The Real Lawyer: Wayne Outten (Part 3)

In this episode of The Real Lawyer Podcast, host Joyce Sophia continues her conversation with Wayne Outten, Chair and Founding Partner of Outten and Golden, a labor and employment law firm. Wayne shares his journey of building a successful law firm focused on advocating for employees and reflects on the personal challenges he's faced along the way. From making difficult decisions about his career path to navigating the stresses of representing clients in legal battles, Wayne offers valuable insights on leadership, risk-taking, and staying grounded. Plus, he talks about the role his family has played in both his personal and professional life. Tune in for a warm, candid conversation on what it takes to build a thriving law firm while staying true to your roots.

Transcript

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:03.15)
Welcome back to the Real Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Joy Sophia Hsu, and you're listening to part three of my conversation with Wayne Alton, Chair and Founding Partner of Alton and Golden, a labor and employment law firm dedicated to advocating for employees.

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:28.622)
Wayne, you've shared so many great insights with us about how to build a successful law firm. And you talked about how you built Alton and Golden into the best law firm in the country for employees. And as I look at you sitting there in your home office with this beautiful stone fireplace behind you, the one word that comes to my mind is rooted.

Does this deep sense of rootedness have anything to do with your being back in the area where you grew up? Well, I'm in the same county. Okay. My hometown, Pocomoke City, is right on the Virginia border, as far south east as you can go in the state of Maryland. My home is near Ocean City, which is about 30 miles north from there. But I wanted to be near here because...

This is where my roots are and my family, my brother and my three sisters still all live in my hometown and countless cousins and nieces and nephews. And this is where I feel firmly rooted in Worcester County, Maryland. And this is where I wanted to return and my wife wanted to return. We bought a piece of property 15 years ago. We built our dream house a little over 10 years ago and we were commuting back and forth between New York and here.

until the pandemic hit. And then we decided to stay here rather than go back to New York and we sold our house in New York. And I've been working remotely from here, my nice home office ever since then. Well, this home office definitely suits you, Wayne. So I'm wondering with all of these decades of

achievements and fulfilling work, if there have been moments that you didn't exactly feel as centered and grounded, if you don't mind sharing, I would love to hear some of the highs and lows that you had throughout life and what you've hung on to in order to stay centered and grounded along the way. One of the hardest things I ever, ever did.

Joyce Sophia Xu (02:52.926)
and this is very personal to me, was telling my father that I was not going to go home to go into the family business. And I told him on graduation day, the day I graduated from college, I didn't have the courage to tell him before that. I said, dad, I'm not going home. And I know that was very hard for him. it come as a big surprise to him? Well,

Maybe not a big surprise, but it was certainly a big disappointment. so that was probably the hardest thing I ever did professionally because I knew that there was something else I didn't know what exactly at that point that I wanted to do. And of course I went to law school and I found by zigging and zagging and making more good choices than bad choices, I ended up at a good place. But that was kind of the crossroads.

in 1970 when I graduated from college. And then during the course of practicing law, obviously anybody who's litigated cases and anybody who's represented clients knows that there's a lot of stress and distress in being a practicing lawyer, especially when you care deeply about what you're doing. And especially when you're representing people, which is who we represent.

I don't represent any institutions. I don't represent any companies. I represent people. And with rare exceptions, the people who come to me come to me because they have a big problem. And my job is to help them with their problem. And I...

take on the responsibility to lighten their load and to help them solve their problem and deal with their problem. And so that adds stress to my life. But I've learned to handle that and to deal with that and not to internalize it too much, but I care a great deal about each and every one of my clients. And so it can be a burden, but it's not a bad burden.

Joyce Sophia Xu (05:06.616)
joyful burden in a way because I know that I'm doing good work and I'm helping people and changing their lives. The one exception to that is when I represent people who are negotiating employment agreements and that's a positive experience, helping them negotiate the terms of their employment agreement for a new opportunity or new venture. And that's really wonderful. That's my favorite thing to do in fact. Other challenging things

Joyce Sophia Xu (05:38.973)
were professionally were figuring out how much risk to take in building the law firm. mean, class action work is pretty risky. And in 2000, when I hired Adam Klein, I didn't know what a class action practice might look like. And of course, it's turned out to be a major part of the firm's practice, as I already said. And in the first several years,

I mean, and Adams, a great lawyer, but he was brand new to litigation of class actions. He had done one that didn't turn out so well at that point. And yet I trusted him and he more than justified that trust. He worked hard and he brought cases and he made new law and he learned the ropes and he hired additional people and trained additional people. But that took a leap of faith.

that that could work and that we could support it. And it was really, really hard to support that in the early years, as I said. I imagine the class action practice like a pipeline, which I mentioned earlier, you you put work and money into it and you hope that sometime down the future, not too far away, money is gonna come out the back end of that pipeline.

And sometimes it takes a lot longer than you want. We just recently settled a case that was in our portfolio for almost 20 years. 20 years. 20 years. so fortunately, most of them were not so long. so that just learning to take calculated risk was one of the things I had to learn that was really challenging because I'm not by nature inherently

a big risk taker, but I learned to calculate a reasonable risk. then when you find out things that work, then you learn to replicate that and to reinvest in those things. And so that was a challenge. And related to that in terms of what we're challenging was just financing all this. As I said, I had never earned a whole lot of money. Before I started out in the gold and I was 50 years old.

Joyce Sophia Xu (07:59.278)
Fortunately, our second child was finishing college, so I didn't have any college bills to pay going forward. And we had a comfortable house with a comfortable mortgage at that point. so with my wife's blessing and with her help, we took the League of Faith and started the firm. And we were under-capitalized. And we continue to be under-capitalized for a very long time. In fact, it wasn't until 2005, seven years later.

that we had our first significant fee recovery that kind of gave us a little breathing room. that was a bit scary at times. And as I said, we had to take down a letter of credit on our house sometimes to pay the bills. So that was challenging and in retrospect risky, but...

it worked out very, very well. And then of course, during the intervening years, there were some big cases, including the one I just mentioned that was almost 20 years old, where there were constant decisions about investing and reinvesting in particular cases and things like that. And fortunately, over the years, we made more good decisions than bad ones, but they weren't all good. There were some cases we invested in that didn't turn out so well for one reason or another.

Maybe the company went bankrupt or maybe the case didn't turn out the way we expected. So I would say those are among the leading challenges that we faced. And I guess the last one was just personnel. I talked about talent, just making all the decisions about how to hire and retain and sometimes terminate.

employees as hard as that is, especially for me as a lawyer who represents employees. Terminating people from the firm was always one of the hardest things I ever had to do. But sometimes it was necessary because they didn't continue to fit the criteria that were important, including being star lawyers or being as much a star lawyer as we hoped for or continuing to...

Joyce Sophia Xu (10:24.994)
have a passion for the work that drove them to continue to do excellent work. Or maybe sometimes not even turning out to be as nice as we hoped that they would be. you know, that's one of the hardest things ever is terminating someone's employment. But it had to be done sometimes. Yeah. I often think that building a firm is like growing a

beautiful, magnificent tree. I want to make sure I put it in the right soil, give it plenty of water and sunlight and all of the nutrients it needs to really thrive. But from time to time, we still need to do some pruning and that's actually an important part of a healthy growth process. But on a human level,

It's never easy. In fact, it's the hardest thing one has to do. Well, so one little lesson I learned in that is sometimes it's the best thing for the person on the other side of the event. There have been numerous young lawyers to whom I said reluctantly, you know, you're a fine person and you're a fine lawyer, but your skills and talents don't fit

the job that we have right here. So you should go someplace else with a different type of job where you can succeed rather than continuing to struggle with succeeding here in this job with the talents and skills that you have. And that was great advice from me to some of those people because some of them I know did.

go on to successful careers doing other things other than litigating employment cases. Absolutely. Well, I think it sounds like you also had the good fortune of finding a wonderful life partner who ended up also being a business partner to you and an essential one. Absolutely. Yeah. We've been married 53 years and

Joyce Sophia Xu (12:51.79)
and counting. Yeah, I've been very fortunate. Jenny has been a great life partner and a great business partner with the firm. Although, as I say, she retired in 2018 from working at the firm. But yes, I've been very, very fortunate. we had people told me before I started out in the cold and, know, hiring your wife is going to ruin your business and your marriage. And I said,

Thanks for the advice, but I don't think so. I think it'll work and it did. It worked wonderfully. So we had sort of this basic deal that at the office, I was the boss and at home she was the boss. on the long on a railroad, we were peers. We were equals. I love that. And that worked out very well. So in the office, I could say, get me this or do that. And at home, she could tell me, go feed the cats and take out the trash.

That worked out very well. It still does. And it makes life more interesting. You get to play different roles at different times of the day. It worked out very well. And just in terms of your daily routine, in addition to taking out the trash and feeding the cat, is there anything that you do?

save some time for yourself, whether it's anything, a spiritual practice or workouts that brings you peace and help you stay grounded.

Well, fortunately, I inherited from my mother a placid disposition. I don't get too stressed about things and I don't get angry with rare exceptions. There have been a couple of lawyers I yelled at, I must confess. Wow. But that's very rare. I don't, just by nature, I don't internalize

Joyce Sophia Xu (15:03.758)
stress. You know, there's the old serenity prayer to you have to accept the things you can't change, have the courage to change the things you can and the wisdom to know the difference. And so I know I've always done the best I can to affect and change the things I can. And I've been fairly good at recognizing the things that I can't change.

or within reason can't change. And so I've learned not to get too stressed about not being able to have everything the way I want it to be because I accept that I know I'm doing the best I can and that's all I can do. So why should I get too stressed about any shortcomings? But beyond that, I'm...

I'm a member of an organization that is not very well known, that is a wonderful, and it's the Ethical Humanist Society, which is a non-theistic, quote unquote, religion that espouses deed above creed. It doesn't really matter whether you believe in God or what God you believe in. What matters is your deeds, how you live your life.

And so I've always tried to live my life in a way that made the world a better place. And the members of this organization, they come from all kinds of backgrounds, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, whatever. It doesn't matter what your traditional religious background was or is. What matters is how you want to live your life.

That has been a guiding principle for me that has permeated the way I treat people in my profession and the way I led Alton and Golden. And so it was easy. It came naturally to me to have that as a guiding principle in my day-to-day life, not just personally, but also professionally. And even with opposing counsel, as I...

Joyce Sophia Xu (17:25.006)
kind of joke about opposing counsel. You know, one of the precepts that I mentioned before is that the lawyers in our firm are expected to be honest and reasonable and decent with everyone, including even opposing counsel. And our firm has a reputation for having integrity and for treating

everyone reasonably and fairly. So that's been translated into out and golden. So with everything that's going on in your life, are you still able to carve out a little bit of time for working out? I've always tried to stay in good shape. I was a runner, not a really serious runner. I didn't have the time to commit to lots of running, but I was a runner until I was about 55.

When I had my third knee surgery, my orthopedic surgeon said you should try something different. So I did and I started going to the gym and I worked out regularly in the gym with a trainer until the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit and my gym shut down. And so I have a home gym here. So I try to work out and I do some biking and I do some kayaking on the river outside our house to try to stay in good shape.

So that's, that's, think, important, especially given that I fully expect and intend to live to be a healthy hundred. So, uh, if I'm going to do that, I have to take care of myself. Yeah. And I, for one, definitely hope that you will live to a healthy 200. So in addition to staying physically active and fit, I understand that you've also been making time for more fun travels. My wife and I love to travel. And so...

We have, we've set an ambitious travel schedule internationally and locally to travel as much as we can while we're healthy and mobile. And so I fit my work in between and around our travel schedule. And also to the extent I'm not busy practicing law, I'm very busy with several not-for-profit organizations. I'm on the board of a number of organizations and that's very...

Joyce Sophia Xu (19:51.862)
rewarding and gratifying and it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble. So I spend most of my day, except when I go out and do stuff and when we travel, I spend much of my day right here in this office where I'm very comfortable. I'm about half the time with my law practice and related things and bar associations and about half on not-for-profit organizations. Yeah, tell us a little bit more about these organizations that

you're involved in or did you start these organizations or did you become involved with them? One of them I did. I mentioned earlier that in 1994, Paul Tobias and I started a not-for-profit called Workplace Fairness. And I was the first president and then other people were presidents for a while. And now I'm president again. It's been 30 years. We have a nice board.

We, main activity is creating this website that I mentioned earlier, workplacefairness.org. I urge people to take a look at that. And that takes a significant amount of time because I'm president and the organization needs time and attention on a regular basis. Another organization is the Delmarva Discovery Museum in my hometown. When Jenny and I moved back here permanently after the pandemic started.

I was invited to join the board of this museum in my hometown, which is kind of the main attraction in my hometown at this point. And it's a wonderful little museum built around the history and culture and geography and environment of this area. And so I'm now the secretary of the board on the executive committee.

and I spend a substantial amount of time on that. In fact, I'm on the finance committee and we have a meeting in just about two hours of the finance committee of that organization. And there are a lot of wonderful people from this area who are involved in running that organization, which is not easy. It's not easy making ends meet when you have a little museum. And we have animals that require time and attention.

Joyce Sophia Xu (22:16.494)
So it's not like you can shut the doors at five o'clock and not worry about it anymore. And even during the pandemic, the organization, of course, had to figure out how to stay in business in order to at least take care of the critters that lived there. And the other one I already mentioned is the Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island. Even though I haven't lived on Long Island for four and a half years, that group is among the most wonderful people I know in the world.

I'll have to check them out. is it, it's not a national or nationwide? Well, there are chapters you might say. It's all part of the American Ethical Union and there's an organization, it was founded about 150 years ago. And in New York City, there's the Ethical Culture Society of New York City or the New York City Ethical Culture Society, I think is the formal name.

But there were chapters around Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., lots of other parts of the country. But I lived on Long Island for 41 years, and I took my children to Sunday School at the Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island a long time ago. And they both grown up to be wonderful and ethical people, thankfully. And I continue to be involved. This is my third time on the board, rotating through the board.

and I'm on the board even though I don't live there anymore because I care a great deal about the people and the organization there. And I've been spending a lot of time on that organization right now because we're in the midst of a substantial fundraising project. And I just finished helping write a six-page paper on how to donate to the society.

various means that people can use, not just giving cash, but also providing money from required minimum distributions of IRAs and 401ks, and creating donor-advised funds, and leaving money in estates and wills, and making a charity the beneficiary of IRAs and 401ks, or of life insurance policies.

Joyce Sophia Xu (24:38.094)
I'm bringing my lawyer skills and my writing skills to bear on those kind of projects to help them for the next generation. Wow, that's beautiful. Thank you for showing us how to really lead a fulfilling and also impactful life. It's really extraordinary. Well, thank you. That's very kind. That's the outcome because I like to be engaged. I want to...

be and feel useful. And as I said at the beginning, I decided not to go into the family business selling furniture, even though it was a fine business and nothing wrong with that. But I wanted to find a way to make a living that was more socially useful. And I continue to want to do that even now. And I will continue to do that as long as I can. Wayne.

You are truly a visionary leader and a humanitarian and a real lawyer in every sense of the term. We are just so grateful for all the work you do and all the beautiful insights you shared with us today. Again, thank you. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you. My pleasure, Joyce. Have a great day.

Joyce Sophia Xu (26:12.216)
Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this deep and inspiring conversation as much as I did. As always, if anything resonated with you, please drop us a comment. We'd love to hear from you. And for more information on Wayne and Alton and Golden, please check out the Sophia Media page on LinkedIn or the Real Lawyer podcast page on Instagram. And do subscribe to our show and tune in.

for more conversations with real lawyers. Until then, be well and be happy.