From Homeless Teen to America's Top Lawyer

It's a people first business.

“So when people are short-sighted and they focus on the dollar or them first instead of people first,”

that's when problems happen. Ken Sterling is an attorney entrepreneur, educator, in the founder of Sterling Media Law. Drawing from decades of experience across law, technology, media, and business. He empowers entrepreneurs, creators, and organizations to navigate change, protect their interests and build lasting success in an evolving world.

One of America's top lawyers, that's the status that, you know, not a lot of people get to say. So talk to me a little bit about what makes Ken Sterling unique as a lawyer. You well by doing good. I do pay attention to people.

“And again, I just keep coming back to me understanding and empathizing with people is what makes me a top lawyer.”

And the way I approach deal-making and the way that I live is... [music playing] It spans the globe, like a super-highest coal, entered in Elvis, ready to fire from here. In today, Apple is going to reinvent the fall. It's not over, I'm telling how we're...

The living your legacy podcast, for those who live to leave a legacy. [music playing] Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Living Your Legacy Podcast. Today, I am joined by Ken Sterling, welcome to the show, first and foremost. Now, you just finished recording your episode with Kofi here.

So talk to me a little bit about what the audience can expect to learn about you in your episode. Thanks for having me today. It's been a great experience with the tears and excited to share the legacy in America's top lawyer status with the world. It was actually a great session and what I really resonated with a lot is that the practice of law isn't just contracts or black and white. Binary Manusha, it's really about people.

It's a people-first business, and it's not a deals-first business, it's a people-first business.

“And the truth is, everything's people-first.”

So why shouldn't it apply to everything is in the should-be people-first? It should be, and what's interesting is, let's not mistake it. It is still people-first, it's just greedy people-first.

So there's always-it's a people-first mentality, it's just people-putting them people first before they people, which is a mistake which I actually spoke about in my episode.

And that is that a lot of times, and we're taught this in law school, we're taught this in business school, the duty of a founder, of an executive, of a director, of a corporation. Their primal duty is to the shareholders, to increase shareholder value. So that's fine. If people only focus on shareholder value, and they don't think of the stakeholders, anybody who has a stake in the outcome of what's going on, what's the deal that they're putting together, where the consequences of the decision that they're making,

when they're not considering think of Dow Chemical, and think of years ago with some executives thinking, "Oh, I guess we can just pour some waste on the river." What's that matter? And they were thinking of their shareholders. They weren't thinking of kids' two towns down that we're going to start having health problems or that they're going to be birth defects. And guess what? That ended up biting them in the ass later. And it hits share value, and it eroded confidence in the company. So when people are short-sighted, and they focus on the dollar, or them first, instead of people first, that's when problems happen.

And the way I approach deal-making and the way that I live is do well by doing good. You can live in abundance, the scarcity mindset thing, the fear and greed. I'm in a huge deal right now with a big VC and a client, and it's just, it's really sad the fear and greed that's going on in that deal, especially from the other side. We live in an incentive-based economy, right? People follow where the incentives lead them, right? And so if your primary incentive is to increase shareholder value, what you end up doing a lot of the time and what I've seen business owners do, which is led to their downfall, is you end up following a line of thinking that is,

how can I cut as many corners as possible. And when you cut the corners off of an object, you end up creating, you're end up walking in a circle.

My grandfather used to always say that funny enough, my entire family has attorneys.

So I'm interested in Jamaica. My grandfather was an attorney at the highest level. He was knighted by the Queen of England. He became Queen's Council.

what it can do to a community of people, if you focus too hard on financial incentive as opposed to creating community. Now, to your credit, just from talking to you and listening to your recording with COVID for a little bit,

“I can tell that you're very focused on making sure that you're doing right by people, which I think is, you know,”

a fantastic thing for anybody to be doing in business. But I want to start off here with just what got you into law, because I went, I went the opposite path. I was like, I'm just going to follow my creative passions.

I'm going to pick up a camera and I'm going to go wherever it takes me. But what got you into law in the first place?

My first exposure to law that I remember and connect with. I was a teenager. I had been homeless for a while. I was taken in by a wealthy family. I affectionately describe them as the West Coast made-offs. And I was on the inside. And, you know, I didn't know Bernie, I didn't know his family or what they did. I did know this family. They were very generous family. They took good care of me and I appreciate that. And there were a lot of lawyers involved because

there were a lot of deals going on. There were real estate syndications. There were stock deals. There were movies being made. I was in the inside in addition to kind of being in the rooms when all these conversations happened. I was on the ground. I was a production assistant in two movies. As a teenager, I was driving celebrities around. It was, it was a great exposure for the whole Hollywood experience. All the things, all the things that we read and fantasize about and some of the things that we dread,

all of those things happened. And I lived them. It really sticks out to me and that I really take from that is these people. I was going to say, guys, it was all middle-aged white guys at the time that we're doing it. These guys that had all this power to make these deals and push things around. And I really revered attorneys back in those days. I thought there was something magical. Attorneys are just people. Doctors maybe at least are saving a life. But again, they're just people too. But there's

this thing about attorneys being in this kind of tower. And it's not. We're all just people. And I

think those of us that approach people first, that want to take care of people, that want to put

“creative deals together, that aren't a zero-sum game. I think it's important. Going back to the”

point you made about incentive-based society, I think it's okay that there's incentive-based society. Because if you actually think about it in early man, early humanity, we were tribal. We stuck together and there were incentives to live. There were incentives to get up in the morning and to go out and catch food and bring it back to the community, the commune, the tribe, whatever that was. And it was highly incentivized to form community because you were safer. Exactly. So what's happened

in Western cultures, there are individualist societies and collective societies. And when we look at collective society and we even look at business and we even look at law and those societies, the way business is done and the way that the law functions and the way that outcomes happen, tend to be more for the good of the greater good of more people. Individualistic societies reward and glorify and exemplify these stories of people that really operate from a very self-centered

perspective a lot of times. And I want to be careful because, and I'm not singling anyone out, Bill Gates or Zucker, those people, yes, they've made a lot of money. They've also done a lot to give back. And you know, in the very, very early days when he wasn't the fourth, wealthiest person,

the world marks Zuckerberg gave $100 million to the public school system of New Jersey. That's

where he was from. He thought the schools needed funding. There was a guy and yes, it was a drop in the bucket. And he made a difference and he tried to do something different. So I applaud people,

“okay, go make the money, you know, get that bag, get those bucks, do what you need to do,”

give back, if you, if you can't give back with full integrity, at least give back to programs and and fund some things that you do. So I think that's important. What's some of my clients make it, I'm encouraging them, what's your legacy, what's your philanthropy, what's your give back here? Hmm, and I want to take a second here to really just focus in because I know we mentioned it a little bit at the, at the start of the episode, but you're one of America's top lawyers. Yes.

That's the status that, you know, not a lot of people get to say. So it talks to me a little bit about what makes Ken Sterling unique as a lawyer as an attorney. Hmm. What my clients say, I want to be

with me is, and, and I get this weekly, you're the best lawyer I've ever had, you're the only lawyer

that listens, you're the only lawyer that I've felt cared for, you're the only lawyer that's gotten this result. You're the only lawyer that hasn't jumped up and down and screamed at the other side and gotten us a better result. And I'm not going to take credit for that. There are some other lawyers who I've met and respected and admired for years who have a very gracious professional approach. They're crafty. They're smart. By the way, I'm not saying I'm smart, my IQ's 2018,

and like Warren Buffett says, you only need 120 to survive sell the rest and invest it. I'm not a really smart guy. I do pay attention to people. And again, I just keep coming back to me understanding

“and empathizing with people is what makes me a top lawyer. And again, to your credit, I think having”

just that mindset, just the mindset of being able to say, hey, I provide a service to people, and I'm going to do it to the best of my ability. I'm going to do it to make sure that I'm benefiting the people that are my clients. I think that's a huge thing for anybody in any, in any line of work, and it doesn't matter what industry you're in, what business you're running, as long as you're focused on creating better outcomes for the people that are purchasing your

service, I think you're along the right path. And going back to your example of using Zuck, I think if we look at it from like a 30,000 foot view and we look at what Zuck has created with Facebook and with social media and kind of being the driver of all of the trends that have happened in internet culture over the last 15, 20 years. What he also did, you can't look at these guys, the Zuckerbergs, the Jeff Bezos, you can't look at these guys as just some monolith.

They also created a community that created an organization that also, everybody within that organization succeeded as well. They brought up a huge number of people with them. So just to go back to like the community aspect like we were talking about, if a business functions as not only, you know, a driver for the personal wealth of the person that starts it, but also for the betterment of the organization as a whole, everybody that is a part of it,

“then that is a business worth investing in my belief. Would you say the same?”

I would and I have a friend and client who I think he was employee 25 at Facebook who I've got

first hand knowledge that that type of community does and did exist at Facebook now meta. What's

also interesting when you think of Zuckerberg and the Facebook story is the legal outcomes and you can pick up a little bit of this in the movie, the social network. Which I've heard is very like fanaticized for, you know, it's, it's hand up a lot. So it is and if, if you actually talk to Mark about it, what he'll say is the whole relationship thing isn't really accurate and he's with his partner that he already had an affinity for.

What is very accurate is the way so and again, Sean Parker, Napster and Sean was an early

“advisor to Mark when Mark moved out to Silicon Valley and Sean had been Napstered.”

You know, there's a lot that went on there a lot of legal wrangling and one of the things that Mark did really, really well is he built a very tight cabinet of advisors and what he was allowed to do and I was just talking with someone because it almost sets this unrealistic expectation amongst founders that they can have super stock. Now there's, there's one Facebook, boys and girls, maybe there's a couple, but, you know, Instagram wasn't Facebook,

other people started that and Mark had the acuity and foresight and frankly the balls to buy it and outbid via comments and some other companies when you really think about it, what he created was so unicorn and so magical he could write his own ticket and the legal community especially tech VC startup world that we play in a lot, a lot of people have this vision of why can I have what Zuckerberg has and that's that he still has a huge chunk of stock that he's got

super stock and that's because again he had the magical sauce that very few even amazing AI tech companies

today have and it's interesting because if you look statistically on average most founding CEOs of publicly traded companies today own less than 10 percent more like 5 percent maybe 3 percent

are it's still very substantial because if you have to give away a lot oftentimes especially when

“you're raising when you're going through you know VC you have to give away a lot on the front end”

to me to be able to build out a system that's going to be able to scale to the level that these companies are scaling to and it goes back to even like take it way back to the point of tribalism that we talked about earlier Mark had like you were saying he had a group of trusted advisors around him and if you go back to the tribalism thing the tradition among like if you go

back and look at history the tradition has always been that there was a circle of elders that the

chiefed in or whoever it may be was listening to it kind of goes back to that as well like you have to keep people around you that are going to mold you and give you the right information to go in the right direction now before we wrap up here I just want to ask one final question which is you know attorneys lawyers you guys kind of function as the when these deals are being put together

“yes these people with you know huge amounts of wealth there are a lot to push pieces around but you”

guys kind of function as the guardrails in the middle of all of those deals what's your take on you know when a deal comes to you or when a client comes to you and there's this huge amount of money changing hands what's your what's kind of your process in that like learning as much information as possible I'm sure but what's kind of your process when you when you get one of these deals on the table so generally we're on the company side we're not on the VC side very

very rarely we'll get involved on the VC side typically the VC's are represented by big law some of the big firms coolie or mofo and what we're doing in the way we're approaching these things is that we want to demonstrate value we want to demonstrate a differentiation play that is unique so that the VC wants to invest and that's not a law firms job that's really more of the

“biz dev and the executives and the principles of having that conversation although us being”

read into that so that when we're interacting with council or when we're in meetings with council and the principles that we can understate the value that our client has so that's part one part two is a really big part of what lawyers and our positions do is when the diligence happens

and diligence can take months even we're involved in a VC deal right now it's about a 50 million

dollar funding we've been doing diligence since October now granted the holidays had us so maybe we lost three weeks there it's very very detailed you know what's your intellectual property what are your what are your claims against other people infringing on your intellectual property how have you protected your intellectual property what lawsuits have you had what potential lawsuits do you have do you have any regulatory issues you know let's take a look at leases let's take

look at guarantees let's let's audit your financial statements and it's almost this ball of yarn when one thing starts getting pulled other things start coming out and what we do is we need to be respectful and then sometimes we need to push back when they're overstepping on their diligence because they could just keep digging and digging and digging and it's a it's a rabbit hole that can almost be a can be and at the same time further down you go the more questions yeah crop up

but their their client big VC is putting in 50 million dollars and they want the

diligence we got I mean there were background checks you know almost everything except a colonoscopy involved with this guy so by the way sometimes there is a colonoscopy if health health health is an issue and they want to know that you don't have prostate cancer if things like that you know because they want to know that the executive is animal that meeting must be like yeah no and I have it been there but I know this happens sometimes there are

physicals required and it might depend on again if there's been previous findings and things like that how's your colon health yeah yeah I can imagine asking your client exactly but as we wrap up here guys if you're still here at this point in the video I want to make sure that you guys go ahead and check out Ken's episode which will be coming out shortly after this podcast air so make sure you guys stay tuned for that you got a full deep dive on Ken's story story of how we got

into his business and the story of all of his success so far and where he's going in the future so make sure you guys check that out again I'm your host here Jason Tyler this has been another episode of the Living Your Legacy podcast we will catch you guys in the next one