LISI’s Founder, Jason Lisi, joins host Julie Owsik Ackerman, writer/storyteller/lawyer, for the first episode of our new series, Behind the Bio. Each month, Julie will interview a different lawyer to explore the many directions one can take after law school and learn more about the turning points that shaped these notable careers.
In this episode, Julie and Jason discuss leaving his tax law practice and turning his passion for computers and the internet (still in their infancy) into a thriving tech company that continues to serve the legal profession 25 years later.
Julie:
Hi, welcome everybody. My name is Julie Owsik Ackerman, I am the communications manager and legal content writer here at LISI. Welcome to Behind the Bio, our new series, we’re gonna interview a different lawyer each month, and the idea started because I’m a lawyer and a creative writer, and I get to, I’m privileged to interview a lot of lawyers for my work, and as we’re crafting the official bios and other pieces, I often get curious about what, you know, what’s the story behind that official bio. So we’re gonna interview some lawyers and find out some stories and share them with you all. And I’m really excited for our first guest, somebody I know pretty well, Jason Lisi is the founder of LISI, he is a lawyer, he’s an entrepreneur, he is a fellow grammar enthusiast. Welcome, Jason.
Jason:
Thank you very much, Julie, I’m happy to be here.
Julie:
Yeah, I’m glad to have you. As I said, I am lucky enough to know you a bit, but I’m very excited to dig into some more of the stories that, you know, I haven’t heard yet, so-
Jason:
Okay.
Julie:
I’m looking forward to those. Let’s see. So yeah, before we, so we are gonna talk about three turning points and then just have a little lighthearted questions at the end, but before we do that, would you just tell our audience what you do?
Jason:
Sure. Well, I founded Legal Internet Solutions Incorporated in the late ’90s, and set up a lot of the systems and have developed a really good digital marketing team of people who have been in law firms, who have been lawyers, and what we do is we know the legal market backwards and forwards, and are really happy to provide high-end digital marketing services to lots of different firms. What I do is I hire great people and I get the heck out of their way, so that’s working out pretty well and I have a great team, you included, of course. And we are having a nice time, and best year ever last year, and very happy about that, so.
Julie:
Great, thank you. Yes, I agree with everything you said.
Jason:
Yes, I also sign the checks, but, you know.
Julie:
Yeah, yeah, that’s also very important. All right, so as I said, in this series we’re gonna talk to different lawyers about turning points in their lives that led to where they are today. And so, in advance of this, you had given me a few turning points to talk about, and the first one was getting your first computer, which I’ll let you decide if you wanna say what year that was or not, but yeah, I’m happy to, yeah.
Julie:
Just tell us a little bit about getting that computer and why that was so important for you.
Jason:
So just backtracking a little bit here, I am in my mid-fifties, I’m 56 as of the date of this recording, and when I was a teenager, there were no personal computers. And then, you know, I was a freshman in highschool and my mother, you know, I was living in upstate New York at the time, and my mother said that she wanted to put me in a typing class, and a typing class in this high school in upstate New York. And so I’m a freshman, glasses, you know, awkward phase, which some people may say I haven’t gotten out of yet, but anyway, the point is, so I’m, you know, freshman, and all the other people in this typing class were the kind of senior girls who were maybe not gonna go on to college, but be secretaries, receptionists, that type of a thing. So all these senior girls and a little freshman, scrawny, freshman guy.
So I learned how to touch type, IBM’s Selectric, with the ball and, you know, heavy cast, you know, machine. So I learned how to touch type, and why that goes to the next point is, like it or not, a good ability to type well makes your life so much easier in the business world. You know, you don’t have to rely on somebody else, you don’t have to, you know, think, or hunt, or peck, or whatever to get your thoughts out of your head onto a screen. So, fast forward to college, I wrote all my papers at the computer center, it was a time, you know, ’84 is when I entered college, it was a time when no one had computers in their room. I mean, I guess engineering students, but I went to a liberal arts college, but maybe they had it, but not at the time, the Mac had just come out. And then I typed all my papers and I could, you know, and I think I actually got some better grades because, you know, back then the students would write and I’m sure that doing that, you know, got me some better grades.
Anyway, went to college to study journalism, or came up with the idea of studying journalism while I was at college, and then decided to go to law school, and before I went to law school, my parents said, “Well, you can have a computer, so go out and find a computer,” and I didn’t know what kind to get, there was, you know, 1988, didn’t know what to do, and I was living in Delaware at the time and I went to a computer warehouse, right? And I was doing all this studious research, you know, this and, you know, IBM computers, and all this is the, and I was talking with the manager at this computer place, and he said, “You know, I have a feeling about you, how about we sit you down in front of this Mac?” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know anything about these Macs,” and everything.
Literally within five minutes of touching the keyboard and moving the mouse, my life had changed. I mean, it was that much of an epiphany, different from, and you know, you may not remember, but back in the day, you know, most IBM computers were, or you know, they were called PC compatible, you know? Or DOS computers, and you would have to type in something to get to, you know, WordPerfect or something like that, you know, way back in the day, and this was just so much easier, so much, and yet I still went to law school. And literally in law school I spent about a third of my time studying law and two thirds of my time really interested in computers and the Mac operating system, and this new thing, AOL, and you could just, and you could connect with other people, you could find information and you could, and it was fascinating. Just to show you that I don’t listen to my inner voice, I went to law school again and got an LL.M. in Tax from Villanova, and while I was there, the, oh, and anyway, I ended up getting a Mac SE, a terrific computer, still have it to this day.
Julie:
I was gonna ask if you still have it, yeah.
Jason:
Absolutely, very sentimental about things. And I spent so much time on it. So I ended up going to Villanova and in 1992 getting my LL.M. in Tax, there was a group at Villanova Law School led by Hank Parrot and other folks there, Jim Mall, others that had the Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy, and it was the first group, along with people at the University of Chicago and Cornell working to put legal, and U.S. government, and law-oriented resources on this new thing called the World Wide Web. And as soon as I saw the World Wide Web, as soon, and I saw it when it had its first 50 pages on it, and it was not command line anymore, like the old type thing, it was point, click, you go to this, you click on this, and you go to this, I said, “That’s cool.” Again, not listening to my inner voice, decided to practice law. You know, five years of a legal education, you may as well.
Julie:
I mean, yeah, it’s understandable. Yeah.
Jason:
All right. So, but all the time I was, you know, so much more interested in, you know, seeing this new thing, the internet, you know? Seeing this new way of communicating and getting information without having to, you know, sit in a library and, you know, pull books down, and getting things that are instant and new, and from other parts of, you know, I remember one of the early things on the internet was, I think it was Cambridge or Oxford, I’m not really sure, but there was a teacher’s lounge at one of those places and they had a webcam on the coffee pot in the teacher’s lounge, and you could see how much coffee had been, ’cause it was glass coffee pot, you could see how much coffee had been consumed and was filled back up and how much, I loved stuff like that, loved it, they had the Netscape, you know, lobby, a fish tank, and you could see the fish swimming around, and to think that I’m sitting in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, and seeing this in, you know, Mountain View or San Francisco, it’s just so cool.
Julie:
Yeah, I sometimes think about my kids who, you know, are 11 and 3 and they’ve always, like, FaceTime has always been a thing for them. But for me it still feels like, it’s like “The Jetsons,” like, you can see that people are talking to on the phone, what?
Jason:
I mean, we are on an interview here and we are probably a good 25 miles apart. And you’re one of the closer employees.
Julie:
I know, I know. Yeah, I wanna talk about that when we get to that.
Jason:
Yeah, so it’s good, very good.
Julie:
Yeah, it’s so interesting because I, you know, I’m a little younger than you, but I lived through that, you know, that same revolution and you know, I wasn’t a professional yet, but I could just really, and I see this in you on a day-to-day basis, but I can really see how, you know, that just really lit up something in you, you know, this new technology. Like, you really, you know, for me it was more like, “Oh, I could play games on this, that’s cool,” you know, and then like, “Oh, I can,” you know, like, it’s just interesting to me that the things that we just respond to, you know, like you just saw that and ran with it.
Jason:
Well, when you, I would like to think that all my decisions up to this point were based on reason, research, and looking at, “Oh, well, this will be a good market to go into,” and, you know, “I’m going to develop this based on these metrics,” and I, no, I wanted to play with computers. And I really did. And it was a lot more fun than tax law. I mean, sounds thrilling, but it’s not quite as, quite as fun as some people think it is.
Julie:
Not as glamorous as we might think. So let’s get to that. Tell me about working as an associate and how that ended. Tell me about that.
Jason:
Sure. Actually a story I don’t talk about very much, not something you really wanna broadcast, so when I graduated from the LL.M. program and applying for jobs, still the economy was in a little bit of a recession, and I ended up picking up per diem jobs for different things and interviewing, and carpet bombing resumes, and everything like that, all that different type of thing. Fast forward to, I got hired by a law firm and it was a boutique tax firm, six lawyers, all of us had tax LL.Ms We did, you know, high-end tax work, mostly transactional stuff, but some other different types of things, a lot of estate planning, that type of thing. And, you know, boy, I gotta tell you, I tried really hard, you know, I would be the first one in and I would be the last one to leave, and I would really, and I was really, really trying hard, I think driven by some idea that you wanna be a lawyer, you know?
And it was just unnatural for me, it was just unnatural for me, and there were, so there were three partners and three associates, and I was one of the associates. The two other associates had more experience than I did, and a lot of it seemed to just come so naturally to them, you know, how to do this, you know, and we all had the same degree, you know, that kind of thing. And I kind of liken it, and I really, really tried, lost 35 pounds for the stress, you know, I wouldn’t eat lunch, you know, I would just work and everything like that, and I just couldn’t get the spark in me to, that I enjoyed with this other thing, and I liken it to, you know, the idea of wanting to be a lawyer is, I dunno if you’ve, like, you go shoe shopping, right? And you find a shoe you really, really want, but it’s a size and a half too small for you, and that’s all they have, and you try and jam your foot into that shoe, you know? “I’ll make it work somehow…”.
And then you find out your feet really hurt and you’re just uncomfortable, and this isn’t for me, and this isn’t sustainable, and everything like that. I would still be plying away at that job trying to make it work, all these years later. If the partner came in one day, this was just after, this was just after Valentine’s Day, 1996, and I remember it because he remarked that the girl I had started dating at the time, woman, we were in our late twenties, early thirties, had sent me two dozen roses, you know, for my desk, and he commented on that, and then turned to, “We decided to take a different direction with your position,” so it was my first real job as a lawyer and, you know, really in a sense, my first real job, because I had gone from college to law school to LL.M. and boom, I’m one of them at 26 or 25, or something like that, and I’m working for the first time, just unnatural. Anyway, And that was a turning point because it really sort of broke through that this is not for you, this isn’t your thing, and this is nothing against practicing lawyers.
Some people are cut out for it and some people are not cut out for it. You know, there’s all, you know, linebackers are good at football, ballet stars are good at ballet, but they probably shouldn’t do crossover, you know what I’m saying? So it has all, took me a little while to make peace with it, but I really made peace with it when that same firm came to my company to do their website for many, many years.
Julie:
Wow, wow.
Jason:
And one of the partners could see the excitement and the everything in me, and talking about this, and what we could do for the firm and everything I said. Yeah, it sounds, yeah, and he said, “Sounds like you’ve really found your thing,” and I said, “Yeah, and the thing was is you guys knew it before I did.” It’s all good and really, you know, you think of, you know, quote, unquote, bad things happening, but that was one of the best things that ever happened to me because you know, they kind of measured that it was, “This guy is very bright, very earnest, trying super, super hard,” because I wanted everything to be a success, said, “This guy may be more linebacker than ballet star,” you know? So not quite sure. Also, I noticed that there was going to be a need for what we do, in the world, here at LISI, the digital marketing websites and everything because on day one I came to the firm and they discovered that I knew how to use the CD-ROM machine, you know? You know, the one where you had to have the separate little…
Julie:
I remember that, yep.
Jason:
You put it in there and you put it in, and this, “Oh, we didn’t know how to use that, it was like a Westlaw thing,” and they said, “You are the online research guy.” Okay, great. It’s just a CD-ROM! And you know, these partners and the other associates, all very, very brilliant people, didn’t know how to use this type of thing. So I knew that there’d be somewhat of a bridge between those running law firms or involved with law firms and the tech world. Now, a lot of that has been closed up because there’s now people in first-year associate positions, they grew up with the iPhone, you know what I mean? Anyway, that was an interesting turning point, it’s one of several epiphanies that happened to me in my career, yeah.
Julie:
Wow, yeah. I was surprised when I saw that, I was like, “Oh, I did not know that,” and I was very interested to hear more about it and reminds me of, like, if somebody, you know, like the boyfriend that broke up with me where I was, you know, it was, like, devastating at the time, and then a couple years later you’re like, “Oh, thank God, thank God you broke up with me, that was never gonna work.” Sometimes other people see it, you know, before we do, so…
Jason:
Yeah. Well, the old joke is, the worst day as an entrepreneur sure beats the best day practicing tax law, so and again, no offense to any tax lawyers out there, those who do it are smart and brilliant, and they are good with the rules, but boy, I’m having so much more fun now.
Julie:
Well, and again, it just strikes me the following your passion, like, you know, you clearly have this and have, from the beginning, had this passion for technology, so. Yeah, you know, like, I’m sure there are, there are, I know there are plenty of lawyers who, like, their passion has to do with, you know, the area they’re practicing and they follow that, and in your case, it took you in a different direction. But I, for one, I’m very glad it took you in that direction, it’s been really, really part of my journey too. But it’s not about me. So I wanna hear about the third turning point, which is coming up with this idea for LISI.
Jason:
So, after the separation from the firm, looked at several different positions, actually got an offer from the Lebanon County Public Defender’s office to be one of their staff attorneys there, talk about how my life would’ve changed at that point, but I had met a wonderful woman, the aforementioned two-dozen flower sender who…
Julie:
Classy lady.
Jason:
Who is now my beautiful wife, Christine, and Lebanon County would’ve kinda taken me away from her, which was in Philadelphia, and it wasn’t, I mean, I was educated as a tax lawyer, so public defender wasn’t like, quite my speed, but hey, sounded like it paid, so I thought that would be good. At the same time I got an offer from a publishing company that published tax seminars. And tech seminars, mostly for continuing professional education for accountants, but they did have CLE credits in certain states, and they hired me as the editor.
The editor of all the books, and it was really kinda neat because I was co-editor of my college newspaper and I was editor-in-chief of my law school newspaper, and my journalism background. So this allowed me to edit all the seminar books using my journalism background, using my knowledge of the tax world and tax code, and how to read all these different type of things, you know, it was a great, great job. I like to say, if they had required me to have played tennis, that would’ve just covered the whole, you know, my whole…
Julie:
The only missing piece.
Jason:
Yeah, yeah. So it was great, a great, great guy, Jack Surgent, and it was based in Devon at the time, Devon, Pennsylvania, and it was terrific, and I set up the entire style book, I wrote a style book for it, they found out I was very accomplished in computers, I helped them with their online product and everything, and then getting, you know, I had gotten married at the time and I was living in Philadelphia, taking the train to, from here to Devon, ’cause Devon has a station, and the officers were right next to the station.
I was taking a shower one day and I was, you know, still couldn’t get out of my head, you know, computers and all, you know, web, all this type of stuff, and then I don’t know if people know, I came up with the, I said to myself, “Websites for law firms. Yeah, what if we built a company that was just for law firms and websites?” And then people might not have my last name, but my last name’s right there, Lisi, and then I came up with Legal Internet Solutions Incorporated, and it was literally in that span of time, it was, “Websites? Legal Internet Solutions Incorporated.” At that point, I could hear God speaking to me, right? You know what I mean? Finally it came through, you know, you don’t wanna be an editor of books, you wanna do this, and it was a major epiphany, and then it just, once you’re bitten by that bug, it’s very hard to get it out of your system, very, very hard.
So after a while and thinking about it, I talked with my wife and she had a great job at University of Pennsylvania, she’s a professional fundraiser, she said, “Wanna start a business? Start a business, it’s okay, you know, I have a great job at Penn, great benefits,” all that type of thing, and her father is an entrepreneur so she kinda understands the gig, and that was that, and so luckily, at that company, there were two people, Sue and Rachel, who I told them about this idea and they said, “Oh well, we’d be happy to do some,” you know, “initial work for you for free.”
And so we built our website for free, you know, and you know, one designed it, one built it, and I’ve since taken care of them, you know, since then, but, you know, and then I went around to some of the law firms with whom I had done per diem work, one in particular out in Valley Forge, and I said, “How about this? I have this idea for this company, we don’t have any clients yet. “How about I build you a website for free and,” you know, “only if you like it, maybe you’ll recommend and be a reference for us for other places.”
We built it, they’d never had one before, it was very successful for them, and that turned into my first paying clients, I got recommended, to that, and it also turned into our largest client for our first five years, so huge, huge opportunity, and then just went from there, so it’s great. So I recommend, you know, every time you can, perfectly once a day, take a shower, because then you can get great ideas in the shower-
Julie:
You never know. Life-changing thing might happen to you there.
Jason:
I need to invent some way to write down my ideas in the shower.
Julie:
Right, right, yeah.
Jason:
Yeah, it was really fun.
Julie:
Wow. Wow, that’s, yeah, I had heard pieces of that, but not all of that story, that’s-
Jason:
Yeah, and I will also say I also completely recognize that I had support from a lot of people, my parents, my in-laws, my wife, you know, people who, I can’t imagine doing this as a solo person, just, and as you’re relying on the income at the startup for your, you know, to eat. But yeah, I had a lot of support and over, and a lot of very, very kind people giving advice, very kind people giving us business and, you know, and also some internal grit that says, “I’m not gonna give up and I’m not gonna give up,” and so I think it was the same sort of attitude of really trying to make tax law work, you know? Being a tax lawyer work, but applied to an entrepreneurial thing, and it’s paid off.
Julie:
Well, and applying…
Jason:
And I’m very grateful.
Julie:
That, I’m sorry, applying the grit to the thing that you really love anyway, just feels like a much better marriage, you know?
Jason:
Oh, yeah. Not every day is a gem, but you know, a lot, you know, most of them are, and it’s so, so gratifying to be able to build something and work with great people like you. But also there are people in our company that, you know, were not married when they joined us and have since gotten married, had children, you know, bought houses, paid for their mortgage, paid for their, you know, are paying for, you know, private school education, all that different type of thing, and it’s just really gratifying to say, you know, “That was just an idea in the shower one day and now it’s manifested itself into this,” and so, yeah, it’s been really, really nice, so.
Julie:
Yeah, it’s been really fun for me to, you know, I came in much later and, you know, probably 20 years after you had that idea, but it’s been really fun for me to be a part of the growth of this awesome team too, so.
Jason:
Yeah, it’s fun.
Julie:
All right, so one more question, I’m just looking at our time. Well, actually two more questions. A lot of people ask me about, you know, many people now are remote, right? That didn’t used to be, but I know that LISI was remote even before I came, I came on board actually in March of 2020, so weird timing, but you guys were already and had been remote for a while at that point, when did you do that and how did that come about?
Jason:
So the history of our physical offices basically goes, I started the company as people start, in the den, in, you know, whatever, but then we had our first child and then our second child 18 months later, and then I started to have an employee, and you know, with the nannies, and the employee, and I was living in a townhouse in the Fitler Square area of Philadelphia, and it just got a little too tight, so I got in my mind, “We need to have offices,” you know, “We need to have a,” so we moved out to Center Square, an executive office complex, which was very good. Center Square is right where city hall is, it’s the clothespin building.
Julie:
Oh yeah, mm-hmm.
Jason:
And we had offices there and I really enjoyed that ’cause kinda liked the peace and quiet, and all that different type of thing. And then we moved, we sublet with a friend of mine from a city club I’m in, he had a law firm and had two, three extra offices, and we stopped there and went there, when that lease ended and they were going to move somewhere, I was looking for office space, and, like, virtually the second I had signed the lease for this office space in 123 South Broad, right on South Broad Street, the Duke and Duke building, for those of you who like trading places, but that, the second I signed it, my project manager walked in and put in her notice, okay?
So basically the reason for actually having a center city office kind of went out because, you know, went out the window, and then I was sitting with a friend of mine, two friends of mine at our club and I was thinking, and one of them said, “What if you didn’t have an office?” And I said, “Yeah,” because at that end, this was 2009, and by that time Dropbox had become a thing, Basecamp had become a thing, all these different online collaborative tools that were not a thing back in 2001 and 2002.
And that was it, and that is one of the best decisions I ever made. Apologies to all my commercial real estate brokers friends out there. But you know, at this point I had moved to Westchester, Pennsylvania, it was about a 50, 55-minute either drive or even longer on the train with parking and everything like that, and I had two toddlers at the time, and I would leave before they’d wake up and I’d, you know, have to come back after they were kinda gone off the bed and everything, there’s just no way, just no way. And their remote systems were so much better at that point and they just kept getting better, so.
Yeah, and what it’s done is it’s allowed, it’s availed me of very high-quality people who just don’t want, who have experience in law firms who have probably gotten to senior positions and just don’t wanna make that commute, or just don’t wanna do the makeup, and the dress, and the office rigamarole type thing and, you know, want to pick up their kids at the end of the day or want to go to the midday, you know, play, or something like that. I do too, I did it plenty of times. The school we send our kids to was right across, is right across the street, they’re graduated now, they’re both in college, but. And it really, one of the best decisions and saved a ton of money.
Julie:
Yeah, well, there’s that, yeah. But yeah, that’s interesting, I didn’t realize it was that long ago, that really is very early to go fully remote, you are a trailblazer in many ways, it’s really cool. Really. No, it’s cool.
Jason:
These decisions tend to, you know, these decisions tend to kinda come by on an assembly line and maybe I just take one, you know? It’s like-
Julie:
I mean, it’s been working out pretty well, I think, it seems.
All right, so the last question before the lightning round is if you could give yourself a piece of advice, you know, however old you were, 1996, when that partner came in and said, “We’re going in a different direction.” What would you wanna tell yourself back then from where you sit today?
Jason:
Well, I would say, “Take every scrap of money you have and put it into Apple stock,” okay? Just put…
Julie:
If only, if only.
Jason:
Yeah. Which I actually did in 1998 when Steve Jobs came back into, because I, yeah. I was one of these guys who followed the Apple News and followed this and everything, so I still have stock to this day.
Julie:
Nice.
Jason:
And its cost basis is probably around 10 cents a share because it’s split so many times and everything, and it’s now, I think, about 134 today, $134. But anyway, what would I say then is that it will take time, you shouldn’t just think you can just kind of, you know, handle that and not, you know, not feel any sort of ill feelings about it, it’ll take time, but a lot of things in life that don’t seem great at the time turn out to be for the best.
And a lot of, and the other thing I would say is the mind is so strange, the mind is such a strange thing. You can think of obstacles of why you can’t do something almost as an excuse not to do that thing, you know? Why wasn’t I more open to entrepreneurism when I thought the idea up? I mean, I’m thought of, you know, when I first started touching computers, you know, I mean, I basically had the idea for internet access. You know, it wasn’t solely my idea, but back in the late nineties or mid, I mean, early ’90s and late ’80s, it was kind of tough to get onto the internet as a solo person, not within an educational institution. I could get on ’cause I was part of Villanova Law School, I could have started a company, but you know, you say, “Well, no, I need this and I’m already doing this law thing, so I should follow that,” and everything, and if you can break the chains of those preconceived ideas and have the critical voice of, “Well, why can’t you do something?” You know. You know, in the company we have certain phrases we cannot say, and I’ve told you that, and one of them is in reaction to somebody’s voicing an idea, it is forbidden to say, “Yeah, but the problem with that is.”
It fosters sort of a negative sort of, you know, heavy weighted blanket on the idea, and it also inhibits the person from ever bringing up an idea if it gets shut down immediately, and if you can do that to yourself, if you can think up an idea and not instantly think, “Oh, well, no, the problem with that is,” or “Oh no, I can’t do that because I’m held back by this or that.” If you can break free from that, not an easy gig, not an easy trick to do, but if you could do that, boy, the human mind, and the human body, and the human energy is capable of incredible things.
That’s what I think.
Julie:
Thank you. Okay, so now we’re gonna do a little, just a couple fun questions. I have a, I don’t even know, I know I wrote all the questions, but I’m not sure which ones I’m gonna pick, that’s, like, the fun part for me.
Jason:
I will be silently judging your grammar.
Julie:
Okay, “What is your favorite TV show?”
Jason:
Oh, well, of all time or currently running?
Julie:
Let’s say something you’ve seen recently.
Jason:
Okay. Well, I’m gonna leave aside news, okay? Because I’m a news junkie and if I don’t watch the “Today Show” every morning, you know, and it’s not, that’s not the deepest news, you know, analysis they’re gonna do, but if I don’t get. I say to my wife, you know, “What if I woke up and the world had ended and I didn’t know about it?” You know, so. Yeah, so I have, so that’s pretty good. Absolutely adored. Oh, recently, I guess, recently I’ve been watching, my wife and I watch “The Morning Show.”
Julie:
Oh yeah.
Jason:
On Apple TV+. Really, really good. Jennifer Aniston completely took me by surprise in that, I mean, she is an incredible actress and I only know of her, like, I think I’ve seen two “Friends” episodes, something like that, and I only know of her in that early mid-’90s sort of-
Julie:
The rom-com.
Jason:
Yeah, bubble gummy type thing. Her acting in this is, it’s stunning, it’s stunning how good it is, so yeah, “The Morning Show,” and you know, also with a hat tip to many of the people on our team, of course love “Ted Lasso.” A very good. Very good show, but I tend to like non-fiction stuff. So I just saw the Ken Burns documentary on the USA and the Holocaust.And that was stunning. Almost everything Ken Burns puts out, I love, you know, his thing about “The Roosevelts,” Teddy, Frank, and Eleanor, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, now, that’s not recent, but that was just an incredibly crafted documentary. Very, very good. So yeah, that’s news, a couple of these shows. I don’t tend to like anything that’s sort of like supernaturalist, you know? I’ve never seen “Game of Thrones,” never seen any of these “Stranger Things” or anything, and there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not my cup of tea.
Julie:
Not your cup of tea.
Jason:
Right.
Julie:
All right. Okay, next question. “What would you sing at karaoke night?”
Jason:
Hmm, wouldn’t do that, but I’m pretty sure that it would be something from the “Spice Girls.”
Julie:
That’s amazing. I did not expect you to say that. All right, last question. “What sound or noise do you hate?”
Jason:
Whew. So interesting you should say this ’cause I just went to an audiologist, you know?
You know, you need to get your hearing tested and over time, you know, your ears go and everything like that. My dad has some hearing loss, mostly because he fought in artillery in Korea, and you know, that type of thing. But still, I can hear things, like, way away, you know? And high, different frequencies and that bothers me a lot, you know, and everything, so I have to, many times, put on some sort of background sound, either music without lyrics or, like, brown noise, or white noise, or pink noise, or something like that, you know, this type of thing. I would say sound I can’t is the screeching together of styrofoam.
Julie:
Oh, yeah. Oh, why is that so awful? I hate it too.
Jason:
You know, I’ve seen something about, you know, some people liken those high pitched sounds to, you know, a evolutionary type thing where, I think, when apes or monkeys are in danger, they screech at a very high level and we are sort of pre-programed, of course, I think that could be kind of just, you know, an academic making things up, but you know what I mean, The point is that I think we’re programmed to not like those screechy, screechy noises, but yeah, it’s not something I can do, so…
Julie:
Wow, thank you so much for being our first guest on Behind the Bio. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
Jason:
Can only go up from here.
Julie:
No, no. Where could people find you online, Jason?
Jason:
Well, you can always contact us through the Legal Internet Solutions website, I’m not a prolific poster to social media. My wife is, in fact, many times people say, “Oh, I see that you just ran in this race,” and I say, “Did you?” They say, “Yeah, your wife posted it.” Anyway, so, you know, contact us through the website. You can get to my email, of course I’m on LinkedIn, I do a lot of interacting there and, you know, I’m very happy to talk with people, especially entrepreneur people who may be thinking about doing something or may be in the early stages, happy to give advice. I’ve made a ton of mistakes and would be happy to help somebody not step on that same bear trap, you know?
Julie:
Thank you. All right. Take note, entrepreneurs, Jason is a great person to talk to.
Well, I hope you and everybody else will come back to meet the other fascinating lawyers I’m gonna be talking to this year. I have somebody really interesting scheduled for next month that I hope works out, and next week we are at LISI Podcast, one more thing will drop wherever you get your podcasts. And our next, my next interview is scheduled for Friday, February 17th, so you all can join us then. Thank you so much, Jason.
By Dr. James M. Dahle, WCI Founder
