Co-op Cincy

going to be reading the chat so she can bring the questions to you guys and if you need anything please reach out to us and hope you have a great session thank you okay all right thank you very much and i appreciate all of you as speakers who decided to go ahead with with the show the show must go on and uh and again i thank uh paloma as well but you were in the process of introducing yourselves i believe yeah jackie do you want to go next sure um so i got involved in club work um when matt curry and his team had um started doing some of that work and had funding and wanted to expand the practice at able um and add some transactional work and had a great project going on in dayton that needed legal support um so i've been my name is jackie radebaugh i'm currently with jason weiner pc a boutique a firms focused on cooperative businesses startups and social enterprises were based in colorado but kind of he remote first have been for for years now uh and i joined the firm early in january but had been doing co-op work with abel in dayton and in the dayton region for about four years or just just short of that um and ground up quite a bit of i guess organizing work around that as well and incubation so my i think my as i developed that practice which i didn't have before i was um focused earlier and um corporate taxation nonprofit work and community land trust um as i joined abel and started working with community groups starting to to organize um i think i became partially a community developer as well kind of working really closely with um cop dayton in in in dayton in the dayton region just kind of trying to figure out what what are the steps to get to even be ready to need legal support or to be prepa ready for legal support to be relevant um so it's been a really fun ride and getting a little bit more i guess specialized and specialized in other newer areas right now with platform cooperatives dao cooperatives and kind of more tech focused as well which is being a very interesting um yeah interesting twitch uh twist to to to my traditional i guess if we can say community neighborhood-led cooperative formation now stop here for now okay yeah hey go ahead you know i was gonna ask matt have you had an opportunity no if not okay go right here so i yeah i'm matt curry and um i manage the housing and community economic development practice group at abel there's a legal services law firm in ohio western ohio um our main offices are in dayton and toledo um and yeah i mean i think the intent of this session is to um well before i get this from the work that i've done right so i got into this work through gmc market and co-op dayton right so i'm the founding president of the company and boarding the current president of the board and did some of the legal work for gmc market um along with eric's help at times um so in my mind the session this session is going to be i think just a way for us to just have a general conversation about how attorneys can support each other and how we can generally support the movement for for cooperative development um and i think part of that is trying to figure out how to tie in the private bar into this work at least the legal aid programs i mean i feel like i get involved because people don't have the funds to pay the attorney right so they contact us but i don't want to be the lawyer forever right nor should i be i mean they should probably have in their business plan a line for attorneys um and you know legal assistance so part of my hope is like that'll come out of be drawn out of this as well so and i'll leave it to eric or jackie also to maybe talk about what they hope to get out of this session first of all um paloma i'm going to jump in and say if anyone else who's joined julian i thought i saw someone else we admitted wants to introduce yourself and say what you hope to get out of the session before we take it down the road do so i'm happy to introduce myself can folks hear me yes michael we can't oh great hi i'm mike russell uh i'm a senior lawyer with the legal aid society of cleveland um and over the last couple of years i've started doing co-op work with groups around the cleveland area um it started because legal aid wanted to rejuvenate their group representation practice you know their their traditional legal aid organization most of their work is individual work um but they once had a robust group representation practice that sort of fell away they wanted to inject some new life into it and around that same time um we were introduced to jonathan welley of cleveland owns which is our local co-op incubator and he was looking for some legal work so we decided to sort of learn co-op law and i owe a great debt to the other people on this panel including eric and jackie and matt for uh sort of helping steward that process forward and so what i hope to get out of the panel is i will to continue to learn from everyone else um you know since then we've helped a handful of cooperatives sort of get started in the cleveland area a lot of them are still in the in the getting started phase but it's been a wonderful learning process and um yeah i'm here to learn it and i i can share our experience with sort of helping some startup groups um but they're excited to be here hannah do you want to introduce yourself sure uh good morning everybody i'm hannah scott i'm the program manager of the center for cooperatives in the college of food ag and environmental science at ohio state um i'm also an attorney and i kind of came at this a little backwards i guess you could say i was doing my work as a cooperative developer first i started that in about 2015 so helping groups who were thinking about the cooperative business model with things like business planning feasibility studies just really understanding how the co-ops work i'm looking at other models and i saw that it was extremely hard for them to find what i'm going to call useful legal representation competent legal representation in the cooperative sphere and i saw how difficult it was for other rural businesses and farms particularly and i have a personal uh background in agriculture so i actually decided to go to law school myself um and i did that in 2017 while i continued doing my co-op development work and i was uh recently barred in may so i'm a new attorney thank you jackie i'm a new attorney and i'm trying to figure out how to kind of integrate that into being a co-op developer at the same time um and learn from all of you who have a lot of experience in co-op development and understand how we can make it so that you know new co-op groups even experienced co-op groups don't uh kind of look around with a blank stare when they need legal representation you know let's i want them to understand that they have the ability to find good legal representation in ohio so that's why i'm here awesome thanks kenny congratulations on the bar it's awesome news great news um so i don't know how many people are in this we have i think seven that are showing um up on the screen that i see is there 12 total 12 people in this session yeah and i think i see one of your clients names on here i think i see kenya baker right right so maybe a picture yes so if people want to make requests to join the video please do that because this is the idea this is a roundtable discussion they're not really a presentation [Music] so we will give you a few like 30 seconds to do that and then if you want to join jump in and say who you are and what you hope to get out of this would be great also hey kenya hi hi kenya i had to come on since eric named me called you out as a great potential client for someone who couldn't can solve the problem we're here to talk about yeah all right i'm i'm kenya baker i was the outreach director for the gym city market project down here in dayton and now i'm spearheading the work for unified power community land trust and real estate investment cooperative and i hope to get out of this session um some direction to go in with investment law in ohio hey this is julian i can i can chime in briefly uh this is julian hill i'm a clinical teaching fellow at georgetown law right now in the social enterprise non-profit law clinic and so we help with different types of businesses i spent several years in new york working worker cooperatives and have brought some of that work to our clinic and so i'm just here to kind of see what sort of issues you all are thinking about and moving through i'm here in ohio thanks great thanks julian thanks kenya also anyone else who's not part of this video part talking part want to join us everyone else just content listening yeah or maybe put on the chat folks uh who um who you are were calling from and uh your interest in attending or chatting and talking all that helpful let me while other people are putting in on the chat pose the problem from my side that matt and kenya and mike have all run into and i think jackie may run into a tangentially i love doing co-op work i'm every experience i've had with the co-op scentsy people has been fabulous it's been one of the clients i like working best with since i ran into them at the ohio employee ownership conference but i've got a problem i've got the problem that working in a private law firm and that is very much for profit very much has hours targets i end up doing the work for co-ops which i can charge out at a lower rate but only if i get 40 to 45 hours of billing at my full timeout so what i end up doing is i end up doing a lot of co-op work in the evening and on weekends when i can fit it into gaps the pricing structure for private law firms that do sophisticated corporate work and especially ones that do employee stock ownership transactions is not good for either startup co-ops or worker co-ops i could blow someone's operating budget in about a month for a co-op if i charged my full rate and charged all the time i was doing so i keep looking for ways to shift do we either do work more efficiently or to shift it to people who aren't under such pressure to generate revenue for their own business that's kind of the problem that's kind of why i have tried when i can to make use of mike matt jackie when she was at able to do more of the work so that i don't have to write a client a bill they can't afford to pay to put it in contrast when i do an esop deal when i do an employee stock ownership plan buyout for employees i end up generating 70 to 100 000 of legal fees to get the deal done that obviously is unsupportable for co-ops yeah thanks for training eric so thoughts on what eric just said anyone so eric i have a question oh go ahead michael i was just gonna say from legal aids perspective right that's um there's such a there's the difficulty that eric was talking about we can help fill that void right because we're we have the luxury of not billing our clients um of course uh you know they have to qualify for services um which isn't a barrier for most startup cooperatives um but we also need more folks in the legal aid space um that can do this work right we already in cleveland we have our hands full uh with cooperative startups and that's just in the cleveland area i don't even know if we have any outside of cuyahoga county um and so organizations like abel are able to fill that void in dayton um we need other legal aid organizations in the state to take on this work as well um and and nationally i don't i don't know to what extent legal aid programs nationally really dip into this kind of work and that's not because i i didn't research it that much so maybe maybe other programs are doing a lot of this work and i don't know um but you know legal aid and legally type organizations have a big role to play um but uh they need they need funding to get these programs off the ground and they need to learn from people like all of y'all like i and catherine my colleague who i think is signing on in a moment um did um so to the extent that we can help promote this kind of work to other legal aid programs we'd love to do it is there um michael this is cynthia i'm not paloma i'm using paloma's um equipment right now or her device but i i put in the chat what are the qualifications for receiving legal aid support so our group qualifications are a little bit different than our traditional individual eligibility standards right individually uh we can basically assist folks who earn uh 200 or below the federal poverty guidelines per household group work um we we look to the group revenue right um and then there's also a standard applied to is it a group composed mostly of people who would qualify individually for services or is it a group that serves people who predominantly would qualify for services and a lot of our co-ops would fit that absolutely very much absolutely much so what what are your what's your fee structure for that then oh we we don't charge anything our bill is zero yeah we're legal aid so just like with our individual work well okay so um are there looks like there is an opportunity for developing legal aid support absolutely and and there's funding as well i mean this work uh is funded by the ohio access to justice foundation um here in cleveland uh via a grant that we received a couple of years ago um i feel like hannah is probably also in an interesting situation because you almost function like a pro bono coordinator to some extent because you develop and then it's like finding who does the work and how you can send people the right way yeah that's what i was going to ask eric is is in my mind my question is how can co-op developers get get groups in the best position to be ready for legal counsel because i've had you know i've had attorneys send me send me groups that they say hey they came to me first but they're not really ready for me um we think they need help with a business plan before they get to me um so i would just like to pick your guys brains on like what how can co-op developers like me like co-op cincy update and get a group ready to to so that your work with them is efficient and maybe i i'm going to pass the buck a little bit and say that cynthia kind of knows the answer to that because she and ellen and kristen have developed a pretty good model for doing a lot of the training work to figure out if a group will work as a co-op whether they have the culture and whether they have a good idea of how to buy the business before anyone starts me doing any legal documentation and then we try and do we had a spurt where we had a call that lasted about i think an hour and a half cynthia with a group of co-ops that were all working in parallel and we've now formed four of them and maybe five t-shirt apparels is filed with ohio i don't know how much follow-up work we've done after that where all five of them are incorporated and i was able to work on them in parallel because cynthia and her colleagues have packaged it so well that's just a shout out to co-op cincy's method well we appreciate you definitely appreciate your assistance um it's it is a process as you said and it um the co-op u is the process that we've used to get co-ops ready um as eric mentioned we only had one co-op that was in question they just and one of the things the training did is it helped them understand that they had to have true commitment to this whole process if they were to move forward and um so the composition of the co-op changed but answering some serious questions and that's the important thing to answer those questions um but also to your point hannah um i have a question about the um going back again to that legal part the legal aid if you're looking for support there if you need more people more attorneys i presume or would they be something other than attorneys in terms of profession background michael well i'm sorry i meant to address you so i mean more attorneys would be great um i think we also need more folks like um cleveland owns in the cleveland area incubators that can provide that sort of the course work right the building work um and i think they're they do a good job um i don't think they have the um you know they're not where co-op dayton or co-op cincy is yet i think they're still building their capacity on that end um i'm sorry go ahead no i was going to say co-op cincy has been around for about 11 years now and during those 11 years i think they've learned a lot and applied which they you know that which they've learned and it's helped and i i'm looking at opportunities for our training to uh contain even more content to be more content oriented towards the legal side as well we can develop that some more um perhaps do some of the the things that may uh eric once they reach your desk just require a quick you know look over you know you can just review it quickly as opposed to having to you know set up on different steps and maybe we add a module to your training yeah talking about legal and governance issues so that when they get a set of bylaws they understand exactly what's there so that they understand what i'm doing when i'm filing a corporation what the need for those various pieces of paper is and how they fit together at a component maybe it's an hour maybe it's a two hour where jackie or matt or mike or i or somebody or hannah or somebody with that kind of training ghost rights or even co-writes with you all that module so that they see what it is the lawyers are doing and why it's important yeah i think that would be helpful we already do governance and management governance versus management and we introduce uh bylaws to them we give them sample bylaws and articles of incorporation yet you know we also have people who are going through this who are at different levels of understanding anyway so there's there's some challenges there but um i do like that idea i'm sorry i heard someone else yeah let's be moderated and i'm taking up everybody's time i was no no it's great we can i would like to make it kind of like a couple of other angles too that is you know unlike the ease of work or bigger entity work deal work and on my end uh to start to structure a startup co-op is somewhere in between three and five thousand dollars right so it's a lot more accessible in that end um and it's a specialized area of law so i also think there's value and if there's funding or coming up funding to allow private attorneys to have access to that funding as well to support both the word of work of legal aid doing that but also to support their work i think is to some extent unfair to the cooperatives themselves to expect them less than we expect from my startup a small business because that's going to impact their success as well so i think the bar should be about the same right like we provide support and we want to see you successful and therefore you need to have a straight up uh business plan that your financials aspect of the business plan makes a lot of sense if that doesn't make sense that's typically when i send uh clients back to a cooperative developer and say hey you need to figure out your you know your money and money out is structured because if that doesn't make sense on paper you're gonna struggle a lot and i can put anything write any legal documents those will be kind of useless so i've uh right right eric we can't write anything and it shouldn't take too long if but from our perspective but it really needs to match with what the client is trying to accomplish and with how um you know how much they understand their project as an actual business um so recently i have i've been working with a co-op in cincinnati that is well structured wants to grow and didn't have funding for our services and uh the selc had a fund that allowed them to apply and i think the criteria because it's kind of like charitable fund as well it's close to what legal aid would expect it's like are the what's their impact who are who's participating in that that business that co-op um to become eligible and i was able to access that funding on their behalf to cover my legal services and now i'm available to do their work and i think that's part of the thing too is it's i'm charging a lower rate for that but at least i'm getting covered on at least on my costs the client is getting good legal services and is also learning in that that as you grow you need to have a line for legal services that's going to happen with any successful business if you're going to be successful you need to have some of that um so i think it's kind of like increasing the expectation providing and and providing the support that they can meet that expectation as well and you guys uh do a great job and in dayton i present often with the with cop dayton's incubator program as well on the legal aspect so i walk them through the type of legal entities and then sometimes i drafted for them um a year or so ago and have like a few iterations of a new bylaws that i kind of like highlighted for them areas that of discussion um and then like making sure that they have something up front that can that the team can work to discuss through but also understanding that when they come to an attorney it's gonna be depending on where they are and they stay and what stage of development they are as a business regardless of it being a clock or not i think it's really important one other model i have worked a couple times and it's been a really nice experience is instead of representing the co-op or the workers i've got a seller who really wants his succession plan or her succession plan in one case to be a worker co-op to be the workers in one case the deal came to me where they were starting with the thought they would do in esop but that really wouldn't work but if you can get the seller to hire a co-op attorney to represent the company that is going to be sold to the workers sometimes the seller has enough of an incentive in making the deal happen that you can get around the desperate funding needs that happened to me with a group of chemists in florida that happened to me with a bakery in cleveland not in cleveland in the high on north high street in columbus where the seller really wanted this to happen another case where we tried to make it happen was there is a solar panel installer who would love to be a worker co-op if he could work out some of the issues and he was willing to hire me to teach him how to sell to a co-op again get to the deeper pockets rather than the workers audio matt i believe is there anybody else you're still waking up well now you were muted yourself a second ago do you want to add some incident yeah um i was going to take this in a little different direction so if we're not ready to go that way please feel free to redirect but um something that eric's said and something i've heard from other attorneys is and and i think michael said you know learning from each other learning from experienced attorneys um you know i've been thinking about how we can transfer some of that knowledge uh to new attorneys particularly or to even to law students so the ways that i'm seeing connections with legal aid i'm wondering if we can build connections with entrepreneurship clinics throughout the state right so uc has one ohio state has one i'm sure case has one um how can we develop those relationships where perhaps that's another outlet for cooperatives to receive you know below market rate assistance but also teaching new attorneys what this space is like does anybody have experience with that i think matt and i tried or talked about that earlier and i don't think i wasn't very successful in doing that but but i i think i think you're right i think that's the way to go i think it's just um [Music] and julian does that so i'd be curious to hear from uh his side that is he's in a school right like how um how can organizers and developers and then private attorneys get all connected and use that clinic as essentially the place where they meet uh to distribute because the clinic we can teach these students right but typically those clinics even the ones that are doing good work already um don't have an attorney that has a ton of expertise so i think it would probably you know be in ohio matching them with me with eric with mike um to kind of the students to kind of develop that expertise that the clinics director also start developing the expertise and then feel more comfortable themselves supervising these students as that growth but that's how i learned a lot about community land trust was with the entrepreneurship clinic at the university of texas and so i think there's really value in doing that we had two um students from uh i blank now same school as julian's with us this semester and they are doing co-op work there and they are helping develop a grocery store there so i connect them with matt here for the on the ground expertise um but i think you're right i think that's that's that's the way to go i think for ohio we have enough law school that would be great interestingly i had the experience of having a law school intern in a clinical program work with me on developing a co-op but that person was down was working with ariana down in kentucky not in ohio and the experience was really frustrating because it's hard when you can't sit down with somebody this was last year in the pandemic era and it was it's really hard to work with a law student where you can't sit side by side and talk to them i've gotten pretty comfortable talking with mike and with matt but it can be and i will at some point with jackie but it it's hard to work over the phone and not miss the body english when you're trying to really figure out whether someone gets an idea or not i think i'd be curious if anyone on the call has a relationship with ohio state and their center for cooperatives hannah this is our connection i'm sorry i i may have missed your introduction yeah she works for you want to reintroduce yourself hannah sure i manage that center oh my gosh okay great great but to your point to the folks in columbus we cannot get them uh well right yeah so i'm i'm actually not based in columbus i'm based in the college of food ag and environmental science and so we're actually based in southern ohio at a research and extension facility that's actually a research farm so our work has traditionally focused in rural communities and we're pretty small so it's myself and then two other staff members so we just don't the same as many of you we don't have the capacity to be all over everywhere at one time so yeah we're trying to figure out how we how we can increase that capacity do you have any leverage with the law school up in columbus and say hey we'd like to have some of your students working on co-op law or ag law issues i wish i could tell you yes um but i can say i can try um so i i have not developed a relationship there so i actually went to law school at cincinnati um and i had do you have a relationship with that clinic a very good relationship with the entrepreneurship clinic there um but i you know i think that there's a lot of opportunity and in particular because i'm also a part of ohio state it's probably a bit easier for me to start with the law school maybe i don't know you know sometimes law schools are weird places for being honest you know ohio state hasn't made you sign a non-compete or not non-solicit that would prevent you from talking to people at xavier or university of cincinnati or whatever oh man matt we can hear you trying but no we still can't it's just broke you're breaking up too badly there uh but hannah you reminded me of something you referred me to the clinic and you see and i was wondering how that works the the individual by the way um eric i had uh bibi yeah my body um applied you know for some assistance there for her patent because she's still looking for patent that's awesome so that that's another thing how do we is it possible to have a um a network of where whereby i mean is there a place we could go online other than going to uc other than going to the ohio state going one that's uniquely for cooperatives um and legal support around patents around you know whatever what is not on the i.t but on the commercial and business side i think their resources i've seen for that although they tend to be aimed at at farmer co-ops rather than at worker co-ops i think i think as we as we um continue to grow then i could see the uh need for patent attorneys more patent attorneys and they seem to be very sparse in terms of their not so much their sparse as that most of them most of the successful seasoned patent attorneys have existing relationships and are in a niche that they're comfortable with and don't tend to go looking to develop more work especially work for smaller businesses the patent attorneys i at my firm that i tried to talk to about that project do a significant amount of work for second-tier auto parts companies that are keeping them busy and like they are very specialized but also i don't know of anything within cooperative world that would make it very like a specific area right so we are essentially fighting for the same ip attorneys with the same expertise because we don't it's not like you need to go with an up to an attorney co-op or ip co-op attorney they are an ip attorney and then kind of as eric said like you're competing with big clients that are paying big money the selk fellows are a good resource i think um and also this elk has a bunch of attorneys fellows uh that are part of kind of this network that can that are ones rooted around the country to have expertise in several areas and understand fairly well um very well the cell the sustainable economies law center in oakland california so they are a non-profit law firm um that's kind of i guess the leading non-profit law firm in the country doing cooperative work that's the book of their work and among the fellows you're going to find a lot of that expertise as well so we have um i'm blanking on names today but it's the show but we have a colleague in chicago uh fatima um who ipn copyright and that's trademark that's her area of expertise and she's a cooperative attorney she's worked with um a bunch of underground groups there as well so it is a good resource um not paloma sorry that would help with that both we mentioned investment issues and securities law issues briefly when we were saying about what we might want to cover and ip maybe even environmental for heavy manufacturing is i'd love to see a setup where we kind of had a small business clinic where lawyers who normally work for gigantic companies at high fees can do some pro bono work in their area or maybe low bono work by providing specialized services to small businesses through a clinic arrangement where they get some assistance with a referral maybe some grant maybe some help with liability coverage on specific issues to talk to small businesses that couldn't access a niche specialized lawyer have folks heard of the ohio patent pro bono program not yet tell me about it i'm looking in the gym they were set up a few years ago i i briefly worked for the um ipventure clinic at case law school yeah after moving to ohio and the ohio patent pro bono program still exists i had a role in sort of setting up the the application procedure and the sort of i.t behind how cases get placed with attorneys but it's a network of patent attorneys that agree to take cases pro bono they have no specialized co-op expertise but it's statewide and at least while i was there it was fairly successful at placing low-income inventors or entrepreneurs with experienced patent counsel um i don't i haven't had any experience interacting with them in years um but i mean i see the website's still up i haven't even explored the website um recently but it's something to keep in mind and maybe there's a relationship there that we can cultivate um that's more specific to co-op ip yeah it's almost like taking the pro bono partnership for ohio model and maybe expanding that a bit beyond just non-profits right in the beginning it was it was hard recruiting patent council to volunteer to take cases for the reasons we talked about um but if they've grown since then i have a reason to think they have um hopefully that network has expanded well when we talk about issues on securities michael i'd love to see kind of the securities bar and when i say securities that's people who deal with registration of offers and sales of stock or other equity investments i'd love to see the securities bar and some of the big firms do something similar i got one of my colleagues interested enough to try and get him to develop a quote for kenya on something undoing a fairly sophisticated project and he just got sucked into projects for a big for a big toledo based company and never came back to me with a realistic answer but it would be great if we systematically had an outlet for people who do securities offerings do private placements who are looking at how can you sell to people other than accredited investors what kind of disclosure documents do you need to do what are the traps if they were willing to provide their expertise to start up co-ops from time to time especially as michael and kenya both know because it's hard under the legal structures to do community investment even though it's the most natural thing in the world that's something go ahead but i was just that's something that i didn't anticipate having to learn when i started this work and it's it's it's ended up taking up a lot of my uh co-op time uh just trying to get a handle on uh federal and state rules when it comes to securities federal law rules don't worry me as we talked about when we were on the call with the regulators but the state law rules are nasty and they get nastier the more states you have employees in so but it would be great if there were attorneys at squire boggs or attorneys at jones day who said i'm a securities lawyer but i want to do some pro bono work how can i help somebody and i've tried reaching out to those folks individually and through folks who who know them and who work with them and so far haven't been successful or down in cincinnati they're probably people with taft who have the same level of expertise who ought to be saying how can i give back some jackie i didn't mean to interrupt what you were saying oh no you're fine no i was going to say and then you know there's always um sometimes i feel like they feel uncomfortable with not knowing about co-ops enough about co-ops and then we have among the salk fellows a few that are very security feel attorneys that are very security focus so there's always opportunity to develop that expertise on the cop side with securities club attorneys that have a great handle at some state laws and the federal law that can lock those private attorneys through the beginning so they feel comfortable and can be essentially matched to some extent with those attorneys to to feel comfortable doing their work in their area and now with this more specialized but that i think that's a conversation that i had with matt uh on and off too is like let's um how do we make them feel comfortable and for me that i have since i have been with legal aid whenever i see a project that is interesting it's kind of like borderline they cannot really afford but everything else makes sense i will assume that this is probably i can probably get some pro bono credits for it get my cle credits i will just call matt or mike and say hey can i do this pro bono worker through you um and that i'm interested in so i think that's also educating the private bar that if there's something that comes from you that's interesting you can also reach out to the legal aid programs that are doing some of that work and get their support also to find other resources and move forward with that so jackie that raises a question tangentially that i'm really interested in and other people on the phone might be i talked about half an hour ago or 40 minutes ago about the problems with working for a big corporate law firm to what extent do you have more flexibility in a niche but still for-profit law firm specializing in co-ops are there niche firms out there like yours are there opportunities to work with firms your size that are not quite as greedy as mine is well i have uh we have some what a commitment to do about 50 hours pro bono per year per attorney around the farm so there's there's that so that's kind of under what i do i do my work i don't do martial work outside of my work words i do happen to work in a um almost essentially self-driven um firm so we have the flexibility to say i'm not gonna work extra hours and i'm doing my you know 50 extra hours of pro bono within my work time i think it's kind of working with all those big firms let's be honest all those big farms have pro bono uh programs to some extent as well except that they see that as uh no let's hope help people with um very low income center individual income center project um so i think it's educating their pro bono person to understand that this for-profit activity makes sense within a pro bono program but they can still do that because if somebody calls your team to do veterans a veterans clinic doesn't everybody kind of jump on me do that clinic one time feel good about it like it's not an uncommon thing right for bigger firms to do this one-time clinic that assists this one needy population this is kind of the same thing that this has a different impact in the community so i think it's educating those pro bono uh point person in big law firms that this makes sense they can have the same cle and pro bono benefits and have also a big impact in their community i think it's really about education for me i jumping off what you said jackie at the patent pro bono program part of the reason that we were having such a hard time recruiting private council to take these cases is as you were saying there's a perception that there isn't a demand for these services among low-income people that i have a specialized set of skills that um i cannot expand to that clientele i can't use for that clientele there's no demand there convincing them that there is and that they they don't have to go outside of their niche uh expertise right you don't have to go outside of your specialty and securities law in order to provide valuable assistance to low-income people who are trying to um you know raise money for a project um it's it's that education as well convincing folks or making them realize that there's a demand for their specialized services um amongst people who can't pay for their work yeah and are not lost leaders that are designed to get them in the door someplace else some of the pro bono work at least my firm is encouraged to do is things that get us in front of other people who might hire us well that's exactly the point with the cooperatives right and that's kind of how i used to sell it when i was a legal aide it's like if you think that your work is so relevant that can impact the success of a business there's a really good reason to work with the cooperative to set them up that as soon as soon as they can you know focus their resources on something else and be successful you're going to be the attorney that they're going to call and they'll be happy to pay you because you helped them when they couldn't pay for your services and now they're thinking of you that's the first person that's going to come to their life it doesn't always work um but sometimes it does at least to get them like started get them to see that this can work as a kind of economic development um project yeah thinks they know kenya okay and i think yeah go ahead thanks you go ahead now i'm just going to reiterate i think what jackie was saying which is i mean the idea is not for legally to constantly represent these entities forever right i don't want to represent the mc market forever for example right hopefully they're going to have the ability to pay for legal accounts when they need it and they should be planning for that for certain issues that i can't or legal services can't get involved with right for example so this may be a question that jackie have some insights for and hannah will listen to carefully but one thing i thought about is when i was starting to do co-op law some of the other co-op lawyers i talked to were people who had represented the agricultural co-ops who had started in niche firms doing farmer ag financing farm succession planning co-ops is there a way we can set up and more firms like jackie's firm that are servicing the co-op market and have a mixed range of clients both the startup worker co-ops and some larger co-ops that will make it profitable for them to try and do that niche full time and the issue i've always had is juggling co-op work among the other things i do many of which are more lucrative and in some cases just as interesting it's fun to represent an executive who's been terming an executive or top salesperson who's been represented who's been terminated by their employer that's juicy we want to find a way to set up firms where people who are really interested in developing co-ops can do that how can we create more firms like jackie's that specialize in co-ops that service the market and the reason i pulled hannah and is is somebody with a law degree at some point you may want to work for someplace else other than the extension where would you go to be a lawyer and use the skills and knowledge of the market you already have how do we set up the firm that you'd be interested in working with long term i think eric i think part of it is the training in law school to explain to law students like what it is to actually how this work is relevant how it can be positive so social change work but also you can make a living at it yeah that's the key in my mind right it's like tying those two pieces together so get to people very early before they've done a summer internship at jones day or taft right because they i think they still and and i've been encouraging our intern like before uh we're hiring right and ever like everybody else we're having a hard time hiring um but we want them to have a traditional experience in a traditional law firm as well because our work is with cooperatives it's still very specialized um corporate work right we're dealing with securities every day we're doing dealing with all those super complicated things that a lot of people have a lot of money to pay for so i think there's a good they should know what a cooperative is you should learn that in business association classes you should have that as a common client at a entrepreneurship clinic and then when you go to do your jones day for second year summer now you're maybe asking around about that why are we not seeing that is that an option what you have at least a little background to ask questions around that and then when you leave law school or when you're looking for your second internship i've talked to folks in um [Music] from minnesota recently a student at the the law school there who does happen to be one of the the leading um like hannah's leading cooperative development center and there is one attorney one club attorney in the region only that does add work so this student is desperate looking for um opportunities to to get that experience while in law school and then thinking afterwards um so um i don't know where i was going with that but i think but to the point is during law school and also having that expert that in your mind when you're looking other trade for traditional work for the experience because when you come you have the principles you're thinking just in terms of uh principles right that's not a different um it's i want to help businesses and i want to help business with social impact i'm still needing to learn very traditional highly specialized areas of law okay hey i you know in the chat kenya you've really been contributing is there anything you want to share with us you've made some interesting comments observations you like to elaborate on any of those um yeah i just um i had just made the point about you know i think that sometimes we we get caught up with semantics but that's like one of the very important things that i learned in education and working with children who had special needs identifying them as first children and then their disability and it's the same way with people who have been systemically oppressed we need to identify them as people first before their condition and then i just really missed the opportunities that i was being afforded with community lawyering and that concept through able as well as ud law school and talking with some of the students that were in kind of that formative stage and hadn't been exposed i forget the term that eric used but i'm sure it's a lawyer thing but they hadn't been exposed to whatever it is that taints you know the the human compassion in a person who's seeking to be a lawyer so i just hope that those opportunities circle back around and i have an opportunity to engage some more you know budding law students as well as people in in the practice that would be interested in forming a maybe maybe i think that it's really a good idea to have a cooperative law firm like i think that's what we're saying here without actually saying it but like we need uh that's a co-op yeah that's what i was you know saying i agree i mean i mean i don't want to speak jackie you can of course speak to that the best because of your position in your current firm but but i've had experience with like eric was mentioning um some of the co-op attorneys i know outside of this space are agricultural attorneys first and then their co-op attorneys right and i think in a lot of ways we maybe there's value in thinking about being a small business attorney and a co-op attorney right like there's all these skills that go into helping a co-op that are beyond just co-op law so i think we need to think bigger than than that we need to think about being a business attorney and how we train business attorneys who understand co-ops because that is you know having been in that space recently i heard the word co-op one time in law school and it was in a real estate class and it was one sentence um that was basically housing co-ops are similar to condominiums and that's all you need to know right and and there it was and so you know how we can create relationships that help kind of fold co-op law into business law because if you're a good business attorney you'll be a good co-op attorney if you can pick up the co-op part and i would i would also add on a full co-op lie and i think kenya this goes to what you were saying fold co-op law into regular community lawyering education right like like hana like you said i'd never heard of cooperatives in law school i mean i knew they existed but it was not part of any curriculum but i did go to law school with a wonderful clinical program but i work i learned a lot about community lawyering models right and that's really the stuff that got me going but it did not you know there was a limit to that scope of education it did not address business it did not address cooperatives uh and i i was not interested in business law one bit i was on the opposite end of the spectrum right i wanted to get rid of all that stuff but if somebody was able to teach me at that time that this will be relevant to your work if you want to work with communities who are interested in building wealth setting up alternative systems to the oppressive system we know in creating community you need to know about businesses you need to know about how this stuff works i didn't have that and i wish i did and to the extent that we can you know uh fold this co-op stuff the sustainable economy stuff this community development stuff all together into community learning work lawyering work and public interest work in general at the law school level i think it would be wonderful but you know it's a huge task now eric to answer your question on how we can get people to start essentially law firms that do that work i think what kenya said about funding you also do need to start funding or finding ways of funding those businesses right because if we want an attorney to leave all those other opportunities to make money and do this full-time they need to be able to be sustainable themselves and therefore like so helping the small business their startups the cooperatives with funding that allows them to pay for the service um allows the attorneys to be interested in opening that as a business instead of just doing that pro bono right so i think that's the other piece of education is like we don't i don't think we need necessarily to increase or in the meantime we do but to increase pro bono access as much as it is finding ways of funding the legal work that the cooperatives need so that we have more attorneys interested and can make a living out of that like you would expect from any other area and a living wage at least one of the big issues in a law firm is what's a living there are people who who swear they can't survive on less than 500 000 a year and you're never going to make 500 000 a year doing co-op wrong no they're not i'm here to tell you you're not but but you can make a living right and like we're not we're hiring and i've been looking at what other law firms are offering yeah and when i graduated from texas my colleagues were getting starting bonus and between 20 and 60 grand plus they they're they're 200 000 starting pay now they're getting to offer 200 000 starting bonus on top of their 200 300 salary and their annual bonus and all that so that's kind of tempting right so at least if you get people thinking about the principles why you're doing that and the fact that you can lead your life in a different way that's not putting all those 2000 billable hours a month or a year there you can do a reasonable amount of billable hours have a a decent life and and not hate yourself when you go to bed at night right you know i love what i do and i don't work more than you know more than what i need i also don't make enough to pay my house every year and and it's fine because i have that flexibility and i have a living right and i do what i love i think it's exactly just just to throw a piece on that you might look at other lawyers my age who have hit the stage where we say our kids are through school it's not worth it anymore to work that 2000 hours a year doing ipos doing a deal a week i want to do something that's more rewarding that's part of what's driven me to do as much work as i can get to for co-op scentsy you is that it's much more rewarding it's satisfying this is what i'd rather do with my life if i have the freedom but there are lawyers on the other end of their career who we've got to say as you're cutting back why don't you keep your hand in your expertise working with a different class of client kenny were you going to say something that i wanted to jump in after i'm building that point eric yeah i was just saying i think it's interesting about the whole money concept because i mean like i despise money like i'm not like not that's not my angle my angle is like bettering society and i think that there are people that go into lives funny because i initially in college was going to study law and then i was like let me help people before they it was criminal law let me help people before they get in trouble and i decided to be a teacher so that tells you i don't care about money but i i think it's interesting if you can find people like i mean matt jackie you know mike eric you guys are here people that have you know went on in the law in their law careers like um michael made the point let's try to catch them when they're still in school maybe like before they graduate maybe maybe it's the freshmen maybe it's the sophomore before they get to that point where the dollar signs start showing up and you know they're um really going to be driven by money as a factor and then also recognizing that community empowerment can be lucrative like we should have a compelling argument for cooperatives that's not like this is going to be um us continuing in scarcity like really community empowerment through cooperatives is about abundance it's it's just shared abundance yeah shared fairly yes shared equitably yes yes it's if you want to change the economy right like so many people that that go to law school want to do right they want to they want to change the world they want to change these oppressive structures this is how you do it you know i mean what's more socialist than worker cooperatives not that you know you have to be a socialist want to do this sort of stuff but like this is how you do it that's what i want to say matt too and i know you wanted to say something i mean to cut you off mike but that was my thought though it's like for me you guys have the power to change the condition overnight but we're talking about how much it costs to do it i just that's how it's calculated in my head that's what i had wanted to say too i'm sorry eric you're gonna say something i was just gonna start um i think jackie knows this mike and matt might know this but one of the amazing things to me is the ability of large business law firms to change people's personalities and corrupt them we really want to get people early i was a union side labor lawyer when i was in law school i did all my work all my internships all the thing was training was i would be representing unions and then i moved to a different city and got stuck doing esop deals and turned into a business lawyer or tax lawyer somehow yeah so i wanted to maybe shift gears a little bit i think but i think it's relevant still which is like jack you mentioned the knowledge issue right how do you make sure the lawyers know this area of law and um you know i maybe we can talk about that for a little bit i mean eric how do we get people to like you know know what you know for example or jack how would you get people to know you know for example same with you mike right new handle right how do we share the information share the knowledge so we are bringing in new attorneys who with the knowledge to do this work well i'll i'm sorry by saying that what i told you i think we need to get hannah center to start interviewing eric and folks like ham and we have like this huge record of like let's share your experience what do you know about such and such topics um because those centers can preserve that to an extent and can share that to a large group of folks they are within universities um so that would be for me one way of at least preserving because linda phillips in my firm has been doing this work for us longer like for 25 years she's retiring soon as well like how do we preserve all that expertise i don't know anything about water cooperative she's the only person that i know they've done a water cooperative in colorado um and then now we have a client brand new startup wants to do a water cooperative after like 20 years of not hearing about it um so kind of how you i think you're right we need to preserve uh like educate the newer attorneys and preserve the experience of attorneys like eric and linda and other folks that are looking into retirement or slowing down to share that couple things that strike me one thing you want to do is when you think about preserving expertise it's not just knowing facts or knowing rules it's having judgment on how much flexibility there is in rules that look like they're black and white and that's really training through experience not lecturing at people you have to have somebody at your side as you're making a hard decision for them to see well gee you went up this close to the line but not over how did you decide where to stop you know i think that's especially important with this kind of work right one of the one of the frustrations but also one of the things that's most exciting about doing this is there is so much flexibility and you have to figure out you know where the gray area is and how far you can go from somebody who who come comes at it new that can be very uh scary right because it's not an easy answer um but it's necessary and and and it's here that freedom is here it's just how do you how to wield it responsibly uh you know it's funny i'm gonna piggyback go all the way back to something that uh kenya said and it relates i think to both what you said eric and michael um when i think about i was at ohio state for my uh masters and i remember being there and i had a friend who was in law school and i said you know i thought about law school and very interested really but i don't know it seems like it's going to take a long time and i said well what year are you going to graduate and she said 1978 and i said ah that's too long i can't wait that long and i just think about over the years you know that was in 1978 had i gone that route if things would have been different i don't think a whole lot different my values have not changed that much in fact um my awareness my understanding and eric as you mentioned you know the importance of of having insight i wonder going back to your comment about uh now that you are an empty nester and you have more time to think about um things other than just you know the income and so forth not that you've thought that way you know a lot you know in the past but um i wonder how many other people are feeling that way because i too took the path that that kenya did you know it was more i want to do things to help you know better mankind you know better the folk who live around me um myself you know picking people up you know just helping people get out of their circumstances um and and um also getting folk before they that you know having an opportunity to feed into them so there could be other folk who are like me or like kenya who have in the background had a um maybe a propensity you know for this type of work you know around the legal thing at least the ear for it or who may want to go back to school maybe not at my age but who knows would it be feasible for that to happen if a person reaches the age of 50 plus can it is it possible because i know back in the day if you were over the age of i forgotten what it was now you know they weren't even you know law schools weren't even admitting people at that time can we still grow them and then use their years of wisdom and knowledge and working on the front lines to you know propel them to i have an idiosyncratic answer to that and that is that i kind of see what i'm seeing with law school debt the debt people take on and the way people's personalities are changed as they try and pay down that debt it just warps people i'd rather have those same people continue to work as an organizer in a different capacity than have them take on 50 80 100 000 a dead and spend the rest of their lives digging themselves out of the hole i think i have a little bit of a different perspective um sorry michael um so i did a non-traditional program so i continued working while i went to school and i did what uc calls a flex time program so it took me longer um but it but i it was it was not a part-time program it wasn't like a separate program at night or anything um it was the ability to be flexible in your schedule to reduce your coursework to the point where you uh could balance that um and so you know i think that that was that was the reason i was able to go to law school right because i was in you know i was i i was had a house and you know i wasn't able to just stop everything and take on law school and and stop working and um and i was afraid that i was going to be the only kind of like non-traditional student um and that's not true actually i found a lot of what i would consider non-traditional students who had done other things and and figured out that they wanted to try to be a lawyer so you know i think there are paths but i also would agree that there's you know law school sometimes seems to be a little bit uh more behind in terms of finding ways to be flexible than other types of programs and other types of education it's still pretty traditional did you get stuck with a lot of debt no i did not i didn't have that experience but that's because of the way that i approached it so i think it just depends it depends on how you do it and there are part-time programs um throughout this i mean there's there's at least one in the cincinnati area there's one in the columbus area um so it just depends but i do see eric's point that it can really there is a way that it really prioritizes uh money if we're just being honest i mean it just it really just prioritizes money the forces of capital are strong psychologically as well as economically let's talk about a different twist on that to the extent we have someone who is a law student who'd be interested in this and they reach out what could we collectively as a group do to get them the opportunities they need to steer them in the direction of doing co-op law or co-op representation as part of a community lawyering practice what can we do to get them the backup they need to stick to that to countervail the internship with a big law firm or the the instinct to go work in a judicial clerkship well i think legal aid has a role here right because we have money we bring in interns every year and if we can bring those interns into our community development practice and they can see the potential of this kind of work that can have an impact but again working at legal aid is a bit of a luxury right i don't those people are already coming in it's just a matter of placing them in the right department and they're already the kind of people that uh would be susceptible or would be interested in this kind of work if only they had exposure to it that's interesting mike how many like how many summer associates or interns do you have working on this sort of stuff every year and how do you get this sort of stuff how do we get them um we legal aid recruits in the area and we never have a shortage of them so we get them from area law schools and we've had you know the interns that have worked with our community engagement practice group which is the group that i work in at legal aid that handles this kind of stuff this group work um they do a variety of different things so they're not just working with us they're also working with other groups um but i think it it behooves us to make a more concerted effort to expose them to this kind of work in particular and i think we need to be more deliberate in figuring out how to do that in a way that would give them the proper introduction but also the motivation to carry this forward um and we we can do that but you know we're also geographically limited right i think for for me part of it is um kind of inserting yourself in all those panels that they have like lunchtime um conference not conferences but lunchtime panels or no brown bag uh eventually law school often invites alumni and experienced attorneys to talk about either an area of expertise or talk about their background um so i've done quite a bit of that when i was with abel and now i'm a little less proactive but i think there's room to kind of insert yourselves ourselves into connect i want to talk about it reach out to the professor and say hey i do this area of law do you want to have you know a day that i come in talking with your students about this um in texas at least i had we have that at least once a week that would be a lunchtime panel about people just now attorneys love talking about themselves some people would just knowing their viewing tell me about your experience and people are like happy to share what they've been doing and how they got there how successful they are so i think part of it is like what let's do that we're doing an area that we're passionate about working that we are passionate about with folks that do great work and we believe in the impact of it and part of it is just kind of do it as any other corporate attorney would do and or any other judicial pers appointee would do it that's about your experience i want to do that go to law school i've done that a couple times at the ud when i was with legal aid and they reached out to me both because i was with legal aid and because of uh community lawyering work i was doing so i think it's kind of developing some of their relationship as well let's talk about teaming up on this let's get jackie up into cleveland when mike's doing it and vice versa and i'll go try and go in and add some perspective on how you can do at least a little bit of this from the big film side that sounds great the other thing that would be nice i was thinking on that is we've been talking about lawyering on the co-op side and i think all of you have run into this in one way or another one thing that would be great is if we had some community work being done by cpas if we had a network of accountants who had the same kind of mindset you all have who can go in and talk to a potential co-op group about what they'll need in terms of doing a cash flow analysis in terms of doing a balance sheet in an income statement somebody who can talk about how you would apply the cpa skills to development work maybe we do a co-session someplace at some law school or some business school on that and try and also get that pipeline working a little bit because on the esop side on employee stock ownership plans there's enough money involved that there are accountants who are interested in it the accountants i know who really know co-op accounting tend to have come from the ag side tend to have come from working with the country marks the landmarks etc i think already always cracks me up that in our region there is this national society of accountants for cooperatives i was never able to get them into any of my events or even you know get into the event so i'd like i think we we are lucky that that's in our region but yeah i think you're right yeah we're moving to some of their events and i felt like i didn't know enough about ag financing actually it's a lot of ag finance professionals in my understanding um and so i wonder about and i think you know our center works in this space like how can we get the folks who come from the ag background but really know co-ops as even as big businesses how like how can we get them to transfer that knowledge or engage in this other space of cooperatives because co-ops are so diverse um you know what does that how can how can we build those bridges yeah i you know some i think are already doing it like people like david swanson in minneapolis yep um he's a big ag guy but he also works with you know small multi-stakeholder cooperatives and sort of stewarding them towards development but i don't i don't know how broad his reach is does anybody else have uh experience working with him or his firm i have experience working with him in a different context going back to when we have a big client that was acquired by one of his a big ag co-op client that was acquired by one of his clients to the extent that he could serve as somewhat of an ambassador of sort of you know i'm a big ag co-op lawyer but i've also done this other work and maybe he can talk to his colleagues to try to convince them to do the same are we running out of time on the panel um you know i was told you had until 11 30. great okay okay all right is that okay that's fine i just wanted to make sure we weren't running into the like the the five minute finish line and we have so i was gonna suggest we take a break though because you know you've been sitting for a little while are you okay with that or would you like to continue it's up to you i am going to take a break to refill my tea i'll be back i'll be right back so why don't we take five okay all right well that means you will return at let's make it 10 35 6 minutes okay palama oh no cynthia i i invited um little africa to the conference i wonder um they would need to how much is it for them to attend oh at this point where which parts were they gonna come to um they were gonna come in um i wanted them to get an opportunity to meet the people in this session and they weren't aware of it i feel like you know if you can invite them to come into this session and i'll let them in to the rest of this session and then i'll tap respect with any do you know how to do that tell me okay um i look i'm asking you because i'm not sure this was clancy's thing and clancy's having a baby today so i wonder if i just take the url and yeah just link well that um does they have hopping already that's what i know that they would have to get it is taking me automatically in but i wonder if it's doing that because it knows that i'm already like logging yeah you know it knows you're already there um because otherwise you'd it's my understanding you'd have to be registered um for hopping or for the conference for the for the the conference itself for that link to work i believe it would have to be let me check for a sec okay i'll be right back okay well i apologize for the jumping in and out my computer is failing me so i'm on my phone now matt no worries i had to assume that you have what's going on with me which is that you have a lot of users on your uh wi-fi connection and that you're running out streaming movies right now we had at one point at work a glitch in our timing on connection to the interload and what we found out is that one of my partners was downloading every fish live concert you could find there's nothing wrong with that nothing oh is this the female partner what's your name is that who you talking about no no okay because i i met sir virtually she's in the able board actually too i met her and she's a fish fan he's a big fish fan yeah no the uh the person who did it was a third person who's a friend of both of ours gotcha michelle yep michelle michelle's awesome michelle has managed you think you you laugh at what i do with limited amounts of bandwidth for co-op work it would be great for the world if michelle could do immigration law full time yeah she's really into that for sure she's really good at it yeah she does she do unemployment or employment work she does employment work she does hr compliance she does labor law too yeah she's a management side labor lawyer as if you look on paper but she's really an immigration lawyer doing enough management side employment law to stay alive right jackie how long has it been since we talked other than exchanging emails are you are you familiar with the fact that i am in the process of winding down my practice and when people need referrals you're a name i throw out uh yeah no i i might have heard something from matt but not in those terms i thought it was like it was over your head eventually in the next few years now that you're actually all painting now yeah i am planning to retire on my 62nd birthday and whenever while i was saying december 31st but there's a fairly big project for a healthcare client that i won't have done by the end of the year wow and are you gonna move across the country i've been thinking about it but that's complicated yeah wow yeah yeah you feel free to send people my way next year though not this year we're not i i understand and i'm going to keep my hand in co-op law somehow so we'll figure it out we should talk about it if you want to do that uh you know a few hours a month yeah yeah that sort of was part of my question which is like how do we ensure eric that like the knowledge you have can be beneficial for newer attorneys who want to get involved in this work and i just keep stressing the amount of knowledge i have isn't important it's developing judgment and confidence your ability and how to evaluate a situation and figure out how some fairly simple rules apply it's there are some securities law issues that are complicated there are a couple tax lie issues that are complicated with ag co-ops but a lot of the real issues doesn't require technical knowledge it requires judgment but eric currently people don't have either one yeah and i've got yeah that's right i have the technical knowledge so let's start the technical and gave them the opportunity to you know grow and apply that and find out like happy hard hard situations to deal with yeah um hannah so you're in rural ohio you know our the able service area has 32 counties much of it is rural how do you suggest we start doing this work in rural parts of the state that does not serve farm co-op law or ag law yeah that's a really good question one that we've been thinking about um because so you know we're here i think focused on worker co-ops but but there are relatively few that's not to say there are none but there are fewer worker co-ops developing than rural spaces um but that's something that our like our center has an initiative called the appalachian cooperates initiative to try to build up the network of of uh community developers who are thinking about co-op opportunities in rural areas so i think one way is to if anybody's interested in engaging with that network um in you know jackie has presented to that network if there are opportunities to present we have a monthly networking call um if that's something that you're interested in joining and just building relationships i think could be really valuable um and and i think you know on my note here i i have you know how do we build connections between legal aid and co-op developers like we see with eric and co-op cincy throughout rural communities and part of that is just like i know of matt for example i know of your organization michael now now yours but like i don't know where to find that in eastern ohio for example so if there's connections to your colleagues in eastern ohio uh there's connections to your colleagues in west virginia um i think just connecting people is one of the first places we should start where and that's where i think matt and mike can play a really good role and because you know what the funding that we all got at the time and the legal aids that still got that same funding as a platform that was put together and they meet on a regular basis and even outside of that you know kind of the the state surrounding us they need for training and i think that would be a great opportunity to actually connect to you you know with with that as well so the word can be spread fairly easily there right yeah so for example hannah after the meeting at gmc market with the statewide incubator program a few months ago you know i made a connection to the athens people and nelsonville i think had two people who were part of that network from the developer's side i made that connection to the legal aid program in out of lancaster's office i don't know how it's gone though right i just made the connections or like left it at that but um but there is a space i think for that to happen as we've talked about a little bit in the past yeah i think there is certainly a space um and i'll say that that's actually one of the areas that we have as a part of our work plan over the next year is to develop that space so to build those relationships and to create those um to eric's point about passing on technical knowledge if there's ways we can pass on technical knowledge to do that but then also to develop relationships which i think gets to eric's point about developing judgment and true and understanding mike maybe this is something we should bring up a task force meeting then yeah i'm also very interested in developing materials yes not just for lawyers to use but also you know practitioners people who want to form co-ops to use that may be a little bit more legally oriented than the materials that hana your center has already put out like your workbooks um i'm thinking of one client in particular we're spending a lot of time creating sort of like decision flow charts uh asking certain questions about how they want to be set up and the the ultimate goal would be to take all that information and draft articles and bylaws but we're going at it at a very slow deliberate pace and it's not very linear you know we're sort of grabbing decisions out of the air based on conversations that organically sort of developed but but we've created these outlines these worksheets and i'm sure they can they can definitely be improved um they can only be improved um and so i'd love to work with others around the state in creating those types of sort of worksheet workbook type materials that that we can give to folks thinking about uh starting up co-ops or give to folks that we're working with as sort of um you know homework to do in in parallel with the representation co-op dayton and co-op cincy have both done some serious work on that and you should get in touch with i think kenya would be rachel with co-op dayton and either ellen or kristen now at co-op cincy because they've gone down that path and they're further ahead than on what you want to do michael great okay does anybody else have anything to add so i have a question about an idea um one thing that we had talked about at the network meeting a couple of i guess it was a couple months ago now um is understanding if there's opportunity for a co-op type clinic right like a pro bono outreach clinic um so we see this with small businesses and maybe it's built into a clinic that is a small business clinic with co-op attorneys there as well but i was just wondering like brainstorming growing spaghetti at the wall what people think about a clinic opportunity would it be valuable would you have interest is it maybe maybe refer to eric because i think eric you may have helped abel do this in toledo years ago this idea of a clinic around small businesses i did anna-lysa greita fey was one of the drivers on that but we would sit down the trouble with that is it's such a short-term encounter with somebody you don't know it's hard for the person to walk in talk to an attorney they've never met maybe be the first business attorney they've ever talked to and get focused in a 30 to 45 minute session on what they really need i always felt like when i was doing those sessions that it was like the first the first meeting with a therapist that you were just barely trying to figure out what the real problem was yeah and jack maybe talk about the incubator update and had that you were presenting at a couple years ago yeah yeah i thought that that was a very useful model so that was hannah working with the incubator so i went a few sessions legal sessions throughout their program maybe two got to know the project at those instances so i attended some of those events just because i was interested in learning with them as well and then at the end i had my my full legal session and offered both uh one session an hour with me with whenever with everybody that was in the program as groups and then i would use that both to understand what their legal needs were what i could do or not and how to refer them to then another kind of pro bono clinic that i called as well uh so i reached out to a handful of attorneys that would meet i think maybe three attorneys and each one of them met one or two teens that were more ready um and more ready to legal services in the sense that they were less scary to an attorney that was not used to working with that sort of group right so they had like fairly easy scope that was either a formation or a contract they were dealing with and they had they were well established enough that could lead to a one-time thing either the one question or a quick follow-up um and i i thought that way was actually super helpful and led to the formation of maybe three or four cooperatives in the past couple years um or or at least really addressing an immediate legal need so i think that's kind of a form that i found that was more helpful both turning into the teams that kind of like integrate the attorney through some of the educational process um and then do a clinic afterwards then the clinics that i did that were kind of more similar to uh what annelise did in toledo that was kind of on one thing just a few questions nobody really knows what they what are their needs and then it stops there um it's good for the private attorney because they don't have to think much about it afterwards but also let them feeling like eric is just like but i'm i don't feel like i'm doing anything the team might come out with the feeling kind of comforted in their decision or where they their question but really on both ends it's kind of still left hanging the positive encounters i had doing clinics liking like that in one case i had somebody who needed expanded retail space they gotten to the point where they needed to deal with a landlord a commercial landlord for the first time helping them with their lease and that was brilliant because they came in knowing what they needed and i was able to give them concrete answers for what to ask for another case i talked to somebody who is thinking about gee we're at the point should we shut down should we file for bankruptcy should we talk to our the person who loaned us the money we needed to start up and i was able to help them walk through the game tree they ended up deciding to negotiate with the neighborhood person who lent them the money and get them through to the point where they could keep the business going rather than filing for bankruptcy or liquidated but there are a lot of things where it's just gee i don't know where to start you and your brother own a business and you can't get along let's talk about all the different issues about how you could sort that out so it sounds like most successful when it's paired with a longer term engagement yep with some follow-up yeah and i think your center is way better place than most because of your you know legal expertise and kind of at least being able to issue spot um and help kind of filter some of that those that are that just need to attend an educational session with those that have a very clear legal question or legal issue and those that need a deliverable right hannah to answer your question or was it helpful yeah thank you let me ask a question and this is oriented i think kenya has dropped off but one of the things kenya wanted us to bid on that i was not able to get one of my full-time securities small business development vc venture capital fund lawyers to give her a bid on even though he wanted to work on was exactly parallel to the issues mike and i have been working on for cleveland community solar at some point what we might want to do is a token example of how do we pass on how do we share knowledge we might want to sit down and do a session for a variety of co-op lawyers about how can a co-op take investments from people who aren't actually worker members or in the case of an ag co-op aren't actually farmers buying or selling product through the co-op talk about the security law issues and share i'm not sure i can say knowledge because the knowledge doesn't help ohio law just is not well set up to take money from angel investors who are not accrediteds but have a have a working session among the people who are working in this area about what can we do when we have a co-op in the co-op cincy network a co-op in the co-op dayton network a co-op in the cleveland area a co-op in akron or athens or toledo who does want to take community money what what what advice collectively can we offer them and let's try and make sure we're taking advantage of what each of us knows i don't know if you have this issue when you work on clients in other states jackie but i just found it huge problem that co-op dayton and co-op cincy both can get neighborhood people to invest in worker co-ops if we could find a way for them to do it and mike ran into the same issue with one of the clients he's working heavily with with one of jonathan weller's co-ops yeah it's so weird because i i don't feel like i have that issue in other states it feels either more clear or because my colleagues have more of that expertise it feels easier and less risky versus ohio where is where you know i have most of my experience i have no idea it just feels so risky and unclear and so i think you're right it's a huge need there i can advising like five other states about their securities extension and how that work or not i know exactly how it works in florida for instance i have a pretty good idea of how to walk through the path of north carolina i know it can't be done in new york if anybody has like a before colorado even foreign a second topic we probably want to share knowledge about some at some point and this is going to become an issue i think pretty rapidly on co-op cincy when they do more when they when they help more groups of employees buy existing businesses is how do you do a hybrid co-op that is both a worker co-op and still has equity held by the seller not as a member of the co-op how do you structure that second class of that founders stock that's still common but isn't membership stock and i'd be happy at some point to sit you down and sit down and talk people through the way i think about that the way i think about being able to maintain co-op status even though there's a second class of equity that isn't co-op membership stock that's kind of a weird multi-stakeholder co-op yeah i think both those would be great topics eric i would love to sit down and learn from you about that mike too you if you're working through it with um up there especially the first issue i mean i'd love to get your thoughts on it as well i'd also love to participate and learn from others um you know we're still with with the solar group we're still trying to work through these things we don't have our answers yet but i'm still trying to figure it out so on this point um one of the areas we were we're planning to work on in the next year is educational sessions on co-op legal topics so i'm taking notes um what are some others and so there's there's kind of a two-pronged i feel like issue here one is these are for these topics that you just mentioned are for attorneys who know co-ops right they're right basically this is kind of a working session rather than a training session i know matt said he'd like to learn what i think but it's more about we work through the problem together right yeah that makes a lot of sense what are the other words for example for for getting attorneys who are maybe not familiar with co-ops engaged so two huge ones what do you want others to know two huge ones at least on the worker co-op side are how do you phase someone into membership how do you have how do probationary memberships work when someone has not yet finished buying their membership stock or paying their membership initiation fee what rights do they have what responsibilities do they have how do their transactions in that probationary period get counted towards their share of earnings that's one i've worked through a lot especially with startup co-ops where maybe the only member is the founder at day one i don't think that ever comes up with farmer co-ops hannah i just i haven't seen an equivalent issue a second issue that is huge for the people it hits is on a worker co-op how do you handle pay house how do you respond when the irs says you haven't handled the payroll taxes on patronage distributions correctly and again that's not going to come up for ag co-ops or marketing co-ops very often but for worker co-ops every time it comes up it's a panic issue because the irs comes in and says you've underpaid your fica and i think a issue in between those is really just structuring membership for one right like war members how do you even get to that and then uh and then as a sub issue is membership versus stock cooperative right even on the stock cooperative i started separating those because you they are do separate concepts you have a membership in it and you may have a stock in it that will be part of your membership requirement so kind of like bifurcating that is kind of important and i've found that that's something that we need to clarify early on for people getting into that work yeah and that is actually huge because for a lot of co-ops i like to build in the flexibility to issue preferred stock but you can't issue preferred stock without issuing membership stock right which really you can just say there's a comment and you remember the sub chapter 18 i've grown to love at the club taxation and just kind of understanding that it's a mix between corporations when i walked one of my tax colleagues who does a lot of real estate and deals a lot with s corporations through co-op tax i saw a light bulb go off in his head at some point about how wonderful it could be if you have if all of your income is patronage income being able to turn on and turn off pass through treatment um another topic that we probably should talk about at some point and this is more of interest to lawyers maybe in developers than people who are in existing co-ops is multi-stakeholder costs how do you walk people through the conversation about what part of the board represents each constituency how do you divide up the patronage if you have for instance i worked a lot six seven years ago with a food co-op a retail food co-op that also wanted to be a worker co-op and their decision making one of the hardest things they had to do was decide what portion of the patronage to reserve for the workers yeah market did that i think it was like a 60 40 or 70 30 in favor of the workers yeah yeah and that's not it's not that there's any legal rules on that it's just how do you get to a decision point that everyone's going to live with yeah exactly and so hannah i mean the idea of these training opportunities i mean it's a great idea i know you know i mentioned this when we spoke last time this idea of like doing one for ohio attorneys um i have been completely negligent following up on that um so i mean i think like maybe collaborating with the legal aid programs would be a great idea for this right now we could open it up to others as well um yeah i would really like to do that definitely and i you know um incentivizing attendance with cle i mean if there's other opportunities people seem to like get people engaged i'm happy to think about that too yeah it sounds great mike i'm not sure what i've seen another topic that i would love to learn more about and this doesn't go to sort of bringing other lawyers into the full but rather training the ones already doing this work and it's similar jackie to what you were talking about with sub chapter t as someone who isn't as familiar with subchapter t as they should be like what are the tax issues that need to be considered up front right like what are what do you need to know at the beginning to to competently guide a star startup co-op through the process when it comes to subchapter t and mike i wouldn't be too hard on yourself either i almost daily i will tell somebody like here is the big picture of you on this you need to talk to a cooperative accountant and here's a number because like the first year is not even a problem right the first two years until they have surplus it's not gonna be a problem so they need to understand really big picture make a somewhat informed decision and knowing that that's not gonna matter for a while i i i concur with that but the thing that really surprises me is what really starts mattering is when you have reserves and investment income that's not attributable to anybody's work that's the point at which the rubber hits the road and understanding what's a sub-chapter t patronage distributor the treatment is going to be the same regardless it's going to be taxed at the corporation yeah yeah but people always want to try and figure out a way to turn that investment income into patronage business so they can distribute it yeah so part of that hannah maybe it is kind of like learning more about patronage and like tracing it that's i've been talking a lot about about that with clients i can tell you what it is patronage i can help you define patronage but the team that they also need to figure out how to track it and put that formula on a spreadsheet but learn how to track it is that you just have a quick formula like with platform cooperatives is becoming a nightmare because some of them should do like oh commenting on retweeting or sharing information about this is patronage sure i don't think legal is a big deal how do you keep track of that right and that's something that we've you know when we have talked with groups and we do presentations on the financial systems of cooperatives right and usually at the end of it people are like oh my gosh i had no idea how complicated it was gonna be to to like figure all of this out and so helping people understand the record-keeping needs is a really big deal um so yeah i think tying into like practical information from for example accountants about how to maintain your records and bookkeeping and so that you have accurate member accounts yeah another question we deal with a lot and it's similar to something eric brought up with regard to worker cooperatives is how how should founders or early you know those who are putting this co-op together um how can they be compensated for their sweat equity right before the co-op starts does it how does that convert to patronage if that's how you want to do it just um especially when working with communities with low incomes i mean people want to know what i'm i'm i'm doing this by doing this i'm sacrificing other income that i could be making yeah what am i working in the evening instead of doing overtime at my day job right yeah so i think over time here um i just want to be recognized that yeah i am um we're doing really still pretty good on time i you know at the same time i noticed that we have a total of about 14 people here and oh i thought it was up to 11. i'm sorry steps 11 30. yeah let's open it up for questions from other people let's do a q a right now see if i can find anything in the q a i don't see anything there it says those you have questions you can either write them in the chat or you can speak up yeah and then there are like three people i don't know brian ready mark working and i think that's true now um on the chat so if you guys have anything you want to share with us i don't know where my what happened to my video really weird well i think that's okay anybody want to share or have questions no something that okay i mean i don't even does anybody know whether you can read law in ohio can you join the bar without going to law school i don't think you can no no i think are people familiar with celts radical real estate law school i thought i saw i was on a list serve and saw a reference and thought gee if i had more time i ought to do that it what happens it's one of these things that just sounds crazy and it's so incredible that they're actually doing it but they're teaching intern they're teaching workers law in developing these radical sort of real estate solutions to cooperative ownership of land and housing in developing these these models those who are working on it are being taught law outside of law schools for the reading law while going through this program to become lawyers in california so at the end of the program they take the bar and they pass in their lawyers and they've learned how to they've been working on developing these new models of collective ownership of land in the process that's awesome it's incredible from vermont's another state where you can read for the bar you think you have to have a pressure for like five or six years and you can sit for the bar exam for what statement vermont oh yeah i think montana used to have it too but that's the kind of program that it just it seems so innovative and it was the seat of such a creative idea that i'm sure at the beginning people had the reaction that i had like how can you possibly put that together but they're doing it yeah i think that's uh that that is a good idea it's similar again to what i was wondering if there was anything of that nature for those of us who are older do you see what kenya wrote in the chat earlier she wrote down that um what was it her comment about sign her up she said find me a scholarship i would go yep no that's what that's what prompted me to think about it yeah but i mean even if that doesn't work in ohio right because you can't read law the the share the creativity behind that kind of program and that idea let's take a step around that michael even might even be on reading law just put on a presentation where we teach community organizers to do real estate law if they need to form land trusts or to do tax clinics if we're worried about people's wages being garnished by the irs just the idea of giving people the skills to represent themselves i know in some areas the national lawyers guild especially i think in new york and the east coast has done some programs where they're empowering people who are non-lawyers to take control of their own legal affairs well that's that's like that's the grail right that's that's the the end result of all community lawyering work if the lawyers disappear right no need for us anymore of the legal system worked right yeah you know you're you're empowering you know the masses you know you're doing that you know empowering the people but it also takes some it also takes money away as we talked about earlier you know that's no longer the big thing just thinking about what i just said maybe one reach out we should do is find anyone in ohio in the national lawyers guild who isn't working almost entirely on criminal immigration issues and see if the ohio chapter of the national lawyers guild would be interested in co-sponsoring a program get some more lawyers who are doing community lawyering in to learn about this thing that may be more corporate than what they've ever handled before the folks up here in northeast ohio in the cleveland area who are involved in nlg it's not it's not as robust as i think it used to be but it's not as robust the only people i really know in toledo who are doing it and she's not in toledo right now is reem have you worked with reem at all matt well remy's uh works with uh matt and his practice yeah right right and she's also as far as i can tell the national lawyers guild in my corner of the state okay you saw you're on matt on mute matt can you guys hear me yeah now we can only getting part of the conversation about the nlg was the question about the nlg oh the question was is there a way that we can reach out to some people in the ohio nlg who have some bandwidth and are interested have some energy to do something other than immigration law or criminal practice and say hey we'd like to co-sponsor a program as part of development of a community lawyering thing here's how we can do some community organization through worker co-ops get a session going that way matt you disappeared again i'm sorry jackie i feel like you were going to say something i don't think i was laughing yeah but i did but i did um i i still have in my mind that cooperative conference i've done with now the past couple years and i'd love to do that again next year okay so it could be kind of like a summary or from those you know training that might be a little too detailed for us for a conference like that that's also an opportunity to get people in the door and get them cle and that's fun one of the things we would do if we did at least part of that is an intro to co-op program is we would get some people who are interested and might be motivated to put some energy into this who wouldn't otherwise i'd really like to think about how we could i would love to be involved in that again as well jackie i'd like to think about how we can get rural entrepreneurs and attorneys involved in something like that as well i don't know if that has to do with how we do outreach or where we host it or what that looks like but i think that we can do better there yeah i remember catherine uh i think caroline uh israel grass right her concerns though were fairly similar to you uh eric's with like i i'd love to be involved with it but i have no other paying attorney paying clients that i need to work on and i have only so many hours that i even can put for the training or but she was extremely interested and i think her being already kind of have joined a little bit us in this could be um be insightful and how to approach that as well great so i think i might have missed a lot of the conversation that just happened i didn't log off and log back on oh okay yeah we decided you're doing it all i hope not it's never going to happen yeah what jackie was saying is let's let's make sure we involve carolyn who is at the conference in dayton and see if we can make more of a reach out to rural entrepreneurs farmers make sure we have a broad bandwidth rather than being at urban yeah so focused only i once say i'm doing a cle for the dana corporation which i think is up near toledo is that right that's a client of mine yeah for their attorneys and i it's going to be like co-ops and how you get involved in the pro bono field so if there's any ideas you guys have that i could be talking about with that i mean i'm happy to talk let's set up a call i don't know who your contact in the law department is but mention to them that i work with lisa amon regularly on a totally different set of issues i do dana's pension work okay but i would love to be involved with that if it helps yeah yeah are you free on monday eric this is a one state thing that's happening i am free on monday well i'm free enough i have some calls but i can juggle sometime right well i'll send you an email then we'll figure something out yeah um it's it's interesting because i would not have expected dana to be doing that there is something going on there that i don't know about but that's because i've got a very narrow slice of their reality i deal with one lawyer in the law department and a couple hr people okay that's the other thing um it reminds me corporate the corporate attorneys in corporations are also a really good resource right so like able uses a lot folks from that what's the gas company right marathon uh they're they they provide a good amount of support and pro bono attorney pro bono work for abel's clients and legal aid clients and i think they have the corporate expertise right so that allows them less of the the billable our concern as well they have maybe more flexibility on that end um have some of the expertise and can be use that also maybe as a training to see what else is going in the corporate world that they can get involved with and also as a future career option why not and just to switch sides around i didn't see casey on this call at all but we might also if we're talking about community lawyering and some people who can provide some legal resources talk to the union side labor firms i think case studies have another panel actually okay okay that's also something that um uc law does an entrepreneur clinic and it's actually in partnership with duke energy so i think their law department is engaged with that that's interesting i'm used to thinking on the environmental stuff i do and my environmental stuff isn't through my firm just to get you a tie it's more like terry lodge's environmental stuff but duke energy is usually thought of as not being a good corporate player that's because of their commitment to fossil fuels i i'd like to hear people's thoughts on something that's totally separate from this sort of training conversation yes which is um what do folks think about the potential in ohio for passing legislation similar to what they passed in california to make small investments in cooperatives easier you know like a thousand dollar cap and investments from individuals aren't securities so long as they meet a certain set of uh qualifications what what's the potential for that here i don't think we know we should try it though i mean if we could get policy matters ohio interested in something like that i wonder if they could get it through and then you have all the organizers on the ground with the centers right there's like we have four at least four cooperative development centers um you know yeah i think you need the rs involved not the ds yeah that's that's that's why it's entrepreneurship right it's business exactly that's the easiest i i think easiest no i get that i'm just saying like who should be right who you you reach out to about it right to get support for it and selk has draft bills yeah back in the days in the back in the day in the 70s and early 80s when esops were just starting to be a thing there were a lot of republican supporters for spreading ownership among employees there were a lot of people thought that's a lot better answer than some of the other things we could be doing with our energy maybe we can get the same kind of thing going with ohio republicans but i don't know if if we got something like that on the books it would make a lot of these questions so much easier to answer and you think we should be partnering with whom again um my first thought was policy matters ohio because they're sort of the the lobbying group in ohio that works most on issues that affect legal aids clients um but there could be others as well okay yeah that makes sense mike i'm just saying i don't know if they're the best to get something passed in this current state house yeah yeah you certainly want the first person who introduces the bill to be an r yeah well matt do you know of any other organizations that would be interested in pursuing something like this i'm sure you sure broke up there on me uh do you know other organizations besides policy matters ohio that may be interested in pursuing something like this um maybe organizations with a more neutral reputation yeah there's one that has done some eviction work that may be worth i think the more centrist may be worth talking to if i can find out the name of the group i can't remember there though the other thing is just to talk to like megan o'dell at oplc to see her thoughts on this [Music] one other thought i had is there any kind of overarching group that is helping the various university tech incubators i know at least five universities in ohio have these kind of tech incubators that start up that act the shelters and they may have an interest in supporting that kind of effort too it's like the third frontier ohio or something like that yeah if we pitch it right they'd have an interest mike we should type into the task force meeting yeah okay uh you said working with him again i'm just picking up on that any university overarching group working with it's actually just like hannah's working with an extension part of osu that does co-op development a lot of the universities have tech incubators that provide technical assistance space administrative support for startup tech companies yeah and what we want to do you said third frontier matt that that name rings a bell but i haven't worked with him i guess i'm not techy enough yeah it's like a state age agency or group that's out there to support you know tech now like essentially like you know tech get in cities is that some familiar to anybody hannah you're turning on your head thanks yeah so it's actually a program third frontier is um uh i would have to go back to my colleagues but there's it's essentially kind of a sister program i think to um like sbdc and ptac and all of those programs out of the ohio development services agency um i think it i think it runs through there but i would have to check so like for example i know um ohio university has a program focused on tech development that i think falls under a third frontier um i can see if i can get more information okay so um i'm sorry the the question you had about a tech company that might also be a route to get assistance for that company is finding a third frontier or similar partner i don't know about legal work for example but technical assistance often perfecting copyright or patent rights you can sort of squeeze into technical assistance it's a little bit different than thinking about doing a buy sell agreement or doing litigation [Music] all right so i'm looking at the time it's 11 21 and i think you all have done a fantastic job so far so unless they're additional questions uh or comments does anybody want to uh you know speakers jacqueline eric and uh matt do you have any final comments you'd like to make before we wrap up i would just say how are we going to continue this conversation because i think it was a great conversation i really appreciate everybody joining and participating in this yes i'm not sure about the other people who are silent but it'd be great if we could get the six people whose face on the screen on a call about once a month to talk about keeping momentum and any of the rest of the folks are welcome to join as well definitely and we should make sure that co-op dayton is as well okay so i think at least going forward jonathan co-op cincy and co-op dayton are great sources of feed through for legal work in this area not necessarily paying legal work but legal work right jack work it's it's been great i'm always excited to see these friendly faces and yeah um i i'd love to to keep um having a conversation and actually um get some of the training the brainstorming that sometimes we don't do as much with folks from outside um of our practice or our firm so it'd be fantastic to to keep going on to the nice beer is it something that that uh that someone from the on this call would like to take on organizing i can try to give it a shot okay michael thanks mikey appreciate that you know how to reach me so that's good that helps i talk to everybody on this call really regularly if we have um everyone's contact information let's see you know hannah you put yours in the chat and mike you know you can touch me yeah i know you have mine and for some reason i can't even write in the chat anymore i got this little jiffy gift thing going um all right so again thank you all uh is it snowing there where you are uh eric it was yeah it was barely snowing this morning a little bit in cleveland a little bit cleave oh that's right chance tomorrow so it was a little nippy out there this morning i can understand why it's just a precursor for things to come thank you so much i thought about driving down to an in-person session when i saw this was virtual i decided to stay home and i haven't left the house yet i know we you know this is for lots of folk i'm telling you but you know to some extent i think it's brought more people together it's a weird thing but just think about it the the fact that we could have hundreds of individuals on the same hall versus and from different parts of the united states or the world for that matter and we're connected it's it's just amazing so it's true on the other hand i will say that i feel a lot more confidence that i know jackie and mike because i ran into them at prior versions okay this conference okay great i was gonna say i'm so grateful to co-op cincy for putting this together because at the very start of this learning process it was the the symposium a couple of years ago that's right well my first my first as well when i joined abel the your guys event in 2017. wow so we must carry on the tradition yeah we'll see you next year and before perhaps i'm i'm really looking forward to hearing what happens as a result of your getting together um make sure that we're all included you know in communications you have thanks so much one of the things i hope that happened cynthia is that when you have co-ops coming through something like the power and numbers program or the co-op view there'll be more people you can you know to turn to who can help you get things done definitely this has been great great thanks so much i'm going to go check to see if that little one thanks everybody catherine regrets that she shouldn't she couldn't come this morning she really wanted to so okay i did see that in in the comments but thank you thank you for we'll include her on these calls these monthly calls mike all right all right everyone have a good day you too ugh you