In this episode of ALPS In Brief, our Risk Manager Mark Bassingthwaighte talks about the importance of creating a succession plan and naming a succession/backup attorney.   — Transcript:  Hello, I am Mark Bassingthwaighte, the risk manager here at ALPS. And welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. Of course, that's where our home office is, and if you ever get out to Missoula, you should stop by. It is a beautiful, beautiful area.  It's a time of year where you get to thinking about all kinds of things. We have a year coming to an end, and boy, what a crazy year this has been, huh? And a new year starting. And these are the times where at least I do, and I don't think I'm alone or unique in this, just start to do some processing, start to think about what was good about the year, what things need to be done. And also, I've been with ALPS now coming up in 26 years, and I've been thinking more and more about what's next for me. Again, I've got a lot of years left, God willing and knock on wood here that ALPS will want to continue to have me.  But I want to say a lot of years, I don't know, five, six, maybe eight more years of work here, but I also think about retiring and what's next. And there are interesting things you start to think about just looking at all kinds of stuff. And I won't get into my sort of what's personally going on with me, but it does bring up an important topic, and that's the topic of succession planning. And I want to talk a little bit more about this in some interesting ways. It's something I've been talking about writing on for years.  I can simply say it doesn't happen overnight. I'm in a community where I see lots of people. We're in a 55 plus community now down here in Florida actually. It's been just a wonderful, wonderful decision for us. But I see a lot of people in retirement. I see some that have been very successful and I have seen and visited with some where it's not working. There's different drivers behind why retirement happened for some. Some had happened earlier than they thought, think health issues as an example. Others are still very, very active in second or third careers. Just because they retired doesn't mean... They retired from their profession perhaps, but they're still doing all kinds of other things.  So I want to talk about this. The first thing I want to say is regardless of your age and where you are in terms of your practice and your career in law, it's never too early to start. We've been dealing with the transition issues and decisions and financially restructuring for, oh gosh, now it's been a good six to eight years easy. And of course, we're blessed that we have the ability to retire at some point here. Again, I can say I've worked with lots and lots of lawyers, and I mean that literally who are not financially in a situation where retirement ever seems likely, and it doesn't need to be that way. So I just encourage you to start early, particularly on this, just the savings side, if nothing else, but okay, back to succession planning. And we're going to also explore backup attorneys in this context, which is the central issue I want to focus on here.  But before we get there, being a lawyer is hard. I understand that. And it can be quite a challenge. It's an ever-changing landscape, if you will, in terms of the introduction of AI and how that's impacting things, but also different types of clients and different types of matters and all sorts of things can go on. And as some of you may know, if you've followed me over the years, whether on the blog or podcast, I've been at this a long time and I've done a lot of consulting and I have worked with lawyers that have dealt with cancer as an example. And one lawyer in particular was so involved out of necessity, don't get me wrong here, but so involved in his cancer treatment, having to travel and be gon