing that you're doing, and to the utmost extent, the best you can possibly do. Loyalty is also obvious. You shouldn't be sitting on the board of multiple entities that compete with each other, that would mean that you would be dividing your loyalty or a lawyer can't be a lawyer to multiple people that are in conflict with each other unless they've all agree that's allowed.

You have to have 100% loyalty to your client or in the case of a business to the shareholder or shareholders.

And then the prudence part is where people get tripped up. I think because prudence is such undefinable thing and people see it in subjective ways. They can't really define what would be the prudent choice in a certain situation. But it means something done with good judgment that has the possibility of improving things and making them better. So it's like stewardship.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: I think that all of those concepts are capable of measurable results. If you are loyal and prudent acting with the utmost care. It is apparent and, I think everybody knows what that looks like.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah, absolutely. You, You can spot that a mile away and definitely you can spot the opposite in two miles away, usually.

So tell us about how your, your journey getting into law and I know it's a fascinating story, so please share that with us.

Jane Muir: Thank you. Well, I come from a family of lawyers. My mother was a judge and my father is still a practicing lawyer. He's almost 80. My grandfather was a lawyer also. He was the lawyer who handled all the real estate transactions to develop Miami Beach for Carl Fisher. So we're a long time Miami family and we think of lawyers being like knights and shining armor.

So it's really a point of pride to be a lawyer in our family.

So I went to law school at University of Miami after graduating from the University of Florida.

I came outta law school during the subprime mortgage crisis.

Tom Jackobs: Yay.

Jane Muir: So

Tom Jackobs: Good timing.

Jane Muir: Yeah, there weren't a lot of jobs. I, I was fortunate to have some great choices, but I got laid off after only six months and a firm, and my partner from law school, who's my trial partner. He and I decided to start our own firm and it was kind of a crazy idea that we thought we would just try it and see if it worked. And after a year, we really hadn't made very much money and he went to go join the public defender's office. I ended up continuing and I later partnered with another lawyer and finally I, he started a bar that became extremely successful called Adam Gersten was my second law partner. His father was also a judge and he that judge Gersten connected us.

And then after his business ventures became more successful than his law practice. He decided to sell his ownership to me and we became Jamie and Associates.

Tom Jackobs: Okay. Oh, wow. And what's your specialty?

Jane Muir: I practice business law, so I generally

70% of the time I'm counseling small businesses, which is not necessarily a business that is small or doesn't make much money. It's a business that is owned by people, like a family business or a partnership that doesn't have the intention to be grown and sold.

It's a business intended to be maintained and operated for the benefit of the owners.

Tom Jackobs: Okay. Okay. Kinda like most small businesses in the US.

Jane Muir: A lot of restaurants, a lot of dry cleaners. I have all kinds of companies, trucking import, export just a really, a huge variety, which I love because I'm a curious person by nature, and I'm interested to learn about every area.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that I love the fact that you combining the law and them business and you get so much exposure to many different types of businesses, and you can take that experience to other businesses and help them even more because you have this broad knowledge.

So the service offerings can be great for you.

Jane Muir: Yeah. And they all pretty much have the same things in common. Healthcare has its own legal standards that you have to meet, but they all pretty much have the same kind of issues. They have employees they need to interact with, they have vendors they need to interact with.

They have county, city, state, and federal government, regulations to comply with. And so it's really a kind of a routine of attending to these Administrative legal requirements?

Tom Jackobs: So tell me how have you brought in the heart part of the business?

Jane Muir: One thing is I care about being happy in my work environment. So, one way I've done that is, is with color and decor. I'm working from home today, but I have a mural on my wall that's very colorful. I have art. I have pictures and plants all around at the office so that it's a beautiful work environment and so I think that's key. Another way is I hire friends. My Office manager is my dear friend of 20 years who introduced me to my husband. And we basically have fun all day, every day, just working together. We were teammates in rugby. We played rugby together. We had the experience of working together as a team you know, well, and she has a background in education, so I felt that would be an ideal candidate to help train and project manage my team.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah. The theme of the show is all about business and heart-led businesses specifically, and a lot of businesses especially heart-led businesses struggle with the balance between making a profit and being heart-led. So how do you, first of all, balance your own business with making a profit and still being heart-led, and then also advise the clients that you have on how to balance that.

Jane Muir: We use targets and math and data. For example, in, in the practice of law. There, there's a concept that with our fiduciary duty that we owe to our clients, we are not permitted to exceed ordinary profit without violating the fiduciary duty. Because if we don't put the client's interests first, which include saving money, that would lead to our having extraordinary profit and ordinary profit is defined as three times cost. So we use the three times cost model as our sort of home base, where every lawyer is expected to generate three times cost, and we compensate them with one third of what they generate. We have like a, a base salary and a bonus up if there's less than if the salary isn't quite what a third is and that one third is designed to compensate the person. The second, third is designed to compensate the or to pay for overhead costs like rent and utilities and software and so on.

Excess healthcare. The third is profit to the shareholder. This was historically the way every law firm operated. But more recently, the practice of law has forgotten about this. Uh, Ordinary profit concept. We find that it is a really reasonable, fair approach to everybody's compensation. And then

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: for admin people, we pay above market because we want the best people.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: Henry Ford did that. Apple does that, if you want the best people you pay above market. So what's great about this is it results in having the best type of people. People who prioritize achievement that just want to be excellent. In their phones, they care about being accountable and creating great results and we just had a $6.3 million verdict in December on a case.

That was a very challenging case. A lot of people didn't think that we would succeed and we had a lot of obstacles, but we're the kind of team because of this. This feeling that everybody, when we have a challenge to, to face, we all get together and everybody is supporting each other and it's a really good result.

And so then as to the clients, I just talk to them with total radical candor.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: And, and we talk to each other with radical candor, so you have to care personally and confront directly at the same time. The definition of radical candor.

I wish I could recall the wonderful author's name, but it, that's a

Tom Jackobs: Ray Delio, I believe.

Jane Muir: No, I think it's a lady

Tom Jackobs: oh, okay. Oh,

Jane Muir: lady.

Tom Jackobs: He brings that up in his principal's book.

Jane Muir: Kim Scott.

Tom Jackobs: Kim Scott. Okay.

Jane Muir: Scott, yes. But Ray Dalio is fantastic. I've read several of his books. I really, I'm devastated by the one I'm reading now, Principles for a Changing World Order.

Tom Jackobs: Oh

Jane Muir: He's a great author too. When you talk to the client, like for example. Yesterday I spoke with a family business where there the partners were having conflict with one another and there was an element involving mental health.

One of the partners had a mental health crisis and it was leading that partner to change behavior and act suspicious and make accusations.

And, it was aging related. So they wanted to know what their options were because they had already consulted some other lawyers. if I talk to anyone about a litigation, what I always do is I give them the cold hard truth about expenses of litigation. What we've seen, and I've been practicing now 16 years. And it'll be 17 in September. So if some comes to me with litigation, I can tell them in all my career, two times I've sent a letter saying, please pay this amount or else I'm gonna sue you. And had a response that was favorable. One door company that was like, oops, we just lost your order.

Sorry, here's your money. And that was it. And the other one was another honorable business, but I find that when people stiff you. They don't really intend to pay. They intend to avoid that responsibility. And so I, I send letters, but I always advise someone consulting with me that it's going to be a minimum of 10 or $15,000 because we have to draft a complaint and even if we settle right away or have default where we win because the other side doesn't answer. It's gonna have at least that expense just to do the paperwork and file it with the court to make that happen.

Tom Jackobs: Wow.

Jane Muir: So, if someone has only lost $75,000, it's almost not worth it.

It's almost not worth putting the money because you could end up spending what's the average of a lawsuit in my practice, which is 50, 60,000? That's usually how much it takes to get us through discovery to a point where the other side cries uncle and decides that they really the money or should do the thing that we're trying to force them to do. And that's an amount that hurts. And then our outlier cases, this case we just tried in December that had expenses over $600,000.

And it's not that we are expensive either because we got to compare our fees apples to our adversary in that case. 'cause it was a condominium matter where all of the records of the association are publicly accessible to the members of the condominium. We got to see their bills compared to our bills and ours are like 25, 30% of what they charge. Because we don't staff that way. We don't like, we don't have three people on a phone call all billing or we just don't stack up the people on the, even if we did if we have three people on a call, we'll only bill for the highest biller.

Tom Jackobs: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Jane Muir: So 'cause fair's fair, three people need not be on a call every time, like maybe once a month. You need a case management conference with your colleagues. But most of the time people can organize themselves. So there's an assembly line and write notes into our log of what work has been done. I explain to people what's the expense of the possible dispute and what is the cost benefit? That's a prudent thing to do in any situation. So if we're liable to shell up between 10 and 600,000 and we have X dollars to recover. Understanding that every lawsuit has a 50-50 chance of success.

Do we want to expend the resources in coin flip situation?

The answer is no.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: But there are exceptions. And I always tell people there are basically two exceptions. One is a principle litigation, like we want to promote a long-term philosophical goal like freedom of speech or some important legal right.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: And then the second one is a long-term business goal, like avoiding fraud and insurance does this a lot where they will fight a lot of claims that may be legitimate just to make sure they're legitimate so that people won't submit fake claims.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah. Yeah.

Jane Muir: But a, a common area we see in our clients' businesses would be collections where they have however many accounts receivable and they need someone to just regularly send the letters, file a lawsuit and they can dedicate some resources, understanding that they will recover some of that.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah. So how do you then counsel your clients then on. You getting their heart into, because I'm sure especially family businesses, there's a lot of passion around that. And there can, they can almost go overboard and no, I got it. This is, we have to fight it. Even if you're losing money, it's spite your nose for, to save your face.

Right.

Jane Muir: It's all gotta be math, like we run background checks and asset searches on our potential defendants. I don't want you to hate me in two years when we're facing trial and you've spent a half a million dollars.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: Because we have a piece of paper that says we're entitled to money that we can't ever possibly get.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: And so this is about you knowing what you're getting into and us doing our very best job to make sure that you're aware of the risks before you take the risks and that's really what a lawyer's supposed to do. A lot of lawyers will just say, oh, don't do that. Don't do this Because it's not quite kosher, it's just a little off. You could get in trouble, and that's not how we do it. We say, here are the risks and usually it's not like a black and white situation.

Tom Jackobs: Yeah.

Jane Muir: Our clients, you know, birds of a feather flock together. So the type of people who come to me are typically honorable prudent people, and they are tired of spending big bucks on big law firms, and they want to work with someone who is smart and reasonable, but not the premium prices. And so they're not out there like pouring chemicals in the Everglades or doing something that is apparently wrong, it's more like, it's a question, should we do A or should we do B? And that's where the prudence is so important. So I just like when I disagree with my husband, I'll be like, listen, I'm, I have professionally good judgment, so I must be right.

Tom Jackobs: That's a good argument. That's awesome. Bringing the heart into it as, as well. That's awesome. Jane, this has been absolutely fantastic. Just learning kinda how you navigate the law and the heart and the profit and all that to make a really cool business and still be true to yourself as well.

How can people learn more about your law firm and you in particular?

Jane Muir: We have a website. It's miamibusiness.law. And if anybody wants legal advice on any topic, we offer a 30 minute consultation, where you can just either call our office or online schedule and talk through any legal problem with any contract or regulatory issue. And, if I'm not the right lawyer for the job, then odds are, I know who that is because being in the family business, and I was also president of the Miami-Dade Bar a few years ago.

So I'm really familiar with the legal community and the people who might be best suited for something specific.

Tom Jackobs: Okay, and are you practicing just in Florida or do you have a license elsewhere as well?

Jane Muir: My license only applies to Florida. Sometimes there can be occasions when something outside of Florida is something I can be allowed to do, but it's a particular situation. So yes, I would say generally Florida.

Tom Jackobs: Okay. Awesome. That, that's good to know and we'll link all that up into the show notes as well. But Jane, thank you so much for coming onto the show today and sharing your wisdom with the audience. I know they appreciate it and I certainly appreciate you as well.

Jane Muir: Thank you. I'm so grateful and I love your book, and I'm honored to be your first lawyer guest.

Tom Jackobs: Thank you so much and

thank you listeners for tuning in today. We really do appreciate it. So we're gonna put all those resources down in the show notes, so make sure you check that out along with the transcript of the show as well if you rather read it. And then while you're down there, there's probably a little button that says share the show with a friend.

And if you could do a favor and share the show with others that could use the advice that was shared on today's show, we'd really appreciate that. And until next time, lead with your heart.

Speaker 2: You've been listening to The Heart-Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.