EP# 221: From Helicopter Pilot to Bankruptcy Law: Attorney Michael Gort's Journey Through Adversity and Innovation

What makes Attorney Michael Gort with Gort Law, P.A. a good neighbor?

Have you ever considered how one's career could be as diverse as flying helicopters in Vietnam to guiding distressed companies through bankruptcy? That's exactly the kind of life Attorney Michael Gort has lived, and in our latest Good Neighbor Podcast episode, he unpacks his journey and offers a treasure trove of insights into the world of bankruptcy law and debt reduction. Michael isn't your typical attorney; his virtual practice has dismantled traditional barriers, offering clients more accessibility and convenience. His tales not only shed light on the legalities of financial distress but also emphasize the human side of navigating such challenges.

As Michael shares his story, from military service to investment banking, and eventually to the legal realm, you'll be struck by his adaptability and tenacity. His approach to client interactions—primarily through Zoom and other digital means—reflects a broader shift in legal services post-COVID, taking advantage of technological advancements for greater efficiency. This episode will not only appeal to those needing guidance in bankruptcy matters but also to anyone inspired by the resilience and innovation that define a successful career pivot. Tune in for a blend of personal anecdotes and professional advice from a neighbor who has weathered many storms and now helps others find their financial footing.

To learn more about Gort Law, P.A. go to:
https://gortlaw.com/

Gort Law, P.A.
561-900-0478

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Garfield Bowen.

Speaker 2: 0:14

Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you in need of a bankruptcy attorney? Well, one may be closer than you think. Today I have the pleasure of introducing your neighbor. To be closer than you think, Today I have the pleasure of introducing your neighbor, attorney Michael Gort, with Gort Law PA. Mike, how are you doing today?

Speaker 3: 0:30

Doing great, Please tell us all about your practice. Well, I offer bankruptcy and other debt reduction and elimination services for individuals and small businesses. I've been practicing bankruptcy now for since 2011. So 13 years. I have a unique practice. I'm a virtual attorney. I do not have a law office. I have several occasions where I can meet clients by appointment and I otherwise, in this day and age, do an awful lot by Zoom, Google Meetings, whatever the person has. And the funny part about that, Garfield, is I've only had one client in the last two years that really wanted to meet, so it evidently has extended out to the general public. You know, as an attorney, it's great that we don't have to go to court anymore for bankruptcy. It's pretty rare that I have to show up at bankruptcy court now.

Speaker 2: 1:47

It seems like after COVID, they made a lot of things a lot easier in terms of not having carriers and signatures and running all around. Everything is electronic now, right.

Speaker 3: 1:58

Yep. We electronically sign all the documents. I run two or three Zoom calls a day with clients. I do all of the intake via Zoom. Some clients don't really like Zoom and we just have a telephone call and still get more done than we would if we both took time to get to an office.

Speaker 2: 2:26

So, Mike, how did you get into this business?

Speaker 3: 2:31

It's been a long journey. I spent four years in the military. I was Army Aviation, I flew helicopters.

Speaker 2: 2:39

Thank you for your service.

Speaker 3: 2:43

It was the best job and the worst job. It sounds like the beginning of a novel. There's no better job than taking out a three or four million dollar helicopter and being able to use it for the day. In fact it was an absolutely spectacular job for every day, everything but about 15 minutes. One night in Vietnam, where we got ambushed, I got hit in the first burst and sent home, and it was kind of interesting because my wife and I my wife was an Army nurse we were assigned to the same base. We had married quarters and it was about four months later that she finally was able to come home. So she's still mad at me about that. We've been married 55 years. We got married on 32 days knowing each other. Military time does strange things to you.

Speaker 3: 3:37

When I got out of the service I went back to college, finished and got my BA at University of Michigan and went on to the George Washington Law School in DC George Washington University Law School. When I got out of there I landed a good job at a big firm Foley and Lardner. There are now a thousand attorneys. Back then they were just the biggest firm in Wisconsin. They had about 160 attorneys and I was a municipal bond counsel. There are now a thousand attorneys. Back then they were just the biggest firm in Wisconsin they had about 160 attorneys and I was a municipal bond counsel. And that job put me in contact with some outstanding investment bankers at Smith Barney and they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. So I switched careers and went into investment banking. I spent four years with Smith Barney in Chicago and then I moved to New York and in New York I was a managing director at Lehman Brothers and then ultimately the same at Morgan Stanley.

Speaker 3: 4:38

I got out and kind of a weird career. It's not like you're learning skills that you can easily turn into a job. But I was lucky. I ended up having a technology assignment. I was. I was given the opportunity to move over to IT and be a member of the of the executive committee. It's a. That was a two billion dollar IT operation and by the end of the first year doing that, I was responsible for internal customer support. I had a $950 million budget. Wow, every management, 650 people in 72 cities on every continent except Antarctica, and every management technique I had was broken in the first 30 minutes.

Speaker 2: 5:26

So how did you get into law?

Speaker 3: 5:31

After I left investment banking, I ran companies for 10 years and that was during the run up and then to 2000 and then the early 2000s and, honestly, I, I, I get. So I was so discouraged by the attitude of boards or in a couple, I had several jobs during that. They're all C level. It was the question of you'd have a board, you'd have three people, you'd have three groups of different opinions and they all wanted to do it their way, and I just got to the point where, you know, it didn't make sense to me to keep doing it and I thought, well, I have a skill that I haven't used for 30 years. So I took a six month sabbatical from doing anything other than playing golf and studying for the bar, came down to Florida, took the bar and I was admitted in 2009.

Speaker 3: 6:35

Fell right into that foreclosure crisis. So I did a lot of foreclosure litigation and as the laws tightened up and the banks got better at bringing foreclosure actions, well, it turns out that bankruptcy is the end game for many foreclosures. So I ended up. There's a fantastic consumer bankruptcy attorney. His name is Max Gardner, recently passed away. Max is up in North Carolina and he ran a seven-day boot camp for bankruptcy. I went through his course and started taking courses. That's how I ended up being a bankruptcy attorney All right.

Speaker 3: 7:31

Tell us about some myths and misconceptions about bankruptcy. When they're facing bankruptcy almost universally feel shame and embarrassment that they're having to file bankruptcy. And I have a little book that I send people, pages that I copy out of the book for them. It's called they Went Broke and bankruptcy has been used by, I mean, our former President Trump. He never filed, but his company went through bankruptcy twice. The people that went bankrupt it would absolutely rattle your mind when you realize how many very famous people finally ended up filing bankruptcy. I look at it this way Our bankruptcy laws are based on the laws that were in place originally in England.

Speaker 3: 8:34

We had our first bankruptcy law in the United States in 1800. It didn't last very long. It was repealed in 1803. There was another one, and that one didn't last very long, but by 1878, we started with a real bankruptcy law. It was expanded in the 1930s and in 1978, the bankruptcy code that we have today was passed.

Speaker 3: 9:01

And the truth is that everybody that let's take the biggest problem that people have they feel like, oh my, I'm not going to pay back the banks that I have credit cards with. Well, the banks have in that rate that they're charging people. That's so high. They have that all figured out. They know there's going to be a certain number of bankruptcies where they're not going to get paid. It's not a question of morality, it's a question of basic common sense.

Speaker 3: 9:40

If you reach a point where you cannot handle your debt service, you really need to think of it. How are you going to get out of it? There's a couple of ways you can engage with carefully choosing a good debt resolution firm. There are several that front load their fees and really don't do much for you, but there's some good ones and they will consolidate. They will help you consolidate your debt and let you pay it off over time. But if you can't do that, the best thing you can do is come talk to a bankruptcy attorney as early as possible, because you know, because you know there's even a quote in the Bible that I don't have the exact reference handy, but it says every seven years people should have a chance to start over and that kind of underlies the concept of bankruptcy. You get a free start. You get a free start, you get a fresh start In a Chapter 7, all of your assets that are marketable get liquidated and it pays out to the creditors.

Speaker 3: 10:53

The creditors that are secured can go ahead and execute against their security. The unsecured creditors get paid out pro rata In a chapter 13,. It's just like a corporation does, and you know I think we all know that corporations file for bankruptcy all the time and often come back and do very well, and often come back and do very well. I have a client who I took his company through bankruptcy in 2013. And not only has he come back from that, but he had a single storage site. He now has a second storage site that he's growing by 40% in volume and space and every one of his creditors got paid at least something a fair share. And the funny part is the secured creditors have come out just fine. They've all been by now. They've all been retired.

Speaker 2: 11:58

Yeah, mike, I was watching the History Channel Yep and I remember seeing back in the days when you couldn't pay your bills. The police came and they locked you up. You went to jail, but tell us you know outside of.

Speaker 3: 12:16

That actually is a really important point, garfield, because the primary reason that bankruptcy laws were passed in England and in the US was to get rid of debtors prison, because debtors prison is the dumbest idea. Take someone that can't pay, throw them in jail. Well, I don't think you're going to get paid while he's in jail. And you know, some of our founding fathers were tossed into debtors prison in England, and so you know. That's why England in the mid 1800s passed a good bankruptcy law and they've since expanded as we have. And it really it was in the, let's see, the last of the debtor prisons went away in 1878. And that was a state-by-state process. There was a federal law that was finally passed that outlawed debtors' prisons in 1833, actually.

Speaker 2: 13:33

So, Mike, when you're not busy running your business, what do you like to do for fun? When you're not busy running your business, what?

Speaker 3: 13:40

do you like to do for fun? Well, I used to play tennis and golf until my left shoulder decided it was time that it had to be replaced. I used to hunt. I don't have the time for hunting. I used to shoot competitively and I don't do that anymore. I still like to fish. I love to fish the Big Lake O bass fishing there, and my son and I also go inshore fishing for snook when we can. But my primary hobby actually is reading. I read on average between a low of 120 and a high of 241 books in the last eight years. Um, so it is. It is. It's interesting because I spend all day reading as an attorney. But reading, and I'd like to tell you that I read great, the great books. I like good military fiction and military science fiction and I can get lost in those stories for a couple of hours and it's a very, very. It's how I get to sleep at night. It kind of detunes the mind. So, more than anything else I read. But I still will go fishing on occasion.

Speaker 2: 15:05

I would like to spend more time reading myself. Mike, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit. I know you have a lot to say about your law firm and bankruptcy in general, but I want you to leave our listeners with one thing, one thing they should remember about God law, pa.

Speaker 3: 15:32

Well, you know, I had a crisis in 2013. We almost lost our eldest son and he was saved by a. The doctors in the emergency room told us it was a one in a million chance something called the Arctic sun, which reduces the core temperature and induces a coma, and it saved his life. But he was in intensive care for 61 days and I practiced law sitting in his room every day, and that freed me up to the point where I realized I didn't need an office and I could pass on those savings to my clients. And so you know my fees are. For my amount of experience, my fees are fairly low. If there's one thing I can offer, it's that if you come to me with a financial problem, we will figure out a way to solve it.

Speaker 2: 16:33

Okay Now, mike, our listeners are probably thinking about their friends and families and uncles and aunts, and thinking of some of them that can probably utilize a bankruptcy attorney and probably have one question on their minds right now, and that's how, how do they get in touch with Gort Law PA?

Speaker 3: 16:57

There's two easy ways. One is you call my office office, which is 561-900-0478. And the receptionist will set you up with a 30-minute meeting with me, and I don't charge for the initial consultations, no matter what they are. The other way is you can go to my website, which is really simple GORTLAW G-O-R-T-L-A-W dot com, and there's a fair amount of information there. There is also a contact form where, if you fill that out, you'll hear from me or my staff very quickly. There'll be a brand new website next month which will have a lot more information in it too.

Speaker 2: 17:51

Well, Mike, I really appreciate having you on the show. I wish you and your business the very best moving forward. It's good talking to you, Garfield.

Speaker 1: 18:00

Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast Port St Lucie. Listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast Port St Lucie. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpportsaintluciecom. That's gnpportsaintluciecom, or call 772-362-3840.