Tom Dunlap - Washington & Lee

Louis Goodman / Tom Dunlap – Transcript

Louis Goodman 00:03 

Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk to attorneys about their lives and careers. I'm Louis Goodman. Today, we welcome Thomas Dunlap to the podcast. Tom is a founding partner of Dunlap, Bennett & Ludwig. Started in 2001, it has grown into an internationally recognized venture with over 80 attorneys and 14 locations across the United States and the United Kingdom.

Mr. Dunlap has substantial experience in business, corporate, intellectual property, and government contract litigation. He's been featured on major media outlets, including CBS, Fox, and NPR. He is himself a podcast host fronting the Black Letter podcast, and perhaps most impressively, he served for nine years in the United States Army, where he rose to the rank of company commander.

Tom Dunlap, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer. 

Thomas Dunlap 01:09 

Thanks, Louis. Thanks for having me on the show. 

Louis Goodman 01:11 

It's a pleasure to have you. Where are you speaking to us from right now? 

Thomas Dunlap 01:16 

So I'm in the DC metro area, about 35 minutes outside of Washington. In a town, regional town in Loudoun County near Dulles called Middleburg.

Louis Goodman 01:27 

Can you describe in your words what kind of a practice you have? 

Thomas Dunlap 01:33 

So my individual personal practice is principally intellectual property. It involves some prosecution work. It involves litigation, involves licensing, transactions, and government contracts. The firm's practice includes M&A and real estate and estate planning and a few other areas.

Pretty much most of the things that touch a concerned business. We have an immigration partner that does H1B visas. So the firm's pretty broad, but my practice in particular is IP and government contracts. 

Louis Goodman 02:01 

You started the firm in 2001. And as I mentioned in the intro, it's now quite large. Can you tell me how it got so big so quickly?

Thomas Dunlap 02:12 

Well, it's been 23 years, so it didn't happen over the 23 years. The first five or six years, my only law partner was Dan and Dan and I were both still in the reserves and guard. And if you'll recall, we went to war with almost everybody at that time. And so we were both stop lost. I was a cavalry officer and Dan was a 20th special forces group officer.

So we took turns deploying sometimes at the same time. So the first six years of the practice was being in the army while sort of having a law practice. And then it really took off after I went back to school and got my MBA and made some very intentional decisions about how to build the practice and what I wanted out of a law practice. And that was about 2012, 2014, when we kind of turned that corner. 

Louis Goodman 03:04 

Where are you from originally? 

Thomas Dunlap 03:06 

Sort of all over. I was born in New Jersey, lived in Texas until I was eight, then moved to Northern Virginia, Great Falls, and then went to high school, moved to London and Switzerland. Came back here for college outside of Manhattan and Pennsylvania. And then now I'm back here after law school. 

Louis Goodman 03:23 

How is it that you traveled around so much? 

Thomas Dunlap 03:26 

My father's job, he moved for a company called Arthur Anderson. And so he moved a lot, at least initially back then they didn't have Teams or Zoom. So he had to be there. 

Louis Goodman 03:39 

When you went to college, where did you go? You said you went outside of New York.

Thomas Dunlap 03:42 

Yeah, I went to Lafayette college. I'm actually a professor there now. I teach a four credit class called intellectual property for scientists and engineers, the school of mechanical engineering. So it's kind of neat to be back at my college as a professor. My kids don't go there. My daughter's at Brown and my son is still in high school. I'm hoping he'll look at Lafayette. We'll see. 

Louis Goodman 04:03 

Well, how was your experience at Lafayette? Probably pretty good since you ended up going back there. 

Thomas Dunlap 04:09 

I love the college. I think it's a great school. I know it's principally an engineering school, but it's, I was a liberal arts major back in the day. I think it's a great school. Has a deep connection with to the Marquis de Lafayette on his grand tour of the United States after the Revolutionary War attended the opening of the college and that was named after. It's kind of neat. It's got a cool history. So it's an old school. 

Louis Goodman 04:33 

When you graduated from Lafayette, you ultimately went to law school. Did you take any time off between college and law school or did you go straight through? 

Thomas Dunlap 04:41 

So I went to Manhattan, worked at Chemical Bank, which is now JPMorgan Chase, for a year, and then I worked at Bank of New York for a year, and loved living in the city and working there. It was just a lot to do, so I kind of took a break and went to law school at Washington and Lee.

Louis Goodman 04:59 

Back in Virginia? 

Thomas Dunlap 05:00 

Much quieter than Manhattan. 

Louis Goodman 05:03 

Yeah, that's really a kind of small town world, isn't it? 

Thomas Dunlap 05:06 

Yeah, Lexington, Virginia, yeah. 

Louis Goodman 05:08 

How much time did you take off between college and law school? 

Thomas Dunlap 05:12 

It was two years. 

Louis Goodman 05:13 

Do you think having that two year period of being off and working, you know, in financial industry essentially helped you kind of focus when you got to law school?

Thomas Dunlap 05:26 

It gave me a huge appreciation for education and how much better it was than having a job. And law school was kind of fun. I know not everybody says that, but I had a lot of fun in law school and, and did fine. So yeah, it gave me a really good appreciation for how valuable it is to be a student. 

Louis Goodman 05:43 

And then what was it that prompted you to join the military and how did that all fit in with your education and your law practice?

Thomas Dunlap 05:54 

I worked as a prosecutor first. 

Louis Goodman 05:56 

Where did you do that? 

Thomas Dunlap 05:57 

Norfolk, Virginia. So I really loved the people there and I had an offer there and, but I ended up working for a private firm for about a year, I guess. And I felt like I wasn't doing anything useful. So I quit and I enlisted in the army as a private.

And I went to Fort Benning infantry school and at the end of infantry school, I didn't ask. I was asked if I wanted to go to OCS. And then I went to OCS and went to armor school and did that whole thing. So I kind of had a, my wife calls it my early midlife crisis. I was like 26. Yeah. I just quit law and enlisted in the army. So yeah, my parents thought it was a problem too, but I, I got a lot out of the army, honestly. 

Louis Goodman 06:35 

My dad got drafted into the United States army at the age of 35 in 1942 and he had been practicing law for 10 years at that time. 

Thomas Dunlap 06:47 

Did he get drafted as a JAG? 

Louis Goodman 06:49 

No, he got drafted as a private. He ultimately left the army as a master sergeant in the military police and did have some experience in the JAG Corps and, you know, it was during World War II. So things were moved very, very quickly in those days. 

Thomas Dunlap 07:09 

Wow. Wow. 

Louis Goodman 07:10 

Yeah. Yeah, as a matter of fact, they, they wanted him to stay on and give him a commission to be on the defense team for the Japanese war criminals. He turned it down because he wanted to come home to New York. 

Thomas Dunlap 07:25 

I kind of get that. 

Louis Goodman 07:27 

But he always wanted me to go into the army. He thought it was one of the really great experiences of his life. 

Thomas Dunlap 07:33 

I told my son the same thing, but I've told him not necessarily to go to the army because I was in a lot of mud and dirt and a lot of everybody. I knew that was in the Navy or the Air Force had pretty good generally speaking, experience a little bit different experience living conditions.

So if you have to pick unless you really want to be in the mud. You know, then go be in the mud. 

Louis Goodman 07:55 

Well, I guess it takes all kinds. 

Thomas Dunlap 07:59 

Yeah, fair enough. 

Louis Goodman 08:00 

I want to ask you a little bit about the business of practicing law, because you have not only had a successful law practice, but you've, as we discussed a little bit earlier, you know, really have built a very good business in your law practice.

I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that's gone for you and what your expectations around that were and how that's come out? 

Thomas Dunlap 08:27 

That was really a very intentional decision. So right now our firm has a CEO, we have CMO, and a CFO. All of these people, Deanna is our CEO, Amy, Jeff, and Rob, and Doug, none of them are lawyers, our CFO is a CPA, our CEO is a former VP from Airbus, our CMO is a former VP of marketing from Merck.

So we hired professionals to do the business. Lawyers, it's like flying airplanes and doctors, right? You're not good at everything just because you're good at one thing, just because you're smart and you went to law school or medical school doesn't mean you should nest, weren't trained to run a business.

So I went back to school and got my MBA and a lot of my final projects for that, since the other students didn't really care what we picked we're around, how do you structure and run a law firm? What's the best use of an attorney's time and not shockingly, the best use of an attorney's time is getting clients and using their legal degree to do law as opposed to look at malpractice renewal or photocopier contracts or HR stuff. That's not really your job as a lawyer. 

So that's, that's a lot of ethos that I base our firm around. And I think it makes for happy lawyers because they don't have lawyers on committees about, well, where should we put this desk or what? You know, we have professionals who do it who are unbiased and who aren't looking at it for the benefit of their particular practice area or their little fiefdom. 

You know, a lot of law firms aren't fun places. And so we really want to work at a law firm. We like going to and a lot of, part of it, a lot of it's culture, a huge part of it, but part of it is also not having lawyers do things that they're not necessarily great at. So that's a lot of how we build our practice. Happy lawyers make good lawyers. 

Louis Goodman 10:10 

I know that you're involved in intellectual property. I'm wondering what's going on with artificial intelligence? Everywhere I turn, I run into somebody talking about artificial intelligence and wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what your experience with it is and where your practice fits in with that? 

Thomas Dunlap 10:31 

We deal with it a lot. In fact, one of my good buddies, tennis buddy is a counsel at RIAA, recording industry of America, and he said, it's 95 percent of his job now is dealing with AI because AI can take anything and make anything and bake anything. And the challenge we have in the intellectual property space, especially in the patent space and the technical spaces, AI is now working with inventors to develop things.

AI is creating things that are cops. I think I can't remember her name, but a woman just won a book prize in Japan. And she admitted that like a third of her book. Was written by AI and she said she intends to keep using it. But where it stands from a legal perspective? 

So right now, artificial intelligence could not own a patent and they cannot create patentable subject matter. U. S. P. T. O. Has come down very strongly on that and said you can use AI to make a patent to do to invent. But a human has to be the input end and the output ends and it has to have human human attachment to it. It has to be a human invented thing because artificial intelligence can't do that. What's interesting is there's a fella who had AI invent something. So if you write a book using AI and say you drew the pictures, this is the most recent and famous case that the U. S. Copyright Office puts out there. A woman wrote a book and she used AI, I think Dall-E to create the pictures in her graphic novel. And the U. S. Copyright Office gave her copyright rights in her text, but no copyright rights in the images because they weren't generated by her. 

So AI can do a lot of things and it can help you, but you've, and you can use it as a tool, but in the IP space, you're not going to own the IP. Now you can use it for something like chat GPT. Hey, give me 30 interesting names for a company that sells beer. I don't know that nobody else is using. That's a great use of AI. You can use the brands and then you have to do a trademark search and all that happy stuff. But. I think that's a good use, but you have to be careful when using AI that it's not doing things that you couldn't own. 

Thomas Dunlap 12:34 

You briefly mentioned patent prosecution, and for people like myself who work primarily in the criminal law area, we see prosecution as one type of thing. But patent prosecution is something very different. I'm wondering if you could explain that a little bit. 

Thomas Dunlap 12:54 

In the IP space, we call patent prosecution and trademark prosecution, the prosecution of a subject matter. Patent prosecution is the drafting of a patent application to protect an invention or an idea.

So it's not prosecution in the traditional sense, like what I did back in the day, putting people in jail or what you do defending people, keeping people out of It's putting a patent into the USPTO and getting it issued or getting a trademark filed and registered from the USPTO. That's all it means in that context.

Louis Goodman 13:27 

What's your experience in dealing with the government on government contracting and centrally dealing with the government as a business? 

Thomas Dunlap 13:37 

We have a significant practice that represents government contractors. And so the government, any agency you can think of off the top of your head, we'll put out a request for a proposal. Company will bid on it. We deal with bid protests, teaming agreements, getting qualified before the SBA is a small business or woman owned or STV, OSB, any of the things that you need in the government space. And there's a lot of it here. Not surprisingly around Washington, D. C. Probably heard the term Beltway bandits.

Well, there's a lot of Beltway bandits are our clients and they do a lot for the government that supports our country and not just defense. One of our biggest clients is health and human services. We as a law firm are a government contractor ourselves to health and human services for all their external IP needs through NIH. NIH's office of general counsel, mostly for trademark work, but they can ask us IP things by a contract. So NIH's office of general counsel, this is generally how most government contracts will work. We bid, we won the contract, they'll give us a project. We'll give them a cost for the contract. It's inside of the quote that we gave them back in the day when we bid on it a year or two ago, and then they'll issue a purchase order. And we'll file a trademark or do a trademark search or, well, do a trademark trial and appeals board case, whatever it is. 

Louis Goodman 14:55 

You are also a podcast host. And of course, that interests me. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your podcast and what you do on that. 

Thomas Dunlap 15:05 

Sure. Yep. The Black Letter podcast is in its third year, I think. We have some 30 something thousand downloads. It's principally a sort of like your podcast, but it doesn't go into lawyers careers. It goes into business people's problems and experiences. So usually what I do is my guests are. I've had the chief counsel of the FAA, but I've also had, you know, guys who started a real estate broker business that they grew to 200 people.

So it's kind of like you, but it's kind of on the business side of things. And my format is more, tell us a little bit about where you come from, that's two or three minutes of the show, not the whole show. And then the bulk of the show is tell us about a challenge you faced and give us advice for people who want to do what you do.

If I wanted to start a brewing company or a distillery, I've had I mean, everybody can imagine on the, on the show, give us advice about that. And then every Monday I have a Monday morning minute, which is really two to five minutes. And it's usually about either something esoteric in law that I found interesting that week or something that's really relevant.

Like the last two weeks I did a Monday morning minute on the FTC's ban on non competes. And the chamber of commerce is lawsuit against the FTC, which is a huge deal for everyone in the United States, whether you know it or not, you know, if something's big, I'll talk about that. 

Thomas Dunlap 16:20 

What do you think's the best advice you've ever received? And kind of the other half of that. Is what advice would you give to a young attorney just starting out? And you could answer both or either parts of that question. 

Thomas Dunlap 16:34 

I think the probably the best advice I've ever received is that you don't make money by being a lawyer. A law degree is not entree to money.

You make money when you're a lawyer because you hear about things and people need you for things. And so you can get involved in things. And I know that's a weird piece of advice. I started a biotech company because somebody came to me for help. And that's been successful and I've started other things.

So you really make money because you're a lawyer, not by being a lawyer. If that makes sense. 

Louis Goodman 17:06 

I think that's really true. It's interesting. I've never really heard it put quite that way. And is that the advice you'd give to a young attorney starting out? 

Thomas Dunlap 17:16 

You know, my advice to a young attorney starting out today is, don't be jaded by where you work.

There's so many things you can do with a law degree. Being a lawyer isn't miserable. I have a friend who's a psychologist now who was a lawyer. You can do anything with a law degree. It gives you the access to the box top for all playing a board game right here. The lawyers at least read the box top, no matter what you do in life.

So my advice is love the fact that you were a lawyer and whether or not you practice law, you don't have to practice law and do what you love. That's the advice I'd give to anybody. Do what you love and you will be successful. Personally, that's my definition of success. 

Louis Goodman 17:51 

You obviously are someone who is very bright. You have lots of experience. You have lots of opportunities. You are a practicing attorney. What is it that keeps you as a practicing lawyer, as opposed to doing one of these other possibilities? 

Thomas Dunlap 18:11 

I get a personal satisfaction out of clients, companies that do complex and interesting things. And I really enjoy helping people. I know it sounds weird as a lawyer, but helping people fix their problems and being successful for that. 

Louis Goodman 18:26 

Going to shift gears here a little bit, Tom, can you talk a little bit about how the practice of law has fit into your family life, how your family life has fit into your practice of law? What about that kind of work life balance thing?

Thomas Dunlap 18:39 

Well, so my wife, when we started out, was a lawyer at a large firm. And so you probably know what that's like, crazy hours. And I had joined the military and started deploying. We had young kids, so they were daycare full time. It was, it was tough at the beginning. It was a, you know, 4 AM to 9 PM or 10 PM job initially, but I really took some intentional decisions to figure out how to change that. So I, I've kind of worked my law practice around my family so that I could be involved with them more. And, you know, I think it's good. 

Louis Goodman 19:16 

What sort of things do you like to do recreationally to get your mind off of the practice of law every once in a while?

Thomas Dunlap 19:23 

So since I've been out of the army, I've been a big runner. I've run usually a couple marathons a year. I did triathlons for a little while. Back in 2012, I was the last Ironman. So it's been a little while. And I have been a pilot for the last 20 years. I had a plane for nine. I sail, I am a master scuba diver, paddy master scuba diver.

I used to do archaeology dives with a group in DC that went all over the place. It was fun. So, you know, I do hike, I travel for fun. I like drinking, you know, white burgundies mostly, but you know, wine, stuff like that. So. 

Louis Goodman 19:58 

Well, it sounds like you're a real renaissance man in a lot of ways. 

Thomas Dunlap 20:02 

Or ADHD, you know, I think probably attention deficit is probably more likely than you cause, but you know.

Louis Goodman 20:09 

What mistakes do you think lawyers make? 

Thomas Dunlap 20:12 

I think the biggest mistake that I see when I talk to lawyers, well, two mistakes. So, I think some lawyers who are jerks to other lawyers are shooting themselves in the foot. I feel like that's a big mistake you're making. Well, probably with your life too, cause it's probably not healthy, but, and then the other mistake I see as a business mistake is where a lawyer tries to be their own businessperson for everything. They try to do their social media. They try, they try to do it all themselves. And their idea to grow is to hire another associate. Now realizing I've talked to a lot of lawyers who are like, Oh my God, you're right. Hiring another associate means a lot more work for you. Not less work. Just because you have another body. It's a lot more work. So, so I see that mistake. I mean I don't know if everybody agrees, but it, it seems to be pretty universally true in my experience. 

Louis Goodman 21:02 

Where did you kind of get this notion about getting someone to run the business for you? I mean, how did, how did that come up? 

Thomas Dunlap 21:10 

I went back and did my MBA at night while I was still in the reserve and my kids were quite young and I was sort of running a law practice.

And the last year or less, really year and a half of that night program, at an MBA program, you do these projects. And the first project I picked was what practice area drives the most revenue and the best return for what you do. And it's the most interesting. And we did a practice here in consumer sensitivity study.

And then the next thing I did is how are law firms inefficient? And we listed, we created a SWOT analysis for each thing that a law firm does, like how it manages money and how it manages resources and how it manages people. And the answer was that lawyers shouldn't be doing these things because the value of a lawyer's billable hour is so much more than the cost of the people who are very good at these things.

I mean, it ended up being common sense, but we did a lot of charting and graphing and research to prove that it was common sense. 

Louis Goodman 22:08 

So it was part of this MBA project? 

Thomas Dunlap 22:11 

It was initially. Yeah. I mean, obviously as the firm grew over time and I, that was, I finished that in 2012, it was, you know, life lessons learned.

There's some good books out there. It's hard to read a book and take something from it. So some of it was just hard lessons at each time. It was a huge step. It was a huge step to convince my partners when we were a smaller firm. Like we should have somebody who's not a lawyer run the firm and you know, lawyers, their heads almost exploded.

They're like, no, a non lawyer can't run a law firm. They wouldn't know things. I'm like, what, like what things like, I think they can figure out trust accounting if there are our CFO, which they now love MBA CPA sold his company to travel law cities. He's smart. I mean, he's able to figure out trust accounting in like an afternoon.

So lawyers like they'll never understand that same with our CEO. She figured out everything a law firm does within a few months and now and then now all of the partners trust her. I mean, it's just a natural thing. But it's that was a huge leap for lawyers mentally to think that a non lawyer could do it because since you know the 1700s the tradition of lawyers is lawyers manage other lawyers. We're all kind of this little secret club and, and, and breaking that paradigm. I think it's going to happen more because they're publicly traded law firms now, one at least in the U S and so practice rules are changing and the world is changing and venture capital, private equity, they're getting into the law business because there's money there.

Louis Goodman 23:34 

What sort of things keep you up at night? 

Thomas Dunlap 23:37 

My kids, I stress for my kids and their stress. And I don't even know why they have this stress and we tell them not to have the stress, but the kids have the stress. 

Louis Goodman 23:47 

Is there anybody living or dead who you'd like to meet? 

Thomas Dunlap 23:50 

I would've loved to have met Patton, because I was an army officer and he was the most successful general of all Generals on Earth. I don't know, you could look this up. It's actually a fact ever. I mean, I know he is terrible to PTSD. People in the hospital and that whole thing, but love to have met him. I would have loved to have met George Washington. Honestly, the man who could have been King. I know that there's sounds so trite or Marcus Aurelius. I'm a big fan of the stoics, so I would've loved to have met him if I could have spoke. I'd have to speak Latin, I suppose so with the translator. 

Louis Goodman 24:24 

Yeah. I've just started reading some of his meditations. 

Thomas Dunlap 24:27 

Yeah, it's great, right? Some of them are fantastic. you're like, yeah, duh. Yeah, I have his, I have meditations by my bet, so I think it's, it's a good one.

Louis Goodman 24:37 

Let's say you had a magic wand. There was one thing in the world that you could change the legal world or otherwise. What would that be? 

Thomas Dunlap 24:43 

What would I change? I don't know. I'd like to change. I don't, I just wouldn't want the magic wand. I think it's just, you know, too much. There's, there's too much I'd want to change and it's so risky. You know what? I'd wipe out cancer. That seems like a good thing. 

Louis Goodman 24:58 

Tom, if someone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that? 

Thomas Dunlap 25:05 

DBLlawyers.com. 

Louis Goodman 25:08 

So it's D B L lawyers. com? 

Thomas Dunlap 25:13 

Yep. So it's DBL, two L's in the middle, Delta Bravo, Lima, Lima, Alpha, whiskey, Yankee, Echo, Romeo, Sierra dot com. 

Louis Goodman 25:19 

Said like a real pilot. Tom, is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven't touched on anything at all that you'd like to mention or talk about? 

Thomas Dunlap 25:28 

No, not at all. You've been very fair and fun and you've covered everything I can think of plus some things I haven't thought of. So thank you very much for having me on your show. Appreciate it. It was good fun. 

Louis Goodman 25:40 

Tom Dunlap, thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

Thomas Dunlap 25:47 

Thanks, you too. Thanks Louis. 

Louis Goodman 25:49 

That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.

Thanks to my guests, and to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

Thomas Dunlap 26:29 

I know it's not a great answer, you know, but 

Louis Goodman 26:31 

So it's your answer. 

Thomas Dunlap 26:33 

Yeah, that's all I got.