What happens when a Marine officer, Silicon Valley engineer, and fintech disruptor builds a better way for law firms to get paid? On this episode of Veteran Led, host John Berry sits down with Emery Wager, co-founder & CEO of Confido Legal. From combat tours in Afghanistan to streamlining cash flow for thousands of law firms, Emery shares why financial clarity is the lifeblood of legal success—and how great leadership starts with ownership. Tune in for real talk on accountability, client experience, and the business side of law that too many attorneys ignore.
Leaders that I’ve worked for have really given me, I would say, space and responsibility. The space to solve the problem myself and not be told what to do or how to do it, but also put the weight of responsibility on my back.
Welcome to Veteran Led. Today’s guest is Emery Wager. Emery graduated from Stanford University with a degree in mechanical engineering and began his career as an engineer at a startup in Silicon Valley before joining the United States Marine Corps and earning a position as an infantry officer. Emery spent two combat tours in Afghanistan, one as a platoon commander and one as a company executive officer. He left active duty and wrote a novel called How to Name a Generation. After almost a decade in the financial technology sector, Emery developed a concept for Confido Legal, where he is the co-founder and CEO. Confido Legal focuses on finding ways to help law firms succeed as businesses. Through Confido, Emery has personally worked with hundreds of law firms, helping them optimize their financial health. Welcome to the show, Emery Wager.
Thank you. I’m very excited to be here.
The great thing about… We got a Marine, Stanford degree, Silicon Valley, and now is working in the legal industry. As a lawyer, I know that a lot law firms are horrible with their finances. They don’t understand. Usually, they’re really good with their trust accounts, but beyond that, they’re horrible at running their businesses. Tell me, how did you come up with the concept of Confido?
I worked in financial technology and payments for about a decade, as you mentioned. One of my side roles at the company I worked for was managing all of the relationships we had with the various law firms that the business worked with. I was basically a business client of half a dozen law firms. And after paying millions of dollars over the course of 10 years in legal bills, being in payments, I saw the… I’d never experienced an industry that was so far from e-commerce best practices. You think about the effort that Amazon puts in to optimize that checkout page and the value that they get out of it. Of course, the benefit is not as extreme in the legal case, but it can be life or death in terms of cash flow, taking the friction out of that experience. We wanted to bring best-in-class financial tools to law firms and make sure that they could still comply with their ethical obligations and get best-in-class digital payments technology.
Yeah, and this is where the huge opportunity is. I mean, obviously, you come from Silicon Valley. People are hungry for opportunity. But what you see is lawyers are great about managing their trust accounts. They are all over it. You mess up your trust account, you’re going to lose your license. You’re going to lose that ticket. You will not practice law. So no monkey business with the trust account. You got to keep that clean. And also, lawyers usually do a phenomenal job working their cases. The good lawyers do, right? They are so laser-focused on the law and getting the best result for their clients. They are zealous advocates. And yet when it comes to running their own firm, their own business, they are horrible. And I know this because that’s who my father was. My father was a legendary attorney. He tried cases in 24 states, three different foreign countries. He was well known for the Green Beret Affair where he defended the Fifth Special Forces in Vietnam. Well known lawyer, horrible businessman. And so a lot of it is because they’re trained to be lawyers. They’re not trained to run a business. And they leave law school and they start a practice.
And then the old guard is like, Well, this is a practice, not a business. And so for some reason, they think that the legal industry is the only one that shouldn’t have market or sell or be financially responsible. It’s all about a practice, but it’s not. It is a business. If you don’t run it as a business, you do a disservice to your clients because you need your best people doing what is the highest and best use of their time, which is solving the legal problem. But you also need people in the business space to make the firm profitable so that you can get the best lawyers, the best paralegals, the best technology. Take us on that journey. When you’re going through there seeing how jacked up the legal industry is from this perspective. These great professionals who do everything for their clients seem to be incompetent at running their businesses. Tell us about that.
Yeah. So if you and I were not doing a podcast right now, but we were actually doing legal work in your average hourly firm, hourly practice area, the work that we’re doing today, we would get paid for, and this is average, we would get paid for in June sometime. So you think about, that’s basically a four month, three-and-a-half-month loan that you’re giving to your clients. And you just think about as the firm grows, the amount of cash that is outstanding there is just, I mean, it’s huge. And not to mention the impact on the likelihood of payment. So it also hits your revenue. It hits your profit in a big way because you’ve already done the legal to get that money. So all of that, collections, revenue that’s coming in drops straight to your bottom line. So we think a lot about cash, profit, and revenue, and I am personally, given how I came to this, passionate about the client experience and making that just way, way better. There’s a lot of challenging things for the client when they’re dealing with a law firm, and we believe that experience should be better.
Absolutely. Let me just tell you something. There’s nothing worse than when a lawyer provides outstanding service for a client, wins the case, and maybe they’re asking for a five-star review, and the client… But the billing is screwed up. The client is mad because they got an inaccurate bill. They feel they got ripped off or they didn’t get the billing for three months, and now it’s like, all of a sudden, wait a minute, you’ve been charging me the whole time? There’s ways we can really screw up the client experience if we don’t understand the financial piece. Now, that being said, you brought up a great point, too. AR. Man, I used to suck at AR. I wouldn’t bill the clients right away. And for some lawyers, they have head trash around that. But I wouldn’t bill them right away. And then I found out that the longer I waited to bill them, the less I get paid. Then I figured out, if you don’t get paid within 30 days, then you might not get paid in 60 days. If you don’t get paid in 60 days, you might not get paid in 90 days. And if you don’t get paid in 90 days, you’re not going to see that money. Right?
A hundred percent. I mean, I’ve probably talked to about 2,000 law firms in my time here, and it’s amazing how you say, what is your collection rate at the firm? And they say, well, my collection rate is 100%.
B******.
We collect everything. And then you say, well, how much do you have in 90 day plus AR? And it’s like, well, they have five years of revenue sitting in in that aging report still. It’s like, you probably won’t be collecting on that.
Yeah, there’s nothing more disgusting than aging AR. You know that the more it ages, the less likely you are to recover. And of course, you never want to sue a client. Sometimes people have to do that, but then you end up terminating the attorney-client relationship. And especially in a large transactional firm, you don’t want to be… I’ve seen that happen where someone, their great client is the one that’s bleeding them to death because they’re paying the least revenue, they’re carrying the most AR, they’re not paying them for months. And I got to tell you, back when my dad practiced law early, back in the days in the ’80s, before you could get… Now, today, you go bankrupt, you’ll get a credit card in the mail by Friday. But back in my dad’s day, there wasn’t all this cash out there. People would then hire them, they’d pay them. And when you did criminal defense, they’d pay them with cars, guns, whatever it took. Everybody had something but my dad always had a saying back when he had criminal defense, because if you would win a criminal case, people would be like, Well, I shouldn’t have had to hire a lawyer.
If you’d lose a criminal case, they’d say, Well, what good did you do for me anyway? My dad would always say… When I first started, and I started criminal law, now I do Veterans disability, personal injury, and some other things. But when I started, that was where I learned how to try cases. My dad would say, You got to get the money when they come to you with the tears in their eyes. Get paid up front.
I’m going to remember that one. Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things that totally we preach that, a collect early billing model. Even if it’s just grabbing the… Storing, securely the client’s payment method, so at least you have, maybe you don’t have the money in the trust account to work against, but at least you have a way to bill them. So they don’t need to take any action to pay you because that’s what they’re used to on Amazon, Uber, all these places where it’s so easy to click and pay or do nothing and pay.
Absolutely. And I think that’s the challenge is that we’re not competing against other law firms. We’re competing against Amazon, FedEx, Uber, all these instant payment. Those are the people who are getting the money because they’re We’re getting the money right away. For firms like ours, we’re a contingency-based firm, mostly now. That means when we do personal injury cases, we don’t get paid unless our clients win. In our Veterans disability cases, we don’t get paid unless our clients win. Our clients don’t pay us money up front. It’s really important not only that we collect the money and we’re smart about it and we get our clients paid right away, but also that file can’t just sit on a desk. Every day that that file sits on the desk, it costs the firm money. The lawyers need to work the cases and work them quickly in order to, number one, get our clients paid who are oftentimes maybe facing bankruptcy or they’re worried about whether they’re going to be able to pay their medical bills, they’re not working. We need to get them paid right way, but it’s also really good for the business when you can keep that cash flow going because there’s nothing worse than not being able to meet payroll or worse, going bankrupt.
No, it’s amazing. I’m looking at the top contingency-based firms like yours these days, and just that that model is the incentives are so much more aligned with creating a good business, creating a good client experience, because you do want to move it quickly, be efficient, create a great experience. On the hourly side, the incentives are all jacked up, where it’s actually better to draw it out. And of course, there’s a few bad eggs out there, but most attorneys are doing a good job. They’re doing their best. But at the end of the day, the incentives are totally misaligned on that side.
Yeah, divorce attorneys, right? Divorce attorneys. Hey, let them fight for six hours, what each attorney is billing them $1,000 an hour, let them fight over the $300 drapes for six hours. All of this, it’s just it’s insane. A lot of times with a divorce or even transactional, it becomes personal. People say, it’s not about the money, it’s personal. It’s like, well, but it is. There are times like criminal defense. Now, you served your country, you swore an oath, you understand what it means to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. There are times when our liberty is at stake, where there is no amount of money that’s going to fix the problem. Either the government will dismiss the case, or we will defeat them at trial. That’s the attitude. But because our clients don’t want to be convicted felons, they don’t want to lose their civil rights, they don’t want to lose their Civil Liberties. They will fight till the end, and then they need a lawyer to do that. But when it comes to money, it’s always interesting to me. People are fighting over their principle, and it’s insane. I’m going to fight them over the principle.
I mean, look, maybe we should have trial by combat. I don’t know if you want to fight over a principle. Otherwise, it’s just money. At the end of the day, if you have a problem and you have enough money, you don’t have a problem. Let’s get into that. Tell me all the ways that you help law firms now with their money, which is the lifeblood. Cash flow is the lifeblood of a law firm or any business. How do you help?
We basically built our entire business on the non-contingency practice areas and helping those firms that need to get paid from their client, eliminate all of the friction in that process. So obviously, if a client doesn’t want to pay, that’s outside our purview. But any client who wants to pay but is busy, whether they’re a business client, an AP person or a consumer client, we want to take all the friction out for that client so that the law firm, instead of being the 10th bill to get paid, they’re the first ones to get paid. And so we think a lot, like I said, about shortening that AR cycle to impact cash, profit, and revenue. So that’s how we’ve built our business for the last five years. Something I’m very excited about, we launched earlier this year, is a outbound a digital payments solution to allow contingency-based firms to really improve their workflows. But more importantly, as you mentioned, speak to that next generation of plaintiffs who grew up on Venmo, Cash App, Amazon, all these digital options, and they don’t want to wait for the check to show up, and they don’t even know what to do with it when it comes.
And so, again, coming back to that client experience and giving that Amazon-esque experience to law firm clients and just making it instant, easy, and really improving that experience.
Yeah, I find it crazy. I’ve been involved with some other law firms. As a lawyer, look, I don’t handle my own stuff, right? So I hire lawyers for stuff, and it’s always amazing to me. It’s like, Okay, look, why are you making it hard for me to pay you? This doesn’t have to be hard. You got LawPay and these other companies. It’s like, Look, let me click a button and pay you. I’ll sign the agreement, but you can’t get me a digital agreement to sign and let me click a button and pay you? What’s wrong with you? It’s like, Hey, take the money, because I know if you don’t take the money, you can’t run your operations to represent me. So I lose confidence in you if you can’t control your cash, I don’t think you can control your firm. And if you can’t do that, you’re not good enough to represent me.
It basically says to the client, I think, I didn’t care enough to make this easy for you. And that is the area where a lot of people are looking at a bill that’s bigger than they expected. And those little things, those little moments, just have a huge difference. That’s how we got into this in the first place, seeing that from the client side. What we didn’t know initially, and now we live and die by this, is the massive financial impact that optimizing that has on the on the underlying cash and profit position of the firms.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, it’s good for the firm, it’s good for the client. Just stay on top of it. I found also, give your client the dignity of allowing them to pay for the legal service. So many times it’s like, Well, the client is behind. Why not? Pick up the phone. How do we help them work through this? Because sometimes our clients do go through difficult times, whatever it is, whether it’s a divorce, they lost a job, they’ve been laid off. I think any time the client is struggling and we can help them work through that payment process, it’s important. Sometimes it is giving them grace, and other times it’s saying, Look, this is an agreement. We have to have this conversation. I realize that you may want to, whatever people waste money now on, I don’t even want to know, on Prime or whatever. But hey, your legal bills, this is your future. What is a more important investment than your future? If I’m hiring a lawyer, I’m investing in my future. That lawyer is supposed to protect my future, and I’m not going to go cheap. There’s nothing more expensive than a cheap lawyer.
But you see these lawyers, and if they can’t control their finances, where else are they broken? Where else are they going to fail you?
And what are you paying for as a client that isn’t that quality service? You’re basically paying for them to run a s**** business.
Yeah. And where else are they dropping the ball? And that’s, excellence in the practice of law, excellence in business. We expect both as consumers. So you don’t work with contingency firms now. It’s all mostly hourly-based?
Well, now we are, yeah. As of this year, with the outbound digital product. We’re starting to work with contingency firms. Frankly, it’s been very fun because of that, what I mentioned earlier, where the incentives are so aligned to really think about the business in strategic ways and move cases through and be efficient. It’s really been enjoyable to work with that area of law that we haven’t really focused on in the past.
That’s great. I think that’s probably how we got connected because we are mostly in the contingency space, and we’re pretty tech savvy and somewhat business savvy. But I had a paper route since I was 10, 10 years old. That was my business lesson. I learned all about collecting money, people bouncing checks, AR.
It’s amazing when you think about it, how people used to write checks at the grocery store, and the grocery store was basically taking the risk on that payment that you were good for those checks. So we think about credit cards and whatnot as airline miles and whatnot. But there’s amazing… That instant authorization is an amazing tool for the business that used to be hoping that you were good for the money.
Yeah, that’s great. And you know what? We still take checks in some cases, but yeah, it’s a lot better when we can do it digitally. So I want to talk a little bit about your novel, How to Name a Generation. I mean, here you are, a Stanford grad with an engineering degree. Now, my brother went Navy. He’s a Stanford grad with a systems degree. He worked in my business, so he worked in the law firm for a while. But tell me, how is it that you came to write a novel? I mean, you’re an engineer, so why did you think you could write?
I had actually always enjoyed writing, and it was in college, I was choosing between English and engineering. Engineering won out, but I’ve always enjoyed writing on the side. When I got out, I took a little time to decide what did I want to do with my life next. And I was fascinated by two things. One, I went to a prestigious private high school. It was the same high school that Bill Gates and Paul Allen met at and developed Microsoft. And so the MO there was like, no, you’re going to graduate from here. You’re going to go to the best college. You’re going to get the best job, and you’re just going to be on this path. And I was on that path, and it was really hard to get off. It was a major mental shift for me to make a decision to say, oh, I can join the military. I can be a Marine. I can get off this path. It took me a while. I went through college, and I started working before I made that shift. But I thought it would be fascinating, A, to write about someone who is in that situation and made that decision to enlist right out of high school in that situation.
That was the first piece of it. The second piece of it, I was fascinated as I was getting out a lot of the Marines that were in my platoon, in my company, my battalion, they had done four, eight years. They were getting out, and now they were going to college for the first time. And I thought, wow, it would be so fascinating to write about their experience meeting the me’s in college without that experience, without that maturity. What is it like for them to go back to college and be with those younger kids who don’t have that experience in combat in the Marine Corps or in any of the services. Those were the two topics that I really thought were fascinating to explore. And, in the novel, the main character grows up, goes to a prestigious private high school, through a series of events, decides to enlist right out of high school. It’s about his experience juxtaposed by that of his or those of his classmates who go on to top-tier colleges, high-powered careers and everything. At the end, he gets out and goes back to college. It’s about his experience interacting with those classmates that are five years younger than him and don’t have those experiences.
Really, really fun experience just going through the process of writing it.
Did you ever read Once an Eagle?
I love that book. When I got out, actually, three people had given it to me, and I drove back across country and listened to it, and it took me almost exactly… I was basically hitting the Pacific Ocean when it was wrapping up. It’s amazing. It really is an amazing book.
Yeah, I see some similarities there. The guy doesn’t get into West Point, and so he enlists to fight in the war and then becomes an officer, and then he’s dealing with the careerist officer. I mean, it’s an interesting… A little bit long for my taste, a little bit too much on the romance side and all that garbage. But I thought it was a very well-written book, and I loved it when, especially I believe he’s in when he went to China, right? And he’s there and he’s talking to the former Emperor who’s now leading the resistance. And I thought that was just such a great moment. All right, well, we will move away from literature and get to leadership. All right, let’s talk about this. So you’ve been a Marine Infantry Officer, but you’ve also led tech teams in Silicon Valley, and you’re leading a startup. Let’s dive in. Of all of those, just mesh them together whatever, your three best examples of leadership and the three worst examples of leadership. And name names or don’t, I don’t care.
All right. So best examples, I think, are the times when either I or leaders that I’ve worked for have really given me, I would say, space and responsibility. So the space to operate autonomously, to solve the problem myself and not be told what to do or how to do it, but also put the weight of responsibility on my back for success or if we are not going to be successful owning the failure, learning from it. So I would say a big thing is that space and also that responsibility. I’ve really done well in those situations, and we really try to make that… We really try to instill that in our folks and in the culture of the company. One of our core principles is, everyone’s an owner. We do provide legal ownership, but that’s not the important part. The important part is everyone’s expected to think and act like the owner of the business, not like they’re in their little silo and they’re only thinking about their one little part. They need to understand the economics, the customer acquisition cost, the customer lifetime value. If you don’t understand those things, how are you going to spend money to solve a customer problem?
You won’t know how much to spend, and you’ll have to be told what to do. That part of our culture is huge. I would say on the negative side, you can tell when a leader is out for themselves. And the toughest leaders that I’ve worked for, tough in a negative sense, where I really didn’t feel like working hard for them, was when you can tell that they’re really in it for themselves. When they’re talking to you, it’s not about the best interest of the unit, the best interest of the company. It’s how can I advance, and I want to be in charge. You don’t have to say anything specific. You can just feel when that’s there. Those are the worst examples.
Fair enough. As we wrap up, and I don’t think I nailed this, Emery, but what is your title at Confido?
I like to use co-founder, but I put CEO on the contracts.
All right, fair enough. Emery, where can our audience learn more about Emery Wager or Confido Legal?
Confidolegal.com is the best place to get in touch with the company. You can reach out on our contact us page, a bunch of different ways to get in touch. And then for me personally, LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn and check those messages. So please send me a note. Love, especially working with Veteran entrepreneurs and helping out where I can. Our lead investor at Confido specializes in Veteran-led startups, and so we’re really deep into that Veteran entrepreneur ecosystem. But you don’t have to be a Veteran. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks so much for your time, and thank you for your service and your continued service to our community and to our Veterans.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting Veteran leadership in business, strengthening the Veteran community, and getting Veterans all of the benefits that they earned. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @VeteranLed on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
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