Mark Shaiken - Author/Attorney What Makes Me...Me

Mark Shaiken 2.1 / Louis Goodman - Transcript

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to the Love Thy Lawyer Podcast, where we talk with attorneys about their lives and careers. I'm your host, Louis Goodman. Today we welcome Mark Shaiken to the program. Mark has had an outstanding career in bankruptcy law practicing in five states over the course of 38 years. He has been a partner at a large bankruptcy firm before becoming an author and writing books with another book on the way, and we are going discuss one of his latest books called It's What Makes Me Today. Other than law and writing Mark is also a photographer who is an editor and founder of an internet magazine that offers periodic photography and insight articles. His photos have been used on several publications such as Forbes, the Pulse, and many collegiate athletic websites.

Mark has been on this podcast before, specifically on the March 9th, 2022 episode, which was season three, episode 1 0 4, and I encourage you to listen to that if you want some further background information on Mark. And Mark Shaiken, welcome back to Love Thy Lawyer. 

[00:01:17] Mark Shaiken: Hey, thanks for having me back on. Appreciate it. 

[00:01:20] Louis Goodman: Well, it's great to see you and we have talked a couple of times since you were on once before, and I was just saying to you about how your, I don't know whether it was your first book, it was the first Mark Shaiken book that I ever read about bankruptcy and how it really explained in a very compelling way, the bankruptcy law.

So let's just start there. Tell us a little bit about that book and the way you got into the bankruptcy law there. 

[00:01:47] Mark Shaiken: So the first book that was entitled Fresh Start. There's now four books in the legal thriller series, Fresh Start, Automatic Stay, Unfair Discrimination, and Cram Down. And each of the books takes their name from some concept or actual phrase in the bankruptcy code.

So Fresh Start is not a phrase that appears in the code, but it's what debtors go after when they file bankruptcy, they want to get rid of their debts and start anew called Fresh Start in the bankruptcy world. And so Fresh Start was about big time sky riser, real estate developer who needed to file bankruptcy 'cause his bank was starting to bear down on him. And he decided to create the cardinal sin in bankruptcy and probably is the cardinal sin, which is to not disclose all of his assets. And he had a very large eight figure account, off in a Swiss bank. He didn't tell anybody about, didn't tell his lawyer, didn't tell the banks about it during the years, didn't tell the bankruptcy court about it.

So the trifecta of violations and some of the inspiration for that came from Boris Becker, the famous tennis star who ended up filing the British version of a chapter 11, I think. And also failed to disclose assets, but got caught. The penalty for getting caught there and here 'cause our system is based on theirs is that the Justice Department looks pretty dimly at that. And Boris ended up in jail, as did Quincy Weatherman in my first book, having gotten caught through a variety of unusual circumstances in the middle of a trial that I won't go into 'cause I don't wanna have a spoiler alert going on. But he ends up in jail just as COVID breaks and he is all freaked out, of course, that he's gonna die in jail of COVID.

[00:03:30] Louis Goodman: Let's back up here a little bit. Mark, where are you speaking to us from right now? 

[00:03:34] Mark Shaiken: Denver, Colorado. 

[00:03:36] Louis Goodman: And that's where you live and work now, correct? 

[00:03:38] Mark Shaiken: Yeah. I love it. Yeah. We moved here in 2015. 

[00:03:41] Louis Goodman: So you've been, you've been working as an author since 2015, so you 20 left? 

[00:03:46] Mark Shaiken: 2019. 2020. I, I retired or stopped. Going to court is another way of putting it for my law firm.

In 2019, which timing may not have been ideal 'cause then the pandemic struck and many of the things I thought I would be doing, I was not doing just like everyone else in the world. 

[00:04:03] Louis Goodman: Can you very briefly tell us where you're from originally and go through your educational background because we talked about this in far more detail in our first episode and I wanna move through kind of quickly now so that we can talk more about your books. 

[00:04:21] Mark Shaiken: Sure. I was born in Queens, New York. My folks moved a lot and so we moved to New Head Park, Long Island in New York when I was five, and then we went off to New Haven, Connecticut, and I can't even tell you how many different places in New Haven we lived. It was a lot. I graduated and then went off to Haverford College, which is just outside Philadelphia, small Quaker school.

At that time, it was all male and its sister school was Bryn Maw, which is where I met my wife. Graduated in 77 from Haverford. We got married and my wife got into veterinary school in Kansas. So off we went to Kansas. I got into law school at Washburn, which is in Topeka, Kansas. I was waiting to apply to law school to see where she got into vet school 'cause there's way more law schools in the country than vet schools and we were there through her graduation.

I graduated first 'cause law school's quicker. Worked for a bankruptcy judge. First clerked for a bankruptcy judge for three years in Kansas and then off to Houston. We went for the, just in time for the demise of the oil industry in the early, mid eighties 

[00:05:28] Louis Goodman: And lots of bankruptcy work. 

[00:05:30] Mark Shaiken: And yeah, I peaked early.

I mean, it was incredible the work I was working on, and it was incredible, the number of zeros and the aggregate debt kind of culminating in the Hunt Brothers bankruptcy in early mid-eighties. She then did her residency in Philadelphia. So we went back to Philly for that as she was at Penn. And then when she finished, we had one more move left and I said that we need to pick carefully 'cause I didn't want to keep picking bar exams.

By that time I had taken four 'cause I was never any place long enough to get reciprocity and I was starting to crumble from the bar exam study. So we ended up in Kansas City, Missouri and were there for over 25 years. Loved it. Worked at a big firm and they let me, you know, do my bankruptcy thing there for a number of years, decades. Yeah. 

[00:06:18] Louis Goodman: You worked in bankruptcy, you had a long career there. We discussed that on the first podcast, and then you left the law and started writing books. Did you write books at all while you were still practicing, or did that come afterwards? 

[00:06:33] Mark Shaiken: I wrote, I co-authored two treatises. One I practiced, which is for me anyway, was super hard to do 'cause you know, you still have to get up in the morning and go to court.

And so I'm up at 4:30 trying to write portions of the book to give to John Wiley as we had promised in the contract and then off to court and then, you know, back and collapse and then do it again. It was a very interesting experience. It was nothing like the experience that I've had with the six books I've written since retiring but it did rekindle something that I had always wanted to do when I finished college, which was to take my shot and write and see if I liked it, see if other people liked it when they read it. You know, just see how I reacted to the whole writing process. And that really did rekindle a bit of a dormant dream that I had had.

[00:07:20] Louis Goodman: When you say treatise, are you talking about like a scholarly treatise that lawyers would use for analyzing cases? 

[00:07:28] Mark Shaiken: Yeah. I don't know how scholarly it turned out to be in the professorial world, if you ask one of the law professors, but it ended up in most of the law school libraries, so it couldn't have been too bad.

Yeah. It was a book called Litigation Under the Automatic State Bankruptcy and when people file bankruptcy, all collection efforts stop. That's because of this one statute, the automatic stay. There's lots and lots and lots of litigation once the bankruptcy is filed, when a creditor says, give me relief from the automatic state so I can continue litigating, continue foreclosing, continue suing this person, whatever has been going on beforehand.

And it was a really fun book to write because there was so much litigation and disagreement amongst courts throughout the country about what to do in certain situations. So it was fun to collect all the cases. It was fun to put the book together. And then it was fun to do nothing 'cause Aspen Publishing at that point kind of took over as the publishing company and published it, marketed it and you know, did all the things that I now do because I'm an independent author. I was kind of spoiled and didn't realize it at that time. 

[00:08:28] Louis Goodman: Well, let's talk a little bit about your book. It's called It’s What Makes Me Me. I read the whole thing, cover to cover.

It was, it was very compelling read. I guess one of the things that I found interesting is how much of it kind of paralleled my own life and my own experience growing up back east. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit, first of all, like what prompted you to write the book and talk a little bit about the format of it.

[00:08:54] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, so a lot of what I cover in the book, it was my hope that people who read it would've had some similar experience, may not have come out the same as me, but had been involved in something like that during their life. Something that they could relate to.

After I finished the fifth book, which was the fourth and legal thriller series, the Cram Down book, I started to write little 800 or a thousand-word essays kind of to myself almost as if I had been journaling, which is something I've never done.

And then I started making lists of, oh, this is sort of fun. What other topics might I, you know, cover in 800 words? And the next thing you knew, I had enough topics to fill a book. The next part of the journey was, well, are they at all related? And the way they were related was that every one of them in one way or another has something to do with me, how I got to where I am, why I am the way I am, the good and the bad. And it sort of was easy for me to group these chapters together in different sections, different sections of my life, different sections of the way I think about things. For the people in the world who know me, and if you're a lawyer who goes to court, it ends up, there's a lot of people who know you good and bad.

I thought it was a good opportunity for me to say, well, you know, if you like me, this is kind of why I am the way I am. And if you didn't like me when you met me in court, maybe this is the reason you didn't like me. And I've had a lot of communication from folks, gosh, I haven't thought about in decades, who read the book and said, oh, now I understand, and I never really understood when they said that, whether that was, now they understand why I'm as messed up as I am or why they understood why. How they understood what, why I did what I did in the manner that I did it, and I really enjoyed it. I found it very cathartic, and it was nice to be able to put it out there, write it down in paper, check with my brother, I have one brother, to see if his recollections of growing up were similar to mine. Suffer through him being horrified that I would actually publish anything that I was, and luckily he's not my editor and kind of move on from there. So for me it was a really wonderful experience of transference, you know, this is what I feel and hear you read it. 

[00:11:11] Louis Goodman: Yeah. One of the things that I found interesting about it is that the book moves, you know, basically, I think chronologically and yet you could read any chapter as a standalone essay about that particular moment in time. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experience where you were growing up in Long Island, you felt very comfortable with the school there, things were going really well for you, and then all of a sudden, almost without warning, you got jerked outta Long Island and you ended up in Connecticut then.

Talk a little bit about that experience, because you mentioned that a few times in the book. 

[00:11:50] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, I mean, I even give that moment a name, I call it that day. And I even know the day, which was December 10th, 1965. Not that I'm counting, and someday I'll probably forget that, but you know, I was a very, going back to the Queens experience, that was kind of a rough existence in kind of a tenement setting.

And when we moved, all of a sudden, you know, at five going on six, we were no longer in a high rise with tough kids in the alleyway and in the, the hallways. But we were, you know, living in suburban America, which was unfamiliar to me. And I had all of a sudden lots of friends. I didn't have any friends in Queens and I was really living the life, you know, of a eight, nine, and 10 year olds. And unbeknownst to me, 'cause I was just a kid, my dad was unhappy in the job that he had commuting into Manhattan and working in the Empire State Building. And he took another job in New Haven, Connecticut at an accounting firm. He was an accountant. And you know, if they ever told me that this was all going on or it was about to happen, I missed the memo because all I remember is I had a birthday in November and a month later we moved.

To make that move happen. My folks sent me off to school that morning, and at about 10 or 10:30 in the morning, they showed back up in the classroom, I guess when they had packed everything, and they were there with the principal whispered in the teacher's ear, and I was asked to stand up and in front of everybody left the classroom, and that was the last I saw most of any of those folks and certainly of all my friends.

Now remember this was 1965, there was an internet. If you made a long-distance call, it could cost you, you know, a fortune. So there really was no communication after that. And off to Connecticut we moved. 

[00:13:34] Louis Goodman: I wanna just stop there for just a second Mark 'cause I think there's a couple of interesting things. You were also kind of involved in some sports, is that correct? 

[00:13:43] Mark Shaiken: At that point in my life, I played and loved baseball and not that I was any good, but I just lived baseball and I was a Mets fan and anybody that might remember the Mets in those days, they were terrible. It was before Tom Seaver and the rest of the Miracle Mets showed up. But, you know, the Mets were somebody that my dad liked, my grandpa liked, and so I liked them and that was my thing. 

[00:14:08] Louis Goodman: And you, you played yourself? 

[00:14:10] Mark Shaiken: Played Little League, right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Pony league, right? 

[00:14:14] Louis Goodman: So you, so you had friends and you had a sport, and you had school, and then all of a sudden all of that sort of ends up getting jerked away very quickly. 

[00:14:24] Mark Shaiken: Yep. That that was it. I just don't wanna play. 

[00:14:26] Louis Goodman: And it's not really, and it's not really discussed either, is it? 

[00:14:30] Mark Shaiken: It wasn't. Now, to be fair, A, my parents weren't big discussers and B, I'm not sure in that day and age whether any parent would was in the discussion mode. I don't know that for a fact because I don't have any friends that actually went through this. 

[00:14:43] Louis Goodman: Yeah, right. And that's the thing that, you know, I, before we started recording, I mentioned that I, you know, that I really related to a lot of what you said in the book because I grew up in New Jersey around the same time.

Mm-hmm. And I think that that generation of people who raised us was so unlike what so-called good parenting is these days. They just did things like this and they didn't tell us what was going on. They just did it, and you were supposed to just kind of live with it and suck it up, whatever it was.

And I guess I was struck in the book by that moment and thinking of a number of moments in my own life where things were just kind of changed and quickly and jerked away. And this is what you're doing now and, you know, I don't know. I mean, you just think about the way parenting is done these days and how different it was in the 1960s.

[00:15:46] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, it was different. And once you become a parent, you realize how hard it is. I don't think as a kid, no matter how much thinking you do on the topic, you have any clue what it's gonna be. I know I didn't until our kid, Zachary showed up and all of a sudden I thought, Ooh, this is seriously hard stuff.

And we tried. My wife had heard all these stories, and we tried very intentionally to do things differently than my parents did. That was the intent. Whether that was a good way to parent or not, I don't know. It was another way, but my parents were terribly unhappy once we got to New Haven and if they were that unhappy when we lived in New York, I was just unaware, but it was so palpable when we got to Connecticut, how much they hated what they were doing. Hated being outside of New York, hated each other at some point. I like to think that they were mad all the time, and I think I've come to believe as I've gotten older that they were actually just sad all the time and that was the way that manifested and they moved without regard to school district without regard to, you know, what effect it would have on the kids.

And we, we probably moved, I know I calculated this exactly in the book and I don't remember what I ended up with, but I know that in the 12 years of schooling before college, you know, the number of schools I went to were, was high. Maybe double figures and you know, that affects kids because you don't really have any grounding and when you move, that's one of the reasons that Habitat for Humanity is so important to me, 'cause I do work for them. Because one of their mantras is if you wanna solve, you know, a whole litany of problems, solve the housing problem, keep the kid in the house, keep the family together, keep 'em in one school and they get friends and they stay outta trouble. And I believe all of that, I kind of lived a bit of that.

[00:17:29] Louis Goodman: Do you think there were any advantages to having moved around and been in different schools and been exposed to, you know, so many different institutions and groups of friends, acquaintances? 

[00:17:41] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, I've thought about that. Maybe I'm just being hard on myself and my folks and the whole situation, but I don't find a lot of good in that.

I kind of gravitate toward the habitat, you know, belief that it isn't really good to be moving around that much when there are kids involved. 

[00:17:59] Louis Goodman: Some of the stories that you talk about are from your college years. I'm wondering if you could pick one of those out and tell us a little bit about that.

[00:18:06] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, so I mean, Haverford was very hard school to get into, and I had it in my head that I wanted to get into the hardest small school that I could. I'm not entirely for sure where I came up with that, but my dad had drawn a circle around New Haven, that was approximately a four hour drive and that was the limit of how far I could go. 'Cause I remember I asked if I could apply to George Washington University in Washington DC and he took the map out and he goes, that's outside the circle. No. So Haverford was right on the edge of the four hours. And so I guess in response to the GW answer I picked something that was as far away from New Haven as the police would allow me to go.

And so I got into Haverford somewhat miraculously. You know, it wasn't known as a place where inner city kids went. And so there was a fairly small population of us that were inner city kids. And I guess I always lived in fear decades later that I was gonna get a letter from then, Dean Potter, he's passed away since, but he was the Dean of Student Affairs at the time.

And the letter would say something like, you know, we've made a terrible mistake in admitting you if you just send back your diploma, we'll send back the tuition you pay. Well, I didn't pay any tuition, so that was kind of a one way, one way deal. And it's funny because my two best friends also were inner city kids.

One from Queens and one's from Baltimore. When we shared this kind of story, you know, sort of around the fake campfire one night they both had the same reaction. You know, I dunno how I got in, I dunno how they let me graduate. I'm sure they're gonna come back for that degree someday.

[00:19:41] Louis Goodman: I'd like to talk about some of the other books that you've written. We talked about the first bankruptcy book. Let's talk about some of the other things that you've written and what subjects you've covered. 

[00:19:51] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, the very first book after retiring was And Just Like That, which really just traced my path before into, during and out of the law. So kind of the memoir of a not famous lawyer. And I talk a little bit about a JLT in the new book 'cause it seemed like a natural extension about what I was about to get into. The new book really doesn't focus, I don't think, hardly at all on my legal career. I left that for the first book And Just Like That. 

[00:20:20] Louis Goodman: I read that one too.

[00:20:22] Mark Shaiken: Yes, I remember. And you weren't too horrified. And what was interesting about the first book was the number of people that reached out to me that I had, you didn't know who they were. They were lawyers. Most of them, you know, somewhere in the last third of what you might guess would be their legal career.

And they had enough. And they read the book and they called to commiserate. And you know, I made it clear at the beginning of the first book that I'm not a career pivot counselor. I don't think it's a cookie cutter issue at all. There's not one size fits all for any career, but especially for, you know, lawyers and that all I could do is tell my story and sort of do an emoji shrug.

You know, that's just me. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily apply to anyone else, but it did. It was just fascinating to me the number of people that were setting up calls with me to talk about it. And I enjoyed the calls. I do enjoy talking to lawyers. I think, you know, you can take the boy out of the law, but you can't take the law out of the boy.

And, you know, deep down, I still think like a lawyer. I still sometimes act like a lawyer or try not to, but sometimes I do. And so that was, it was very rewarding. But after I got that off my chest, I did what I had always hoped to do. That hope went back to my junior year, maybe my senior year in college when my dad asked me what was my plans in life and I didn't have any, I mean, to have a plan you have to be able to plan and I hadn't really got to that phase of, of maturity. And so I kind of foolishly was honest with him and told him I would either be a photographer and follow the Mets around the country working for the New York Times, which I thought was what a great idea that would be. The second idea was that I took a couple years off and write the not so great American novel.

And on that, what he freaked out, that was, I don't even think he heard the Mets photographer idea, that second one he just lost it. Told me it was a pipe dream, sent me back to the drawing board, and that led to time off between college and law school while I pondered. And then 

[00:22:23] Louis Goodman: How, how much time did you take off between college?

[00:22:25] Mark Shaiken: I took a year. Yeah. I took a 

[00:22:26] Louis Goodman: And what'd you do? 

[00:22:27] Mark Shaiken: Drove a forklift. Not well. I drove a forklift at Lender's Bagel Bakery in the frozen bagel freezer and really learned how to drive forward very well but did not understand the broken English instructions of how to drive backwards and crashed into a ski of bagels that went rolling everywhere. So, end of forklift career.

But what I really wanted to do was to take a shot at writing fiction. And so when I retired, I had this, you know, great idea. I'd write this memoir, get it off my chest, and then dive into the fiction world. And the first thing that I started to do was to think like a lawyer, which is, what do I know about writing fiction?

Unfortunately, I didn't start thinking about that. So after I went down the elevator at the law firm for the last time, having retired, and I really got all wrapped up in the overthinking of my God, how am I gonna do this? I don't know the first thing about writing fiction. Wayne Gretzky said, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take, a quote I’ve always loved. And I finally went with what Wayne said, which is just cut it out. You know, just sit down, come up with a system and write. And that led to the main character, whose nickname is 3J, and she's grown over the four books. I've grown also. I think I know how to do this better than I did in the first book.

I enjoy her character quite a bit. Kind of nice to have a cup of coffee with her one of these days and talk, but I created this galaxy, which is what fiction, you know, series writers do. And then you're sort of the king of the galaxy and you do what you want within the context of the story that you're telling.

[00:24:04] Louis Goodman: Do you have a process, I mean, in the sense that, do you like sit down at your, at your desk and write. You know, every day, five days a week, certain number of hours a day, whether you feel like it or not, that kind of thing, or do you have a somewhat more organic process on it? 

[00:24:21] Mark Shaiken: No, I do have a process that I can thank law school and being a lawyer for decades for that.

Lawyers love order and processes and I do too. And I don't fight it. That's okay. It works for me. And you know, there's this famous quote that I'll paraphrase about writing, which is get it down on paper, because you can always edit it no matter how bad it is, but you can never edit a blank page.

And that resonates with me. And so what I do when I'm writing as opposed to researching and planning, but what I do when I'm writing is I write five to six days a week in the mornings for at least two hours. That's the deal I have with myself. I can't write less than two hours and I'm allowed to write more.

So if I'm on a roll, you know, two could be six or eight hours. And you know, if I only write 10 words in two hours, then I only wrote 10 words. And I try not to sweat that normally that more than 10 words come out. 'cause I'm pretty organized about having planned out the chapters and outline them. A lot of the dialogue I've already written in notes to myself as I imagine two characters talking to each other, and then practice it, you know, in front of the mirror, maybe in the bathroom to see how it sounds.

Because I do want it to be realistic if two lawyers are arguing with each other. I wanna remember what that was like and have the argument on paper that I'm creating be true to how that happens or be true to a interaction between a skeptical judge. A lawyer at the podium arguing his client's position.

And I, you know, lawyers that have read the book appreciate that. The general public, it's interesting that the reaction has been, they like it, but it's different than TV. And tv, you know, has to squeeze the entire case into 48 minutes, you know, plus commercials, I don't have that problem. So hopefully as the non-lawyers of the world read the courtroom scenes and things like that, they get an appreciation for at least my perception of what really happens, you know, when it's a lawyer preparing to go to court and then go into court. 

[00:26:20] Louis Goodman: And do you write things out on like on a yellow legal tablet or do you write on a computer? 

[00:26:26] Mark Shaiken: I use, it's a free Microsoft product called OneNote and it's part of the Microsoft 365, but it was free before I ever signed on at Microsoft 365.

So, what's nice about it is it sits on your phone, which of course these days is tethered to the rest of my body, like everyone else, and it sits on my computer. And so if I'm somewhere in the grocery store or if I'm sitting watching a show with my wife, or we went to the movies and I think of something, I whip out the phone, I open up one note, I write down whatever I was thinking, and I don't lose it, and then it's transferred automatically, synced with my computer. And so I have just a huge number of these vignettes or thoughts and sometimes it's a one-liner and sometimes it's, you know, 3J and her mentor having a long philosophical discussion about what to do when you discover, when you think you haven't discovered yet, when you think your client's stealing assets, but you can't prove it. You know, what do you do? Her mentor is a senior lawyer at the firm in his late sixties, 3J is in her forties, and so that's who brought her along and that's who she goes for her, you know, couch sessions when she needs a higher power to listen to her and help her think through a problem. 

[00:27:42] Louis Goodman: I wanna shift gears here a little bit and ask you just a couple of questions about some other things. For example, you mentioned going down the elevator at the firm in the building for the last time. What did that feel like? 

[00:27:59] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, it was something I had thought about for a number of years. What would it feel? So, I mean, the trip starts with me giving away whatever's left in my office to whoever will take it, their mementos, hugging my secretary, who I loved for the last time.

I'm saying goodbye. It was the only time I ever hugged her, but saying goodbye to her for the last time and giving her a hug and then going to the elevator down the 24th flights. To the 16th Street Mall in Denver, where of course it's winter and it's snowing and then realizing as I'm walking home, 'cause we lived downtown at that point that I didn't feel my feet touching the ground that much. I was just gliding like a hover vehicle. And during that three or four block walk home, I felt euphoric. And at least for me, that wasn't an emotion that I had felt ever, or if certainly not often as an attorney, always felt good to win a trial.

Did I feel euphoric about it? Not necessarily Always nice to, you know, have a judge say something nice about you. Did that make me feel euphoric? Not really. And the euphoria is fascinating because it takes over everything else. And so my best laid plan was I was gonna wake up the next morning and start the book, but euphoria takes over.

It consumes you to a point where every day was like, yeah, I could do that tomorrow. I'm feeling really good today. I don't wanna bust the feeling up too badly. And I always chuckled when I give speeches about this euphoric feeling to lawyers who sometimes look at me like, what are you talking about, that I imagined I was like the three guys that supposedly maybe escaped from Alcatraz and did they make it to the shore in San Francisco? And if they did make it to the shore they must have been euphoric. They did it no one else had. And were they looking over their shoulder at all times for the Alcatraz police to return the US Marshal service, catch them and bring them back?

And so luckily I didn't have US Marshals chasing me, but I did spend a few times chuckling about whether the law firm police were gonna come get me and drag you back. 

[00:30:01] Louis Goodman: Along with the Haverford College police taking your degree back. 

[00:30:06] Mark Shaiken: Exactly. Exactly. You know, they, they give it and they can take it.

And the law firm thing was funny, be eventually that wore off, you know, a couple weeks. And I wish I had enjoyed it more during the moment than I did, 'cause I start to worry about was I ever gonna get back down to Earth and start doing the things I wanted to. But the last part of the law firm euphoria was that six or eight weeks after I left the firm, a dear friend at the firm took me to lunch.

We're talking and he asked, well, now that my sabbatical was over, was I coming back? And I didn't remember signing a sabbatical agreement. And so the answer was no. I think this is a little more permanent than a sabbatical. 

[00:30:43] Louis Goodman: One of the things that you said is that it's hard to write a book, but it's even harder to get people to read it. Yeah. And I'm wondering if you just sort of comment about that a little bit. 

[00:30:56] Mark Shaiken: You know, the, the two books I wrote during practice, I never had that problem because John Wiley for one book and Aspen for the other were my publishing companies, and they got people to read the book. You know, they took ads, they promoted the book, they did all the things that I didn't have to do.

I just had to write. When I started down the path of writing for myself, there were far fewer publishing companies and far more writers looking to get published. And so that combination makes it very difficult to get your book in front of somebody that can actually make a decision at Random House or one of the other major publishing companies, and there's many fewer publishing companies.

[00:31:34] Louis Goodman: Yeah. 

[00:31:35] Mark Shaiken: So I decided I could either go out looking for a publishing company and maybe be, you know, 80 or 90 before I know the answer to that question, or just self-publish, which Amazon had perfected and made so easy. So I went that path. But when you go that path, you're then the marketing department, you do everything.

You oversee the design of the cover, you oversee the formatting of the inside of the book, the editing process, and then the marketing. And you know, what did I know about marketing even less than I knew about writing fiction. And I've learned a lot and there's sort of a comfort zone, things I like to do, things I don't like to do, and I try to steer away from the things I don't like to do 'cause it turns out I'm not that good at it. You know? I don't do book signings at bookstores. It's a complicated process, believe it or not. And they throw contracts at you and it's, you know, it's almost too much for me to deal with. I'd give podcast interviews 'cause turns out I like to do that.

I speak. Next month I'm speaking at my old law school on a Lunch and Learn. And then I'm speaking to the Historical Society in Kansas City about how and why I use American history and the thrillers. And I've talked to a number of places here in Denver and I love to do that. So I do that.

There are things I try out, you know, Facebook, Facebook ads. I'm not very good on social media. I was on, and now I'm off Instagram because I gave up, I can't figure out how it's helping me. Things like that. And it's a learning experience and authors are really open, which is nice about what they're doing and how they do it and what's working for them and what's not.

So that's kind of fun to collaborate in that manner. But it's damn hard to sell a book 'cause there's a whole lot of books out there. I am not the only author of legal thrillers at all. And what I, what I've learned is that as much as I love writing the legal thrillers. It's actually easier to sell memoirs and books about aging in adulthood, which is a lot of what's in, it's what makes me, me, and, you know, amazingly, It's What Makes Me Me debuted as the number one book on Amazon new release in adults in aging category and, and stay there for a while and people, you know, will search for books about, you know, aging.

And my book pops up on the Amazon search and you know, they give it a shot so it's actually easier to be in a writing genre that isn't as populated as legal thrillers. 

[00:33:57] Louis Goodman: Well, since you're mentioning Amazon, let's just put in a little plug here. All of your books are available on Amazon, correct? 

[00:34:04] Mark Shaiken: Yeah. And most of them are available at Barnes and Noble. They're all now out on audio books, and so they're available at Audible, Apple Books and things like that. 

[00:34:13] Louis Goodman: And we can find those by just, you know, putting in Mark Shaiken, S-H-A-I-K-E-N, and then the books will come up. 

[00:34:21] Mark Shaiken: That works. 

[00:34:22] Louis Goodman: Okay. Is there somebody who you'd like to meet somebody living or somebody out of the historical past that you'd like to meet?

[00:34:30] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, I would love to meet Michael Connolly in person. I don't know if you or the audience knows him. He's the incredibly prolific author who writes the Lincoln Lawyer series. The Lincoln Lawyer is a lawyer in LA that they call him the Lincoln lawyer 'cause he doesn't have an office in the beginning books.

He works at the back of a Lincoln Continental that has a chauffeur driving him around. And Michael Connolly's background, is that he was a crime beat journalist in Florida before he moved to LA. So he's got all these stories that he reported on, lived through, observed, and they just come out and it, they're great. They're compelling and because he was a crime beat lawyer, he actually was in court all the time for criminal cases. So when Mickey Haller, his star lawyer in the Lincoln lawyer goes to court, which is often in the books and often in the TV version of it on Amazon, it's pretty real.

And it's not the 48 minute TV show thing. It's okay, there's yelling that's going on in a chamber conference because the lawyers are not getting along and it's much more real than some other versions of, you know, lawyer things that I've seen. So I've never met him. I would love to, I don't know what I'd say.

I love your books. Keep 'em coming! 

[00:35:47] Louis Goodman: Let's say one of your books really took off and all of a sudden you came into three or four billion dollars. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life? 

[00:35:58] Mark Shaiken: If I had $3 billion, Louis, I would do the McKenzie Scott thing in a heartbeat. Actually, somebody at one of my board meetings today asked that question of all the board members, and that was my answer and so I'll repeat it. So it's interesting that I got asked this question twice in one day.

I'd buy a jet, hire a pilot. That would be it for me, and then the rest of it I would run around the country giving it away. 

[00:36:20] Louis Goodman: If you had a magic wand, there was one thing you could change in the world, the legal world, the publishing world, or otherwise, what would that be? 

[00:36:28] Mark Shaiken: I'm satisfied with the publishing world. The legal world I knew was the bankruptcy world. I'm of the camp that it works. It's of course, it's not perfect, but it does what it's supposed to do. It allows people a chance to get back up on their feet or a company. We'll see what happens with 23 and me, and whether they're, you know, saveable, more likely they're sellable, but, you know, fascinating parts of the fiber of America end up in bankruptcy for different reasons, like 23 and Me, which may not survive, but certainly put the whole notion of DNA on the map in such a large way.

Obviously there are things about everything that could be used for bad purposes, but for DNA for good purposes helps people understand, you know, their genetics. What are the diseases in my family that I need to worry about? Helps to identify all kinds of things. Helps the criminal world identify criminals and didn't exist, you know, not that long ago.

[00:37:25] Louis Goodman: Yeah. And for some people even who is my family? 

[00:37:29] Mark Shaiken: Well, exactly. And with my family, that's a hard question to answer because they came over from Russia at the turn of the prior century and there aren't any records over there, or if there are, no one has access to them. So the DNA is the only way to start to get some sense of, well, who are you or who am I?

[00:37:49] Louis Goodman: Let's say you had a Super Bowl ad, someone gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl, so you could talk to a really large audience. What message would you like to put out there to that nationwide group of people? 

[00:38:02] Mark Shaiken: Number one, I don't know that I'm smart enough or worldly enough to come up with a message that would resonate that I could, you know, with some amount of hubris, I suppose, convey to everybody, but as a message from somebody that's not smart enough and doesn't have a ton of hubris, I would re-broadcast the old Coca-Cola ad.

I'd like to teach the world to sing and then see the reaction because the reaction back then when it first came out was, oh my God, this is amazing. What a great ad. What a wonderful thought. You know, I'm gonna go out and be a better person tomorrow. And I worry that today, you know, the response will be, you know, the puke response. 

[00:38:42] Louis Goodman: Mark, how do we get in touch with you if someone wants to contact you about your book or anything else, what's the best way to get in touch with Mark Shaiken? 

[00:38:52] Mark Shaiken: Yeah, I have a website, it's Mark Shaiken author.com, and there's a way on that website to get in touch with me. It's pretty easy to get in touch with me. It's actually a little surprising what happens if you Google my name these days.

There's a number of hits and the number of ways that you can get ahold of me or, or there to be old, but the easiest way is on, on the website where you can also keep up with anything new that's happening. If I get some awards, I will post them. Got three awards just 10 days ago for, It's What Makes Me Me that were very cool.

And so those will go up on the websites. And so, if you wanna follow me, in other words, that's an easy way to do it. 

[00:39:32] Louis Goodman: And we can once again get all of your books on Amazon and they're available in all the different formats, correct? 

[00:39:41] Mark Shaiken: Amazon, all formats. Barnes and Noble, most of the libraries will have an electronic copy of it, of the books, so it's pretty available.

[00:39:51] Louis Goodman: Mark, is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we haven't discussed? Anything at all that you wanted to mention before we wrap up? 

[00:39:59] Mark Shaiken: No, I think a very far reaching discussion, which is one reason I am so glad that you were able to have me back on the show. I enjoy the dialogue on this particular podcast. It's in depth and it's a great show. 

[00:40:14] Louis Goodman: Well, Mark, thank you and Mark Shaiken, thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you again. 

[00:40:25] Mark Shaiken: You too. Thank you. 

[00:40:26] Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs, and information.

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

[00:41:07] Louis Goodman: Don't go anywhere. I'll start that. Lemme start that over. 

[00:41:09] Mark Shaiken: Okay.