Tim Yoo is a partner at Bird Marella and probably one of the few lawyers who can reference both the second fundamental theorem of calculus and The Undertaker. Tim went to Caltech as an applied mathematics major, worked at two top litigation firms in LA, then made the leap to go in-house at CJ Entertainment in Seoul, South Korea. That experience, combined with his lifelong love of pro wrestling, golf, and tennis, has given him a truly original lens on what it means to perform as a trial lawyer.
In this conversation, we go wide. We talk about how lawyers can borrow storytelling and character-building techniques from professional wrestling, why low-variance decision-making is the key to sustainable success in litigation, how the second fundamental theorem of calculus connects to neutral thinking under pressure, and what Tim learned about deliberate strategy from watching a Korean entertainment conglomerate achieve its global vision. We also get into emotional intelligence, the value of debriefing with opposing counsel, and how golf has reshaped Tim's self-talk.
Keep reading below for the full link to the episode and the full transcript of our conversation.
Top Insights
Below are the highlights of our conversation:
- Lawyers Are Storytellers, Just Like Pro Wrestlers: Tim draws a direct line between what professional wrestlers do in the ring and what litigators do in the courtroom. Both professions require you to build a credible character, maintain consistency, and command your audience through delivery, not just substance.
- Low-Variance Decisions Compound Over Time: Tim caps himself at roughly 20 high-quality decisions per day and deliberately avoids high-variance choices in litigation. Over the course of a trial, a series of steady, low-risk decisions compounds into a more reliable outcome than swinging for home runs.
- The Second Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and Neutral Thinking: Drawing on the book "Getting to Neutral" by Trevor Moad, Tim explains that before you can move in a positive direction, you have to pass through zero. When something goes wrong at trial, the goal is not forced optimism. It is getting back to a level-headed assessment of what is still possible.
- Client Satisfaction Equals Expectations Minus Outcomes: Tim uses a simple formula: your client's satisfaction is determined by the gap between their expectations and the actual result. Since you cannot fully control outcomes, the highest-leverage move is constantly managing and resetting expectations throughout the life of a case.
- Debrief With Your Opponent: After a settlement or trial, Tim regularly sits down with opposing counsel to exchange feedback. What worried you about the case? What did we do well? This habit creates a learning loop that most lawyers never access.
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Full Transcript
Khurram Naik: This is Khurram's Quorum. My guest today is Tim Yoo. Tim is a partner at Bird Marella, and he's one of the most well-rounded lawyers I know. It's not a lot of lawyers who could reference the second fundamental theorem of calculus and The Undertaker. We ran pretty wide on topics here. I'm hoping we can bring Tim back for a second round.
Khurram Naik: All right, Tim. Well, I am really excited to sit down with you. This has been brewing for some time now, and we are, I think we could riff for a really long time on a wide range of topics. I'm super excited to see what we have time to get into.
Tim Yoo: Likewise, I've been looking forward to this for a while as well. I know that when we first sat down for lunch, and just, yeah, like you said, riffs, I think we were talking for a long time, and it just felt very natural. It felt like I knew you for a really long time, so I'm looking forward to this as well.
Khurram Naik: Cool. All right, so you have, I think just big picture, something that strikes me that's so interesting about you. We were just talking a little bit, and we'll get into it later on, about some of the quantitative approaches you took to finding your spouse and how that worked out. But so, you know, you went to Caltech, you were this applied math guy, so in many ways you are a product of that training, but you also are very eclectic in the kinds of ideas that you pull from, the disciplines that you pull from. I think one of the most interesting ideas, or set of concepts, that you riff on are the parallels between your work as a litigator and the practice of pro wrestling. So can you tell us a little more about your love of pro wrestling?
Tim Yoo: Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, I think it originated from when I was a child growing up, so it's very similar, if you ever seen the movie Minari, that was a critically acclaimed film a few years ago, starring Steven Yeun. There's scenes where he's basically a Korean American growing up in the 1980s, which was very similar to my upbringing. And one of the memorable scenes I think in that movie is that the child is spending time with the grandmother and they're watching professional wrestling together, because there's something about that, there's something about the theatricality of that, that appeals to, I guess, both young and old. So that was actually right on the nose in terms of, I think, how I grew up, where I remember spending a lot of hours on the floor, where my grandma was on the couch in Texas and we were watching pro wrestling on Saturday mornings. So I think that's where the genesis of that, I guess, lifelong interest kind of grew from.
Tim Yoo: But yeah, to your point, I definitely see a lot of parallels between what we do as lawyers and especially as litigators versus what pro wrestlers and the performers in that world do, because first and foremost, I think that, look, they are storytellers and we are storytellers. I think the big difference is that, look, they tell stories with the action in the ring and with their bodies and how they interact with each other. And similar to our world as lawyers and certainly trial lawyers, we're trying to tell a story because we use our words and sometimes we use body language and our intonations and our facial expressions and things like that. So I think there's a lot of similarities in that regard.
Tim Yoo: I also find it fascinating that if you listen to any of them speak, like for instance, if you listen to a podcast or if you listen to any mainstream media or appearance in which a pro wrestler appears, they're excellent storytellers, first of all, because I think there's a very strong oral tradition in that industry. Because if you think about it, they spend the bulk of their time in cars where they're trying to go to 300 shows a year. So a bulk of that time is making towns, going from, let's say, LA to Sacramento, Sacramento to the next town, and they're spending hours in cars. So they're just sitting there telling each other stories, working on their delivery and working on the payoffs and things like that. So if you listen to them speak, I find them to be really the best storytellers around.
Tim Yoo: And the other thing that strikes me is that they also have, they care a lot about their profession. They care a lot about their jobs and how to be effective at it and how to get better at it and how to improve what they call their presentation. And their presentation consists of a lot of different things. It can consist of, most basically, their appearance. Obviously they spend a lot of time in the gym, but they also think about the other aspects of their presentation in terms of their outfits, how they walk to the ring, how they walk out of the ring, how they move, sets that they use that are parts of their character.
Tim Yoo: So I think that's very similar to what we do as lawyers because if you think about it, I mean, even from the very first client intake meeting, you're trying to project something. And hopefully the thing that you're trying to project is a level of credibility. And that credibility can come from the words you say, but also how you say them, how you conduct yourself, how you command a room or read a situation. So all of those things I think go into engendering credibility at your first client meeting. I think that extends all the way to the time that you're ready to stand up in front of the jury and say, good morning or good afternoon, my name is Tim Yoo and I represent Acme Corporation. The jurors or whoever it is or the judge is going to make a snap judgment on you about whether you're credible or not. So I think all of that is part and parcel of the presentation, which is very similar in my view to the pro wrestling world. I could wax on for a long time about this, but certainly, if you want to ask me specific questions, I can expand further.
Khurram Naik: I do, because I know you have more to say about wrestling and the structure of the storytelling in wrestling for sure. So we'll pick up on that shortly. But something you just said is, you know, establishing credibility in, let's say for instance, a client intake meeting. So yeah, I've observed, you know, like if you're a litigator, you go to lots of status hearings, you can observe how litigators establish credibility in a courtroom. So I think that's, I mean, you can see a lot, observe a lot, and it's free, it's public. I think what's more difficult is to get information or insight into how people establish credibility with clients. And so do you believe that you have a set of principles or techniques that you use to establish credibility with clients? I'd be particularly interested, you know, if that's different things in person, different things over phone call. Tell me about that.
Tim Yoo: Yeah, I think, I don't know if it's like a technique, but I think, and this is very simple, but a lot of it is just listening to what they say. You know, I worked very briefly in a sales job, where I used to sell phones for a time, but a big part of sales is they say that, look, you need to qualify your customer, meaning you need to figure out what their issue is and what they want to accomplish. And hopefully you can do that as soon as possible. So a lot of that is asking a lot of questions, sort of, what do you use your cell phone for? Do you take a lot of pictures? Do you play games? Do you call your grandkids? Do you do video calls? Things like that. So you're qualifying the customer.
Tim Yoo: So I think client intake is similar where you're asking them a lot of questions about what their particular issue is, and that means that you're necessarily going to be a good listener. I think you have to be a good listener. So that almost goes without saying. But in terms of the credibility, it's also, I think it's a combination of, hopefully they're consulting you in an area in which you have a level of expertise. So I think that needs to come across, that this is an area where you have a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge. And for me, I'm not afraid of the "I don't know" answer. So I think a lot of times when you have a discussion and you're supposed to be one of the foremost people in a field and a client asks you a question, I think sometimes you may lose credibility by fumbling around and hemming and hawing. So I'm never afraid to say, I don't know the answer to that question. It's an easily knowable question, hopefully. If it's not a knowable question, it's not something that can be readily figured out, then I'll tell them that as well.
Tim Yoo: So I think that ties back into this notion of, you need to project credibility and you need to foremost have confidence in what you're saying. And I think that from the listener's perspective, the amount of conviction that you have when you're delivering your advice or your recommendations is proportionate to how much confidence they're going to have in that recommendation.
Khurram Naik: So I think going back to the wrestling analogy, it sounds like there's two dimensions of practice that are interesting: credibility with your client and then credibility with, say, opposing counsel and the judge. And of course there's overlaps between these, but in some ways these are just different functions. And so maybe going back to your wrestling analogy, can you parcel out the ways in which a wrestler builds his audience, builds his supporters, while also establishing who his enemy is and what differentiates him from his enemy and why he should prevail? Because it seems like the oral, I mean, I'm not particularly familiar with wrestling, I've seen some of it, but it seems to me that it's not about athletic expertise or prevailing that way. It's about who has the better story and having that story prevail. So can you speak more about that, how you build your audience and then how you think about opposing counsel and judge, and how you build credibility with all of these?
Tim Yoo: Yeah, 100%. So I will let you in on a secret, and I'm hoping I'm not divulging or spoiling anything for the audience that's listening, but yes, pro wrestling is not a genuine athletic competition. It is essentially like a live action morality play in which things are predetermined and things are largely choreographed to a degree. So you're absolutely correct. It's not a genuine contest of who is trying to win. But I think what's important about that, though, once you acknowledge that and once you sort of recognize and appreciate the premise of it, is that it's still very important to maintain the credibility of a character. Because the big conceit of that is the audience members, including me, we want to suspend our disbelief for that amount of time. We want to be completely enamored and completely lost in that world for whatever amount of time that we choose.
Tim Yoo: So it's important for the characters and the performers to stay in character, not do things that would take you out of that moment. It'd be no different than if you're watching Mission Impossible and Tom Cruise playing the Ethan Hunt character and you've invested into this Ethan Hunt character and you believe the world that they're in, if he all of a sudden stops and says something as Tom Cruise and it takes you out of that. I think it's very similar. So it's important for the performers themselves to maintain consistency and continuity in their characters.
Tim Yoo: So for instance, if you have someone just as an example, let's say The Undertaker, who is essentially the walking undead or somewhere in between mortal and immortal, there's certain things that that character is going to do and certain things that the character is not going to do. And he in particular has done a great job of doing that for close to 35 years now. When he was an active performer for close to 30 years, he never gave any interviews, never, because he always stayed in that character. And he would talk about how when he was walking through airports, he was always going to be that character, whether it was 3 a.m. in the morning or 2 in the afternoon and some children are seeing him. He's always going to stay that way because he wants to make it easier for the audience to buy in and not make it known that this is not a real thing, this is really a gimmick.
Tim Yoo: And you mentioned the role of villains and protagonists in that world. So the protagonists are known as babyfaces and the villains are colloquially known as heels. So there's a dynamic between heels and babyfaces, and just like anything else, you need to have a very dynamic, imposing, threatening heel to allow the protagonist or the babyface to have a worthy foil. So I think another thing they're good at is setting up the conflict. The way that they set up the conflicts is, you make the villain someone who is very imposing, perhaps indomitable. So when the babyface actually wins, then that win means something.
Tim Yoo: I think they're very important about treating their opponents with the appropriate amount of fictional disdain. And what I mean by that is they're very good about, when they say something, they never say things like, "Hey, you're washed up, your moves are terrible, I could beat you easily." They never say that. If you listen to them, they'll say things like, "Hey, I think you're a rotten person. I didn't like the way you did that, but I respect you in the ring. You've been doing this for however many years, you're one of the toughest SOBs walking God's green earth. And I hope I can beat you." And that's really how they set up that conflict. Because at the end of the day, if you beat a nobody, then what does that make you? So I think they take that aspect of it very seriously.
Tim Yoo: But I think the performers that tend to be more successful, and we talked a little bit about this in this arbitrary world, no one wins the title in the ring. Someone selects you to be promoted, so to speak, to be able to win that title. And it's not unlike any professional setting. It's a lot like a lot of professional settings, including a law firm setting, where people look at how credible you are, how dependable you are, how you are relating to your audience, whether that's clients or in the pro wrestling world, the paying fan, and how effective you are at that. Those performers who are the most effective, whether that's being the best performers in the ring with technical ability, or the ability to attract a large audience to the live shows or TV, those are the rainmakers, so to speak. Those are the ones who tend to get promoted. And in that world, that's called being pushed. They get pushed, or their storylines are elevated and prioritized. So I think that's another interesting parallel.
Khurram Naik: So is there something, I mean, in law, we have a tendency to take ourselves very seriously. You know, we're working on these weighty issues, we're in these courts, which are very formal, judges wearing this black robe, you don't see that in any other parts of society. So there certainly is a theatricality to it, but it's also very serious. And I guess I'm struck with what you're saying about these professional wrestlers, especially the ones that have endured the most, like The Undertaker, in that the gut level reaction society has to pro wrestling is that it's trivial, ridiculous. And notwithstanding that silliness, it's possible to take something ridiculous very seriously and still proceed with that as a professional. And I wonder if you see any parallels to law, and I wonder if that's had any impact on you.
Tim Yoo: It is. And maybe not to put too fine a point on it, but I think going on what you said about it's a serious profession, there's serious issues, and there's issues that are important to the principals that we represent, and by the principals I mean with P-A-L-S as well as P-L-E-S, so the agent-principal context. For the clients we represent, look, these are very important issues. And this is oftentimes the most important thing going on in their lives, certainly the foremost in their mind. So I think it's incumbent on us, it's mandatory for us to take those things seriously. And there's a lot of parts of the process that are serious. Like you mentioned, we go to court and there's someone deciding these issues and they're wearing robes and it's a very august situation in a lot of ways.
Tim Yoo: But I think that is a little bit different than taking yourself too seriously. So I think there's aspects of it that I think you should allow yourself as a lawyer to enjoy certain moments of levity at times. And to be clear, I don't mean to suggest, I actually have a strong opinion on this, I'm not a fan of humor in the courtroom. I think it's fine to break up a tense moment, maybe with a quip or a one-liner, in very sparing circumstances. But I'm not at all a proponent of trying to cut up and trying to say something clever or even sarcastic or funny because it just doesn't read well on a record. I don't think it plays particularly well.
Tim Yoo: So in the situation of a courtroom, I think it's similar to being like The Undertaker. I'm sure the man himself is a very charismatic, funny guy, but when he's in that ring, there's certain things that he will do and certain things that he won't do. He certainly won't cut up and laugh because he's the very serious undead character. I think that's similar to the courtroom. But I also view it as distinct from, I'll put it this way. Absolutely take the issues seriously and your client's concerns and the legal disputes that they're facing seriously, but give yourself some grace to not take yourself seriously at all times. And if you want to indulge in silly hobbies or silly content, have at it.
Khurram Naik: Yeah, I think that's an interesting point because that comes up for me in the context of how I present myself on social media. So I use LinkedIn a lot and I post very often and have for some years now, and so that's been a growing audience. I mean, that's actually how you and I met. You had a comment on my post, and I thought your comment was really thoughtful. So we just started having a phone call from there, and it just kind of snowballed from there.
Khurram Naik: And so you raise a really good point because I feel like my persona, let's say in law school, I think I was definitely serious about law school but I really liked having fun and making fun of the circumstances. And there were some friends of mine who were just hilarious in law school, and of course there's so much pressure and so much opportunity to have a lot of fun and laugh a lot. And I find myself, I don't really access a lot of that. I don't think I'm as funny anymore, to be honest. And definitely my LinkedIn persona is, there's definitely some people in legal spheres whose persona is "I'm a funny person." These kinds of people get a lot of attention and engagement. And certainly some of them also have serious, substantive, intelligent things to say.
Khurram Naik: For me, I think I might take maybe more of The Undertaker approach. I'd rather have a consistent persona that people know. I'd seen somebody else who has been very prolific and cutting edge in using the internet to grow businesses and media, Tiago Forte, and he had made an observation about a newsletter. He's like, well, a newsletter, you should treat this as a TV show, right? It should be on at the same time every week. And you know what you're getting in that newsletter. Just like with a TV show. Seinfeld's on at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, you know what you're getting when 7 p.m. rolls around. And so I try for that consistency of persona on LinkedIn, at the cost of, yes, having some fun, cutting loose, whatever. But I'm in favor of that because I think it's increasing a uniformity of experience.
Khurram Naik: And then it also helps me understand. It's kind of like maybe that parable of the cat and the tiger, where the tiger's like, hey, I'm going to teach you all my ways. Tiger taught this cat, cat's like, oh my God, show me your ways. You know so many things. Tiger's like, oh yeah, I got this trick, I got that trick. And hey, I'll show you this one trick. You jump up to the top of the tree. Okay, cool. So then the cat learns that trick from the tiger and then a hunter comes along and is coming at both of them. And the cat's like, oh my God, I'm just going to do the one thing I know, and jumps in the tree. And the tiger's like, okay, how am I going to handle this hunter? I got so many good options. And the hunter nabs the tiger.
Khurram Naik: So yeah, I think I favor having fewer options, which I actually think ties into something really interesting about your practice. You try to make 20 decisions a day. So I wonder if you'd make the connection. I think something really interesting that you've observed about your practice, the ways you litigate, the ways you present yourself in the courtroom, and approaches you take maybe with clients as well, because you talked a bit about client intake and maybe you just have a limited set of tools, which is, hey, I'm primarily here to listen, or whatever. Does that all tie together with this 20 decisions a day? Can you tell us more about the 20 decisions a day?
Tim Yoo: Yeah, absolutely, right. It's become somewhat of my gimmick at this point, but I think the origin of that is that I'd read somewhere that once you make a certain number of decisions a day, you start suffering decision fatigue and therefore the quality of your decisions sometimes degrades. So I can't remember if that number was 20 or 25 or whatever it was, but I decided, look, I'm going to try to keep the number of decisions I make below 20. And obviously that's not possible. You make a lot of choices in a day. But I think it's useful to think about in terms of limiting the number of quality decisions.
Tim Yoo: So for example, I guess an extreme example of this is I remember I went to a boba tea shop once and they asked, okay, would you like a small, medium, or large? Okay, would you like boba or no boba? Do you want 30% filled boba or 60% filled boba? And then, okay, do you want sugar? No sugar? And that's when I said, look, just give me a drink, just make me my drink. And obviously that's an extreme example, but the point is, I think I try to be very deliberate about what I would call the high-leverage decisions I make, and I try to make low-variance decisions where I can.
Tim Yoo: Because over the course of litigation, over the course of trial, and I tell my teams this, I think we should try to the extent possible to make low-variance decisions where the outcomes don't swing wildly. So that means for me, I guess I'm a little bit risk-averse in terms of making a decision that could be a huge home run if it goes well, but at the same time, if it doesn't go well, then it's a complete disaster. So let's say that you make a decision to call a certain witness that you're on the fence about, if he or she hits that piece of testimony or says something about your case, that could be a home run. On the other hand, if that person gets obliterated on cross-examination, it could ruin the case. Then I think that's something I would have to think really hard about, and to me, that would probably fall in the category of a high-variance decision. I'm not saying I'm never going to make that call, but I try to avoid those to the extent possible, because over the course of whether it's 20 decisions in a day or 140 decisions in a week, over the course of a trial, those high-variance decisions tend to compound.
Tim Yoo: So obviously, hopefully by the time you get to trial, you feel enough strength and conviction in your positions that you don't need to rely on these high-variance decisions. But sometimes maybe you're in a position where you're not as strong on the strength of the arguments or the evidence, and you need to rely on these types of decisions. It's similar to, I'm not a gambler myself, but if you go to Vegas and play certain table games, you need to be able to take advantage of these high-variance swings and leverage that in order to have success, because over the course of time, as the sample size increases, the house edge is always going to win. So I view it that way in terms of the decision-making process, and I think that's a way of saying I give a lot of deliberate thought to how those decisions are made.
Khurram Naik: So I wonder if part of that is, somebody who influenced me early in my career as a litigator explained that the key part of what a lawyer is selling is, and it just goes back to earlier where we're talking about credibility, a key part of what a lawyer sells is peace of mind. And so I think, particularly for litigators, litigation is inherently unpredictable, and that's maybe arguably a feature and not a bug of litigation, that unpredictability forces parties to get serious about saying, okay, what are the issues you really want to pair down to and get resolution on? And so in that way, in litigation being so unpredictable, you can't project or fully control outcomes, but what you can communicate to clients and sell clients on is this idea that, hey, we took a risk-adjusted approach on this, and having factored in the variance of the different decisions we can make, this is the best risk-adjusted path we could have chosen. So is that part of your thinking, in terms of client management, to say, here's what to expect and forecast for this case? Is that part of the rationale for choosing those low-variance decisions?
Tim Yoo: It's not only part of the rationale, I think that is the rationale. I think if you captured it in one pithy statement, that's how I would capture it. You're right, you can't control outcomes. So I tell myself this, I try to follow this, I tell my case teams this, but I say, look, our job is governed by, in my opinion, one formula. So I studied applied math in college, dealt with a lot of formulas, but I think in the job that we have, one formula applies. And that formula is: the level of your client's satisfaction in any given situation is going to be equal to the level of expectations they have, minus the outcomes.
Tim Yoo: So as you said, we have a lot less control of the outcomes than we would like to think. So let's assume, let's cede control of that and say we have very little control of the outcome. I think what you have the most control over, not 100% control, but certainly in my view more control than the outcome, is managing the level of your client's expectations. So that's to say that if their expectation is that they're going to hit a home run at trial and win every issue, and that's their expectation going in, and you deliver that outcome and you do great and you hit every issue and the jury loves you and sides with you and you achieve that outcome, well, guess what? Those two things are equivalent, so your client is maybe not going to be that jazzed regardless of the job that you did.
Tim Yoo: So I think that, and that's not to say, I'm not sitting here and saying that I think you need to not be 100% genuine about the expectations, but I do think you need to be very realistic and constantly resetting those based on every situation that arises, because that could change over time. So let's say over the course of litigation, depending on how the ruling on a motion goes or how a certain testimony goes, I think you have to constantly revisit that and update the expectations and adjust them. So I do think that's part and parcel of why, again, in my opinion, the prudent path is to take these low-variance, series of low-variance decisions, because a high-variance decision necessarily means that the outcome could swing wildly, the expectations could swing wildly. And if it's not worth it, it would have to be very calculated. So to your first point, I think that's what permeates everything, abiding by that formula that I just mentioned. I think in any client services business, you have to do that. And foremost is always managing the expectations of the principals that you work for.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned earlier this concept of qualifying in a sales context, which in sales is really just another form of communication and influence. And as a lawyer, you are communicating and influencing your clients. So there's a nexus between sales and client management. And so in a sales context, you mentioned the concept of qualifying. And I also think more in terms of disqualifying. And so as a legal recruiter, I talk to people who are at outstanding firms and doing great work at those firms routinely. And so an early question I have that I revisit is, hey, look, it sounds like you're getting great experience, you've got a great team, and you're at a great firm. Why would you even consider making a change? And so that helps manage expectations and really ensures there's a clear narrative for them for why they would even make the change. And that's something that we can hone in on. And then, okay, so if that is the goal, then let's maintain that goal. Really clarify the narrative there.
Khurram Naik: And so I'm wondering, for you, as you progress in the course of a case, new information arises that can change expectations. I just used this concept of disqualifying, saying, hey, here's all the reasons why maybe you won't make a change. And by the way, in practice, it's almost never the case. It is extremely rare that somebody does not make a change if they are in this path and making a change when they work with me in particular. But I'm curious for you, what is the communication principle or technique you're using for setting expectations and communicating with clients?
Tim Yoo: I think a good start is what I talked about in terms of qualifying your client. So at the very outset, I think one of the first questions I always ask is, what is the home run outcome for you here? That's one of the first or second questions I ask after "tell me what happened." What is the outcome? If I had a pen and paper and this is a script, and or if this is a pro wrestling match and I could book the ending of the match, how do you see this ending? And I think that you have to listen to that and internalize it. And hopefully all the recommendations and the actions that you take are consistent with that, and to the extent practical I try to do that.
Tim Yoo: So I think constant communication is right because obviously if you're not communicating and having an open mind, an open ear and listening, then you're not going to always be attuned to things that could be changing every day. Because obviously, whether it's an individual client or a company that has a lot of different stakeholders with a lot of different interests, their whole paradigm could change day to day. Their expectations at any given piece of litigation could change and their objectives. There could be management turnover and therefore certain things are prioritized. Certain things might be prioritized this quarter that aren't prioritized next quarter. For an individual client, there might be circumstances in their life that change. So their expectations and what they want to get out of it are not going to be fixed and static.
Tim Yoo: So I think it's a mistake if you think that the information you have at initial intake is going to be the same throughout a typical piece of litigation, which typically lasts between two and a half, three and a half years. So at some point during those two and a half and three and a half years, or if it goes to trial it could be longer, those goals and objectives are almost necessarily going to be different. Certain aspects are going to be more important, certain aspects are going to be less important. But I think the point is that you want to always be attuned to what your client wants. So that goes to the basic thing of asking them, having conversations with them, seeking feedback. Let me know your thoughts, asking a lot of questions.
Khurram Naik: Can you go back to, you mentioned you're an applied mathematics major, and so you're using this concept of low variance, you've got this formula. I wonder when you talk about low variance, that's a statistical principle that's effective for understanding outcomes. And so I wonder, are there any other fundamental mathematical principles that you use in thinking through decisions, litigation or otherwise? Something that comes to mind for me is a concept like reversion to the mean. It's a fundamental property of numbers that I think you need to understand. Or you just talked about the law of large numbers as well about the compounding effects of either high-variance or low-variance decisions. Are there any mathematical principles that you think you rely on heavily, or ones you think that more lawyers should be aware of and use?
Tim Yoo: I think reversion to the mean is a great one. I like that. One I thought about recently, and I don't want to get too abstract about it, was perhaps the, I might be messing this up, but as I recall it, the second fundamental theorem of calculus. And I think about that. I thought about that a lot lately in the context of, I read a book recently that I really liked called "Getting to Neutral" and it was written by a guy named Trevor Moad and he was the performance coach for, among others, Russell Wilson, who was a Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks.
Tim Yoo: His whole concept was, it wasn't, hey, you should have this positive mental attitude at all times and have this rah-rah mindset. It was, to the extent possible, always try to get back to neutral thinking. So it's the notion that even if things are going horribly wrong and things are going bad, I think the example I use was Russell Wilson had thrown three interceptions in the first half of a football game. Negative thinking is obviously, we just don't have it tonight, we got to pack it in. Positive thinking would be more like, there's nothing that we can't overcome, we can overcome this if we just try really, really hard. Neutral thinking is more like, okay, I've thrown three interceptions, is the game out of reach? No. Okay, so the game is not out of reach. That means we still have enough time to score enough points to win this game. Then thinking backwards, what do I have to do to score those points? So if I'm two touchdowns behind, I need to score two touchdowns and a field goal or three touchdowns, certainly three more touchdowns than the other team is going to score. So what do I do? What are the things I can do to adjust that?
Tim Yoo: So I think that is the shift to neutral thinking. And the whole philosophy behind that is, if you have negative velocity before you get to positive velocity, you necessarily have to shift to zero velocity, which is where the second fundamental theorem of calculus comes in, that at some point in time, something's moving backwards and you have to have it move forward, and at some point in time the rate of change of position is going to have to equal zero. So I really like this notion of getting back to zero, getting back to neutral, because in the course of litigation, in the course of trial, things like that are always going to happen. And I think you need to have a level head and say, this bad thing happened, this witness or my key witness just gave away the farm, they just admitted to something devastating, or they just produced this document that is not helpful, that has things that are very damaging to my case. Let's get back to, after I dog-cuss myself or whoever that is, let's get back to, well, is this still a winnable case? Can I still prove what I'm supposed to prove? And if the answer is yes, you can still proceed and do that. Then it goes to, okay, then what are all the things I need to do to achieve that outcome?
Tim Yoo: So that's a very long way of answering your question. I think about that a lot, trying to arrest momentum if it's moving backwards, negative momentum, and then steering it in a positive direction, but getting to that neutral place first where you can have a level-headed, objective view of the world, hopefully making a lot of low-variance decisions along the way.
Tim Yoo: So a funny story about that. It's funny, but I happily joke about it. When I'm hosting opposing counsel for a deposition at my office or something like that, I always make sure to offer them coffee or tea, do you want water? Do you want ice with that water? Do you want a mug? Do you want a cup? So I've already burned up half of their decisions before we even go on the record.
Khurram Naik: That is diabolical. But so, actually, I'm interested, when you mentioned reversion to the mean, the first thing that came to mind was that concept, I don't know if it's biblical or not, of "this too shall pass." And what's interesting about that concept is that it applies to both poor outcomes and positive outcomes. And so I wonder, how would you use neutral thinking even when you're doing really well? So you're up, doing really well, and oh man, it looks like we're getting some really damaging admissions at trial or whatever. Do you still do that level-setting, saying, okay, things are going well, but let me make sure, what else could go wrong here? Let me proof against that.
Tim Yoo: I try to, because I think I try to the extent I can to be process-oriented more than outcome-oriented. So I try to focus on what was correct about a certain process and not so much about outcomes that you can't always control, like we talked about. We like to think that we can and we like to think that a certain outcome was a direct byproduct of our inspired thinking or our preconditioned decision-making and things like that. But I think if you're realistic and honest with yourself, you recognize that that's not always the case.
Tim Yoo: So to the extent possible, I try to focus more on the processes. And for instance, if there's something wrong about the process or suboptimal and yet notwithstanding that the outcome was positive, despite perhaps poor preparation or something I didn't anticipate, then I try to think about it in terms of things that could be better about the process. And also at the same time, not throw the baby out with the bathwater when there's a bad outcome, and look more in terms of were there things about that I could have controlled.
Tim Yoo: As you know, in a trial, we don't create the evidence. We can't control people talking about what they saw, we didn't create the underlying events. So to a large degree, we have to work with what we have. Meaning that if you apply the same principles and the same processes to every trial, the outcomes are not always going to be the same. One way I like to think about it is, I've been playing more golf lately, but sometimes I might have a bad swing, I might hit the top of a golf ball, and it might just roll for 150 yards right down the middle of the fairway, which is a good outcome. Other times, I might have a really good, solid swing, have a really good committed swing to it and just not make center-face contact and it might go astray, or maybe I strike the ball really well, and I hit it exactly how that ball is supposed to be hit by that club at that distance, and it happens to go into the water because there's a water trap on this course where there wasn't one at another course.
Tim Yoo: So all I have to say is, I think that you have to look at the way that you're doing something more so than what actually happened, and I know that's difficult. Obviously that's against human nature. But I think in the profession that we have, to a large degree, we have to have that mindset, because I don't think you can go in and have a mindset and say, well, this outcome wasn't good, so therefore I must have done something wrong or I'm no good as a lawyer. And that's not to say that you shouldn't have a level of self-reflection, because it could be that both the outcome and the process were not optimized. But I think if you focus more on the process and how you optimize that, that is key to our profession. And frankly, as part of the job I really like, this notion that you have to always look at your process. I find rewarding endeavors that require a lot of routine and repetition in terms of trying to get better at it. So I think that's a big part of what appeals to me about what we do for a living.
Khurram Naik: So tell me about, it seems like there's an interesting relationship between this low-variance, process-oriented approach to working a case with the practice orientation of challenging yourself by taking on new kinds of cases. And I know you recently had a trial and that was new subject matter for you. How do you think about that? Because that's risky, right? That's risky to take on some unknown new kinds of work. A low-variance approach to the work itself is, Tim, you're a patent litigator by training, so just focus on that, only do patent litigation, maybe even niche more into that. Maybe you're the pharma patent litigator or whatever. Tell me about the relationship between that low-variance, process-oriented approach with challenging yourself, and also keeping yourself interested in the field as you progress, by taking on new subject matter that you're not familiar with that you want to do well with.
Tim Yoo: Yeah, absolutely. And I would say, with very few exceptions, and I think you mentioned some of them, like even within our IP industry, there are certain specialties that even people who have been in it a long time, you would need that specialized training, like FRAND or like Hatch-Waxman litigation or something like that. But aside from those very specific niches, I think that you can abstract any dispute to a principle that spreads across all cases, right? At the end of the day, what we do is we're litigating over a breach of a legal duty. And that legal duty might be conferred by a patent that says that you can't do something for a certain period or others can't do something for a certain period, or it could be conferred by a contract, a piece of paper that says you will do this in exchange for that. And what we're litigating at the end of the day is a breach of that legal duty.
Tim Yoo: So I'm not trying to be glib about that point and say that means all lawyers can do all manners of dispute. But I think you can abstract it enough. And if you abstract it in a way and you tell yourself, is that something that I can do, then I think that's a good way to push yourself. It might not be necessarily in the wheelhouse of things I've done all the time, but if it's something that at the end of the day, we have to go and figure out who's telling the truth, who is making more sense with their positions, how did people treat each other, what legal duties did they have among themselves, who didn't perform that legal duty? I think that's at the core of every legal dispute. So I try not to cabin myself necessarily, but yeah, to your point, there's got to be aspects of it, a subject area that you haven't picked up, or a piece of technology or an industry that you're not as familiar with. And that's also the fun part of it, getting in and doing a deep dive and figuring out the things that matter, the things that don't matter. And that's part of the challenge that goes into this very dynamic profession that we call the legal profession.
Khurram Naik: On the topic of exposing yourself to different kinds of work, I think something really interesting in your background is you're an IP litigator at two great firms in LA, and then you took the unusual step of going in-house to an entertainment company in Korea. Can you tell us some more about how you came to that decision and the impact that's had on your career?
Tim Yoo: Absolutely. I think in retrospect, it turned out to be the most important decision I made in my life, the best decision I made in my life. Categorically, I'll just say it was the best decision I ever made in my life. That said, at the time, sitting there and making that decision, I can't sit here and say it was the byproduct of a ton of precise calculation. That's not to say that I didn't give it some thought and weigh the pros and cons and things like that. I think foremost, I had an open mind about it, and it wasn't a rash snap decision. It was something that was percolating for a few years prior to that, which is this notion of, I'm a Korean American, my parents immigrated here in the 1970s, so I was born and raised in Texas. I grew up here my entire life. I traveled back to Korea frequently to visit my grandparents, and then at some point my dad moved back to Korea, so I had a lot of occasions to go back and spend a lot of time there, but I never lived there. And for that matter, I never lived outside of the US ever. So I figured it was a good time period where I told myself, some time in the next few years, if the opportunity presents itself that I could go live and work in Korea for some period of time, I would have a very open mind to that.
Tim Yoo: So it turned out back in 2013, so it's been 12 years or so, at CJ they had a very specific opportunity where there was a piece of securities litigation, and it was high priority within the company, and they needed someone specific. They wanted someone that had experience litigating in California, because it was pending in California. They reached out to their networks and asked around to see if anyone would be potentially interested, any experienced California litigators who were willing to consider relocating to Seoul, Korea, and taking the job and being responsible for that piece of litigation. So I think it was one of those situations of being in the right place, right time, having enough of an open mind to consider that opportunity.
Tim Yoo: So I took a look and I said, like you said, I worked at two great law firms in LA. Part of the calculus was, law firms will always be there. At least that was my gamble or my projection, and maybe that was prudent or imprudent, but I figured, look, law firms are always going to be there. This opportunity seems fleeting. This is a time in my life where there's not as much inertia to overcome. I didn't have family at the time. I wasn't married at the time. So it was in a lot of ways easy for me to port myself over halfway across the world. So I decided to just take the opportunity, and there's the aspect of YOLO to it as well, right? You only live once, so figured why not. And in retrospect, it turned out to be the best decision for myriad reasons.
Khurram Naik: Well, let's get into some of that. Maybe a first jumping off point is, there was something, there was like a motto emblazoned on the wall there. I'm not sure what that was, but tell me your thoughts on it.
Tim Yoo: Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, CJ is probably the biggest entertainment and media conglomerate in Korea, but it also has a lot of different business units. So it has a logistics affiliate that does shipping and moving, it has CJ Foods where they package a lot of the foods and create a lot of the foods that you might be familiar with in your supermarket. They have a lot of different business lines. But for CJ, I worked at the entertainment side of it, and at the time, this was 2013, they had, like you said, emblazoned on the wall, every wall, every hallway, every workspace, every bathroom, every stall, there was this notion of the great CJ Vision 2020, the 2020 vision. Kind of a cheesy, what I thought was a marketing gimmick, this great CJ 2020 vision. But if you read what it said, it said, look, our mission as a company is that the objective is, by the year 2020, we want every citizen of Earth to consume one piece of K-pop content a week, watch one Korean drama a month, eat one Korean meal a month, or something like that. That was the metric and the standard for success that they wanted, and everything that they did was driving toward that outcome.
Tim Yoo: And at the time, I thought it was silly, I thought it was a gimmick, and frankly, probably snickered about it and thought it was unrealistic. But seven years on and by the time you actually got to the year 2020, I think they either achieved that outcome or got as close to it as anyone probably had the right to expect. And I think to me that was impactful because it showed me that those things don't happen by accident. You don't sort of set out to do something and then just land there. I think it showed me that it was the product of a lot of deliberate thinking and actions behind those thoughts. And if you look now, if you go on Netflix and you see a lot of the top content is Korean content, a lot of the top performers on the Billboard charts are K-pop music acts. I think a lot of that wasn't by accident. A lot of that was a lot of smart and talented people working a lot of hours with a lot of strategic thinking behind that and a lot of effort. And that's the outcome of all that. It wasn't this lightning in a bottle or some phenomenon. It was more of, I view it as more of a byproduct of large-scale strategic action. To me, that was very impactful to see that in action.
Khurram Naik: So what else is the legacy of having this stint in-house? How did that change the perspective? If someone had never worked in-house and just did great work at a great firm, what's the difference in perspective that you have, or the set of tools that you have, that somebody who didn't have that experience doesn't have?
Tim Yoo: I think in a lot of ways, it changes your perspective and your whole paradigm because fundamentally, we're all service professionals. So as outside counsel, we more often than not work for in-house lawyers at companies. So they're your clients, they're your customers if you want to think about it that way. So viewing it from the customer side was very eye-opening. I like to joke that I'm probably the only lawyer at my law firm who's both been a provider of my law firm's legal services as well as a consumer of those services.
Tim Yoo: So if you view it from the consumer-side perspective, I think it's very informative because you recognize, what are the things that make a lawyer user-friendly, so to speak, easy to work with, a pleasure to work with in a lot of ways? What are the things that are important from the in-house perspective? Because when you go in-house, you have a lot of different stakeholders and those stakeholders are different than when you're an associate at a law firm, where those are the law firm partners that you work for. When you're in-house, a lot of times there's folks who are on the business side, a very particular business unit. Whether at CJ Entertainment, we had a lot of different business lines. So at any given moment, you're talking to the folks who are in charge of film production or film distribution, music distribution, figuring out what to do with the next K-pop act or the next piece of content. I think CJ produced "Parasite," which won the Oscar a few years ago. So they had a very robust film division as well and live performances.
Tim Yoo: So at any given point, you have a lot of different stakeholders in a lot of different industries. And you recognize that at a law firm, you have a very focused objective in a sense. And you have tunnel vision about that, and all of your efforts and the time that you spend is driving toward, in my case, handling a piece of litigation. But you realize that when you're in-house, the objective of a company is to make money in a different industry, whether it is to sell out a concert or sell movie tickets or something like that. So thinking about it in terms of how you support them and how your legal function is really only an aspect of that larger enterprise was eye-opening to me.
Tim Yoo: It was also eye-opening in terms of the sense of proportionality, that not every dispute requires the same scorched-earth approach. So there could be a very tailored approach. Sometimes the objective is to be more measured, to be more collaborative, to try to impel an outcome that maybe preserves your relationship. Sometimes you want to, yeah, right, unleash the junkyard dog and take a more aggressive approach. But that whole experience gave me a different perspective on that.
Tim Yoo: And then taking a step back, just having literally a perspective from the other side of the world was very interesting as well. I think that changed my entire paradigm of thinking in terms of "something's better or worse." So after my time there, it was always "things are different," not "better or worse." Different in some ways and similar in other ways. That goes all the way to, there's aspects of living in Korea that I enjoyed more, there's aspects of living in Korea that I enjoyed less. It was just different, not better or worse. Same thing with working in-house or working at a law firm. I think there's aspects of working at a law firm that I personally prefer, there's aspects that I don't prefer as much. So it's just a different experience. But having that different experience was invaluable to give you that perspective.
Khurram Naik: You're interesting about being in-house, and I recognize you weren't in-house at a US-based company, but of course you service US-based companies as well. And I'm curious about, when I hear about these Korean conglomerates, it's very interesting. The United States had its conglomerates phase in like the 60s or whatever. And so in South Korea, they're very successful today, apparently and clearly. But it's definitely not invoked anymore in the US, right? US companies are much more focused on fewer verticals. And I'm curious, is there anything that you think American companies can learn from South Korean companies and what their success was?
Tim Yoo: Yeah, that's a great question. Having lived and worked there and observed it, I think what was striking to me is this notion that most everything is routinized. They have processes and they follow those processes and they're very deliberate and strategic. I'm not saying that US companies don't do that. Obviously, they do. But I think the degree to which I observed it was eye-opening in terms of how deliberate, like I said, deliberate and rote. They're going to chart a direction and they're going to go in that direction and they're going to work really, really hard to get there. So to see that number of capable and talented people working that hard at that scale, it just wasn't surprising to me that they were able to achieve their vision.
Tim Yoo: And then in terms of Korean conglomerates and what they represent in Korean society as a whole, I think that's clearly the reason why Korea was able to pull itself out of a bad situation where 30, 35 years ago, in my lifetime, it was a developing country. You go back to the time when my parents immigrated from Korea to the US, it had a gross domestic product that was lower than Vietnam. It was definitely a developing country and now it's G13 or G14, and I think it's directly a product of that approach and that collective movement.
Tim Yoo: And again, I'm not saying that this is better than or worse than, it's just different, but there's more of a collectivism than there is individualism. And I think there's drawbacks to that as well, but definitely in terms of rote movement, applying something and using the dint of repetition and effort and brute force to get to an outcome, I think that was something that I saw that perhaps there's aspects of that US companies could learn from.
Khurram Naik: And you talked about the 20 decisions concept and trying to have lower-variance decisions and more routines. Is that a legacy of your experience there, or is that something in parallel that you developed?
Tim Yoo: If I trace it back, I think so. I hadn't quite connected the dots in that way before, but obviously, look, I graduated law school in 2007. And I can't quite remember if I viewed the work and the world in that way. So I think you're right. I think it was that time in Korea and seeing it from that perspective and seeing how things were very deliberate.
Tim Yoo: I'm talking about, I remember one of the shows that CJ Entertainment produced was an American Idol style contest, but for rappers, to find the best Korean underground rapper. It was a show called "Show Me the Money," which I really liked. And the way that the judges were so scientific in terms of coaching up and analyzing the contestants was humorous to me in one aspect, but very insightful. They'd have a contestant come up and do their rhyme. And the breakdowns of those were clinical, in a way. They would say, yes, so you should be more mechanical with your breathing, be more consistent with your breathing, especially when you're hitting these rhymes. So your flow could be better. Your swag, your swag was quite good. So your level of swagginess was excellent. And then they would be like, oh, your drip was on fire. And the way that you sort of break that down, where I think if you saw it in a US program, maybe it'd be more ephemeral and more holistic about feel as opposed to a scientific approach to what comprises a good hip-hop artist or a rapper. So it's just a different approach that was interesting.
Khurram Naik: I think you're correct. I think you probably adopted a lot of that about being strategic in your thinking and your outcomes and your strategy. But you have an interesting principle, and you're not the only one who's articulated this, but I'm very curious about how you framed it, that EQ, emotional intelligence, is at least as important as IQ, if not more important. So can you say some more, notwithstanding this systematic and rote and organized approach, about the emotional component? Tell me more about how this concept of EQ differentiates successful lawyers from the table stakes of smart lawyers.
Tim Yoo: Yeah, 100%. You hit the nail on the head. My view of this has definitely evolved over time, whereas before when you say, oh, that person's a very smart person, I would think about it purely in terms of IQ, which is a measurable and is more like a brute force attribute or a measurement that you're born with or you're not born with. I think that EQ, like you said, is at least more than half of the component of intelligence. And I view that now because I think as lawyers, our number one job, by far, everything else is secondary and tertiary by a large margin, is you want to get the fact-finder, the ultimate decision-maker, to want to rule in your side's favor. That's the number one job we have.
Tim Yoo: And that requires, I think, a lot of things. Reading the room, getting a sense of who your decision-maker is and getting a sense of what's important to a jury, what's important to a judge, what's important to opposing counsel, the other side's clients, your clients. I think a lot of that is emotional intelligence. It's astounding to me a lot of times, and I'm not trying to be patronizing here, how you see, if you're in court, sometimes you see people who are not reading the room correctly. So they're pounding a certain argument or they're blowing past the stop sign, the judge is telling them and giving them indications of how they're going to rule and why they're going to rule, or maybe they're on the fence, maybe they haven't decided yet, but someone is not being helpful to their client and pushing a point and not quite reading the room about what the judge in that particular case finds important. So it's actually astonishing to me to the degree that I see that.
Tim Yoo: And that's not to say that I never do that, but I think as lawyers, that's an important part of it. I think an important part of it is recognizing what levers to pull, because as much as we like to think that we're governed by laws and legal principles, and of course we are, but a legal principle, a judge can decide that, look, today I think this legal principle is going to take priority, or I'm going to focus on this case law that you cited because it supports this side winning, or I'm going to decide to focus on this evidence and credit that piece of testimony and not credit this piece of testimony because I think this is the right outcome in this case.
Tim Yoo: And we can have a long discussion about which judicial philosophy makes sense, but I think fundamentally, there's a world that we perhaps ought to live in, and then the world that we actually live in. And that world is predominantly occupied by people who rule and make decisions based on who they want to win. So there's a lot of aspects of that, but I think a big part of it is knowing your audience. And I think knowing your audience starts with having a certain level of emotional intelligence. And I think unlike IQ, that seems to be something that you can develop and hone over time, by having a lot of different interactions, having a lot of client contacts, having interactions and communications with opposing counsel.
Tim Yoo: I think a big part of it is, obviously part of what we do is having, we're necessarily going to be adversarial and we have an opponent. But I think you can also learn a lot from your opponent as well. So for me, I always looked at litigation and trials like a tennis match, maybe because I'm a big tennis fan, but I say that in the following respect: in tennis, you're trying to win zealously, you're trying to compete on every point, you're trying to beat the other's brains out, frankly, within the context of the 78 feet or 90 feet that you have across from your opponent, and within the lines of the court. But at the end of the day, you shake hands with your opponent, and you say, well done. And that's kind of how I view it too. So you certainly have an opponent, but I think there's a level of civility and gentlemanliness that you can approach that opponent with, and you can also learn a lot from that opponent as well.
Tim Yoo: So one thing I like to do is, more often than not, I like to have a debrief. Like if we settle a case, I'll call opposing counsel, or after we have a trial, or if there's a summary judgment or something like that, I'll usually have a cup of coffee or sit down or talk to opposing counsel and essentially pick their brain about, hey, what are the things that worried you about the case? What are the things that you think we did well, or maybe even, what did I do well? What were some of your takeaways? Because I think you can always learn by having this feedback loop. So it could be opposing counsel, it could be your own clients, it could be your own colleagues. But the point is, I think emotional intelligence is the one aspect that you can work on a lot in my opinion, and the one that I think correlates to having successful outcomes.
Khurram Naik: That's a really remarkable idea. I don't know if I've ever heard a litigator do something like that. That's actually a really effective way to learn from opposing counsel in a way that, in a settlement, you're all aligned. And so why not share and debrief on the experience? It's just a free lunch. So yeah, that's a really cool concept. And I wonder if the synthesis between the strategic, analytical techniques that you described here and these EQ components, I want to think about and synthesize another one of your principles, which is that the most effective lawyers are ones that don't think in a straight line. Can you say some more about that?
Tim Yoo: Yeah, and I think that's part of having relationships with your opposing counsel as well, and I'll get to that. But correct, I think our conduct and our profession is guided by the rules of civil procedure or the rules of evidence or things like that. So there's a way to litigate a case in a straight line where you abide strictly by the code, things are due when they're due. I'm not suggesting that you disregard that, but I think that sometimes you can do a disservice to your client by thinking too much in a straight line, by having a level of rigidity.
Tim Yoo: And by that, I mean, it could be, hey, the other side did not abide by the code, these aren't conforming with code, they didn't do this within the 30 days that they were supposed to. We should immediately, or let's say like noticing a deposition, I can notice a deposition within a reasonable time that's not going to work for you, then I'm going to appear, I'm going to take a notice of non-appearance, and we're off to the races because my conduct is consistent with the code of civil procedure. So I think that's what I'm referring to when I say there's ways to do things in a straight line.
Tim Yoo: And then there's ways to do it with more non-linear thinking about what are the outcomes that are mutually beneficial? What are, in this prisoner's dilemma, how do I optimize utility for both sides? And a lot of that is having communications and having a good relationship with your opposing counsel. It's also realizing, thinking backwards, this is the outcome that you want to achieve, and what are all the different ways that are available to achieve that in a mutually beneficial way.
Tim Yoo: A lot of times, especially when you start out as a young lawyer, I think it's easy to set out these long meet-and-confer letters or set your position and cite all the case law that supports your position. I think these days, more often than not, if I get one of those letters from opposing counsel, I will go immediately to the last sentence. And I would say nine times out of ten, it says something to the effect of, "Notwithstanding the positions stated above in the prior five pages, and without any prejudice to our ability to change our position later on, okay, we will agree to your proposal." So that's to say that, look, I think there's a straight-line way of citing the right cases and the right civil procedure sections and things like that. And in a way, I'm minimizing that, but I don't mean to minimize it. I think foremost, those are in service of our objectives. They shouldn't be the tail wagging the dog. They should be used as a guide to govern our conduct to a large degree, but I don't think as lawyers we're necessarily doing a service to our clients by indiscriminately following them without any level of discretion. I think that's a big part of our profession too, to exercise your discretion and your judgment, because at the end of the day, we're getting hired by our clients to exercise our judgment and to make recommendations. And that's something that they can't look up in the rule book.
Khurram Naik: Is there an example that comes to mind where you presented a non-linear solution and that was well received or was otherwise effective?
Tim Yoo: Yeah, I think in a recent trial I had, there was a discovery deadline that we were coming up against. And this is a case that I had come in late in the game, actually after fact discovery. So we were talking about expert discovery and there was something like 20 experts that we needed to depose and figure out the schedule on, and there was limited time. So it was almost like an LSAT puzzle. And I think the prior approach had been sort of, hey, you're supposed to do this, I can't remember if it was three days in advance or seven days in advance, but the point is there was some code provision that said you needed to be done with it a certain time. And I think if you limit yourself to those strictures, there's no way that it could have gotten done.
Tim Yoo: So I remember, I called opposing counsel and said, look, at the end of the day, we need to get these things done a certain amount of time before trial. And for me, I don't care if it's within that prescribed period before trial, we just need to get it done. So how do we do that? So we were able to have a collaborative discussion about, okay, I'll be flexible. I'd say, okay, I can't make that work, but I'll make this work. Not horse-trading in a sense, but it was a real sense of, this is a collective problem for us that we need to solve together. And we were able to do that.
Tim Yoo: So I think that's an example of, it would have taken a lot of letters, it would have taken a lot of threats to seek court intervention or seek relief from the court if we can't resolve this ourselves, which I don't think was going to be a productive use of the client's time. And a lot of times you can cut through that by just having a direct A-to-B conversation with the other side. So I think that's something I would cite as an example of this non-linear approach.
Khurram Naik: I want to double back. You mentioned golf, mentioned tennis. And it strikes me that you are, going back to what you said about wrestling, you are observing top performance in these different spheres. So I want to start with golf. What is it that you've observed? And I know that we've talked before about the rise of golf in South Korea and how much that's a big part of South Korean culture now. So you might have more exposure than other people. Can you say what you've learned from great golfers?
Tim Yoo: I think it's the approach as well. Just like with pro wrestlers that care a lot about their jobs, if you look at golfers, and I don't know if you've seen the show on Netflix, "Full Swing," which was fascinating to me, they profile these different tour-level golfers at different stages. The top guys as well as people who are fighting and competing for their tour card. But I think what strikes me about golfers, as well as all athletes in general, is that they care a lot about the process that goes into performance.
Tim Yoo: All of that, everything that goes into the moment where they step into the tee box on the first tee of a tournament and they swing the golf club and they hit the ball, that's about 10 seconds from the time they go into the tee box and by the time their tee shot is off. But the things that go into preparing for those 10 seconds is fascinating to me. The decisions that they make in terms of where to live in the off-season, a lot of golfers live in Florida or Texas because the ostensible reason is that there's better weather, more wide-open spaces, more access to facilities. The nutrition decisions that they make, the staff that they have around them in terms of their physios and making sure that they have a certain level of flexibility and strength in certain areas. And the way that they track their progress, they track their progress in terms of how much clubhead speed am I generating, how much clubhead speed do I need to generate to hit this ball a certain distance.
Tim Yoo: And if you watch these pro golfers carefully, they're very meticulous about it. There's this funny interview that Phil Mickelson did where he's talking about the science of hitting his wedges and he's talking about, oh, sometime early in the morning, when there's some dew on it, it's not going to come off your club face the same way. So you've got to discount that by five yards. You've got to figure out where you're going to choke down an inch and take another two or three yards off of it. Different types of grass, it also depends on how the ball is lying relative to that grass, whether the blades of grass are going this way or the other way. All of this goes into the calculus of it.
Tim Yoo: So I'm really fascinated by people who take those processes very seriously. And the goal of that is to have maximum performance at one very specific window. So 365 days out of the year, their goal is to make sure that when they're swinging that club for those 10 seconds, they have a certain amount of clubhead speed going in. And in order to generate that amount of clubhead speed, they recognize that they need to move their hips and their arms at a certain speed, meaning they need to have a certain level of strength in their trunks and their legs. And working backwards from there, it's very fascinating to me. So that's kind of how I view it in terms of what are the things that go into optimizing your performance and thinking backwards from there about how you can optimize those different opportunities.
Tim Yoo: And I think fundamentally what appeals to me is this notion that I play tennis as well, and I can hit a good forehand if I have enough practice and repetition. But to me, that's similar to this notion of taking a good cross-examination or taking a good deposition, which is to say that those are products of the amount of time and preparation that you put into it. So when I say I hit a decent forehand, that doesn't mean that I haven't picked up a racket in six weeks and I can go out to the court and immediately be grooved in and hitting good forehands. I need to practice and drill and hit a certain number of shots.
Tim Yoo: And I think no matter how many times you've cross-examined witnesses at trial, how many times you've taken depositions, you've got to take that process seriously as well because it's very process-oriented. And in my opinion, the effectiveness of an examination is directly proportional to the amount of time that you spend preparing for it. So these are all fluid concepts. I would never sit here and say I'm a good examiner or I'm good at taking depositions. I would phrase it as, I know what it takes to take a good deposition. I know what it takes to take a good cross-examination. I know the level of preparation that it takes to do that and the discipline required. So that's kind of how I would view it and phrase it.
Khurram Naik: And then with, I know you've been playing more golf lately, I wouldn't expect, given that you, again maybe similar to the 20 decisions a day, it's impossible that you could be directing the same energy to your work as you are with golf. What are you getting out of playing more golf? What's the impact that's having on you?
Tim Yoo: A lot of benefits, I think. Foremost, it's an outlet, right? We have high-pressure jobs, high-leverage jobs where the stakes matter. And that's great because, I can't remember who said it, maybe it was Billie Jean King, great tennis player, she said pressure is a privilege because if you didn't feel pressure, that means no one gives a damn about what you're doing. So I think golf for me is a good outlet in terms of stress relief. It's also, to the extent that you're walking on the course, a good way to get your steps in. And then the other part of it is having more of a sanguine attitude about things in general.
Tim Yoo: Having more grace with yourself, foremost. I think one thing I told myself in the last couple of years is that before I'd go out there and I'd have a shot and maybe I didn't hit a good shot, more often than not I didn't hit good shots, and I would dog-cuss myself and say, you're terrible at this, why did you do that? I thought to myself, look, if I'm not out there every week on the range practicing that exact shot from that distance with that club at that angle, then I have no right to have an expectation of myself that I'm going to hit that shot well. If it happens to be that way, then great. But unless I'm out there processing that very specific shot, I should have more grace with myself. And therefore the conversations that you have with yourself, be kinder.
Tim Yoo: And I think that helped. And that's contrasted by, look, if I have 140 yards with a seven iron in my hand to the pin, that's a shot that on the range you're practicing basically every time. That's the shot that you practice when you go to the range. You have that club at that distance. So I'm darn sure going to have an expectation of myself to make that shot. And maybe that's different. But those other shots, you just got to have more grace with yourself.
Tim Yoo: So I think my takeaway of that is it just gives you a more sanguine attitude about things, about how, and not to get too philosophical, but look, you got to hit the ball as it lies. So even if you hit a terrible shot and it's sitting in the sand, or it's just a foot off the water, and you have a playable shot, you have to hit the next shot at that spot. Meaning you have to deal with the circumstances and reset. So it doesn't matter how many shots preceded it or how many shots are going to follow, you have to focus on executing that one shot.
Tim Yoo: It doesn't matter how poorly you've played. I think what I like about it is that during the time that you walk to your next shot, and that's a lot of time usually for me because it's probably way off the fairway, you have a chance to reset yourself and say, okay, well, going back to neutral thinking, I've sliced my tee shot way right. Do I have a shot at the green? Can I play this club? Can I hit a shot, get a shot off here, and get it back into play? Okay, if that's yes, then what do I need to do? I need to pick the club and then commit to that shot. And make the shot.
Tim Yoo: So I think that's been good in terms of general mental approach, which I think is a big part of it. I listen to audiobooks, and there's obviously a plethora of these, but it was the mental aspect of golf, and I think there's a companion one for tennis, the mental game of tennis, which I think you can apply across your job and your profession. So that's been great.
Tim Yoo: I mean, look, by no means am I a good, well, you know what, let me qualify that. I recently shifted my mindset on this as well, because I recently read "Atomic Habits," and the big takeaway is that, look, you can set milestone goals of saying, hey, I'm going to break 100 this year. Or you can set habit goals and say, look, to get that, I'm going to play however many rounds. But they say the most important driver of that is to kind of see yourself as a person who does those things.
Tim Yoo: So when I started out, I think for a number of years my New Year's resolution every year was, I'm going to break 100 consistently in golf, and I didn't achieve it. And then I set a milestone goal of, okay, so I'm going to play this many rounds a month to try to get better at it. And I think very recently, I shifted the mindset to, I wouldn't say I'm a good golfer, but I'm a competent golfer. I somewhat know what I'm doing out here. So therefore, before when I have a bad round, I would say, you have no idea what you're doing, you have no clue, you're just a complete duffer, shots are going wayward, and you have no way of figuring out how to get back on course. But now I tell myself, no, you're just having a bad day, or you're having a good day, but the point is, you know what you're doing out there. You know how to swing a golf club, you're a competent golfer. And I think viewing yourself that way has been a powerful mindset.
Tim Yoo: And I think that goes back, I mentioned the book by Trevor Moad, "Getting to Neutral," and he tells a story about, possibly apocryphal, I don't know, but there was an executive that he worked with, and that person thought he was a bad student all throughout high school. So he kind of goofed off and cut classes and things like that. And then he took the SAT, and it turns out that he got like a 1,400 on his SAT. And that changed his whole paradigm, where he said, oh, I guess I'm not a screw-up. Turns out I'm a pretty smart guy. So he decided to go to class and apply himself and study. And then he did really well for the rest of high school, went to a good college, got a good job.
Tim Yoo: And then a number of years later, as the story goes, he gets a letter from the College Board, and it says, oh, look, it turns out that during your testing year there was a mistake, and we counted your verbal score twice. So it's not that you got a 1,400, you actually got a 700. But by that point, it was too late. He had already internalized that, look, I'm a good student, or I'm a smart person. So he started doing the things that smart people do, or in his view, that good students do. So that's kind of how I view it. If I tell myself, look, I'm a good putter, I shouldn't say that unqualified, I think I'm a good putter. And part of the reason is because I have a small little putting area that I try to hit a certain amount of putts every day. So I like to tell myself, look, you're a good putter. You should be able to bury this. You should be able to put this in the back of the cup. And I think that mindset helps a lot, seeing yourself as someone who has certain habits.
Khurram Naik: Yeah. The first thing I want to mention is, you said the word "dog-cuss" a couple times. That's how I know you really are from Texas, because when I moved to New Jersey as a kid, I was so confused. I'm like, oh, these kids are talking about cuss words? What are cuss words? But yeah, look, I think a couple things you said resonated for me. The practice that I have is a yoga practice. And so a couple things you said resonated with me. One is that you observe that you shouldn't talk about, hey, I'm great at depositions or whatever. And the more effective way to frame that is, hey, I know what it takes to be good at that.
Khurram Naik: I've observed that really experienced yoga practitioners have a similar mindset, where it's not, oh, I can do handstands. Handstand practice is a practice. It requires a lot of work, even for an experienced practitioner who is conditioned, and there's a lot of specific muscle groups that you're using for that, and mindset as well. And so I would think that a number of experienced practitioners would not say, oh, I can do handstands. They'll think about, a month before I could do it consistently, it took long practices every day. So that resonated for me.
Khurram Naik: And another thing, at the studio that I'm at now, they do emphasize self-talk a lot. Particularly when you're progressing through class, you're warming up but you're still not in the swing of things, you've not fully warmed up and challenged yourself. And maybe you start to have expectations of, well, especially for someone like myself who has a regular practice, I should be able to do a certain thing today. Well, first of all, there's a lot of variability in our bodies. Our bodies are asymmetric. And on any given day, our body may be responding to something in the world, and our bodies may perform one way or another way. And so the self-talk is important.
Khurram Naik: And it's important to also, I think to your point, rather than saying I'm great at this, putting all this pressure on myself, say, I'm competent at this. I know what it takes to get even better at this. I'm also satisfied with the level of performance given that this is just one part of my life, I'm not a full-time student of yoga or practitioner. And so yeah, I also think one of my big takeaways from "Atomic Habits" was this identity component, that you don't just go through the motions. For some time, I cut out drinking almost five years ago. And if I recall right, early on I was saying, oh, I'm not drinking right now. And then the shift became, oh, I just don't drink. And so just that identity shift, as I recall, made it so much easier to sustain the habit.
Khurram Naik: Actually, I'm just remembering, it's not the alcohol component, it's the caffeine component. That was a harder identity switch for me, because alcohol was much more clearly having a detrimental impact on me. Caffeine was like, I cut the two out at the same time. And I was like, well, I don't know, I kind of like coffee. Everything in society says coffee is a good thing to have. So that was the harder identity shift, going from, oh, I'm not drinking caffeine right now, to, I just don't drink caffeine. So yeah, I think the identity shift is important.
Khurram Naik: But I think a subtle point that you're making is, rather than putting all this pressure on yourself to be, hey, I'm great at this, say, hey, I'm competent and I'm good at this. I know what it takes to be better. And I am good enough that if I'm having an off day, that doesn't dent me. I know that I'm good at this and I keep on at it and keep going.
Tim Yoo: Bingo. So I think you hit the nail on the head. You believe, you have conviction that you're competent at this. And if you're competent at something, like anything else, just like you said, the way that you respond to things happening in the world, you have good days and you have bad days, but it gives you the self-assurance that it's not going to shatter you. Trust me, I've taken a lot of suboptimal, let's just say, cross-examinations or depositions, or not focused on the right arguments in a motion, had a bad day. That doesn't shatter my self-belief or this notion of being self-assured. It's just, it wasn't the best day at the office.
Tim Yoo: I think when you're a young associate or young attorney coming up, that can be similar to a lot of people in their early yoga practice or an aspiring golfer. But if something happened that you could have done better and you tell yourself, man, and you beat yourself over it and you have this self-flagellation about it, I think that's not as productive as just having the right identity of, no, I've earned my stripes on this. I've been around the block enough times. I've done this enough times to know that I know what it takes to be good at this.
Khurram Naik: And you mentioned a few books by now. So I'm curious, as maybe a parting question for you. Are there any books that you've read in the past year, past five years, that have had an impact on how you think about yourself and your progress professionally?
Tim Yoo: I have a few on my nightstand that I revisit from time to time. One of them was "The Credibility Code." That's a lot of what we were talking about earlier, in terms of the takeaway that people make snap judgments about you based on nonverbal cues, in terms of how you conduct yourself, how you hold your head when you're speaking, how rapidly you speak or not, how articulate you are with words, things like that. So I always try to keep that top of mind in terms of what I project into the world and how I want the world to perceive me. And hopefully there's an identity between those things, and I try to get as close as possible. So that's one that's been a helpful guide.
Tim Yoo: I think also reading "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink, the former Navy SEAL, that talks about how the takeaway is this notion of there's no bad teams, there's only bad leaders, and talks about leadership principles and taking ownership of those things. So I would say those are things I think about a lot because more often than not these days, and I don't know if you can see it, but there's a picture of Dan Marino in the back, and I'm not particularly a fan of Dan Marino, but it's really the notion of, I like to view myself identity-wise as the quarterback of my case teams and the one who more often than not has the ball in their hands at critical moments.
Tim Yoo: So just kind of viewing that, that's for me why I think reading books about leadership appeal to me. The credibility side of it is something I'm constantly thinking about. And to bring it back to what we were talking about at the very top of the conversation, pro wrestlers are great at thinking about how their characters come off. One of the big influences in that regard, and one of my favorite performers of all time, is Jake "The Snake" Roberts. And if you hear him talk about how important it is to present a certain image by the way that he walks through the curtain, the way that he saunters to the ring, the way that he has a level of coldness and remorselessness, and how he's trying to portray this very evil character, and the thought that goes into it and the choices he makes to do that are just fascinating to me.
Tim Yoo: So I try to think about that, and I tell my case teams this too, in terms of think about that, like your character essentially begins at the check-in line at security. The way that you put your bags through, the way that you conduct yourself and talk to staff, talk to other people at the courthouse, talk to your teams, and the way that you conduct yourself as you walk into the courtroom. Are you sauntering? What kind of presence do you have? How are you reacting to things that come out during the course of that trial? I think that all plays. So those are things that I think about a lot and try to apply.
Khurram Naik: Super fascinating range of ideas that you've drawn from. I'm glad we had this time to talk. Our time has just blown by. And I know that we would probably have another hour or two in us. So hopefully there'll be a round two another time. Super fascinating, Tim, and it was a real privilege to have you on.
Tim Yoo: I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Khurram. And yeah, I can talk to you at any time. I really enjoy the conversation. So I'm hoping to do it again soon as well.