1065: Master Legal Writing and Leverage Through Storytelling with Legal Writing Expert Brendan Kenny

[00:00:00] Robert Plank: Hey, and welcome back. This is the Marketer of the Day podcast. Brendan Kenney is here from hjlawfirm. com. And Brendan is a seasoned litigator. He has 17 years experience in administrative, state, federal, and appellate courts. And Brendan is a sought after speaker and writer on legal writing, e discovery, trial practice, storytelling, and all things persuasion. [00:00:26] Robert Plank: As you get to know Brendan in our conversation here, You're just going to get a feeling of how he likes writing, he likes expressing, he likes fun, he likes the humor, and we can all use some of that into communicating with our audience and also just being a more interesting person and coming alive and rising above the noise. [00:00:44] Robert Plank: So Brendan, wonderful speaking with you. [00:00:46] Brendan Kenny: Thanks. Thanks for having me. That's a tall order to fill that bio. [00:00:51] Robert Plank: It is, but we will set our expectations high and then deliver even further. And so that's me and my first impression of you, but what are you all about? What's the elevator pits? [00:01:01] Robert Plank: What's your [00:01:01] Brendan Kenny: focus and passion? I just start off and say there's three key things. I think that drive everything I do is that is that really challenge is the greatest engine for growth. There's no such thing as a failure. There's only failed strategies. And that to quote the line from It's a Wonderful Life, no man is a failure if he has friends. [00:01:23] Brendan Kenny: And so that's three things. I'd say like undergird kind of everything I do. But yeah I guess I'm, this is a strange thing to say. Maybe the audience is going to be, why do we want to hear from someone who's talking about failure as being a great thing, but I think I've learned the most from failure in life. [00:01:39] Brendan Kenny: And the first thing I think is the reason I'm a lawyer is because for some reason, I'm not sure why I always felt. How hard it is to convince someone of anything and even get anyone to listen. I don't have some crazy traumatic childhood or something, but those are just two key things that were always with me. [00:01:59] Brendan Kenny: And I think the reason I like doing what I'm doing. is that those are the two things I'm trying to do in most things I'm doing when I'm writing. I'm trying to get someone first to listen, the judge usually sometimes even opposing counsel because sometimes I'm writing something to tweak them to get them to over respond or make a mistake in their response, but mostly the judge. [00:02:19] Brendan Kenny: And then I'm trying to convince them. And that's in, I don't, the best I can think of is the most salient experience I have in my life that I think affected that is I was when I was a kid, maybe I was seven or eight. I was going to, I'm from California. So I was going to an A's game. [00:02:36] Brendan Kenny: We had a friend who was a former, a's pro player. His name's Rick Bassetti. He's still up in Reading where I grew up. And I was going down with a number of people and someone who was just a jerk kid accused me of stealing something from the store to me. And I said I didn't steal. And he kept saying I was stealing, telling other people I stole. [00:02:55] Brendan Kenny: And I just was like, how would you disprove something like this? And that's just been with me my whole life. Yeah. So that's the basis of kind of my origin story, I think, as a lawyer and as a persuader. It comes from that those sorts of things. And I guess in terms of the greatest engine of growth being failure, I don't know, I I've always been had, I've always been a person of extremes in terms of having things I'm good at, or at least I perceived as those and things that wasn't, and I really was. [00:03:26] Brendan Kenny: Not a very good athlete at all. And luckily some of those lack of athletic athletic abilities. I feel like I took one for the team for my kids because it seems like all of my kids have some athletic ability. I have six kids ages 13, 3, and they all seem to have some athletic ability. So I'm glad that I took all the bad genes on athletics, but I guess. [00:03:46] Brendan Kenny: At least for me, I always had the experience of having something that was a real challenge. And as a result, maybe it creates a something to overcome. I could just say that compared to maybe some of my peers, I don't have any sort of special, like I said, traumatic or Downwardly mobile, or in any way economically challenged background, but I just always felt like there was something to overcome, something that needed to be done, and I find that especially in writing especially in writing That's really hugely important because at least for me, some people are different. [00:04:22] Brendan Kenny: I have talked to people who are different, but for me, every writing project, I have a part of crisis where I just want to throw my computer or throw my notepad or throw something out the window. Nothing's working out. It's never going to work out. I'm going against the grain and that just happens every time, but I've learned to walk through that and it, and I, over time get it improved, improved product. [00:04:45] Brendan Kenny: And [00:04:45] Robert Plank: failure leads to success in many ways, right? In a lifetime way, but also in this whole writing process, right? Like your writing needs to take a certain shape. It needs to be complete, needs to be long enough, short enough. And then what I made a mental note with you is there's two steps in the process, right? [00:05:06] Robert Plank: There's Getting someone's attention and then changing or pointing their mind in a certain way and both ingredients are important and one needs to come before the other. And it takes a lot of finesse and nuance to figure that out. And you need to navigate a lot of different things, right? interesting and be unexpected and you can't just do a straightforward kind of a delivery you have to wake people up and get people to notice and many times with the either the failure or the limitations or the negatives is a great way especially in the beginning of writing focusing on The problems focusing on what didn't work. [00:05:48] Robert Plank: That is what is exciting and interesting. And that's where the drama is, right? If you watch a movie, if everything worked great in the first half of the movie and there was no problems at all, you'd say this is a really boring movie. But if you watch a movie where there's disaster, failure, problems, stress, and then that ends up leading to something, then that is a lot more interesting. [00:06:08] Robert Plank: And and also, Since we're here on a marketing podcast, I always think about this idea that marketing and salesmanship, especially, is about taking something that might be dull or boring on first glance and making it interesting. And so it seems like that's a lot of what you do with your writing, right? [00:06:27] Robert Plank: Some of these legal subjects, I'm sure, are just really dry, but you have to make it exciting for the person reading. And you also have to excite yourself, right? You have to get yourself Interested and invested in what you're saying. [00:06:40] Brendan Kenny: Yes, that's utterly true and totally true. The way I try to, look at it is, I don't think legal writing is art, but I think it's, it can be as close as to art as something that isn't art. [00:06:52] Brendan Kenny: And the only reason I say it's not art is because no one's free not to respond. You file a motion, the other side has to respond. But I think, yeah that's really the point is that. It goes back to, it really goes back to to Aristotle. You've got the logos, you got the the pathos and you have the ethos, right? [00:07:13] Brendan Kenny: So you have the three aspects and lawyers are great at the logos, the logic part they lose the pathos and a lot of times they lose credibility for themselves and their client in their writing and in other things. So they lose the ethos part. And so you've, I think you have to have. You have to have all three and you have to tell a story and you have to do it in such a way and this is I'm sure I've been guilty of on the wrong side of this, but you have to do it in such a way that's not totally self referential and makes it about you showing off. [00:07:42] Brendan Kenny: I should say, I shouldn't do it where it's about me showing off. And that's a fine line, if you're gonna, I had a, I did have a brief where I, at the very beginning, it was a probate matter about a family dispute. And I did, I did quote the line from Anna Karenina. All fam all happy families are alike, and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. [00:08:00] Brendan Kenny: But that's only because it fit. And that's one of those borderline cases. It was apropos, and it was the right way, I think, to set it out. But if you're just, going for I'm gonna do something really creative and show how great I am you lose out on both things. The getting their attention, because I'm distracting them, and also convincing them, because they're distracted. [00:08:22] Brendan Kenny: Right. [00:08:23] Robert Plank: And it seems like part of your process here is to break down the problem into more manageable parts, right? Like you're saying if I say I've got to write all this stuff and that's a real hard problem to solve, but you make your first stab at it and then you say, okay do I, am I putting the ethos, pathos, and logos in there? [00:08:42] Robert Plank: Am I too self referential? Am I too braggartly? And and also we've all been there, right? We've all been there having to write a a technical paper or write a school assignment and we sneak something in there see what we can get away with, right? Sneaking a little pop culture reference or a little bit of humor. [00:09:02] Robert Plank: And and it's also reassuring to hear that. You go through it like the rest of us, right? When you get stuck, you don't know how to finish it. You don't know how to really break through. And like, where have you really struggled? Like you mentioned about like that probate situation, but it has been like a project where you're like, I don't even know how I'm going to. [00:09:21] Brendan Kenny: I struggled because at the, and I think it's why my writing is so much better now is at my last job. I'll be frank. I got fired. It doesn't show up as being fired. But that's another story. But I was at the Minnesota attorney general's office before before this. And it's funny, right? [00:09:35] Brendan Kenny: I think some of the thing is someone said that, An old fashioned term for it is human respect, not to make my worth based on what someone else thinks, because I'm this legal writing guy here, and I was supposedly fired because my legal writing wasn't good enough. And that was a long process. [00:09:50] Brendan Kenny: I gave that job everything humanly possible and more. And and it, it improved my writing, not because The person who was reviewing it improved it, but because I just, I don't know how to put it, that I think with writing, every obstacle to writing has to be removed. There's a lot of internal obstacles to really coming up with the best product and that it just forced me to overcome all those. [00:10:18] Brendan Kenny: And, there's a term from This platform, this productivity with a soul kind of platform called optimal work, which I use all the time. So anyone who's listening should check it out. I think it will change your life because it's focusing not on just on productivity, but productivity with a soul. [00:10:36] Brendan Kenny: Seeing every opportunity as a way to live my highest ideals and grow. And so one of the things they say in that the main guy says is that when adversity comes, you double down on best practices. It's not like I go, go into crisis mode. I have to double down on best practices. And and that's what you're saying before it was structure. [00:10:57] Brendan Kenny: So I said about the Aristotelian thing, but the basic structure and I'll say this quickly, but I think it could be helpful for anyone writing is something called the flowers paradigm that's been popularized by the legal writer Brian Garner, and that's, there's four stages in a writing process. [00:11:11] Brendan Kenny: There's the madman phase, there's the architect, there's the carpenter and the judge. And the madman phrase phase is that sort of mind map brainstorm. I even do before any writing project, I do 10 minutes of free association where I sit in a dark room with my eyes closed. I have a recorder and record just whatever comes to my mind for 10 minutes. [00:11:33] Brendan Kenny: And some really ridiculous, mostly stupid things come out 90, 95 percent stupid, but sometimes even some of the imagery. Or what it's compared to, or what I'm thinking of gets things going. And then the architect is the outlining phase. And then the harpenter is the mad person writing, just getting that draft down, because the only thing that has to exist for a first draft is for it to exist, right? [00:11:57] Brendan Kenny: That's all you need. And then the judge is where I'm going through an editing. And unless I'm doing those four processes really broken down just I'm an example of if I don't follow this sort of structure it goes apart really quickly. So I say to anybody who feels like something doesn't come naturally, That doesn't mean it's not gonna come. [00:12:18] Brendan Kenny: It just means that it's going to take best practices, sometimes obsessively. And [00:12:25] Robert Plank: it will take these different mindsets, these different versions of you. And there's the phrase, Write drunk, edit sober, or you hear about how Yeah. There's writers like Aaron Sorkin who would take 10 showers a day, right? [00:12:37] Robert Plank: He gets some writing done, go and take a shower to reset his mind. And that's very helpful and powerful to think about that you go through these different phases and hit it with these different personalities. And you're making me realize that like back when I was in high school and had to write essays and things like that. [00:12:55] Robert Plank: And if I had. More time, and if I revisited something every few days, it would end up being like a really nice finished product because I could do the deep thinking and go through it, especially near the end there with a full on editor mindset and fully be like, okay instead of trying to add to it, now I'm subtracting reconfiguring and instead of trying to scramble and saying the assignment was seven and a half pages. [00:13:22] Robert Plank: I need to get two more pages written. Instead, I say, hey, here's everything that's put out there. And if anything, it could be trimmed a little bit. And that's a much more, I'm not sure if like comforting is the right word, but it's more pleasant to look back and say, okay I'm in that final stage where I'm just like refining and tweaking instead of just dealing with the chaos and the [00:13:42] Brendan Kenny: mess. [00:13:43] Brendan Kenny: And it's highly, it's more highly motivating, right? Because if I'm getting to seven and a half pages and that's my focus, that's an outcome, right? It's not in the problem is that outcomes can be realized. And if I realize an outcome, then what happens? The great thing about ideals is they can't be realized. [00:14:01] Brendan Kenny: Like you can't get to the end and being like, wow I'm a hundred percent generous, I'm a hundred percent sincere, or. Or I've developed bonds with my co workers or my family to perfection, right? These are things that, these are limitless opportunities for growth. And at least I've found, some people are easily bored. [00:14:23] Brendan Kenny: My mom used to always say when I was a kid, she'd say boring people are bored, right? Which, but more than that, I'm bored because there's some. lack of an ideal that I'm striving towards because this thing that I'm doing has lost its meaning in some way. At least that's my experience. [00:14:42] Robert Plank: Speaking of things losing their meaning, I know that you are aware of, and like many writers, you deal with the newness of chat GPT, which is quite the mixed bag, right? Because it was promised to us as, hey, you don't have to write anymore. And then you go through the panic phase and saying, oh no, will I be able to have a job? [00:15:00] Robert Plank: And then you use it and it's so aggravating, irritating. And then some of these phrases even get stuck in your mind. Like even there's a couple of phrases that you and I said back and forth. I think it was talking about like continuous opportunities for growth. And some of these phrases from chat GPT that. [00:15:16] Robert Plank: Where do they even come from? They get stuck and sometimes it becomes a mess. And this whole chat GPT thing, it was promised to us as a way to make things easier, but in a way, it's added complexity and annoyance. So just what are your thoughts on chat GPT and navigating it so that way it's a tool, not a burden? [00:15:37] Brendan Kenny: Yeah let's just use it in the even bigger term. Let's say like technology. Let's say AI. I'll just say AI because it's a great tool for a lot of different things for synthesizing documents for timelines. There's a lot of really useful legal usages for these this technology specifically legal research on for say Westlaw. [00:15:59] Brendan Kenny: The AI function is very powerful and it's. It's chat GPT is useful for matching voice because one of the things I'm doing we do here because I write for so many other people is here is we're trying to what I would put is have legal writings. That's the best version of that person's voice. [00:16:23] Brendan Kenny: Because that's a whole nother thing, right? It can't just be my voice. It has to be the best version of their voice. If I'm writing for someone else. So Chappie T's GPT is very helpful for that. It's very helpful for the nuts and bolts for synthesizing documents for summarizing. But yeah, I agree that the problem with having something that can spit out. [00:16:42] Brendan Kenny: Rose. Is that the process of reviewing or refining or editing that prose is sometimes harder than writing it in the 1st place. So it really depends. I wouldn't recommend, having it as anything other than a way to synthesize, summarize documents, do something with documents or provide a general basic legal overview of something. [00:17:06] Brendan Kenny: It's helpful for that. for that purpose. Yeah, it's definitely not the cure all, the be all and end all, but it can make things easier and cheaper and affordable so that clients that couldn't be served by me can. That would be one example because of the time savings with some of these tools. [00:17:24] Brendan Kenny: So it's great for that purpose, but if you're expecting, if someone's expecting it to spit out something and be able to have it as a final product with very little review, that's just not, that's not in the cards. It's still not [00:17:36] Robert Plank: an unintended tool and it is your buddy and I found some of the same things that you're mentioning here in that it helps me to run circles around a Big chunks of text if there's like a whole book or if there's a big long Transcript like the man and also how many different cups do you have by the way? [00:17:55] Robert Plank: That's every time you take a I need to set up like a running gag like every time different cups There's a blue one. There's a mason jar. There's a prescription [00:18:04] Brendan Kenny: But don't worry. The mason jar it's it's water and the prescription is coffee. So it's [00:18:09] Robert Plank: just, uh, and you hear that's a, and on a tangent, that's like a, like an ADHD thing, right? [00:18:13] Robert Plank: They say you have one drink for hydration. One for energy and one for flavor, and so that way you can choose your own adventure. And that's what Shad Sheet Lead helps us to do, right? Choose our own adventure. And sometimes if I look at some big old transcripts or some big, all this stuff that's written, and I'm like, where do I even begin? [00:18:32] Robert Plank: And then I have it summarize, give interesting points, give a structure. And then I go back and revisit the transcript somehow subconsciously. I know what to focus on and what not to focus on. And I found it really helpful for condensing text. If I have a big old paragraph, I'm like, I know I can reduce this. [00:18:49] Robert Plank: And I say, give it to me in half it. And it just somehow just like condenses it. And it doesn't require that much editing. But I found like with the enlarging, that's where I get into trouble, right? If I say Here's a sentence, make me five pages, then that's when the terribleness [00:19:03] Brendan Kenny: happens. Yeah, I recently used it to create an abstract. [00:19:06] Brendan Kenny: We're writing an article actually on it's called the, it's going to be called the Timeless Art of Legal Writing and it's actually going to be called, what is it? Flash backward. So it's taking that timeless art of legal writing with the newest tools in AI and saying how savvy legal writing teams can combine the two to really make law more affordable, effective, et cetera. [00:19:28] Brendan Kenny: And so I, to create the 150 word abstract for the bench and bar article, I took a bunch of stuff and it was useful to break it down into a 150 word. Abstract. So it worked well for that, but I agree. Yeah. Trying to have it go the other direction is rough. And I've noticed [00:19:45] Robert Plank: that even though the past week or so that just giving it a bunch of stuff, it's really good at that. [00:19:50] Robert Plank: If I have, if I've recently used it to reply to some emails and of course I don't. Paste it inside Unseen, but if there's a big ol email thread or a bunch of things, I'll paste every, I'll paste the person's name, signature from email address and it sorts it all out. And then it might give me like a list of five or 10 sentences. [00:20:08] Robert Plank: And I say I'll choose this. I'll choose this. I'll add my own sentence. And then I'm done. So it's it's like maybe a non linear like you expect it to say I wish it could take two hours and condense it into 10 minutes. And you might say it might've taken you two hours before, but then it, it maybe gives you 20 minutes here and five minutes there, and it's a more nuanced situation. [00:20:30] Robert Plank: And so there's a lot of crazy things to navigate in this world, right? With chat GPT, boredom. Humor, the aggravating writing process. And so what are you building towards now? What are you working on and what do you want more awareness, attention on from the [00:20:48] Brendan Kenny: interwebs? Oh, yeah. I think the direction I'm moving in my focus from a marketing perspective, frankly, is, I, at a firm Helmuth Johnson. [00:20:57] Brendan Kenny: And I'm working networks and whatever to bring work in, but the specific kind of marketing that's broader is the idea of marketing legal writing, mostly to small and solo practitioners, with the idea being that based on kind of economies of scale. Experience and again some of the newest AI tools that we can be positioned myself and another colleague here are positioned to handle legal writing needs for small and solo practitioners because of workflow and litigation. [00:21:26] Brendan Kenny: If you're a two person, a three person, a five person lawyer firm, you're handling things okay, then suddenly you have this lawsuit and you have a motion for summary judgment to, to oppose or maybe to file. You, turns out you have a client that. Body wasn't served, but was. You've got a motion to default to to fight there. [00:21:45] Brendan Kenny: You're on a short time period and you really could benefit from expertise of people who do this all the time. And of course the more traditional route of legal writing marketing is toward appeals, which we also do all the time. But what we're seeing is whether In the space, especially for small and solo practitioners we can do a lot of the legal writing for them to make it possible for them to to handle their business and market and do everything else they need to do and not have some out of the blue kind of one time legal writing all hands on deck thing break down their whole process. [00:22:23] Brendan Kenny: It's [00:22:24] Robert Plank: more modern thinking, right? Because you always hear about some of these ideas that you should be thinking about building your team and looking into a specialist. Don't try to do it all yourself. Especially, as you said, if there is some kind of like an emergency or something to be done in a hurry where you have to ramp up and then there's only so much time in the day. [00:22:46] Robert Plank: So if you have one of these two person law firms and then now You have all these new writing tasks and they take away from important day to day that's happening now. There are other choices and options available. So if someone is saying, okay I do want to explore these choices and know what Brendan and Helmuth and Johnson can do for me. [00:23:06] Robert Plank: What's the website and how do they know if they're a right fit or a prospect for someone that might want to speak with you? [00:23:14] Brendan Kenny: That's a great question. So the, I always have to pull up what actually is our address, right? One of those deals where I need to be correct, right? Yeah. I want to make sure I'm correct. [00:23:24] Brendan Kenny: And don't, don't don't send people to our our evil competitor, right? Like bizarro Helmuth and Johnson. It is yeah, it is www. hjlawfirm. com. You go under Awesome. I'll be there under Brendan Kenny. It's a great question. And what it really comes down to is it's pretty transparent in that. [00:23:45] Brendan Kenny: And we are because we have a pretty, I certainly have a pretty clear idea of what, let's say what the market will bear for something, so if someone calls me with an administrative law issue, which I have a lot of background and having worked in government before, I can say, look, you write a, you, you have a letter will cost this much, the letter might work, it might not, I can give them the chances that it will, if it goes to administrative process, what it will cost, if it goes to trial, God forbid, what it will cost. [00:24:13] Brendan Kenny: And the similar thing with the most, if they called me, if someone called me and said, look, Brendan, I've got this default judgment. And it's been entered because my client wasn't or thought he wasn't served with a complaint, but was, or maybe was, or the other side says he was, and they move for a default judgment. [00:24:30] Brendan Kenny: We have to move very quickly and get that vacated or else we'll be stuck with this judgment. That is dispositive without having any opportunity to defend ourselves because we just supposedly didn't respond. I would say to them get more of the background. I'd be able to give, give an estimate of how much time it would take and everything at this point we're looking at various options, but mostly it's it's hourly. [00:24:54] Brendan Kenny: So it'd be like how many hours would it take to do this the way it needs to be done to win. And then the question is is that something that Make sense for the client and that's it's really that simple. It's that interactive process because, the worst thing I could do right now from just enlightened self interest would be especially starting off. [00:25:14] Brendan Kenny: Kind of, we've been focusing on internal clients, our own lawyers here and been doing that. And now we're moving the process and the best practice we've developed to external clients, which would be primarily small and solo practitioners. If I'm taking on jobs for people and it's costing more than I'm saying then suddenly I've got a bad review. [00:25:33] Brendan Kenny: It's not in my interest to do that at all. So if someone is even interested in exploring the possibility of looking at it, it would just be calling me and I typically don't answer the phone simply because I immediately. forward that voicemail on to my assistant to do a conflict check because I can't just answer the phone and be talking about someone's case if there's a, if there's a legal conflict. [00:25:56] Brendan Kenny: So it always has to be run first. So if you call and you don't get a, get an answer, it's not because I don't want to answer. Just leave a voicemail. I'll get it to my assistant. She'll set up a call and assuming the conflict checks run, we'll have basically a complimentary call and you can just talk to me about. [00:26:14] Brendan Kenny: Your issue and we can see if it makes sense or not. [00:26:19] Robert Plank: Wonderful. It's very helpful to just hear about your dedication and your persistence and your thought process and how you go about having these conversations and solving those problems. And that phone number, according to LinkedIn, at least, is 952 746 7000. [00:26:36] Robert Plank: 2 1 3 9. [00:26:37] Brendan Kenny: Is that correct? Yes, that's my direct line. All right, perfect. [00:26:40] Robert Plank: Don't share it with the wrong people. I won't. The website is hjlawfirm. com. We're talking with Brendan Kenny. And as we're winding down our conversation here, Brendan, We've jumped around and talked about all sorts of cool subjects and got an insight into you. [00:26:56] Robert Plank: You're a legal expert, you're a writing enthusiast, you're a dad. And in all of your travels and adventures, is there a soundbite? Is there a quote? Is there a lesson that would really apply today? That really get us energized, excited, and send us on our way? [00:27:15] Brendan Kenny: Wow. Um, yeah. I think it's this. I think the takeaway is that. [00:27:21] Brendan Kenny: Ideals are inherently motivating and energizing. And the highest ideal is building bonds with others. If whatever I'm doing, I can be doing with the thought of connecting with someone, growing with someone, helping someone encouraging someone. That's really the most motivating thing I can do, whatever I'm doing. [00:27:48] Brendan Kenny: And I can do that in whatever I'm doing. So I would encourage just everyone to try that today and see if that you, when you're, if you're focusing on really built, developing bonds with the people around you. Whether that really is a motivating, life giving, encouraging process. I [00:28:06] Robert Plank: love it. That goes back to the infinite growth you were mentioning, the intangibles, right? [00:28:10] Robert Plank: Is there a finite outcome of how well I can connect with my family and my co workers and find fulfillment? No, it's this weird abstract concept, these ideals. And so that's beautiful and wonderful to think about. Any kind of writing you make, it'll never be a hundred percent. Perfect. 100 percent complete. [00:28:30] Robert Plank: And it's just the absurdity of life and of humor and of happiness and all those other things. Brendan Kenney, hjlawfirm. com, 952 746 2139. It's been wonderful speaking with you, Brendan, and exploring some of the ideas, finding out what makes you tick. I really enjoyed it, [00:28:50] Brendan Kenny: appreciated it. Thanks for having me.