How Does Your Accounting Background Give You a Unique Approach to Business Law? 

I combine the CPA side, which is sort of how do you manage this thing going forward, with the legal side, which gives me, I think, a different perspective from most lawyers. Most lawyers – and there are a lot of very good lawyers out there. I don’t mean to speak ill of them, but many of them limit their practice to a specific transaction that has a start, a middle, and an end, and then they don’t talk to the client again until the client comes back with another problem. My philosophy is it’s a lot cheaper to avoid a problem than it is to solve it after the fact.

I was making a presentation to a Board of Directors about receiving gifts of assets from membership of the organization, and they asked about what if we get tainted property. Well, you’re supposed to get a – you should get an environmental assessment, which may cost $1,500 to $2,000. If you skip that, and you wind up having to litigate over this gift because somebody didn’t give you an accurate answer, you’re looking at ten to twenty times that amount to file a lawsuit. Most nonprofits can’t afford that.