What is Forensic Accounting? - with Business Valuation & Forensic Acct. Expert - Mark S. Gottlieb

So welcome back to close to the Vest. My name is Arthur Ettinger, where we talk about all things relationship and divorce related. I am happy and honored to have today as my guest a long time friend and well respected colleague Mark Gottlieb. Mark, thanks for coming on. Thank you, Arthur. Thanks for the invitation. So Mark is a forensic accountant and in divorce fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, you need forensic accounts in divorce. And Mark, wanting to tell us a little bit about you and your background. Sure. Well, I'm a CPA. I have a master's green tax and I have a variety of credentials in business valuation and forensic accounting. And I appreciate that you introduce me as a forensic accountant and most attorneys do introduce me to their colleagues and their friends in that fashion. But the truth is that I'm in the financial literacy business. My job is to sit with attorneys like yourself and help them get through the financial composition of their case. It could be a divorce case like the area of practice that you focus in but it could be other areas also. But you're right a lot of the work that we do is involved in the divorce arena. So for people that don't know this, can you just explain a little bit what's the difference between just say an accountant and a forensic accountant? Well, by definition the term forensic means preparing for court. That's what a forensic accountant does. Other accountants could be tax preparers. They could be compliance accountants in which they prepared books and records, payroll tax returns, income tax returns, financial statements or even audits. Our job as a forensic accounting firm and valuation expert is not to do any of that work, but actually use that type of work to assist in the exercise that we're hired to do. And the forensic accounting exercise and particularly in the areas of a divorce varies from case to case. It even varies based upon if we're hired by the attorney that represents the keeper of the checkbook or what you guys call the outspouse. And that could be either the business owner or the non-business owner. So it really depends upon our function depends upon who's hiring us. And I want that's a great, great point I want to get to that. Let's say someone comes in, they hire a lawyer, they come in, they hire me and they're like, okay, I hired my lawyer. And now they're hearing this. They're like, holy shit, I just hired a lawyer. Now I have to hire a forensic accountant. So can you just speak to that? Why someone would come in like yourself early on in the divorce process and get involved as a forensic account? The truth is that in all practice, the vast majority of the cases that we're involved in are in cases in which one of the owners has a business or when the parties have an extraordinary lifestyle or when there are issues that have to be attended to like a separation of property or the separate property claim or dissipation of assets. When two earners, wage earners gained a divorce to teachers to to a lease officer is something like that, it may not be a need for a firm like us to come on board because the financial issues probably relate simply to the division of the assets that they have. It could be a pension, it could be a house, it could be cars. And so there may not necessarily need to be any investigation or analysis that attends to the fair market value of those assets or the tracing of those assets or the collecting of the data that's needed to allow the attorneys and sometimes to court understand how the equitable distribution should be based upon. So that's why we're not for every divorce. And as far as when we're hired, well, quite honestly, it depends upon the first thing is the financial appetite of the litigant. Sometimes people very resistant to hiring accountants right away. Sometimes they have a feeling, oh, as soon as my wife or my husband gets notification, I want a divorce, we'll settle real quick. We call that fantasy. Okay. And and other times it really depends upon the tone of the attorney that's working on the case and the issues that are evident right then and there. You know, you mentioned tracing. What do you mean by tracing? Well, there are various issues that may be at hand in a divorce case. First of all, people may come with assets prior, they own prior to the marriage, whether they acquired it from their employment before they got married or maybe they inherited it or they received gifts. That's generally a quote, separate property as you know. Okay. I'm preaching to acquire here. But but at times those assets are commingled or they're used or their or their consolidate with other assets. And so we're often asked to trace these assets in order to assist everybody to understand where these assets were prior to the marriage and where they are now. And sometimes the answer is real easy and sometimes it's not. I must tell you that the most one of the most difficult parts of doing forensic work when we're talking about tracing exercise is when we have a dissipation of the marijuana asset and a dissipation could be not necessarily that one of the parties takes it and buys a fancy car with it or goes on vacation. But you know, people have vices. They could be gambling, they could be have drug issues, they could have boyfriend and girlfriends, they could have separate lives altogether. And so this issue, this tracing issue that we're trying to discuss very simply for our audience here could be a very complicated and could be and could be rather talking to me an expensive to kind of figure out. So now when you talk, you're talking about Paramores and I know what you're talking about, but if you could just elaborate for the audience because this is really, we deal with this a lot. And so I just want you to just kind of dive a little deeper as to what you're referring to. Are you asking me if I have a girlfriend? No, we already know you have a girlfriend. I'm just asking you. So I guess what I'm saying is just explain, like it's easy to trace out, you know, an asset moves from one bank account to another, but you're talking about the power more. I'm going to give you a perfect example. We worked on a case recently in which the couple was married for about 15 years. They just had one child. They lived in an apartment in one end of Brooklyn. And the wife insisted, that she, she didn't know what was going on, but she insisted that the husband was having an affair. She had no idea to the extent he was having an affair. So what we did was we actually reviewed the network statement that the parties had filed. And the husband and the wife each listed the various bank accounts that they were aware of. And one of the account had very little money, but a lot of activity. It happened to have been the account that the husband had automatic deposits from his employment. And we started to review that account. And you know, we use, we laid it out in Excel and Excel is a great program. It doesn't replace an account, but certainly enhances our ability to analyze the data. And we were able to identify in the column the date of the transactions. And we entered all the deposits and we entered all the checks. And in order to reconcile the account, we entered all the ATM withdrawals because we wanted to know how the money went up and down throughout the year. And when we actually use the feature in Excel that could identify the date by the day, like Sunday. Sure. And the and the and the actual day. And we laid it out. We noticed every Friday. The husband would take out significant amount of money from the bank account. When we further went back to the accounts to look at the ATM withdrawal, we noticed that all of those Friday, the palms, all those Friday withdrawals came from the same bank account at the other end of Brooklyn. And when we analyzed it and we asked the husband about it, it turned out we had discovered that the husband had a girlfriend who lived in the apartment house above the bank where he used to go the ATM machine and he used to leave work on Friday afternoon, Friday evening, go to that ATM machine on his way to his girlfriend's apartment and he took out money because he was supporting this woman. That's fantastic. Well, not so much for the wife, she was pretty upset. But that's a perfect example of us tracing the work, right? We identified where happened. And it was Khalil dissipation of a marital asset. And you know, I'm not the lawyer, but I'll tell you how I perceive the dissipation of an asset is when the assets used for not the family, not the couple, sure, is useful one or the other. And again, it doesn't have to be because they're buying jewelry or they're buying going on vacation. This guy was paying his girlfriend's rent. And in order to get thousands of dollars a month, he'd have to every Friday take out cash. And so oftentimes I see it's never a perfect scenario where you have just all the documents lined up perfectly. There's typically holes, right? Whether it's missing statements, you don't know if this is cash withdrawal. So how do you how do you deal with those, let's say struggles when you're putting together your analysis? Well, first of all, the holes often come or often apparent when the income that is generated by the family is not all recorded. So there's a different type of exercise when we are working, when we're doing a valuation of a guy who owns a professional practice like a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant, as opposed to someone who owns a candy store. And so we had mentioned before the network statements and very often when we have a couple that is that they own a cash business and they prepare their network statements, there is often a gap or a difference between their lifestyle. One party says they spend a lot of money, the other party says we don't spend a lot of money. And that's why often when you have these preliminary conferences in the court, you know, just like you because you tend to know it's more often than I do. But there's an argument that support should be based upon what their lifestyle is, not necessarily what they're making because what they're making may not reflect what they're really spending. So the issue is, is how are we going to figure this out? Certainly they're gaps, but you know, if someone's income is all on the books, there's one approach. If someone's income is not all on the books, then there's another approach. And so that's really where the the distinct differences in the approach and the valuation analysis, what the, I'm sorry, that's not really correct, what the forensic analysis has to has to follow. You mentioned before your job change is depending on what side you represent. And so can you just elaborate a little bit if you were to be representing or being retained by the, let's say, the title of spouse versus the non-title spouse? I can, but let me just say one thing for us. When I get a call from an attorney that says, "Mark, I'm interested in hiring for the voice case," and he starts to, he or she starts to tell me about the case. I say stop. Don't tell me who you represent. Tell me what the issues are. And at the end of the conversation, we'll exchange our thoughts. Then you can tell me if you represent the husband, you represent wife, you represent the money spouse, you represent the non-money spouse, because it's unfair to to to tell me in the beginning, because I want to have a clear understanding of how we should approach it. The issue is not that I'm trying to or we as a team with a lawyer and a accountant are trying to have multiple fashions of of of approaches. We want to take an approach that meets the needs of the client. Certainly, in an instance in which the wife is the earner and the husband is a a salary employer and makes much less than the wife. And the wife is in charge of all the books and records. And you know, there's a there's a distinct difference between the opinion of the lifestyle. We have to figure out why and it's it's not always clear. The problem is is that we have to do it in a very transparent fashion because we want to prepare for war and hope for peace. We want to be able to side a position, cite the facts, cite an analysis, use assumptions if we need to because of lack of information or gaps information, as you said, that the trial fact, the judge or a referee, or even a mediator sometimes would be able to look at and say, okay, you know, I understand what the issues are and here's the conclusion. I'm a little bit older than you. And no, you're not. Yeah, a little bit. And I can tell you at my age, my fantasies today are much different than my fantasies when I was in my 20s. Okay. My fantasy today. I didn't realize when I was asking you to come on here that we were going to talk about your fantasies. This is probably a lot more interesting than what we're going to talk about. But the point I'm trying to make to you, my fantasy is that when we do preparing analysis and the analysis includes both the exhibits that crunch the numbers, okay, which is what you want from us. But also contains the narrative, which is the story of what really the numbers mean, whether you are the plaintiffs council or the defendant's council or the plaintiff or the defendant and the judge. My fantasy is that you'll read and say, okay, you know, I understand what Gottlieb saying. I understand how it comes to its conclusion. I don't necessarily have to agree with everything he says, but it's very transparent. It's straightforward and it means something to us. And we can discuss the areas that maybe are subject to modification. So I think it's important for those people who have valuation issues in their case or tracing issues and we have to get you involved. I think it's important to touch upon there are two different ways it can be handled. We retain you as our own expert or the neutral. And I know what I like and that's when I retain you on my own. But if you can before we get to what I like, tell me, I'd like you just to explain to the audience the difference between those two scenarios. Well, you're right. Sometimes we're hired by the litigants directly. And when we're hired by the litigants directly, we're sometimes hired as an expert and sometimes hired as a consultant. When you're hired as an expert, whether by the litigant, by the plaintiff or the defendant, everything that I touch, smell, feel and see is open for discovery. As opposed to if I'm hired as a consultant under the umbrella of the attorney, whether it be for the plaintiff or the defendant, I'm the everything is covered or protected under attorney client privilege. And there are reasons why we're hired first as a consultant or hired as an expert. I prefer to be hired as a consultant first. And then when we're at the eve of issuing our report, then we can change our relationship and with the expert. And the reason quite honestly for that is very simple. You can fire me if you hire me as a consultant. And I find something you don't like. That's right. Okay. But if I'm hired right away by an expert, they're going to find out. They're going to find out. That's one scenario. The other scenario is when I get a call or a fax or an email, from the court attorney, from Judge ABC or D and say, Mark, are you available to work as a neutral on this case in which you will be retained by each party right from the start. And we need you to do X, Y and Z. And when we are hired by the while we appointed as a neutral expert, we're automatically an expert and everything is open for discovery. And we're hoping that this will lend itself to a more transparent and an easier and sometimes even a less expensive exercise. I don't believe in that. In fact, I believe the opposite. You know what? I understand what you say that. And I don't necessarily agree. I really would like to just offer to your audience that I would like to make that distinction on a case by case basis, not making a global, global answer. That being said, I do a tremendous amount of work as a neutral expert in, in, in various different counties and various different states. I don't really have a preference because I don't change the way I approach my work regardless. Just like I don't want you to tell me if you represent the, that you can, let the plaintiff of the defendant right away, it does make a difference to me if I'm court appointed, if I'm neutral or I'm hired by the other. I want to get the information. I want to analyze it. I want to, I want to be able to provide the financial literacy components to the case that are important to have it resolved. Can you just touch upon the positives and negatives for both scenarios with respect to neutral or if you were retained by one side as opposed to being court appointed? Sure. So let's talk about being court appointed or being neutral because often two attorneys will call me on a conference call and say, Mark, we're not doing this pursuing to an order by the court, but we'd like to hire you as a neutral right away, which is the same thing as being a neutral, being appointed by the court. When you're neutral, you, you are hopefully going to receive the information from both parties in an efficient, timely and complete fashion and there's no, nobody's going to play around. Nobody's going to, to try to be deceitful. Nobody's going to try to delay the issue. That's the intent, right? And so the selling portion of the case or the selling of the neutral expert by the litigant, by the council and even the court to say, listen, if you guys cooperate and do this in a fashion that you both participate, it'll be less costly and quicker. That's what the neutral portion, the neutral concept is. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and I must be honest with you, it, it, it, it's really 50, 50. Okay. There are also times that you're hired by one of the parties, whether it be the, the keeper of the checkbook or the business owner or the non-moneyed spouse. Okay. And in that instance, we're often running after documents, but we also may in fact be requested to do things that are above and beyond what the neutral forensic would do. In our practice, I do a tremendous amount of work helping with the discovery, preparing discovery document requests, reviewing and indexing the documents, preparing outlines for what it is invaluable, preparing deposition questions, preparing cross examination questions, preparing direct examination questions, not just of the parties but other financial people that are involved. And so, you know, that's why I said, I'm in the financial literacy business, and that's my job. And that is probably one of the differences between our firms and several of the firms that we compete with is my background and aptitude for doing that type of work. And that's one of the reasons why that's really our niche. Okay. So that's really the big difference. I don't really know which one's better or worse. I know you have a very strong opinion and it's really. No strong opinions. Yeah. And it's almost like if you ask, you know, you know, 11 priests, one question about the Bible, you'll get 13 answers. So it doesn't make you right and me wrong or me wrong and you right. It's the issue is that it really is on a case by case basis. I think that's I think that's true in a lot of respects. I my concern is you have a neutral and in a neutral setting, everything I say to you has to get copied to the other side. You really can't be communicating with me. You can't communicate with the other side unless you're looking for documents and you're just sending a joint letter or you're sending it to the titled spouse and you're copying. But there is to me, I think there's an inherent breakdown of efficiency. And I think the concept is to create transparency with the neutral and to keep the cost down. But ultimately the scenario you have and I do your point. It's a case by case basis where you have a neutral and then invariably some person is ticked off with the result. And now they're going to get another their own expert. And then the other side says, well, I'm getting my own expert. And now instead of having the one, you have fucking three, excuse my French. So the whole point of keeping the cost down, you've actually, you've multiplied it by three. I can I can understand that. You know, we didn't mention this before, but since you kind of started to discuss it, it is not uncommon for us to be hired by one of the litigants when there is a neutral. And we are the conduit between the litigant and the neutral. And often we will work in a parallel fashion to help get that information and even do the analysis. Of course, a case when we're hired and those instances that case has to involve a significant amount of money because they're paying multiple experts. That's right. Can you just we're talking about costs? Can you just explain how you operate? So the listener who's about to embark on this process understands what's involved if they were to now bring in just another, you know, an expert. Are our practice bills no different than your practice? We bill by the hour. It's like being in a cab. We get a retainer, we work off the retainer and the retainer, it's exhausted, we get an additional retainer. It kind of cabs, you drive it. And so it's no different from the loiter. There's very, very few instances, if ever, that we do something that's on a flat fee basis because we don't know what's involved. That's our business model. There may be others that do type of work that we do that have a different business model. But generally the work that we do in connection with a matrimonial is either an existing or anticipated problem issue. And so we don't really know how much time we spend. And so the only fair way to do it both for me and for the client is to charge by the hour. And I know you have extensive experience as an expert witness at trial. I firmly believe having, in my experience, when you're involved in a case that you're really instrumental in settling a case. And I believe when there's, especially when there's two accountants forensics where they can communicate together, more often than not, the case is going to get resolved. And so can you explain to the audience how having a forensic account is actually going to help resolve the process as opposed to ramp up the litigation? It really depends upon if people wanted to be resolved. If people wanted to be resolved, it will be. But oftentimes people have to go through that process until they come to the conclusion, all right, it's time to resolve the case. Now sometimes, and don't take the strong way, it comes from the attitude of counsel. I'm there to help facilitate the closure of the marriage and I'm happy to do that. But it's not really on all my shoulders. People have to want to have a conclusion. The lawyer is more important than that regard because the lawyer is going to guide the litigant, their client, that it has to be resolved. Nothing is perfect. The best day of getting a client is the day you get the retainer. It all goes downhill from that day because people get frustrated. It's a very, very, very strenuous, stressful period of their life. That being the case, counting the money is also stressful because people don't really know what's all going on. So I don't really, I don't want to take, I don't think it's my responsibility to resolve the case. It's my responsibility to give you the attorney, the information you need to make an argument to help resolve the case. That's fair. And the truth is, no case is perfect. Nothing in life is perfect. So I'd be out of a job. It was perfect. Right. But no conclusion. I can't recall the last case I had in which the conclusion was absolutely perfect. There's always some, there's always some give and take. Do you believe that there is a better time when somebody should be reaching out to you to retain your services or consult with you? I think that the attorney has to take the temperature of the case. I think it's your job when you sit down for the first, second, and a third time with the client, got acquainted with the client, got your retainer, you've gone through your initial questionnaire that that identifies both the financial and non-financial issues. You have to take the temperature of the case to be able to say, okay, we need an accountant to help us right now. There are discovery issues, there are dissipation issues, there are evaluation issues, there's a lifestyle issues. It's, this is not going, you have to make the conclusion. It's not going to be a clear cut case. There are some attorneys, thankfully, that will call us the minute. They get a new case. And when they get hired, we get hired shortly thereafter. There are some attorneys that hire us two months later. Right before, right after the first preliminary conference with the judge. It really depends. Again, my practice, which may or may not be similar to other people that do the type of work that we do, is generally not geared around two simple earners whose assets are, you know, the house, the pension plan, cash and bank, and you know, grandma's watch. That's not, that's not what, there's no need for me there. And is there for somebody out there who is not yet in the process, who's just woke up today? Thinking about leaving their bride or groom, is there something that they can do to prepare for the process ahead? Well, before I answer that question, let me give you my opinion about divorce in general. No one ever wakes up and says, I'm getting divorced today. They dream about it. They fantasize about it. They act upon it. They may even outline the process they proceed is going to happen. The actual time that they call you and say, Mr. Endger, I got your name from my next door neighbor. I want to get divorced. That's not the first time that man or that woman had that notion. It may be months, sometimes it may be years between from when they first sought to think about it until now, until when they call you. So, again, I don't know, there's no one answer. I can tell you that there are instances in which my first meeting with our client, they come with boxes of bank statements and he or she will say, I've been collecting these statements for three years now. I have a case right now in which there were two owners, but the husband never, ever contributed to any of the household expenses for 10 years in change. We're now analyzing 10 years worth of bank statements and brokerage statements and summarizing and tracing the money because we want to prove or disprove the fact that the husband has diverted all of his net wages over the length or the duration of the marriage. That the wife is convinced of that. And I said, how you understand this is very costly. Jesus, I am sure of it because I have been paying for everything from day one and there's no money and the truth is is that she's not wrong and we're preparing our analysis so that the council can go to the adversary and say, where's all the money? And by the way, I don't have to find out where the money is. I just have to know it's not there. That's right. That's not my job. I don't have a crystal ball. I don't have a magic pen. I just have documents that say one thing or another. Just what that lawyer just wants to make sure you find something or that the other side doesn't know that you're on the case because I've had scenarios. I've had a case where you were even on it. I know you were on the other side and thankfully a report never showed up. Well, the truth is your audience should know for as often as we have worked together, we've actually worked against each other more often and we want to say who won who lost more often. That wouldn't be true. I think it's worth pointing out and asking you, how do you believe from your perspective as a forensic accountant with your background, how COVID has impacted at least the divorce process from where you sit? Well, first of all, during the COVID time, I took it upon myself to review all of the cases I've done over my 30-year career, all my divorce cases. I've come to the conclusion that 99.9% of all divorce is caused by marriage. That is so old man. But in all seriousness, the COVID time has put a tremendous strain on relationships. What has happened is that when COVID first started, there was a drop in number of divorces that were filed, obviously, whether that is because people were not getting divorced or the courts were not in processing cases. I think you'll know better than I and I can just tell you by the ringing of our phones in the office over the last two or three months. Now that it's nine months passed from the beginning of COVID, there's an increase in divorces. Business owners are in fact claiming that their valuation of their businesses from the coronavirus and COVID should take have a significance on the value. That may or may not be correct. First of all, let's just review one thing. In New York State, when a valuation is needed for a business in connection with the divorce, generally, the valuation is done as of the commencement date of the divorce action. If the divorce started prior to, was it the 16th of March? Is that the 14th, 13th date that people are using? If the divorce commenced prior to that, that was prior to COVID. The Fairmarker Value Standard says that you can only use one information which is known and knowable as of the commencement date of the divorce or the valuation date. If our valuation date for arguments take is December 31st, 2019. Now it's 2020. The business owner is now jumping up and down saying, "Hey, it's COVID. My business went down 50 percent." The non-spouses saying, "Yeah, but by definition, the valuation date is as of the commencement date of divorce, which is 2019, it doesn't make a difference." Let's say that's what's supposed to happen. I haven't seen a judge say, "We're going to revisit this," and then everybody's just kind of up in arms and fighting, and I think I'm seeing the judges just saying, "Go figure it out amongst yourselves." Just similar with the custody. They don't want to open up the fucking Pandora's box. I'm curious, are you seeing the same thing? I have yet to see a judge make an order that says to value the business other than a the commencement date of divorce action. I have had conversations with judges and I have suggested that we do valuation dates. We do alternative valuation dates. I don't know if the judge has accepted that, but at least it gives us the information because we don't know if there's a decrease in value. By the way, just so we understand, valuation is a prophecy of the future. That's what it is. If we accept that as the definition or the axiom of the valuation process, the valuation, what a prophecy of the future, are we saying that the business is always going to be down? No. The answer is that we need to do some more due diligence to see how the business will rebound to better afford a more accurate value. Just to say that value of the business, the value of the business is always going to be less now because of COVID is absolutely incorrect. That has spoken a long experience. The truth is that we get that question all the time. I know the judges are thinking about it and the judges don't have a uniform approach to it yet because it has to be done on the case by case basis. If you were in the business of manufacturing PPE, your business went up. But if you had a Del Cotescene that was at the bus stop that closed for six months, then that's not the same scenario. I know that people have different opinions on how to treat it. There is no statistical data yet nor is it expected anytime soon to quantify the change in the valuation multiple that should be applied to the income stream to value a business under the income approach. There's no data on sales of businesses that is currently available that took to take to account the COVID area, the COVID period. So the only variable of the valuation process that we can look at is cash flow. That cash flow is not just going to be the cash flow of the nine months after the value after COVID. It's going to be the cash flow that's anticipated in perpetuity after COVID, the start of COVID, which theoretically hopefully will include a period of rebound. You had me at hello. There you go. The funny thing is that I get this question all the time and I sound almost robotic about it because I know that the attorney wants me to say, "Don't worry, the value of the business is worth nothing." That's just wrong. If someone says that to them, they're giving them the edifice in my opinion. So you've been doing this a long time. Juiciest story, divorce story, as a forensic account. I'm in an office with a lawyer. It's the first time I mean the client. This is before the lawyer, this is before the lowest change in which in New Yorkers now, we know for divorce, prior to that, you'd have to have a reason to get the divorce. We're going through the woman whose our potential client was a model. She had a child from another relationship. She's married to this very, very wealthy guy. They lived in one of the top floors in the Times, Time Warner Building, the West Side. She drove around in a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur. The husband would travel a lot and he would just leave every Sunday night, 10 or 15 thousand cash for the week so she'd have a wife for the week. Not bad. The lawyer says to her, we need to put in the papers why you gain divorce. She says, "Well, because I want to get divorced." She says, "No, you you had to have a reason." She says, "Well, I don't know what to say to you." He says, "Well, does he yell at you?" And she says, "Oh, no, he's an absolute gentleman." He'd never said a curse word to me our entire marriage. He's self-spoken, eloquent, tremendous vocabulary. He's just wonderful. He says, "Alright, do this another way." Has he ever hit you? And she says, "Hit me." I just told you, he's a gentle affection guy. He's so often and he would never raise his hand to me. Has he ever hit your son? He's never touched my son. He treats my son as his own son. And he has no other children. And so that's his really son son. And the lawyer says, "Well, we have to think of something." And the lawyer says, "Does he make you do things you don't want to do?" And she says, "Excuse me?" You know, "Does he make you do things that you don't want to do?" And so she says, "I don't really understand." And the lawyer says, "You know, sexually." And she says, "Oh, no, no, we haven't had sex in years." And I said, "Oh, that's a shame." That was my story. Really? Yeah. So the truth is is that I didn't take on that case. Because it was nothing for me to do. And I don't know what happened with that case. But the truth is that it was fun. That would have been a good, you know, dissipation claim, if you had a trace, the $15,000 in cash payments every Sunday. Is she just, she just wanted, she just wanted the divorce? Well, listen, I am honored that you came. I am touched that you wore a vest for this podcast. Oh, isn't that the name of the podcast? Exactly. What's it called to you? Close to the vest. Close to the vest. So here we go. I appreciate that. There you go. It's always great to work with you. I put up with a lot of my shit and I consider you a friend first and foremost. So thank you. I want to remember that when you and you cross examine me on the next case. - Awesome. - We will. - Thank you for inviting me.