Ask Wes Anything – How to Keep From Becoming Jaded & Can I Take the Intellectual Property When I Move to Another Job?

Audio Transcription

On today’s show. I’m joined by my attorney, Mr. West Court with law firm, winters and king, his law firm, winters king at.com. A repor represents huge names, New York Times bestselling author, t d Jakes. They’re present. The check this out. They actually represent Donald Trump jr yes, they actually represent, uh, Joyce Meyers. They did the pastor, they, they represent the pastor of the largest church, the largest evangelical church in America, whites church. They, they represent pastor Craig Rochelle. This churches over 100,000 members when it comes to business. When it comes to law, West Carter knows what he is talking about and on today’s show he’s, he’s hopping on the show to answer the question, how do you keep from becoming jaded as a business attorney that deals with so much conflict? Ladies and gentlemen, with any further, I do. Back to our interview with Mr Wes Carter with winters king.com you have questions. America’s number one business coach has answers. It’s your brought up from Minnesota. Here’s another edition of ask clay. Anything on the thrive time business coach radio show?

Oh yes. Here

we are. At the threshold. We’re five feet away from the floods coming in off the river into the riverwalk facility is the, we are up at historic high levels here. And we could be, we could be lamenting, we could, we could be hoarding. Yes. We could be buying all the milk. Cause you know when the in times are approaching, what do you do? You go to Walmart, you get all the milk and gold, get that bread, get that milk, clean out those aisles and get on top of your house and don’t, don’t drive away from it. Just get all that milk and that bread. That’s what you do. That’s an end times tip had had striped to the roof. I like that. Straight to the rope that those were the moves. But we instead we decided, you know what we’re going to interview, where’s the car?

Where’s the car? We’re gonna interview him on the show. What the we attorney at law and asked him questions, uh, from the thrive nation. So the first question comes in west, uh, from a woman by the name of Jean based in Phoenix, Arizona. She is a speaker who has worked with Mr. Clay stairs as a client, I believe for three to four years now. And here is the question she asks that she’s taken a new position of a women’s business organization and they want her to create a training curriculum for the organization. She already travels around the world speaking and training and that kind of thing and she wants to know if I create this curriculum and these resources for this organization, can I still use the intellectual property that I created for myself for my other things, cause she’s already a speaker. She’s already teaching, creating content, but now she’s got this new position as the head of a women’s organization. What’s the clear rule of mark the lines of demarcation? What can she use, what can she not use? Talk to us about intellectual property when you have a job, a job.

Well, let’s start with saying the most important thing to do is just get it in writing upfront. I mean, whether you’re an employee, contractor, we’ll talk about all the kind of general roles here in a second, but it’s always better to have that agreement up front, make sure you’re on the same page and put it in writing. Um, with a contractor, if you’re getting paid to provide a certain service to me, usually there needs to be some sort of written agreement. If the person creating, it’s not going to own the rights to it. Now with employees it’s a different world a little bit. There’s something called the work for hire doctrine, which um, if you’re my employee and part of your job duties is to make this copyrightable material, you know, a text or images or video, whatever it is, then the employer owns the rights to that intellectual property, but leaves a lot of room for arguing.

I mean, we can argue here, oh that wasn’t, that was outside the scope of my duties or I did that off the clock, not on the clock. They’re just, there leaves a lot to argue about. And so the best advice I can give anyone is put it in writing. It doesn’t have to be a very complicated document. Just say, Hey, I’m going to prepare this for you. I’m going to own it. I’ll give you a royalty free license to use it. And it just clarifies it right up front and you have to worry about that down the road.

Z, does that answer it from your perspective as an entrepreneur, does that give like the clarity that you need? Are you still going? I don’t get it cause I think there’s a lot of it. There’s a lot of employers. I’ll give you example. A lot of artists who’ve worked for me over the years, cartoonists, yeah. And every single time they leave, every, not, not once, but every time. Except there’s exceptions. They want to take it with them every, every time. I don’t know if you’ve seen it Z, but it’s like the, the operations manual they made for you or the handbook they made for you with a checklist. They want to bring it to their new optometry shirt. Have you had that problem say? Absolutely. Absolutely. And unfortunately

business can be a lot like marriage. Whoa. And that is, is that when you say you’re standing up there and you’ve got your rig in your pocket and you’ve got your tax on that you had fitted a month ago. So it’s a little tight, tight, tight, and you’re looking across and there’s this beautiful young lady.

Why? Yeah.

Oh yeah. And you know there’s a big old cake in the other room, white nine and you look out and got all your friends on your side. Once we get down to business, all her friends and family on the other side and, and you’re sitting there and you’re enjoying the moment cause you know her dad paid for it. So you’re really enjoying the moment and, and all of a sudden it comes to that part and they say I do. And you say, oh I do. Yes I do. They asked him about I was sick so I said I do, I do, I do, I do. And in your mind you’re signing up for what you think is the contract of marriage in your mind and that sweet little thing in her white dress, the standing over there and they as crunch cause well yes I do.

And she has her little contract in her mind and guess what? They’re not always the same contract. And just like a prenup is really good in any marriage you might say, well that’s just negative. You’re saying it’s not going to work. It’s not going to, it’s going to fail. Are you going to go on the record and saying that you and Kanye West you to share the dragon energy worldview that you got to get a prenup? Is that what you’re saying? Of course you’re, that’s what you’re saying. Of course. That’s a controversial idea. Right? Yet there you are. You’re walking on hot coals there brother. You are walking on them hot, cold. What’s this shape thing that west is talking about? And that is having an agreement upfront and not, this is good cause you know what? When you, when you’re first signing up for the deal, just kind it go on your honeymoon and just like when you got you, when you’re first hiring them and they’re coming on their first day at work and you’re like, come on, let me show you the break room.

And you know we got this back here and this here and we’ve got a slide from the first floor to the second floor cause we’re Google and we did because slides are cool, you know, well you want to use an pest collator when you can slide down the anyway ping pong table for breaks. I mean, so everything’s great day one. It’s when the thing falls apart, it’s when they’re going to leave to go to their next job. It’s not going to happen. It had does. Oh it does. It does. I was thinking about a parallel universe where bad things don’t happen. No, it’s a tour of duty to understand a habit in writing to have a, I know it sounds horrible, but to have all the bad things already discussed and figured out when you have all this good Karma. And I mean, it’s all fun and games that, oh yeah. Oh yes. Do you agree with prenups? Well, I think prenups are a good idea. Yeah. I mean, just like in Business, oh, this is,

this is one of the reason divorces get so messy is not just the emotional part of it, but right. It becomes the wild, wild west where there’s no rules. You’re fighting over, I’m going to get as much as I can and I’m mad at you, so I’m not going to be reasonable. Sometimes I’m just going to take whatever I can get, but if upfront and writing, there are certain rules you have to play by then there’s only so much you can say you’re a jerk, I’m a jerk, whatever, but as far as it’s the kitchen result, we’ve already agreed on the result.

Right. Just like the gentleman that comes in and says like, [inaudible] like you clay, they come in and they do your operations manual and then they go, well, I should be able to take this with me or copy of it because I did it all the time. All the time. And you say, no, look at our agreement. Our agreement was that things that you, that I told you to make, that you made on my time, that I’m paying you for my, it’s my material. I’ve worked with a lot of restaurants. I call this to catch up packet principle. It’s the same idea of divorce. It works. What happens is, is you go into a restaurant, not you. It’s none of our listeners. People we know. Well, I just did this. Okay, I did this. This is me telling on myself. I go into a, the barbecue place right over here, Billy Sims. And they said, sir, would you like some a barbecue sauce? I said, yeah, the hot, the hot stuff. I said, sure. They gave me Andrew, what, six or seven packets every time. And I like half a packet every time and I just, you know, the rest of it, I’m going, well probably just throw it out. Cause I, at this point I’m gonna have like thousands of them. You know what I mean? But what happens is if you’re going to their business owner, you have to declare to your staff, you will give per pound of,

uh, you know, per pound of hotlinks one container. It’s a big generous container. Um, and if they want more you can do it, but just give them one the defaults gotta be no, we’ve got to agree on that right now because I’ll go work with a business owner, I’ll work with a restaurant and they have somebody who’s giving away. I mean, this, this particular person has given me you, Andrea, you’ve seen it. If we just drank it like his beverages, we probably could not consume. I mean, it’s so generous with them. And for awhile I was stacking it up. I was saving them building like for rainy day decorative devices was, hey look, the floods come into Tulsa. Could we have packets? Yes, we’re fine Barbie. But when you define it ahead of time, when you, when you define it ahead of time though, and you say, this is the limit, this is what we agreed to, there’s no misunderstanding.

Now when you try to correct an employee who’s been used to giving out like six packets and you say, now we’re going to go down to one, you’re like, aw, you cheapskate whites. So you gotta get that stuff agreed to in advance. That’s the hard part west, isn’t it? It’s always easier to set expectations at the very beginning as opposed to adjusting and later on guys are negative. But you know what? When you own the business and you get it and you understand, you just think, and I don’t know why we default there, but we think everybody comes in and gets it too. They go, well sure. I mean it’s so obvious. It’s so common sense that you don’t give out 87 packets cause there’s no way a guy can eat that much and it’s money out of my people love giving away your money

board. Remember to a lot of our listeners might have independent contractors where the default rule for employees may not apply. So you have to have something in writing. Because I’ve had situations where someone’s made video role for one of my clients clients and when they leave they go straight around the boss, the employer to the end client and say, hey, that’s my video. They don’t have the right to give that anymore. And they say, well, we already paid them for it too bad, stop using it. And so your clients can get drug into this very easily, which is bad for every like half the time. And not that often, just 50%

that seriously this, these are real situations that divorce only happens. What? I mean what person, what percentage?

Only about half. Yeah, I mean it’s inching up there if thought over already.

I think it’s, I think it’s higher because I was reading an article in the Washington Post that showed that 71% of men surveyed admit to having an affair at some point. But then it goes on to d peeled article about, and Andrew, we’ll put it on the show notes, but there’s a Huffington post did a study on this and then it’s like, no, psychology today did an even deeper dive and it showed that like seven and a 10 people don’t like their spouse. So then there’s like follow up questions like, so what are you doing? There’s a lot of people, a lot of like, well, we just don’t live together.

Well the millennials are helping this though because I hear a large portion of the millennials are just being celibate altogether now and foregoing, there’s been a lot of articles about that lately that, oh, well there you go.

Oh Man. That’s a, that’s okay. No, that’s a move. Josh, I’m going to give you the mic for a second and then west is going to take it back. Josh, with living water, irrigation, any legal question you want to ask? And I want to be clear, uh, the, the, the, you’ve heard the disclaimer, but this, uh, these questions that West is answering, his answers are not to substitute for having an actual attorney. So Josh, what is your question for Mr? Where’s the car?

Okay, west. So, uh, we actually were talking about earlier on the show, so I’m just curious, what is my liability for putting cameras in my office?

MMM. What is your liability for putting cameras in your office? Like, so can you do that? Can you not do it? I mean, target’s doing it, you know, Walmart, Walmart’s hilarious. How much they have cameras everywhere. You can see yourself, although tigers, it’s like you’re in a mirror now when you go, you’re walking by a mirror the entire time you’re there. What’s the liability for putting cameras in Josh’s office?

We always have to check on your individual state’s law. Cause some states are more restrictive on the privacy rules that they have. But generally speaking, if it’s somewhere where you don’t have an expectation of privacy, you know, it’s an open office where it’s not a private room, it’s not a bathroom, it’s nothing. You know, where you got an expectation of privacy and typically you wouldn’t hide the cameras. You know, the cameras. You don’t necessarily have to have a giant sign on the wall. But the cameras are out in the open, in the corner, they’re not, you know, hidden in a smoke detector or something like that. Then, um, you know, it’s common these days for offices to have, uh, audio and video, but you always also have to take into account the type of business that you’re running in for your listener. I mean, we were talking earlier, um, my law firm, we don’t do that even though it’s kind of a, one of Clay’s recommended practices for a lot of our listeners because there’s a special set of privilege and confidentiality issues. We have to be cautious.

And as example, Bob Kraft pointed out here, uh, the owner of the Patriots that you can’t fill his legal team pointed out, you can’t really, you can’t use video in a court of law if he’s getting a massage.

Well, yeah, again, that was somewhere where you’d have an expectation of privacy and that the expectation proxy did play heavily into that decision, I think. Yeah. Um, and so that’s kind of the, the general rule there. And then again, if you’re recording phone calls as part of the audio, you have to be careful because some states have a two party consent state so both parties would have to consent. So there’s a, there’s a mix of rules in there, but generally speaking, as long as it’s no expectation of privacy, you’re pretty good to record for your own internal purposes.

Wes, my final question for you then I’ll let you get back to being awesome is ah, you’re an attorney in, in as I’ve, you know, different things. I get involved in grow. I feel like I, before I met you, I built DJ connection and I sold it cause I want to just be done. Yeah. I think I probably at some point, I don’t know a fork in the road. I’ve thought about this, you know, could I have just stayed done. There’s a lot of part of me that enjoyed just not doing anything, like just doing things that didn’t involve conflict. But the moment you run a company, you have conflict because people refuse to do the freaking jobs. People want what isn’t theirs. People want to get rich quick. People want to take what’s yours? People want to sue and guys like Z and I are always dealing with people making up allegations.

Xen or I’m talking about, Oh yeah, slip and falls. People wanting to sue people you haven’t seen in years. All of a sudden wanting to be paid. It’s endless. So my internal strategy for staying positive a was the Joel Osteen book, how called a your best life now where you don’t want to delay having a best life. You just want to basically do your best and let God deal with the stress. And if I hadn’t had found that little rhyming pithy part of the book, I probably seriously would have contemplated shooting myself because I’m be, I’m serious because it’s been so bad for so long, for so many years with the same kind of crap business to business. You just move. Your best friend goes out and starts your car, a company to compete with you every time, every time. Whoever’s close to me, whoever comes to my house, Whoever’s wedding I’ve attended, always start to coming to compete every time.

Whoever I’ve given money to, I help to guy buy a car years ago and then he comes after me for something stupid. How do you stay positive? Cause I’m only dealing with the me book. You know the, the, the book of the movie of me, you’re dealing with the movie of like 50 mes, 50 people that have bigger issues, bigger problems, less problems. But you got 50 data points coming in. How have you not become a completely cynical bastard? Well, I think there’s still got to separate these two things out. I have become a very cynical, jaded person. I think that’s kind of inherent in what I do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m unhappy. There we go. And I think part of that is having a wonderful wife who helps me. She knows when I’m, you know, she’s already mentioned my limit and she’ll, you know, help me find some way to just get people to get my mind off of it.

Um, and also, you know, certain personalities do better with conflict. Um, and see I, I thrive on it. But it really, it takes, the of the people around me who around me are like, does this not bother you? And I’m like, no, F him. I let’s, let’s, let’s do this. I don’t have, I mean I seriously, if somebody wants to mess with me, I have no problem going f him Fms and let’s be friendly to them. But I’m just like, let’s go after it. I don’t even care. Like if you don’t like me. So as an example, when I did the whole mayor thing or on everyday on elephant in the room, somebody writes a comment, we had this thing going on. It was on Google for awhile and on Facebook I didn’t promote a person who was white and they went online and wrote, he only promotes minorities.

If you look the head of elephant in the room, this guy is a mixed race. This person is Hispanic. This, it’s a whole like, hey, white reverse discrimination literally wrote this. I was doing this for some kind of tax credits or some kind of diversity thing. And they were like, let’s see what kind of, and they were posting pictures of these generic diverse photos and everyone read it and they’re talking about how I’m just so fake and I’m trying to hire diverse people just to look good. And this whole thing. And it didn’t bother me at all, but people around me, it really bothered them. And that’s one of the things I find is, you know, you have to be careful not to tie your identity and your self worth to what other people think about you. True. And it’s sometimes that’s harder on

the ones that are close to you because they’re talking about your dad, they’re talking about your husband or talking about your kid. And so they, it’s almost harder for them to separate it. As with us who are directly involved with like neo, I could care less what you think about me. I think I’m rider, I’m doing my job or I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. Um, and it, oftentimes it is hard on the family. So I, I think Z, I wanna get your take on that too. Well I had

question, but I, my, my, my tip, yeah. My take on that is, um, um, you know, you, it’s tough sometimes, you know, and the, the thing about it is, is that as you go through life, you, your high water mark gets hired just like this floodwaters are going out here on the river right now. No. So now there were letting out 270,000 cfs, you know, on a day we let out, your 200 were like test nothing. It’s nothing, you know, so as you go through life experience, as you understand that these things are really, you know, not that big a deal, and you, you go on with it and you don’t let yourself get caught up in it. And whether they’re on reddit or not, I mean, someone could have as a stream on reddit right now, um, about me. And I’m like, you know, I don’t even care enough to even look to see if there is one, you know,

don’t even care. What happens is people close to me will literally like, is it true? And I’m like, what’s true? And they’re like, well, somebody’s just here a day. We did a group interviews, a, we interviewed a bunch of people and this guy was literally, literally where you there, Andrew? Did you see this guy was literally on drugs? He was lit. I mean, I’m not like, oh, he could be like Ibuprofen or anything. I mean, no, he was just like twitching and shaken and just like, and just maybe she’s excited to be in your, oh no, no, because he’s been fired by a friend of mine for doing drugs. The same guy. And he sent a big old Facebook message this morning and I didn’t even know about it, but certain people have access to my Facebook so they can monitor, said things. And they were like, are you worried? I’m like, no, he’s this another psycho. Let’s move on.

Yeah. So W I’m going to ask you a question now. Yeah. I’m a businessman. I’m in business now and I’m having success rocking along and I get my first shake gun letter. Do you have a, and I know there’s everyone’s unique and you have to look at them with a different set of eyes on everyone. First of all, for those of you who don’t know, a shakedown letter is his pre-lawsuit. I want something for you because I feel like your company has done wrong. Right? So it’s a shakedown letter and it usually comes from an attorney. Yeah. So it’s on their letterhead and hey, before we sue, we’re going to give you the opportunity to make this right. Right. Because my, my, you know, my client has been wrong by the boom, boom, boom years in the past. What’s your threshold? Um, when you look at those, what do you recommend? So someone, first time they get one, they open it up, they’re panicked or upset or they’re angry. They go through all these different emotions. Walk me through that process and how you would talk to that said business owner and, and how you would handle that. Well, it’s a great question

because sometimes part of our job is just to calm them down and say, Hey, look, I’ve seen much worse than this. We’ve, you know, we can show this. This is what we’re here for. You know, we, we got there. You got, we got you. Okay. Um, second, let’s notify your insurance company. You know, this is why you have insurance is why you cut that check and every month to, you know, we’ll put them on notice and you know, we’ll make sure you’ve got coverage. Stop, stop. You know, put the weapon down, put the weapon down, put the lead pipe pipe down, put it down. No need to fly to Cuba. You can stay here in the United States. That’s my ticket. Yeah, there’s a little bit of that. There’s a little bit of that [inaudible] you’re right. And then you’re looking at, okay, did you actually do what they are claiming you did?

Okay. And then we start working through some of the facts. Usually, if you give them some homework and say, okay look, we’ll work through this. Once they start getting their nose into digging through emails and records, you know, they’ll get back to entrepreneur, business, business person, you know, they’ve got a task and they’re going to go complete it. Um, but yeah, and then a lot of times those shakedown letters come with very scary hyperbole. Yes. Oh, it’s, it’s like, I always think of tombstones, one of my favorite movies now he’s like, I’m coming and Hell’s come in with hell’s coming up. Everybody wears a Red Bandana. Right. So a lot of those cease and desist letters shakedown letters. They sound like that where they’re scary. Huh. Um, so whatever they want those things. Right. Well, pretty close. We had this conversation before about where’s that line between exactly. There’s a line there somewhere, but where it is. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so you knew who worked through that and then sometimes you got some exposure and you, I think it’s best to tell someone upfront. Okay, well you got a little exposure here, but it’s not that we can’t deal with, you know, again, set their expectations reasonably so that they know what they’re dealing with, but they’re not having, you know, some sort of nuclear scenario in their head

as a, as a pro tip. And as an action step for the listeners out there. I do care. Um, enough, uh, west has been my attorney for a long time, does a great job. I encourage you, uh, to, to check out winters and king as an option, but I don’t care whether you hire my former client is a great guy, Scott [inaudible], he’s an attorney in Dallas where the hire west Carter or ya, I just hire someone you can trust before you need to trust them. Whoa. Back that up again. Hire someone you, you can trust. Hire an attorney you can trust before you need to trust them because when, when the floods start coming down and Tulsa, that’s a bad time to be. Look, try to get back a lot of shirts. What I say, yeah, I have a backup office to go to. So I wasn’t super stressed out when it happened.

I’m like, let’s go to the other office. But you do not want to be looking for an attorney at the very time. You need to trust somebody because there’s just as many shady attorneys as there are shady entrepreneurs, shady people. I would encourage you today, today put on your to do list today to schedule a conversation with an attorney. Maybe you’ve been putting it off for awhile. Get it done cause nothing is more non-fun in my opinion than scheduling an appointment with an attorney. But you need to do it with is a great relatable guy. But I know that the idea of of scheduling a meeting with an attorney, it’s like

how would that go? How would they go about finding out if they liked you or if they wanted to use you down the road? What do you have a deal? Do you have something you, you ease them into it. Do you wanted to see if we’re a good fit? You can check us out on our website. Winter’s king.com or you can call us (918) 494-6868 (918) 494-6868. We do free 15 minute consultations for new clients. What does that look like? So I call up and go do, do, do, do dude man, I’d like a 15 minute consultation. I’d like to talk to somebody about whatever. You probably know. We’ve gotten nine [inaudible] 10 attorneys and so I know what kind of issue you’re dealing with. If it’s something we can help you with, we’re happy to talk to you. If you’re a few minutes at no cost, make sure it’s a good fit. As claim mentioned. So fine. You should find someone that you enjoy working with that’s a good fit, but he’s not a good fit. You know, and maybe it’s not us, but find someone you can work with and you’re not going to dread calling because if you hate talking to your attorney, you’re maybe not going to ever call them when you need them.

Does he not? Is he and I through it? Just, I don’t know what happened. I think we went down the wrong, the wrong rabbit hole and the game of life [inaudible] you go, oh, this z is the secret door that leads to freedom. So you open it up and then there’s like an alligator in there and you run past and you’re like, oh look, I made, I escaped. And then you discover there’s a water moccasin and you go, oh look, I dodged it. And then you discover there’s a viper and you dodge and then you discover there’s a cobra bite in your crotch. Yeah. And that’s why I deal with this a tiny, it was like crazy, crazy lumber. Jerry, remember this? Do you remember this guy? He would just like insult me as part of the company. We just always like his greetings and I’m like, I don’t like, you don’t want to be around money too. It’s a sales methodology out there.

Attorney or CPA or whatever professional. If you’re gonna rely on them for advice, you don’t want to dread every time you have to pick up the phone and talk to them.

I seriously, it was the craziest thing ever. Zhi and I were like, I guess we have to be the Grad. We’re out. Okay, well we’re going to end this show with the boom. And then you thrive niche. Need to call an attorney today to schedule an appointment to meet with someone that you can trust before you need to trust them. Does any further ado? Three, two, one, boom.