Why IP Laws Are Your Company’s Best Friend

Host (00:01):

Welcome to the, She said Privacy. He said Security podcast. Like any good marriage, we will debate, evaluate, and sometimes quarrel about how privacy and security impact business in the 21st century.

Host (00:22):

Jodi Daniel’s here. I’m founder and CEO of Red Clover Advisors, a certified women’s privacy consultancy. I’m a privacy consultant, certified informational privacy professional, and I provide practical privacy advice to overwhelmed company. Hello, Justin Daniels here I am passionate about helping companies solve complex cyber and privacy challenges during the life cycle of their business. I do that through identifying the problem and coming up with practicable implementable solutions and I am a cyber security subject matter expert attorney. This episode is brought to you by Red Clover Advisors. We help companies to comply with data privacy laws and establish customer trust so that they can grow and nurture integrity. We work with companies in a variety of fields, including technology, SaaS, e-commerce media agencies, professional and financial services. In short, we use data privacy to transform the way companies do business together. We’re creating a future where there’s greater trust between companies and consumers. Learn more. Visit redcloveradvisors.com. We’re really excited to welcome Dan Shulman to the show. Dan, welcome. Dan is a shareholder in the IP group at Vedder Price in Chicago, and he’s a former chief IP counsel who turns innovation into value to win in the market before a win in the courtroom. Dan is an experienced litigator and appellate lawyer, but only as the last resort, we really don’t want to be in the courtroom.

Dan (02:04):

It’s the least efficient way to turn your innovation into value. (Host) Now, apparently did not get the wear black memo today. I was more interested in hearing about the snow in Chicago since I won’t be seeing any this year. (Dan) I was watching the news last night and they were showing, of course, you know, they always have the reporter out on the expressway when the snow is coming down. And you know, there were flurries not too bad. And I thought to myself, if this were Atlanta up there, there’d be like, it’s a disaster. (Host) There’s some people who wants to so badly or they just want it to be perpetual holidays that they have still the snowman in the yard. It’s still there, but moving beyond snow, Dan, we’d love to learn how you got started in your career and kind of a journey you’ve taken because it’s been really interesting to see both in in house and at a law firm and kind of the change in the differences between them. If you can share a little bit more,

Dan (03:00):

That’d be great. Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know how far back I go. I think my legal career started in fourth grade when we did a mock trial for Alice in Wonderland, which we’re reading part of our class. And I was tasked with defending Alice in the mock trial and kind of got the litigation bug. And then I discovered, well, we’re, short on time, but the short answer is. One of my friends, Steven was the mad Hatter and he was there to testify about, you know, all the awful things that Alice had done in Wonderland. And he had a cast on his arm and he was, and he testified that Alice had broken his arm in Wonderland, which I, as the lawyer knew to be untrue because I had broken his arm in a play date like a week earlier

Dan (03:41):

So, so armed, no pun intended with that information, totally eviscerated him on cross examination and that, and, you know, we ended up Alice ended up being acquitted and I got, you know, the Perry Mason bug. At some point later, I discovered math and science and decided to, I would try my hand at being a physicist, but I was a much better writer than I wasn’t solving equations. And when I decided at the end of college, that physics wasn’t going to work out, I went to law school always with the attendance of being an IP lawyer because I still love math and science. So graduated from law school started my career in private practice was at a firm called Mayor Brown for about seven years. Always wanted to be a dad more than I wanted to be a lawyer.

Dan (04:20):

So as I got closer to partnership and realize I was spending more time with my kids and it was then I think they would have liked me to spend at the office realized I probably ought to go in-house. And so spent a year and a half at Motorola and then moved on to be chief IP counsel for what ended up being about a $14 billion consumer packaged goods. Over the time that I was there and I was there for about a dozen years. And then those kids that I was so eager to spend time with became teenagers and didn’t want me to spend time with them anymore. And having been in that same role for about 12 years and learned a ton, made me a much better lawyer being in house. And not just in terms of relaying you know, relating to clients, but just in terms of different areas of practice and different problems that needed to be solved.

Dan (05:06):

I had down everything I think I wanted to do, and it’s a blessing and a curse to be comfortable in your job. And I was really comfortable in my job and decided with the kids being older. You know, I didn’t need to sacrifice the lifestyle, wanted to get back in the courtroom. More wanted to bet on myself, wanted to try a different challenge. And so in May of 2019, after 12 years, as a chief IP counsel went back to private practice, and now I’ve been at Vedder Price for 21 months, I suppose it is now. And, and just loving being in private practice and, and doing it with the idea that I’ve been in my client’s shoes that for relate to their, what they’re going through, can talk to them in a way that I think that they appreciate having a different set of tools then lot of outside IP lawyers have, because rather than needing a big budget to do IP work, I had to do IP work with a budget of very close to zero.

Dan (05:56):

And if it wasn’t close to zero, it was shrinking every year. And so making the most out of what you have doing smart IP work from, you know, building a culture standpoint, having the right processes in place. That’s really the stuff that I focus on helping my clients, my clients with, you know, I tell my clients, it’s not necessarily great for business development, but the better I am at my job and helping them the better they are at their job and the less they need me. And, and if they need me less, that’s fine. If they’re better at their job because of what I do for them when they need me, I know I’ll be one of the top people they call. And so it’s all about building those relationships and helping them be better at their job.

Host (06:35):

Digging in a little bit about talked about the companies that you’ve worked at in house. A lot of them either licensed or develop technology products. We wanted to focus a little bit today on the intersection about how privacy and security fit into the process of developing this technology as well as licensing from IP lawyer perspective.

Dan (06:53):

Yeah. So it comes up in a variety of contexts. So the first thing is there are two categories for what would come up. One is internal development. That’s entirely within the company. That kind of stuff is, is trade secret. It’s gotta be confidential at least until it becomes public. And so there’s gotta be security around people understanding that you can’t talk about works that are in development. That until a patent is published, that’s valuable confidential information. If you’re going to get a patent at all, they always become confidential. So, so in that regard, there’s one set of challenges, which is just making sure employees know not to talk about what they’re working. The other category is stuff that people do with joint development partner, where by necessity, you’re talking to your partners about things that you’re doing, but there you have to understand a couple of things.

Dan (07:43):

One the value of confidentiality in that relationship, both going out, not telling your development partner more than they need to know in order to work on the project with you. And number two, not receiving confidential information that you don’t want to have, right? I can’t tell you how many, how much training went into telling, teaching the business, not to engage in a mutual nondisclosure agreement with a party when you’re just talking about a project to have that party tell you what their potential solutions were that would prevent you from go shopping around to another developer or another party that you might want to work. Right? And, and, and that was a change, too many companies, as a default enter into mutual nondisclosure agreements and end up receiving confidential information from somebody else that they don’t want, and they don’t need and prevents them from them pursuing the project with somebody else.

Dan (08:30):

And so teaching clients about being disciplined in terms of their own non-disclosure agreement. And then once you are in development with somebody, again, it’s about making sure that you have security around the things that you’re developing jointly so that they don’t spill the beans to somebody else. Even if the project doesn’t result in something that’s marketable, there is in- process work, that’s gone into that development that you want to make sure that you maintain rights over. So we had agreements that made sure that rights were protected even when the development fell off. Those kinds of things are all about education and strategy and being smart about what product development looks like and what confidentiality looks like and not getting stuff you don’t want and not giving away stuff that you don’t need to give away. That was all about education. On the, on the internal side, there were a number of things that needed to be addressed.

Dan (09:22):

One was that stuff that we were, we knew we were going to maintain as a trade secret stuff. We weren’t going to pursue patents on either because we couldn’t get a patent on it, but it was still valuable, or it would be too easy to design around or too hard to detect infringement that we would keep as a trade secret. We made sure that those things were identified as trade secrets during the review process for the invention, as we decided, whether it was going to be patent, trade secret or something, if they were identified as a trade secret, we would put them in the database as a trade secret and therefore have in our internal IP database, a list of our trade secret is really valuable for the company having that list. And just knowing that the trade secret exists was totally insufficient because you needed to have somebody responsible for maintaining the confidentiality and the security of that trade secret.

Dan (10:12):

So there was another field in our database, which was where is the trade secret located? Sometimes it was just in somebody’s head and you knew who that person was, and you could identify, okay, you are responsible for this trade. So sometimes it was a drawing. It was something physical where in the plant is that being kept because we needed, then the plant manager was responsible for that trade secret. If it was on a server, if it was, you know, on any kind of a SharePoint system that had security around it, okay. Then the, per the IT, the chief information officer or the chief technology officer, somebody in IT who is responsible for that server security was ultimately going to answer for the trade secret and a security compliance for that trade secret. And, and having that, where is it in addition to, what is, it was critical for security

Dan (11:01):

You can’t just say I’ve got a trade secret. Here’s our trade secret policy. Everybody’s got an agreement with the company that they’re going to keep trade secrets confidential. That’s fine, but who’s ultimately responsible. And so when we did our trade secret program, we made sure not just to identify what it is, but where it is, and then allocated responsibility, depending on where that trade secret was located. And that was key to security because then when businesses came in and we wanted to spin off a business, or we needed to license that technology, we knew who was responsible. We knew we could make a rep and warranty, but who was responsible if we needed to spin off the business, we need to know who had access to it. If we were licensing it, we knew where to go, who to go to, to make sure that we could comply with our obligations. And then as we got information in, we also put that in our database with where is it because the, where is it would trigger, who was responsible, 

Host (11:54):

You said something interesting around the mutual NDA. And I think there’s a lot of companies who ask for a mutual NDA. And then the other side where they’ll say, okay, I’ll just sign that. Could you share a little bit more about how would you advise kind of either side? What would you tell a company where you’re saying, throw this mutual NDA in front of every prospect or partner that you’re talking to, what should they be doing differently? And then the reverse of if you’re on the inside, you’re the person receiving that? When should you maybe not sign that? I think that would be really helpful information.

Dan (12:26):

Always ask the question when you’re sitting across the table from somebody and confidentiality comes up, always ask the question, what do I need from this person? And, and do I need something confidential from that person? And you’d be surprised how many times the answer is you don’t need something confidential from that person. Typical example of where this would come up is again, we would have some sort of product development and we’d be trying to develop a product and we don’t have a particular expert. So there may be three or four different companies that has had that expertise that we’re going to need to rely on in order to bring this product to market. Right. We might not have some of the chemical knowledge, some of the manufacturing knowledge, whatever it is. If you sign n mutual NDA with one of those parties that you’re talking to about starting the project and the NDA is typical and says, not only will I not disclose what you told me, but I won’t use what you tell me, except for in a project with you.

Dan (13:19):

If you give me information about how you would solve my problem, right? Because that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m vetting potential partners, but how they would solve my problem. If you tell me how you would solve it, I now can’t use that information to go talk to the other three people. I’m going to talk to you about how they would solve the problem. It may be that they might come up with the same solution. And now you’re going to be in an issue where if you launch with somebody else and come up with that solution, the first party is gonna say, Hey, you used what I told you, right? Maybe you can document that you didn’t, that somebody came up with it independently, but that’s going to be a litigation, or it might be that you need to compare what they said with what somebody else did, well doing that comparison.

Dan (13:53):

in order to order to enter into an agreement with somebody else is using that person’s confidential information. You could technically be in breach of the NDA. What you really want is to talk to partners about, what your off the shelf solutions are first don’t tell me something that’s confidential. I don’t care if it’s proprietary, like it might be patented, but don’t tell me your non-public solution until I determine that the thing that you have off the shelf doesn’t work for me because then you’re not going to receive confidential information. So you gotta make sure that you’re being disciplined about that. You know, another example I would have from time to time, my procurement group would want to talk to a partner about pricing. And the other side will say, we need a mutual NDA. And my procurement group would say, is this okay?

Dan (14:36):

I said, well, what are you going to do with the information? But we want to shop their price around so well, that’s why they want you to sign a mutual NDA. They don’t want you to shop their price around. He’s like, Oh, we always say mutual NDA. And them do price shopping. I go, I know you’re not supposed to do that. So things as simple as that is just being disciplined about what do you need and understand if you are getting something confidential from somebody that you really need it for your business purposes first. And if you do, then you have to treat it as confidential information. Because otherwise you should think of an NDA as an exclusive arrangement your signing up for exclusivity. Once you get that confidential information, you can’t use it with anybody else. And if you’re not comfortable with that push back on that mutual NDA,

Host (15:20):

Thank you for that explanation. Mutual NDA is kind of like getting married. You’re supposed to elusive with that one person. And if you breach the NDA, you go to a different kind of a lawyer

Dan (15:31):

Yeah, exactly. I, and I, and I appreciate that as a member of another Provisors husband, wife team. Absolutely. I’m a hundred percent behind that though.

Host (15:45):

A little more seriously, you know, you were talking about intellectual property and NDA contacts, but let’s talk a little bit about how attorneys approach protecting personal information when it comes to intellectual property. A lot of times I see this in the M&A context when intellectual property is the real value that’s being purchased and, you know, law firms are treasure troves of information, but from your perspective, in a law firm setting, or even working on a client project with intellectual property how did, how do IP lawyers think about protecting the personal information that relates to the IP or the IP itself?

Dan (16:20):

Well, so we’re talking about Justin in this case, different from what I was talking about before, which is protecting your company’s own information, you’re talking about protecting information that belongs to somebody else, somebody else’s personal information, either your customers, your employees, wherever you’re getting information from. And I think frankly, it’s something that IP lawyers need to be better at thinking about. And, and the reason is it’s where there’s the divergence in terms of frame of mind, between a lot of IP lawyers and privacy and, and they are distinct practices, and they need the same distinct of mind as an IP lawyer I am mostly concerned with protecting the confidential information of my clients because it belongs to my client. And so everything I do about protecting my client’s confidential information assumes that my client owns the information that I’m trying to protect, which means they can do whatever they want with it, but they don’t want it to get out because it’s theirs. For a privacy lawyer, it’s not that it’s not that situation at all, the information that you want to protect doesn’t belong to your client.

Dan (17:24):

It belongs to the people who provided the information to your client. It belongs to the customers, the employees, the contractors, the individuals whose information that is, and therefore protecting it is not just an obligation that you have to, that the company has to itself to protect its own information. It has an obligation to actually a legal obligation to the people from whom they got that information, which means they can’t do whatever they want with it, you know, it’s not a matter of, well, if I’m loose with my information, you know, it’s my own company’s information. I can decide that I don’t want to put resources behind protecting that anymore. I don’t believe that that trade secret is valuable anymore, right? The product may be obsolete. I’m not going to take the steps that I used to take to protect that trade secret. Well, you can’t do that when it’s somebody else’s information because it’s not yours.

Dan (18:10):

You don’t make, you don’t have the right to make that decision about somebody else’s information. I think IP lawyers who get asked privacy questions have to remember to treat the confidential information like it was information that you got under a mutual NDA, right? In other words, it’s not yours. You have an obligation to protect other people’s information and make, and that may be a higher obligation that you would protect your own information with. And, and so, you know, as you go through an M & A transaction or a licensing transaction, and some of what is the value of your company is say your customer information, customer data, all of that stuff, you can’t trade it around as if it were your own confidential information, right? You have an obligation in terms of what you do with that. You may have a notice obligation if you’re going to disclose it or sell the company or sell that data to somebody else that you wouldn’t have, if it were your own data.

Dan (19:06):

And I think not enough IP lawyers ask when it comes to transactions involving company trade secrets, or which trade secrets are we talking about? Is it entirely theirs, or does somebody else have an ownership interest in that trade secret? And I think IP lawyers and I know privacy lawyers are conditioned asked that question, IP lawyers are not enough conditioned to ask that question who owns that. Right. I know we’re treating it as a trade secret, but they’re not all equal. And I think that’s where as an IP lawyer, I have to constantly remind myself to ask that question. Who’s is it, who owns it?

Jodi (19:35):

We had a couple of different discussions. And part of what I remember was, and what I found so interesting is if you think about all the different innovation that’s happening today, so someone’s going to be coming and talking about trade secrets and IP, because they’ve created, it’s something of value. If you think about the new technologies that are coming out, where are you seeing privacy and the technologies intersect and where, and when should privacy start being considered in those initial stages. And then kind of practically speaking, when do you actually see it being considered? I might have my, and you might have your perfect idea of, of when, you know, for me I’d want it right at the beginning as you’re ideating and coming up with those, those new ideas and technologies, that’s when you should be thinking about, well, do I need to do it a little bit differently due to a privacy law? Or what kind of information am I having? But I’d love to hear from you from, from the angle that you’re coming from as an IP attorney, where is that intersection in theory that you believe, and then what you’re seeing?

Dan (20:37):

Well, Jodi, I agree with you a hundred percent that that earlier is better. And the reason why earlier is better is because of where the intersection is happening that I see you know, the economy is moving more towards a service-based economy and as it moves to a service-based economy the newest innovations are all about providing personalized services or services in a broader let’s call it in e-commerce environment, right? Which, which is all about where do you live? What’s your credit card information? What are your tendencies? What do you like to buy? What are your preferences, right? And people wanting to leverage that, to build out new models for different kinds of service. And so a new inventor may come to me with a wonderful new e-commerce idea, whatever it is, right. It doesn’t matter. They’re going to be doing something for individuals using the internet as a backbone and different suppliers and different streams of commerce.

Dan (21:40):

And, and, but it’s all going to involve servicing a customer in some way, and that will involve getting customer data necessarily. And so very frequently they have a business model I’m going to, you know, get this good from this supplier, figure out which customers like it best, send it to that customer and get a fee, fine that’s your business model. Have you considered as part of your business model though that you might be quite limited in terms of what you can do with the information that you’ve got, right? You may not be able without jumping through a lot of hoops and hiring some good privacy people to figure out who are the best customers for your services, because it involves parsing a lot of personally identifiable information in that. And if you haven’t accounted for that in your business model early on, and you try to now file for your patents and set up your company and get investors, and now you realize, Oh, there’s a privacy hiccup here.

Dan (22:36):

My business model didn’t account for that my business model didn’t account for, if I want to do what I need to do, I have to go through certain registration processes. I have to allow customers to opt out. I have to build my system to allow them to opt out of certain things, to not provide me information. If I don’t get that information, is the company really that valuable? Well, what if, what if, what if, and you built your model not realizing how important privacy law was to that business model. And so now the whole thing gets upset, right? And that’s not even that’s before I even get involved and try to write you a patent application on this e-commerce idea. It’s that your business model didn’t make sense. And if you have to redo your business model, that patent application that I write you is going to look very different because you may not get data from database, A shifted to database B and use it for purpose.

Dan (23:22):

C, right. Which I might try to write a patent on. Instead, it might have to go a different route because you have to account for the privacy issue. And I think, you know, especially with individual inventors and especially in, in an area where innovation is happening so fast and people are in the innovate now ask questions later you know, forgiveness instead of permission mode, that there’s a real danger that, that skipping the privacy step is going to mean your business model. As you thought it up, isn’t going to work, or isn’t going to work the way that you thought. And I see that not, you know, not every day, but certainly several times a month, as I talk to clients and new clients, new potential startup that don’t have privacy as an initial part of their businesses.

Host (24:05):

Yeah. I’m gonna, I’m gonna take a guess that I think we’re going to start seeing it more and more, as more regulation becomes required. It pushes more into the United States than it ever has before. Just like they’re thinking about if it was a healthcare financial situation, they really would’ve thought of those at the beginning. I think you’re going to start to see it, but it’s not quite there yet. I think pretty soon. 

Host (24:28):

I’m laughing because I just dealt with this issue and you and I both know that from a startup and series a and seed investor round, just not top of mind till they watch their investments blow up or have problems. They’re not going to want to spend on it. I mean, we’re talking on zoom. Once they had their meteoric growth last year, then they got hit with the CCPA lawsuit. Now it was time to bring in the expert and, you know, because their stock had skyrocketed so much, that was merely a cost to do business. Now, if you’re earlier and you’re not quite at that stage, it’s a different story. But my lovely wife, I do beg to differ as I still think, even with regulation, there’ll be a reluctance on startups and early stage investment to focus on it because they don’t have a minimum viable, viable product and customers. That’s always their focus. And as you know, I like to say privacy and security are what

Host (25:19):

inconvenient, except if you were going to create a brand new health care app to connect the vaccine to your doctor’s office, that’s going to be my new thing. And if there was insurance related and I need to think about HIPAA, I, as a, as a startup inventor, any individual advising me, I would drill into you well hold on. You have got to think about that part right there. I don’t think we’re there for non-healthcare and financial data, but I do think as more States continue to roll out and GDPR here in the U S is a questionable one of how many people do pay attention at the very early stage, which is negligible, but as we get more and more in the United States, I do think you’ll see, we’re going to have a shift.

Dan (26:02):

At the risk of being the mediator. I think you’re both right. I think Jodi you’re right. I think, I think Justin, that you were right. That, that when, when it’s healthcare because people are so used to every time they walk into their doctor’s office, having six HIPAA forms to sign, they’re aware that there’s something out there, right. If, if there’s a healthcare issue, it’s like, I think there’s some privacy or something. I don’t really know, but this might be an issue, right? If only people just thought, I think there’s something out there. I don’t know what it is. There might be an issue how much headaches they could say, even if they don’t know what that issue is. They don’t know. I think I got asked this, I think for healthcare related stuff, I think most people are their… problem is you know, the service-based economy and the kind of inventions that people are coming up with are beyond healthcare.

Dan (26:55):

And that’s the sort of stuff where they’re just not realizing you know, they know intrinsically cause they watch, you know, things like The Social Dilemma and they watch, you know, all this stuff with Facebook and they go, well, the real golden nugget for all, this is my customer is customer data. Look at all the things they do with customer data. Like they know that people, people are, I think people are aware that, you know, when they talk to their wife about, you know, what kind of red wine should we get drink tonight? And, you know, they’re just talking and next thing you know, you open up Facebook on your app and you have ads for red wine. And you’re like, my God, my phone was listening to me. Right. And that’s like super, super creepy. And yet we’ve all sort of accepted that that happens.

Dan (27:36):

Right. And so the point is we were all kind of aware of how transactional or customer data is. And so people who want to invest in companies that are startup companies where they think the golden nugget is, I’m going to get a lot of customer data because look at what Facebook made billions off of customer data. Yes. And they also spend billions trying to defend themselves from the misuse of customer data. Right. so you just have to be careful about it. And I think that recognition hasn’t quite hit. So in that regard, I think Justin is right also.

Host (28:07):

I agree. I don’t think it’s there yet with all this privacy knowledge. What is your best personal privacy tip?

Dan (28:15):

Well, my, my best personal privacy tip is to not answer the phone when you get an unknown number. If you answer the phone once and I went through this, like months ago, I made the mistake of answering the phone because the the number that was close to another number in my context. And I thought it was a friend and it wasn’t, it was somebody from China trying to sell me, I think, an extended warranty on my car that, that I haven’t owned in 10 years. And as soon as I answered, they knew the number was real. And in the course of the next 24 hours, I got somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 different spoof number calls. And so, and I called my cell phone company. I’m like, what can you do about it? They’re like, well, they use a different number every time. So we can’t walk it like, well, this sucks. Cause I might have to change my phone number now. Cause I have no idea how long this was going to go on. It’s been 24 hours, I’ve gotten 80 calls and eventually they stopped. So my personal tip just to avoid annoyance is don’t answer the phone if you don’t know a number because they’re getting personal information from you just by you validating the fact that that’s a working phone number that you answer. That’s my personal top.

Host (29:20):

So Dan, when you’re not in the office or maybe not at a Cubs game or the Bears game, what do you like to do for fun?

Dan (29:27):

Well also I team up with my wife to do marketing and business development. Oh, wait fun. I, I am an avid reader. And so I am, I am buying more books on Amazon than I can possibly read and just having them pile up. I just started a new book, which I mean, cause you guys are in sort of the tech business, you might find interesting just came out. It’s called Humble PI. When mathematics goes wrong in the real world and it’s a whole bunch of, of stories of, you know, computer programming that just used math, but had unintended consequences like numbers that weren’t big enough. You know, just all kinds of like software when they were flying F fifteens and seven of them information crossed the international Dateline and the software couldn’t handle the change in the tape back. And all the systems crashed simultaneously and the air force had to put in a bug fix in the next 48 hours. And it was all because they couldn’t handle the zero on changing the international Dateline. Just interesting stuff about math gone wrong, which again, you know, as a math and physics major and science geek is endlessly entertaining for me. So reading is what I do for fun.

Host (30:39):

And where can people find you if they want to learn more about  Humble PI and other math books that you might be reading or they have more important IP related question?

Dan (30:50):

The best way is you can find me on Vedder Price Website. www.vedderprice.com, search Shulman without a C – S H U L M A N. You can email me at dshulman@vedderprice.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can call my office (312) 609-7530. I haven’t been in my office since March, but I will get your voicemails all. I don’t want to give you my cell phone number in case you’re selling car warranties, but but I promise that if you reach out to me, I will get back.

Host (31:26):

You don’t have one of those day calendars. Do you that when you go back in, it’s going to be from a whole year ago, have you seen the pictures of people going in their offices 

Dan (31:35):

No, but I will tell you that I haven’t, I’ve only been in my office for about 45 seconds since March. And the last time I went in was August. Cause I had to pick something up. And, and it was a little bit like an archeologist walking into Pompei because you see kind of what was left when the volcano erupted and you didn’t actually get to in the scariest thing was not the day calendar, but the post-it notes with phone numbers that were on my desk because some more soul is waiting for me to call them back. And I have no idea what those phone numbers were or what they’re for. I assume if it was important, they reached out to me. But yeah, I’ve post it notes of phone numbers, or probably calls that I meant to return as soon as everybody came back to the office.

Host (32:12):

Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining us today. We really enjoyed our conversation. (Dan) Thank you. I appreciate it.

Host (32:23):

Thanks for listening to the, She said Privacy. He said Security Podcast. If you haven’t already be sure to click, subscribe, to get future episodes and check us out on LinkedIn. See you next time.