Insider Secrets with guest Troy Beaulieu

Transcript

Narrator: 0:00

This podcast is for educational purposes only does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. If you need legal assistance about a legal problem, contact an attorney.

Cimone Murphree: 0:15

Well, thank you so much for being with us this afternoon, Troy. We are extremely excited to talk to you about your journey. Excited to talk to you about your journey, what has brought you to being Bertolino Law Firm’s Director of Legal Services, and maybe some of the insider secrets that you have from your previous time as a regulator. So, again, thank you so much for being with us today. How are you doing?

Troy Beaulieu: 0:44

I’m good and I really appreciate the opportunity, looking forward to chatting with y’all and telling you a little bit about my time in government, but then also my time coming over here and doing defense work. So I’m excited we’re excited to hear all the gossip and the juicy tidbits.

Cimone Murphree: 1:02

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. The gossip and the juicy tidbits, absolutely, absolutely. So I guess, Troy, can you take us from you know what piqued your interest in administrative law, what was kind of that, maybe aha moment or some of the things leading up to that moment that got you interested in this field?

Troy Beaulieu: 1:21

Sure, Well, I was always interested in litigation. I you know, even as a kid I was interested in becoming a lawyer. And when I got to law school I went to Baylor Law School. I knew I wanted to do litigation and Baylor’s one of the premier programs in the country for that Didn’t really know that I wanted to practice administrative law, although I did take at the time Baylor Law School’s generic administrative law I think it was a required course when I took it and I started in private practice in 2004 and was doing kind of general civil litigation in a small firm and the firm ended up folding and so I was looking for work and I applied to just you know, kind of one of the jobs that was out there was with a state regulatory agency and, you know, being a new graduate and a new lawyer and not really knowing much, I went to the interview, I got offered the job and it was actually a part-time job with the appraiser, licensing and certification board and you know, it was that point.

Troy Beaulieu: 2:33

I was kind of like well, you know, I’m going to try this and see what I think about it.

Troy Beaulieu: 2:38

You know, I can always look for something else, but you know, for now this is great, and so I started in November of 2005, started at a regulatory agency, and so that’s kind of what got me into administrative law was really just the ebb and flow of moving from one job to the next and realized that, you know, know, administrative law has a lot of the litigation components that I enjoy, but it also has, um, some other really interesting components.

Troy Beaulieu: 3:12

It’s really at the the heart of one of the main ways that people interact with government. You know, you think about things like taxes and no one likes those things. Like you know, there’s a few times in life when you kind of have to deal with the legal system, taxes being one, maybe divorce, hopefully not, but a lot of people deal with that. And so it was very interesting to me to kind of start in that world and see how much of an impact, just, you know, one tiny little regulatory agency can have on an industry, profession and occupation and really impact people’s everyday lives relate to, maybe, you know, sort of finding themselves, not necessarily searching for, but finding themselves.

Cimone Murphree: 4:12

You know where they needed to be or where they really thrive or enjoy, without necessarily going to look for it. And I think it’s also like you said, you know a lot of people. I love how you, how you phrase that because a lot of people don’t realize just how, like you said, you know the effects that the regulatory agency can have on the industry, people’s livelihoods. You know something small can make a big impact in that area and that’s not something that a lot of people are, you know, thinking about, even those who hold licenses. So you know it’s very important and again, that’s kind of you know, the whole point of Know your Regulator too, is to provide that bridge, that gap, you know, between a license holder and the regulatory agency. Absolutely.

Troy Beaulieu: 5:02

Yes, and that’s what I was going to say is, you know, as I started working as a regulator and when I started out and I first got hired, I was a staff attorney, so I was, you know, the low man on the totem pole and just really handling complaints and application matters and just general legal issues that the agency staff had. It was a small, a small agency at the time and they had a huge backlog, but it did really, like you said, immediately impress on me like hey, this has you know, if I’m licensed as an appraiser and this is how I make my living, like what goes on here at the board and whether I have a complaint or whether my application to get my license is approved, all that like has huge implications. You know what’s going on at the quarterly board meeting. Are they going to approve doing business in this way or not?

Troy Beaulieu: 5:53

You know, it really kind of opened my eyes that and not just with appraising but just everything in general how much the business of government goes on like at the local regulatory level. There’s just so much of it and I think we’re all busy with our own families and our own lives that we don’t necessarily take this time to stop and observe that and engage and participate in that, and I think that can, if you can, you know, make that a priority and find the time to do that. It’s going to pay out dividends in your professional lives, in your businesses, in your careers.

Cimone Murphree: 6:33

Absolutely so. How long were you, how long did you work for a regulatory agency agency?

Troy Beaulieu: 6:41

So I started in November of 2005. I was the staff attorney there until about 2011. And then I became the deputy director of enforcement and I did that until May of 2015. In May of 2015, I became the director of enforcement and I did that until I left state regulatory work in early 2021. So all in all, it was about 15 almost 16 years.

Troy Beaulieu: 7:14

I spent another year after that municipal government work as well, before I came to Bertolino as the director of legal services, but it was a very interesting opportunity understanding how government works and how it interacts with the other branches of government, like the legislature, for example, and how it interacts not only with people out in the community but maybe like trade groups and other professional or occupational organizations.

Troy Beaulieu: 7:48

There’s just so many interesting facets to it that you don’t necessarily see looking from the outside. Yeah, and Troy, how long were you with the municipal courts? Well, I didn’t work in the municipal courts, but I did work at the city of San Antonio at the city attorney’s office for about a year. I was the deputy city attorney in charge of their regulatory division. So there were a lot of similarities in that we dealt with a lot of public information act issues, a lot of open government issues, the Texas Open Meetings Act, when the city council would meet, ethics issues, and all of that was kind of on a backdrop of me and the other two dozen lawyers that I managed kind of providing city services to all kinds of different city departments, city departments. So that was a very interesting, a little bit different experience, but still very eye-opening, about kind of the inner workings of government at the local level.

Cimone Murphree: 8:52

When you were director at the appraiser board, what were some of the duties of the director? Duties of the director Like not necessarily day to day, but you know kind of what is that role of director in the agency and you know what did they have their hands in.

Troy Beaulieu: 9:16

Yeah, so when you’re the director of enforcement, you’re kind of it’s a leadership, it’s a management role. So it reported to the executive director at that time was um, doug old mixon and um and uh, you know, my job was basically to make sure the division ran smoothly and that we we did our job, which, um, at that time it was known as the TLCB Enforcement Division and the job was basically to investigate complaints and dispose of them appropriately. We handled any type of application matter where it wasn’t a clear approval. And then we also handled that time experience audits for real estate appraisers. And experience audits were basically appraisers have to go through a process of validating the experience they’ve acquired as a trainee, kind of like as an apprentice, and before your license is approved in your application they have to sample some of your work and make sure that you’re minimally competent. Basically it’s kind of confirming that you have the hands-on skills to do the job of appraising. And so, yeah, my job was to oversee all the investigators and the attorneys that worked in the enforcement division and, you know, making decisions about okay, does this complaint need to be open? Does the agency have jurisdiction? You know, are there any significant decisions that we need to be making about how we’re managing and processing complaints.

Troy Beaulieu: 11:02

Much of the time that I was at the agency, they were facing a backlog of complaints. You know the legislature sets standards for most agencies about. You know how quickly they should be resolving things. Obviously, you don’t want a complaint hanging over someone’s head for years and years. Unfortunately, it does happen because government resources are thin. So when I first started that was a huge challenge, but by the time that I became director we were able to work through it. One of the things I’m really proud of is by the time I left, we had really solved that backlog and we were resolving complaints on average within 180 days. Wow, so it was a huge turnaround. You know the backlog was, say, you know, two or three years old at its peak, you know, but by the time I left, you know it was a very reasonable, you know, within six months. I mean, obviously there’s outliers. You know something that’s a simple dismissal gets resolved a lot quicker than something that’s a very serious ethics accusation and needs to go to a full hearing in court.

Troy Beaulieu: 12:11

But on average things were getting done. So you know I had to. You know I did a lot of speaking engagements in front of members of the public. I obviously had to be present at board meetings every quarter and provide, you know, periodic reports to the board and to the executive leadership team for issues like that. So it was very interesting to see, kind of, like I said, how government works and also, you know, how it interacts with other parts of government. You know we had kind of informal and formal you know crossication and connections with other agencies.

Troy Beaulieu: 12:57

You know I worked at the agency at a time when the mortgage crisis, the financial crisis, hit in 2008.

Troy Beaulieu: 13:08

And the kind of the consequences of that were felt for several years after that, especially in the regulatory world, because it takes a while for all of those kinds of problems to percolate.

Troy Beaulieu: 13:20

You know you start to see the warning signs up front, but it’s usually not until after the crisis that that kind of things start to unfold and and become complaints and serious issues.

Troy Beaulieu: 13:34

So part of that was working. I was for several years the boards designated the Residential Mortgage Fraud Task Force, which was a group of regulators, but also law enforcement, who were trying to deal with some of these really ugly mortgage fraud cases that had come up. It was one of the things I never thought I would ever be dealing with when I went to work for government as a regulator, how interconnected criminal and regulatory law are. People often don’t realize and I think this is one of the secrets I would say people who have a license really need to remember is that there is a connection there. License really need to remember is that there is a connection there. And many regulatory agencies have their own licensed peace officers or people who are in law enforcement and even if they don’t, a lot of them have strong formal or informal working relationships so that those cases that kind of cross the line between oh this is really bad on the regulatory side and maybe even fraudulent, and it crosses over into the criminal world.

Troy Beaulieu: 14:48

There’s a lot of interaction and communication and involvement that goes on there.

Cimone Murphree: 15:19

And so people should always be particularly concerned if there’s a complaint or there’s issues where they’re alleging, you know, unethical conduct or fraud or things are so black and white and there’s really a gray area.

Troy Beaulieu: 15:26

It isn’t, you know, so clear. Yeah, you’re exactly right. I never would have thought, but in fairly short order, you know, after I joined the agency during, you know, say, 2007, 8 and 9, in particular, and even in 2010, I ended up giving presentations about appraisal fraud to all of the major law enforcement agencies in the state. I gave it to the FBI in Dallas and the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. I gave a presentation to HUD’s Office of Inspector General. I gave one to the Attorney General’s Criminal Investigations Division and some of their criminal prosecutions. You know they had a at that time. It was a white collar and public integrity unit that was looking at some mortgage fraud things, unit that was looking at some mortgage fraud things. I did a presentation out in the Houston area. So I never would have thought how much connection there was there, but there really is and it’s something that people need to be more aware of and thoughtful about when they’re dealing with a complaint. Were you nervous?

Cimone Murphree: 16:38

doing a presentation in front of the FBI, of all people.

Troy Beaulieu: 16:43

Well, by the time I was doing those presentations, I had met a lot of those folks and interacted with them and we, you know, during that time we were, you know, when mortgage fraud was such a priority for so many law enforcement and regulatory agencies we all kind of started to realize we’re dealing with some of the same properties and the same people that we were looking at in different cases and there was kind of some common threads and some common themes. So it was really like talking to a group of people that you had some working relationship with and some interactions with and my job. I felt like it was really important. Being the regulator, I never, ever, wanted to make a decision that something was a fraud or was deliberate bad conduct, unless I was really comfortable and I had really good evidence that that was the case. Because, as a regulator and I really appreciate it now, doing defense work that government agency has that person’s livelihood in their hands and they need to take that really seriously. Now, unfortunately, bad things happen, right, people make poor judgments, people break the law. They do engage in criminal conduct. I mean it happens, some people, you know, kind of flagrantly, and some people maybe with less awareness, but it’s. So. I recognize it’s a legitimate thing that government and regulators have to do, but they have to do that very carefully because you really need to make sure that I’m not wrecking someone’s professional life when the evidence really isn’t there, right. You know, if the evidence that’s also part of what I loved about my job as a regulator is it’s kind of like being the designated hitter in baseball. You know you get to bat a lot, right, you get a lot of at-bats and you don’t have to swing at every pitch right.

Troy Beaulieu: 18:46

There are lots of cases came across my desk as a regulator, whether I was a staff attorney or director of enforcement and if it didn’t have good evidence, if there was a problem with it, if jurisdiction was lacking, if there was a legal deficiency, then the right thing to do would be to dismiss it, close it and move on, for two reasons One, like I said, you don’t want to be harming someone’s reputation and livelihood if they haven’t done anything wrong or you can’t prove that they’ve done anything wrong, right. And two, you want to be kind of mindful of government resources right. We can’t leave these cases open forever. We can’t chase down a rabbit trail for a year, two years, three years and find nothing. And so you really need to stop and say, hey, is my time better spent with this thing that has thin evidence, or do I need to let it go and focus on this more significant problem that does have good evidence?

Troy Beaulieu: 19:47

And what I used to tell myself and other people is you know, if they’re really that bad, we’re going to have another case with them. Right that you know people that kind of serially abuse the public trust, those are the people that you want to get out of any industry, everybody makes mistakes, right? I mean, if we’re, as government, focused on just kind of hammering people who make honest mistakes, well, gee, who hasn’t made an honest mistake? But people who are serially, habitually and intentionally abusing the public trust, those are the ones you want to get rid of yeah, the bad apples keep them from spreading to the other.

Cimone Murphree: 20:25

Is it the seeds? You see the bad seeds. They spread to the other apples.

Troy Beaulieu: 20:29

Batch of apples right and you would see that a lot in the appraiser world because of how they develop the next generation of appraisers is, there’s a heavy component of on-the-job training when you’re an appraiser trainee being supervised by a certified appraiser.

Cimone Murphree: 20:48

So if you’ve got one person telling someone how to do it one way and it’s, you know, not within compliance, and you’ve got you knowled down okay bad, bad habits, um, some of the most amazing things.

Troy Beaulieu: 21:01

At one time there was a mortgage fraud and I saw both a son-in-law and a father-in-law, um, and they both ended up going to federal prison, um, for a mortgage. And I felt really bad for the family that had a wife and a young child, because the son-in-law obviously got some very bad training and didn’t get shown kind of the right kind of ethics to have in this profession and so, yeah, sometimes it was really kind of amazing what you saw. It’s just tragic.

Cimone Murphree: 21:38

Wow. So what ultimately? You know how’d you change from you know being gung-ho about, you know, being a regulator and working in the government industry and kind of. Now you’re on the flip side of that, where you’re opposing these regulators and defending these licenses. Where did that change come from?

Troy Beaulieu: 22:06

Well, I don’t know that it’s much of a change for me. I mean, something that I think you’ll hear lawyers talk about a lot is that we’re lawyers and one of the things lawyers do is we’re advocates for our clients, regardless of whatever position that is, as long as it’s a reasonable argument that’s got some basis in law or in fact. That’s what lawyers do, and so it wasn’t really different. There’s nothing that soured me on government. I loved my time in government and I and I’d love to go back. I also love what I do now as a defense attorney.

Troy Beaulieu: 22:48

It’s just different sides of the same coin. Right, you’re representing one of two parties who have important interests and important issues at stake and you’ve got to be a tenacious advocate for them. You’ve got to think creatively. You’ve got to make sure you have all the information that you need, that you need. You have to gather your facts and kind of your witnesses and come up with a compelling argument to protect your client’s needs, and sometimes that means getting the case dismissed. Sometimes that means getting the best result that you can with an imperfect situation because mistakes were made. But I never felt like I had to choose, or I was somehow. You know some of my former regulatory colleagues would kind of tease me and say oh, you’re going over to the dark side, are you?

Troy Beaulieu: 23:44

So how is it working with Darth Vader over there? And you know, I kind of laughed that off because I really do believe that everybody in a legal matter, in a legal issue, when you’re confronting you know something between, basically, the citizens and their government, everybody needs a voice, everybody needs an advocate who’s competent and who’s aggressive and tenacious and willing to fight for them. And so, yeah, I did that for a number of years on the government side and now I’m thrilled to do that. I’ve been doing it now over two years on the defense side. I mean, I used to joke with people.

Troy Beaulieu: 24:32

I think it’s true, you go into the courtroom, somebody’s going to lose, right, it’s not? You know, sometimes there are cases where the government probably really should win, because you look kind of as a non-advocate and just look at the evidence. You kind of go, oh, that’s not very good. You know that’s that kind of shows. There was some. On the other time, and you know you look at some cases and you go, gee, my goodness, why are we even here? Like, what is the government doing? And so sometimes I kind of draw on my former regulator days to talk with opposing attorneys of government and say, you know, talk to me here, opposing attorneys of government and say, you know, talk to me here, tell me what you’re thinking, because I’m not following why, why we want to go after this client, um, when it doesn’t seem? You know? Because, again, when you work for the government, one of the things you’re charged with doing as an ethical lawyer is to seek justice and sometimes, just you know, sometimes justice is yeah, there was the problems, there’s violations. They need to be addressed, because the government’s ultimate job is protecting the public. We want to make sure that, whatever industry you’re in whether you’re a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer, engineer that you’re being safe for the public. You’re not accidentally killing people. As a doctor, you’re not embezzling funds. As an accountant, you’re building safe bridges. When you’re an engineer, and so sure, sometimes that means legal consequences and getting better training and maybe being put on probation and being monitored.

Troy Beaulieu: 26:08

But sometimes the government’s not perfect. I mean, they make mistakes too too, and I’ve seen it and they need to be willing to own that and say you know, yeah, we’re wrong here or this is not the right case to pursue and they need to close it. So that’s what I’m really passionate about doing right now is trying to help, help clients figure out those difficult issues you know, navigate them, because it’s not easy and it’s not always. You know black or white I mean it’s typically gray, right. So you’ve got some good points for you as a license holder. You say, well, I did this and I did this and I did this right and I got this witness and this piece of evidence. And then the government says, well, but let’s not forget, you know there’s this problem here and this issue here, and you did this and that and I have this statement over here and this witness. So it’s often kind of a give and take. It’s not always just absolutely black and white.

Cimone Murphree: 27:10

Absolutely, yeah, no, it can get a little muddy. It can get a little muddy. Are there any kind of misconceptions about agencies or boards that you, you see, clients have?

Troy Beaulieu: 27:22

Totally Both both on the government side and on the license holder side. So, you know, license holders, obviously they’re focused on running their business, right, they’re not really, you know, they’re not trying to harm anybody. Generally they’re trying to do the right thing, but but their focus isn’t the job of the government, which is protecting the public. Their focus is running their business. And so, um, getting, um, you know, being forced to interact with, deal with, kind of address regulatory issues or complaints or problems or audits, um, is not something that any license holder or business owner wants to have to deal with, right, because it’s taking time away from running that business and growing it and helping their clients and improving their revenue stream. The same thing on the government side, though, right, is, you know, government needs to be efficient, it needs to be, like I said earlier, mindful about. Is this really a meritorious complaint? Is it really a just outcome if we make this proposal to resolve this case? So the government has, you know, resources that they come from the taxpayers and the license holders that pay the fees and they need to be good stewards of that and manage that and be mindful of that. So, definitely, on both sides, both the government and the private sector side, I see sometimes frustrations and also lack of clarity. Sometimes, you know, sometimes people and it is a very personal thing to get a complaint, especially if someone’s accusing you of maybe unethical conduct that you didn’t do it’s very easy to to make that personal and get kind of frustrated and lose focus on the bigger picture of how do we resolve this and move forward. Um, and kind of, well, the government’s out to get me. You know, I used to kind of and this is kind of again a joke, but remember, you know, I used to be a government regulator. I people would get very mad at me sometimes and I would talk to them and I would try and be polite and more than once I did say you know, you need to understand persecution and prosecution sound very similar but they’re spelled differently, right? So so you need to understand it’s frustrating when the government comes in and says we’re looking at this complaint, but they do have a job to do, right, and just because they’re prosecuting you for what they’re claiming are violations doesn’t necessarily mean anybody’s out to get you and that they’re persecuting you. Um, you know, so it’s, it’s definitely there’s. There’s a lot of um tension. It’s. It’s a very stressful time, right. I mean, nobody wants to have a complaint that’s threatening their livelihood, that’s just right.

Troy Beaulieu: 30:32

You know, the worst one of the far side cartoons that I like that that kind of reminds me of the reality when you hold a license from the government. Is this this far side commercial? And there are a cartoon and there’s a couple of bears standing in a forest and it’s the beginning of bear hunting season. You can see, in the corner there’s a little sign that says bear hunting season starts and it’s the beginning of bear hunting season. You can see, in the corner there’s a little sign that says bear hunting season starts and it says today. And the three bears are all looking at the bear in the middle. He has a giant red and white bullseye on him and the one bear says bummer, birthmark dude, you know it’s that. I think that kind of rings true. You know a little bit for dealing with regulatory issues and complaints.

Cimone Murphree: 31:18

Thank you so much for your time this afternoon. This has been a really insightful conversation. I’ve loved getting to hear about what’s led you to the Bertolino Law Firm and, before we go, do you have any additional insider secrets or anything you’d like to share with us?

Troy Beaulieu: 31:39

My takeaway, having worked on both sides of these issues in these cases for a number of years now. I think a couple of things. One I think communication is super important. If you can’t communicate with your regulator effectively, then you’re going to have problems. The second thing I think that is super important is being proactive. Don’t wait until there’s a problem, which is kind of the genesis of our Know your Regulator outreach programs in this podcast.

Troy Beaulieu: 32:12

Don’t wait, be proactive, start to engage with your regulator now. Know what’s coming down the pipe. What are the rule changes? What are the new things that are going to challenge your business? Do you need to adjust your business model because of something that the board’s considering changing? Go and say your piece and speak at the board meeting. Tell them your concerns. And I think the third thing is good documentation, good documentation and records. So many times we see with complaints or sometimes just with audits, when you don’t have the records that you need and I saw that all the time as a regulator someone who had a really good work file that was very thoroughly documented. It immediately set you apart and the regulators were already going gee, well, this looks really solid, you know, because they have their material there and ready to go. So those are just a couple of things that kind of pop into my mind that I think we regularly see as a theme. Now doing not only defense work, but when I was a regulator.

Cimone Murphree: 33:18

And that last one in itself Don’t wait until the last minute. People from getting a complaint or having, you know, received a notice of violation, just having some good documentation. Can, you know, maybe in your industry prevent that for you?

Troy Beaulieu: 33:42

Yes, it really is important to be proactive and that’s why I know the firm has started more recently offering compliance consulting services, because we really believe and we see it, that when you’re proactive, when you’re making tweaks and changes to your business or your practice, you’re kind of mindful of the laws that are coming down the pike, then you don’t get caught in those more difficult situations as much. I mean, there’s definitely a difference between people who are proactive and stay aware of what’s going on in the regulatory world. They can react, they can morph and adjust and grow a lot easier than people that are reactive and are waiting to get a complaint or waiting to have a problem, or waiting for a lot to change and then trying to figure out well, how does this impact my business? You know, if you’re waiting till, then it’s you’re too late.

Cimone Murphree: 34:39

Yeah Well, again, Troy, thank you so much for being with us this afternoon and sharing your insights with us. We’ve had a blast, You’re welcome.

Troy Beaulieu: 34:50

I’m happy to do it and excited about continuing this kind of conversation because I think it will really pay dividends out to the license holders who hold these licenses.

Narrator: 35:01

Empower your professional journey Know your regulator. The podcast that inspires you to engage.