Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 You're listening to the U S law essentials law and language podcast, the legal English podcast for non native English speakers. That helps you improve your English, listening, improve your legal English vocabulary and build your knowledge of American legal culture.
Speaker 1 00:00:25 Welcome to U S law essentials. I'm your host. Steven Horowitz today's episode is part of our series of interviews with multi-lingual lawyers. And today we're going to talk with Brian Hersey, a lawyer, uh, for me, Zoho, uh, who is a director in the custody marketing services department. Did I get that right? Custody marketing services department. Yep. Brian graduated from the university of Washington law school and did his undergraduate degree at temple university in Philadelphia, uh, where he majored in, what did you major in Bryan?
Speaker 2 00:01:01 That was an English major. That's why I had to go to law school.
Speaker 1 00:01:04 Okay. Uh, but before we get to the interview with Brian, I'm going to tell you my dad joke of the day, and then I'll tell you the answer at the end and explain it. Okay. So here's my dad joke of the day. What did one elevator say to the other elevator? Okay. You don't have to say it now. Brian, I'm going to say it at the end and I'll explain it in case you don't understand it, but do you want, do you think you might know the answer?
Speaker 2 00:01:35 Okay. No, no. I could guess, but I, I can't think of a clever answer. I feel like my, there must be a more clever answer than my guesses would be right now. We didn't have at
Speaker 1 00:01:46 The end. Okay. So let's get to the interview. Um, so Brian, I said that you went to, you graduated from the university of Washington law school, but that's not the full story. Um, you've also lived, you did law school in another country, is that right?
Speaker 2 00:02:03 Yeah. So after I graduated from university of Washington in 2001, I got a, um, Mamboo Kovack show scholarship, um, too, from the, basically from the government of Japan to study, um, labor law at the university of Tokyo. So I studied there for 18 months, from 2001 to 2003.
Speaker 1 00:02:26 And did you do that in English or in Japanese?
Speaker 2 00:02:29 Uh, it was, uh, all overwhelmingly in Japanese. Um, I had one class on negotiations where the class was in Japanese, but the reading was in English mostly. And we actually negotiated with a team from the university of Washington. So the negotiations themselves took place in English, but all of the discussions for my team were done in Japanese.
Speaker 1 00:02:54 Oh, so your, your Japanese must be pretty good.
Speaker 2 00:02:57 It was in 2003. Yeah. And it's, um, it's not as good as it was then, but it was still, it was still very hard. I'm sure your students, um, can understand how difficult like the studying in a foreign language is. I, my first seminar, um, my professor, I was with, uh, a bunch of other graduate students and there was one from Taiwan, one from Korea, um, one from mainland, from China and me, and they were discussing, I forget what aspect of labor law, but they said, they said, oh, and then what's the rule in Korea. And then what's the rule in Taiwan. And I remember thinking, oh crap, I don't like the way this is going. I'm going to have to speak. I'm going to have to explain what this is. And the whole seminar was done in Kago and like honorific and humble Japanese, which I wasn't, I had studied, but I wasn't completely comfortable speaking. So it was, uh, I remember that being quite a challenge. Like I think all my discussions in my classes in Tokyo university initially started out with, I think that you're talking about this and if I'm right, then the answer for American law is this, but I always had that qualification.
Speaker 1 00:04:20 That sounds like a skill you might've learned in law school.
Speaker 2 00:04:25 Yeah. Amplified because of the language. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:04:30 Um, do you speak any other languages?
Speaker 2 00:04:32 No, not really. I I've studied Spanish and German and some Korean at different times in my life, but I've never really progressed to a point where I was, you know, capable of functioning all day, the way I could in Japanese. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:04:48 And let's see. So you're a lawyer. I mean, you, you went to law school, you graduated as a lawyer. Um, how would you describe what kind of lawyer you are now? How would you characterize that? Strictly
Speaker 2 00:05:02 Speaking, I am a non-practicing attorney, um, because I'm on the business team. Um, but on the business team, my role is primarily to interact with the lawyers, um, but the lawyers for our clients, um, and then also the internal Mizuho lawyers. Um, I work closely with them for, from a business perspective.
Speaker 1 00:05:31 So Mizuho is a, is a, is a large bank in Japan. Is that a, is that a good description of it?
Speaker 2 00:05:39 Okay. Yeah. We're, we're one of the three mega banks in Japan.
Speaker 1 00:05:44 And how do you explain your job? You have two children, right? I do. How old are they?
Speaker 2 00:05:53 Um, one's about to turn five and his sister is six.
Speaker 1 00:05:58 Okay. And how do you explain what you do to your children? Do they care?
Speaker 2 00:06:05 They're not that interested in what I do. Um, I work, I tell them I work in a bank and banks basically hold people's money for them. And that's, that's about the extent of, of what I've explained. Um, and they know that that money always comes from work. Cause that's always, whenever they want money. I always explain to them, well, you know, your money comes from work. What work have you done? Like, that's where, that's why I work because we need money. So, so we can buy food. And
Speaker 1 00:06:42 I've had that conversation with my children as well. Why do you have to work? Why are you working so much as we need? Um, so, and, and if you had to explain, when you explain your job to say your, uh, non lawyer friends, or your wife, or a parent or grandparent, how do you explain that
Speaker 2 00:07:06 The benefit of having an attorney wife, but I'm a much more accomplished attorney? Um, so when I explained that I say, um, basically my main work is with funds and, um, investment funds. And what hour would I I work on is that the team that does all of the non-glamorous aspects of investment funds, meaning, um, we don't, we don't put the money in and we don't pick any investments, but we keep all the investments and we process your, if you send money to your investment fund, we process it. We send you the reports. We, you know, help pay the taxes. We, we prepare financial statements for these funds. Um, all of the interactions you would have with your investment fund is probably with an administrator. And that's, that's what we do.
Speaker 1 00:08:11 And, and you, you said that you're you work, you're a director in the custody marketing services now. And when I hear custody and I think about law, I think about family law and, and child custody and that kind of custody, right? Is that what you do? Well, it's still
Speaker 2 00:08:29 Custody, but as opposed to custody of children or being in criminal law, being in custody, we, we have we custody assets. So, uh, again, if you have investments,
Speaker 1 00:08:44 Did you just use custody as a first,
Speaker 2 00:08:46 We use custody as a verb. So we custody assets, meaning we, we hold like, yeah, we hold your S your, yeah, we hold your stocks or your bonds or whatever. Somebody out there has them. And we're, we're holding them in an account. So it's a custody bank.
Speaker 1 00:09:07 If one of my students ever used the word custody as a verb, I would have told them that was incorrect. So now I know that it can be correct. I mean, I know you can take any now and make it into a verb and you convert it so to speak. But, um, I didn't realize that custody gets used in that way. Huh? Yeah. Interesting. So what does, uh, oh, I have a question about, um, you said Mizuho, but in Japanese, I think it's pronounced museum
Speaker 2 00:09:37 Hall. Yeah. That'd be close to her musical representation. My, my Japanese pronunciation has deteriorated when I speak, it's distracting to me, my Japanese, like, I'm like, that sounds weird. And then I lose track of what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 00:09:53 Um, so how what's it, what does an average day of work like for you? Um, what more, or get a day and describe what you did say yesterday or any other day? Um,
Speaker 2 00:10:06 It's uh, a good question. So we've been working from home thanks to the pandemic. So it's, it's a little bit different. Um, you know, I used to commute into Midtown Manhattan every day. Um, and now I get up and I usually log on, um, kind of right away in the morning, uh, because our clients are in Japan and, uh, it's good to get a jump on everything that has come in overnight with the time difference.
Speaker 3 00:10:37 Um,
Speaker 2 00:10:39 And there's kind of two aspects. There's kind of the ongoing projects and then there's daily inquiries and they both have to be managed. Um, for the most part in my role. Now my inquiries don't come so directly from the clients usually because I have a team of people, um, and they handle the direct inquiries. Um, so they, but they would forward things on to me if they wanted to check them or if they don't know the answer. So, um, I have to kind of monitor my email all day. And then on top of that, I have a range of ongoing projects, both internal and external that, um, I'm working on all the time.
Speaker 1 00:11:26 So what, what, for example, what kind of inquiry might you get?
Speaker 2 00:11:30 Yeah, there's a big range of, of issues often. Um, we have, uh, a fund of investment funds business, which means funds that invest in other private funds and those private funds, um, all have their own know your customer and money laundering, question like anti money laundering, questionnaires, and, and all of these, um, things that have to be completed. And they're all, they tend to be drafted by lawyers at different law firms. So while they are similar from one to the next they're worded differently, or they have different meanings. So people on my team will often bring those kinds of questions to me say, what does this question mean? How do we answer this question? Um, about we have, yeah, what's the, how do we answer the question about the structure of this fund? Or, you know, what, uh, what do they really want to know? Are we compliant with, FACA sorry.
Speaker 1 00:12:34 So, so like you said, you're not in this job, you're not a lawyer, but it sounds like it helps to be a lawyer.
Speaker 2 00:12:40 It helps a lot to be a lawyer. Yeah. I mean, I, I do a reasonable amount of drafting of agreements, but I use, uh, depending on whether I'm drafting something, um, for the fund or I'm drafting something that is an agreement that Mizuho will sign, I would I'd use outside counsel, or I use our internal counsel kind of as the way an associate sends things to a partner. And as I draft something, because it's easier for me to draft it, I understand all the relationships. And then I send it to the attorneys who actually have to sign off on it. And that saves everybody time and money if I do that. So kind of like an associate, uh, it's nice because the partners, you don't work for the partners, they work for you. So they can't get mad at me if I do something dumb or something, if I misunderstand something, but, uh, they just fix it and they're very nice. That's great.
Speaker 1 00:13:40 They don't, they don't give you lots of feedback and tell you to have it back on their desk by midnight that night.
Speaker 2 00:13:46 Uh, no, they never, never pushed that way, but they do. They actually prefer feedback. And I think, um, they've been really nice. A lot of the internal lawyers have, have been really nice about, um, giving me feedback on stuff and saying, how about this, or how about that? Um, so I can continue to learn
Speaker 1 00:14:05 And are the internal lawyers, are they Japanese speakers or English speakers?
Speaker 3 00:14:11 Uh, our
Speaker 2 00:14:14 General council used to be so, um, the bank I work at was merged as I was explaining before. Um, and when we were our own standalone entity, our general counsel did happen to speak Japanese. She was, uh, but, uh, at the moment I don't the lawyers I work with. Don't speak Japanese. I don't know if Mizzou has Japanese speaking attorneys. I, I think they do. Um, I don't know, in the United States if they do or not.
Speaker 1 00:14:45 Okay. And, and how much of your day, how much are you using English and much? Are you using Japanese and when,
Speaker 2 00:14:54 So I get a reasonable number of emails in Japanese still. Um, but I'm so much more productive in English. And then drafting an email drafting, a response in Japanese just takes me so much longer than even when my clients send me things in, in Japanese. I usually reply in very polite English, um, because they, they can all read English. So I would say now it's, you know, 90 some percent is in English. When I started, I was probably speaking Japanese more than I spoke English in the office, but, uh, that's no longer the case,
Speaker 1 00:15:40 But you, you don't, you don't need to speak in Japanese as much.
Speaker 2 00:15:45 No, not so much. Most of my Japanese colleagues at this point, their English is better than my Japanese. So I always feel like you should speak the language of the person who's stronger unless you're paying them to be a teacher or, you know, they're a friend who's volunteered, but basically the point is to communicate. So
Speaker 1 00:16:04 Is that, is that because the level of English of, of the Japanese co of your Japanese colleagues over time has, has improved either individually or the people joining the company or joining your department have, have had stronger and stronger English?
Speaker 2 00:16:20 You know, it, it varies a bit. Um, so in a Japanese company, they rotate, um, staffs, the expatriates who get rotated from Tokyo, who are generally who I've worked most closely with they've, um, rotated and their English levels. Very, they're all very smart. Like they basically, if they get sent to the United States, they're generally, um, the, the cream of the crop, but their English abilities as particularly spoken English varies a little bit. The written English is always excellent. So it depends on the client, but I'd say more that my Japanese has declined probably more than the overall English level has improved,
Speaker 1 00:17:08 But it's, it's interesting that your, a lot of your communications are one of you you'll, you'll, you'll both communicate to each other in your native language, but in different languages, because it's, it's easier to communicate in your own language, but you can understand the other person's communication.
Speaker 2 00:17:25 Yeah. That's that's right. I can, I can do that. That's that's and it's, it's just takes everybody less time, but
Speaker 1 00:17:34 Have you ever had any, any, uh, amusing, uh, miscommunications?
Speaker 2 00:17:41 Um, I'm sure I've had some miscommunications, but I can't think of a, a good example, right. That I can, that's nothing Springs to mind. This is, might be interesting is, you know, you and I, we both were jet in the jet program and taught English in Japan at some point,
Speaker 1 00:18:00 Right. The Japan exchange teaching program. That's how we got to know each other. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:18:04 And I, I find that the, um, maybe more than speaking a foreign language, um, the ability to speak clearly with a non-native English speaker, like to stop using any cultural references to not use any sarcasm or like kind of jokes and just speak kind of a very straight forward version of English might be a more valuable skill than learning to speak another language, because I can use it when I'm dealing with people in Hong Kong or Singapore or Luxembourg or wherever that, that ability that, um, I developed as an English teacher to communicate easily with a non-native English speaker is I've, I've thought that that's maybe my most valuable asset. Um, and I hear other native English speakers in meetings, and they're telling jokes and they're making references to like pop culture. And it's very, like, I'm like, they're not going to understand that you probably had that experience when you, I remember in Japan, like sitting around with some friends and somebody would say something and everyone would laugh and I'd be like, I think I understood everything that was said, but I have no idea why people just laugh. And it's, you know, usually it's like a cultural reference to some TV show or a joke. I, I just didn't know it. So that's been great. I,
Speaker 1 00:19:39 As you're saying all this, yeah. That's something that I think a lot about. And, and in, in teaching, in language teaching or in linguistics, it's called grading your speech. Um, but there's a lot of components to it. One is leaving out the cultural references. One is speaking at an appropriate speed or volume. Sometimes people speak extra loud or sometimes people will stop their speech, you know, or use funny intonations I've heard. Um, and, and the cultural references, but all of that, you're, you're right. It's a skill that I think we picked up living in Japan. Um, you know, just to make it easier to communicate with other people in our own language. It's hard to do unless you sort of get some practice at
Speaker 2 00:20:21 It. Yeah. And you hit it. I had the, um, we all had the experience of you'd speak to someone in English, but you realize that all those, the jokes and the witty things that you tried to say, they just all fell flat. So eventually you just gave up on them.
Speaker 1 00:20:37 Do you have any advice that you'd like to give to other people who want to work in, uh, in, in law and business and or international or cross-cultural settings?
Speaker 2 00:20:52 Uh, that's a good question. I've been thinking. Um, recently I've had an opportunity to get to know some guys who were kind of finishing college and, and getting out of college. And, uh, one of the things I've been thinking about telling them is that you're kind of in, it's not international businesses, just general business, but your integrity is kind of your most valuable asset. And when I say that, it's, it's much more valuable than competence. And especially when you're new in your career, there's a tendency to, to try and project competence and argue that you're, you're doing a wonderful job, and that's obviously very valuable your capabilities and what you understand and what you can do. But, um, they need to be careful. And I I've seen people do this where if you don't deliver what you say you're going to deliver, or even worse, if you tell somebody something and it turns out not to be true, either because you knew it.
Speaker 2 00:21:59 And it wasn't true where you didn't know what you were talking about. It's very hard to recover credibility after that, in fact that it basically people won't work with you. And, um, I've seen that illustrated in a few places and I try and emphasize to people like you can develop competence in a job and you can learn new things and you can get better and more efficient. But once you shoot that, like your reputation as being someone who's honest and straightforward, there's just no re no recovery. It it's impossible. Yeah. So that's something I've been stressing. Yeah. And
Speaker 1 00:22:42 I guess there is a lot of pressure to sort of, to, to, to promote oneself, to, to make yourself seem, um, perhaps more, more competent than you might feel, or, or feeling like you need to be projecting a certain, a certain image or, or, or impression,
Speaker 2 00:23:02 Or yeah. And there's temptations to cover up mistakes or to like, there's always, if you do something wrong or you make a mistake is a temptation to like, deny that that happened or to, to spin it in a way. And, and to some extent, um, you know, you want to be putting yourself forward in the best light, but you have to be careful about that line. Um, because
Speaker 3 00:23:32 Like, if
Speaker 2 00:23:34 You misrepresent something to a client or even internally, there's just, there's really no, it's, it's just never worth it. Even though it's painful to be like, Hey, I messed up. Um, or I gave you this answer. And it, when I looked at it later, it wasn't complete or wasn't correct. So that's something I've been thinking about in terms of,
Speaker 3 00:23:57 Um,
Speaker 2 00:23:59 What advice I give to people, especially early in their career.
Speaker 1 00:24:04 Why do you think you're more aware of that because of your background in law and the focus on legal ethics, uh, that we get in law school and in the legal profession,
Speaker 2 00:24:17 Maybe, maybe in law, like it's more hammered into you that you, you can't, uh, get away with. Like, you need to be really forthright and you're accountable for any misrepresentations you make. Uh, so that might be true, but it's true. It's true in everything, even if it's not, you know, subject to sanction.
Speaker 1 00:24:39 Okay. Well, Brian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. It's really interesting to hear perspectives from a multi-lingual lawyer like yourself. I pleasure. Um, are you interested in, in hearing the answer to today's joke of the day? Yeah, I can't wait. Um, do you remember what the, what the question was?
Speaker 2 00:25:02 What did one elevator say to the other elevator? Is that,
Speaker 1 00:25:06 That's it, that's it. So what did one elevator say to the elevator other elevator, but he guesses?
Speaker 2 00:25:13 No, I don't have a guest. I'm going to, I'm going to wait.
Speaker 1 00:25:16 Okay. I think I'm coming down with something.
Speaker 2 00:25:21 See, I knew it was more clever than anything I could think of, but I'm going to totally use that for my kids. I love it.
Speaker 1 00:25:26 Okay. Um, and the explanation of, of why that's funny for anybody who doesn't know is that, um, it's a common expression or a fixed phrase to say, if you're getting sick, especially if you're getting a cold to say, I think I'm coming down with a cold. So an elevator would be coming down with something or someone in it. And that's why that, that joke is theoretically funny.
Speaker 2 00:25:54 Like people get it. I think we live in an elevator building. They'll get it.
Speaker 1 00:25:58 Oh, look, I'll appreciate. I'll think of that every time they get in the elevator. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Brian. Um, and thank you everyone for listening and have a good day.
