Working as a lawyer in an in-house context is not a topic you would encounter in law school. Bart Peach, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Unio Health Partners, joins Joseph Schohl to share a glimpse of his legal career as an in-house counsel. He shares what every GC should know about this kind of job and how to prepare for it, from being open to leveraging AI tools to understanding your target client’s motivations and fears. Bart also shares how a GC can achieve true work-life balance despite their busy schedules and how to earn your team’s trust as their leader.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
From the Ballpark to the Boardroom: Bart Peach on Leadership, Legal Mastery, and Thriving In-House
We’re talking with Bart Peach. You’re going to enjoy tuning in. We talked about how he went from the baseball diamond to the boardroom and how a sports injury launched a legal career. We talked about how AI is changing the legal game, what every GC should know, and the real story behind work-life balance at the top. Stay with me to the end, and I’ll share my biggest takeaways.
Here’s Bart’s bio. Bart Peach is General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Unio Health Partners, which provides management services to gastroenterology, urology, and radiation oncology practices with over 180 providers across California. With almost twenty years of healthcare experience, Bart previously served as Group General Counsel at DaVita Kidney Care Division, overseeing nearly 900 dialysis clinics. We talk about his DaVita experience and mine in this episode. Bart specializes in healthcare M&A, regulatory compliance, and complex contract negotiations, and has successfully navigated complex transactions, including company acquisitions and major litigation settlements. With that, let’s get into the interview.
Bart, it’s great to see you.
You as well. Thanks for having me on.
I noticed in preparing that you and I both spent time in Illinois. It’s Southern Illinois in your case. Is that where you grew up?
No, Southern Indiana. I got drafted to play professional baseball out of high school. I ended up in junior college in Southern Illinois first, and then I went to Murray State, and then I ended up back there for law school. I had two stints in southern Illinois.
That’s great. How long did your baseball career last?
It lasted right until my first year of college, when I was playing volleyball and messed my shoulder up.
Were you a pitcher?
I was. I was able to thankfully have surgery and played for four years at Murray. It paid for undergraduate school, thankfully.
That’s nice. Are you a baseball fan still to this day?
I don’t know that I was ever necessarily a fan, but I still follow it.
What Inspired Bart To Pursue A Career In Law
That’s great. That’s baseball. What inspired you to pursue a career in law? When did that happen for you?
That exact situation. I got drafted. I had an attorney who was my agent at the time. After I got hurt, I ended up having to go in front of the HMO board of my mom’s healthcare system that she had. There were eight people sitting around a round table. I was eighteen years old. I had to explain to them why this wasn’t a sports injury but a life injury because they declined to pay for the surgery that I needed to be able to continue playing baseball.
Maybe this was part of the argument, but continue the activities of daily living.
The story that I told was about the car that I had, and waxing it out in front of my body made my shoulder slip out of the socket. I had pain for 3 or 4 weeks. Long story short, at the end of the conversation, the lady at the end of the table was crying, and my attorney had his jaw on the floor. Afterwards, he said, “Maybe you should consider law school.” I thereafter realized that the healthcare system, in some regards, was slightly broken and that it wasn’t always about the patient, and secondarily, that I had an interest in going into law to help try to change that.
That’s beautiful. Here we are, still trying to fix it. You went to law school and then got your first job at a law firm. Tell me about the point at which you decided to go in-house for the first time.
When I was in law school at Southern Illinois, I ended up working for the General Counsel of Southern Illinois Healthcare with a great guy named Bill Sherwood. Bill was a great mentor. He had been doing it for a long time. He said, “If you want this job and eventually want to be a GC, go be in a law firm for 7 or 8 years. Understand the law as best you can. Have as diverse a background as you could possibly get.
GCs must understand the law as the best they can and have a diverse background as they can possibly get. Share on XDo as much as you can. Litigate. Do contracts. Do research briefs. Do everything that you can do, because in a GC role, they throw everything at you and you never know what’s going to come through the door.” I took that advice as gospel. I ended up going to a law firm for almost exactly seven years from the time that I graduated. I then took my first role at DaVita.
What kind of work did you do at the firm?
Mostly healthcare. My first firm was very focused on hospital work. They were in-house and out-of-house counsel for the hospital system there in Cheyenne. I then did some physician practice work and some other things. Outside of that, I did a lot of litigation, family law, cow cases, oil and gas, and trust in estates. You name it.
That firm covered a little bit of everything as a smaller practice in the state of Wyoming. You have to cover a little bit of everything. As an associate, it teaches you to figure out what you need to know about that area of law or that area of the world very quickly and try to be efficient at it. That skillset has been great as I’ve switched between various areas of healthcare as well.
It’s perfect training for becoming a GC. The role at DaVita was a mini GC role?
It was. My firm merged with a larger firm. I didn’t want to work for big law. I was at a point where I either had to make the decision to go work there or find other opportunities. I happened to find a message from a recruiter at DaVita. They were right down the street. I was in downtown Denver, so it was close by. I was the youngest attorney they had ever hired at the time, I believe. I was somewhere in the ballpark of the 30th or 33rd attorney. By the time I left, there were 150 or so, and a very large department.
It’s incredible how large they grew after I was there. What did you learn in that role?
Everything. I learned how to be a lawyer, a mentor, and a manager. I don’t think lawyers have a natural skillset to mentor other people or deal with interpersonal issues in people. When I got there, it was two separate, smaller divisions that I was covering. It was a lot of legal work. I was learning about dialysis and the way they did things from an operations perspective. You’re deep diving into the business.
As an outside counsel or law firm lawyer, you see one piece of something. They find something internally, and they want you to research that issue and give them your opinion on it. This is to understand how the business works and find legal solutions to help them get to an end goal. That was where I started my love for being in-house.
Gradually, I moved up in the organization. Somebody you know very closely, Karen Weekly, was my boss at the time. Karen got me into a bunch of different things. I went through a bunch of the training that the operators were going through. They have a DaVita way of management and a DaVita way of team. No other lawyer had ever gone through that before I started doing that. I did it because I enjoyed my operators, and I wanted to learn more about the way they thought. It was a great training ground on the psychology of being in-house and how it works between the people in those practices. It gives you empathy for your clients that I don’t think I would’ve gotten otherwise. That was super helpful to me.
Any surprises in stepping into the role?
Some of the surprises that come up are how much they count on you as the lawyer to help them make those decisions. It’s easy for anybody to say, especially lawyers are the worst at this, of, “If these are the facts, then this is the solution that I think you should take,” or, “If these are the facts, then this is it, but I’m going to wash my hands of the decision that you make.”
When you’re in-house, you don’t get to make that call. Especially as the GC, you don’t get to say, “You guys make the call. It’s this or that.” You have to help them get to the right solution. The great thing about healthcare is that there’s a lot of gray area. Doing the right thing for the patient and for the business is usually the right answer from a legal perspective. As long as you have a True North and good person perspective, you could do well in healthcare, for sure.
That’s great. DaVita continues to be a great training ground for in-house lawyers and executives. Many people from there have gone on to be CEOs of healthcare companies. We called it spreading ripples. It’s a real thing.
I have two former DaVitans at my current location. I helped recruit them for that reason. It’s a great training ground for multi-site operations and for being a good person and a good leader. It’s a great place for that.
How DaVita Brought Bart To His First GC Role
Take me through your personal career trajectory at DaVita and how that led to your first GC role.
I started out in two separate divisions underneath what they called a group general counsel. I was learning the business. There was a need in Southern California. They lost their group general counsel and were lost. They had a new leader. I got an apartment in Southern California and started spending some time there.
Where?
In Orange County, in Irvine. I got to dig into the business. That was when I started doing the leadership training and all of that. I got my chops of understanding the business and doing what’s right by the business. Karen came on as our leader of the department and promoted me to the group general counsel role. I started covering Northern California up through the Northwest part of the US.
I stayed there for 3 or 4 years. I enjoyed connecting with the leadership team, being on the overall company leadership team, listening to the issues that they were dealing with, and helping guide strategy. That, to me, was super valuable. Seeing a Fortune 200 business from a strategic perspective and having visibility to the strategy behind all of that, the legal decisions, the tough jump balls that they would go in front of the entire leadership team, and everybody would debate which way was the right way to go, was an unbelievable place to go learn.
You didn’t stay forever. What enticed you to move away?
COVID happened. We got out of the office, and then I didn’t see a huge path to continue there. There was a good leadership team. It wasn’t like a lot of people were retiring on a regular basis. When I didn’t have a path up, I at least started listening to options out there. My first job that came along was a patient transportation business that was family-owned and was trying to figure it out. They were thinking about going out for sale. They wanted their first general counsel to come in-house.
At the time, it seemed like a great idea. I thought it sounded interesting. I was managing, at the time, 35 people or so. They were a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of other great paraprofessionals and admins. It was an unbelievable team. We had a great dynamic. Everything was perfect. I had 1 semi-paralegal and 1 compliance person. They had contracts in drawers. They had contracts that nobody had access to. I had no idea what kind of legal risks they had.
It was an interesting business to walk into. I always thought, “This is going to be great. Being a general counsel is going to be so awesome. I’m going to love it.” I walk in, and I’m doing $500 settlements and trying to figure out what janitorial contracts look like. I was like, “Did I make a mistake going from this high-level strategy to being in the weeds?”
With all the resources that you had in the prior job. There, you were a little bit on your own. How did you manage through that?
I start with building blocks. One, I interview everybody in the business. I interview all of the C-Suite folks that I interact with, like, “What do you see this role doing? What was your reason for bringing a general counsel in?” It was understanding all the aspects of the business. There’s your contracts role, and then there’s your regulatory role. There’s your credentialing, safety, quality, compliance, and everything else.
I bucket all of that out and build out a spreadsheet for myself on what the roles are that I fit there. I then go through and figure out what the regulatory risks or business risks are in each of those buckets, and then figure it out from there. It’s a 6 or 9-month process of turning over a lot of stones and understanding the business as best you can. There are some dumpster fires that have been burning for some period of time when you walk into any business. You have to manage those while figuring it out. I enjoy that process.
What led you then to your next position?
That company sold. The company that purchased them had a general counsel. As the GC, you almost expect that a lot of the time, when a larger company buys you, they already have somebody in that role. I was exited shortly after that. I took my next job in Austin in dermatology, completely switching industries, but with multi-site operations. There were some former DaVita folks there. That was a natural fit for me from a next physician perspective.
Bart’s Current Work At Unio Health Partners
Tell me about your role.
I left there after about a year, and I came out to California. I’ve been here for almost two years. I’m with a company called Unio Health Partners. It’s a management services organization for a gastroenterology and urology practice. There is a little bit of radiation oncology and a lot of ancillary businesses underneath that. We’re a management services organization.
I was the second C-Suite hire. They were at a three-year point where the business had stopped growing. They wanted to bring in a new leadership team, so they hired the HR person and the lawyer, and then they brought in everybody else. The COO, Chief Development Officer, and CEO all came in after me. I had to have faith with the hiring group that they were going to hire somebody that I wanted to work with, and that it was going to be a good fit.
Mike, the CEO that they hired, has been awesome. He came in five months after I did and has brought the team together. He’s very DaVitan in the way that he manages and his philosophies around leadership. He has us reading books like I did when I was at DaVita about leadership and management. He’s creating a culture in the business. It has been great.
What are some of your favorites?
Amy Cuddy has a book. The name of it escapes me, but it’s about leadership. It is one of my favorite books to read. It’s not one that we read here, but it was one that I read when I was at DaVita. The philosophies behind having purpose behind what you do have been transformational in my leadership, for sure.
Having a real purpose behind your work is transformational for any leadership. Share on XWhat does your department look like?
I have a vice president and assistant general counsel who manages a lot of the legal stuff with me. I have a compliance officer who handles most of the compliance roles. I have a risk quality and safety manager and a payer contracting manager below them. That’s it.
Do you have payer contracting from a business negotiation standpoint?
From drafting and business negotiations. It’s interesting because I’ve never had to manage that before. I’ve touched payer contracting in previous roles, but not managing it at this level at a physician practice. It’s been an interesting road to get there.
How many states do you guys operate in?
California. We’re 110 physicians, 200 total providers, and 55 sites.
Are you looking to expand?
Yeah. I can’t disclose anything about that, but we’re looking to expand.
Understanding How Multi-Site Operations Work
That’s great. When you look back over your career thus far, because you’re right in the middle of it, what are the inflection points that you think were a real accelerator to getting you on your path to where you are?
For me, it was going to DaVita and understanding the business and how multi-site operations work. A lot of lawyers get into the business of being lawyers. They want to just go do the contract and help you figure out things from a legal perspective. From my perspective, in being a general counsel, you have so much influence on so many things in a business. The way that operators talk to potential targets and the way that operators talk about the business internally can create risk for your organization.
The more that you can learn about training, the more that you can help people with tools. Everybody understands you have to take compliance training, but nobody understands why. Nobody understands that there are federal and state law penalties, and your payer contracts could get terminated if your entire organization doesn’t complete compliance training.
People understand that you can’t hand a bag of money to a doctor, but they don’t understand that if they talk about, “This person’s going to help us close out the market,” you’re creating antitrust issues, along with maybe admitting that you’re doing something inappropriate from a compliance perspective. Those are the kinds of things that, to me, have been super helpful. I learned a lot of those things going through a corporate integrity agreement at DaVita and having to deep dive into the psychology of an operator. That has been huge for me.
Going through sales and that business side has been good for me in understanding how equity works in a business and how your financials work on the backend. As a lawyer, you don’t typically get into how finance works, what the profitability of your business is, how the sale works, who the bankers are, and all of that. Going through the process once and hopefully at some point going through it again, it’s amazing how much you learn on that front as well.
Working With People You Can Genuinely Trust
Choosing that first in-house role is so important because the role that you described is not necessarily the case everywhere, where you’re truly a business partner and have that opportunity to add value in that way. Did you get lucky? Did you do things to discern? What would you recommend to others in discerning when they’re taking their first in-house role to make sure it’s going to be something that can help them develop as an attorney and as an executive?
It’s all about your manager. It’s all about who you work for or with. I had a great first manager at DaVita who helped me get visibility with people. He was very intentional about getting me to be at meetings and to have visibility in front of the operators. Eventually, I worked for Brian Stern, who you know from Radiology Partners.
Who did you work for first? We’ll give a shout-out.
David Wolff of MyEyeDr.com as a GC. Dave was a great manager. He understood the business well. He had been there for multiple years before I got there, so he was teaching me how the business worked and how, from a legal perspective, we best supported the business. Brian came in, and Brian taught me how to be a leader, how to be a manager, how to understand how operators thought, and how the business worked.
More than anything, the most important thing that I find and what I look for in any new role that I take is who the people are that you work with and the person that you work for. If you don’t like either of those groups of people, and your life will be miserable, you might as well go find somewhere else to work. I can manage a lot of things, but working for people that you don’t trust or people that you don’t have belief in is very difficult as you continue on your career.
The success of most businesses is dependent upon those people being good at their roles, especially at the GC position, so it’s very important that you vet them. It’s not just them vetting you in an interview process. It is you vetting them that it’s going to be a good fit, because you can make mistakes. If you make a mistake, it can set you back a little bit.
Improving Work With Spreadsheets And A Second Counsel
That’s great advice. Let’s shift to how you manage to do the job. There are a lot of competing priorities, people meetings, and internal and external constituents. How do you stay on top of it all?
I have a lot of tracking spreadsheets. I have a second attorney who’s been very helpful at managing something. I have my spreadsheet of all of my areas of responsibility. I say, “Here are the 3 or 4 that you’re going to manage.” Everything else is going to be on my plate, at least on an initial basis. It has been helpful to have a second counsel. What I have to do is get aligned with my manager. We have weekly one-on-ones. I say, “Here’s what is being thrown at me. I want to make sure that we are aligned, that if I focus on this and push this out, I’m going to get support.”
Inevitably, somebody’s going to be mad at you for not responding to emails. In-house, you’re going to get a hundred to 300 emails a day from everybody at the clinic level and C-suite level. From an outsider’s perspective, you have multiple contracts that are being negotiated at a given time. You’ve got transactions. Everything happens all at the same time, so prioritization and understanding how to get through things quickly are key for me. I can’t be perfect at everything, so I don’t let perfection get in the way of good.
When I was first a law firm lawyer, I remember vividly getting a contract from McKesson. McKesson sends you a 90-page agreement, and as a 1st year associate, you spend 6 hours correcting their grammar and moving things around. That doesn’t make sense to me. This limitation of liability is too high. You spend eight hours doing it. You send it back to them, and they strike out all of your red lines and say, “Either you can sign it or you can not sign it.”
You see that in the payer world as well.
That’s why you have to understand how bad the business needs that contract, whether it’s a payer contract or a vendor contract. If there’s a secondary provider and you have any leverage at all, you can negotiate very differently than you can with somebody that is take it or leave it. You have to understand that upfront, or you waste a lot of time doing those things.
That is so true. I would tell anybody tuning in who’s an in-house lawyer, “Anytime you get a contract review, there are a bunch of questions that you have to ask upfront for context. You can’t start marking it up.” I need to remind myself of that.
I have a basic list of things that I want the operators to manage first before they send it to me, like, “Who are the parties? What is the payment? Have you negotiated that rate at all?” There are some other basics, like, “If you talked about how this is going to work, do you have SLAs for them to be able to hold them if the contract fails?”
Most of the time, when you get a vendor contract, they don’t want any requirements on their side. What I have trained them on is, “Go out and figure out what the things are that you need to happen in the contract and negotiate that stuff upfront before you send it to me. Otherwise, it’s going to slow down this process because then, I have to go to you and figure out what those things are, and I have to go back to the vendor.” That’s been super helpful for me, too.
That’s great. It has helped me help you, because what do the business people want? They want speed of execution. You’re teaching them how to speed things up.
Sometimes, you have to take a risk. Sometimes, there are contract clauses that you, in an ideal world, would never agree to. You have to understand that from a business perspective, sometimes, you have to agree to it and hope that nothing goes wrong. It’s very few. It’s 1% of contracts that ever have a major issue in them. You hope that reasonable people can come to a termination agreement at the end, but on occasion, there is enough risk that you have to push back.
I feel like I’m always on that side of things, maybe because I haven’t worked for McKesson or a payer where it’s like, “This is the contract. Take it or leave it.”
Years later, I had McKesson send me a contract. There were three other vendors that were slightly cheaper and provided the exact same contract. I knew those McKesson lawyers very well, so I set up a call on the first day and said, “This is going to be the one agreement where I’m going to redline it, and you guys are going to accept every single change that I made.” Their faces were like, “Oh.”
How To Gain People’s Trust As A Leader
They’re like, “I’m not used to that.” There were times in the payer world working for DaVita with some of the most satisfying work because there had to be a negotiation, which a lot of the payers weren’t used to. How do you manage the competing demands of being a legal advisor, a business partner, and a corporate leader?
That’s a very philosophical, deep question. I always look at my True North of being a good person. For me, if you do the right things from a business perspective, you do the right things because the people that are underneath you who look up to you as a leader see that you’re doing the right thing. It’s not necessarily the right thing from a business perspective, like, “I’m going to make $5 million on this contract.” If you do the right thing, everybody else has trust and belief in you as a leader.
If you do the right thing, everybody will trust and believe in you as a leader. Share on XMy approach has always been to treat everybody as if they’re a patient in your clinic. That’s why I do this. The only reason I decided to be in healthcare is that it is so important. People are at their most vulnerable when they have to go to a hospital or to a physician’s practice, where they have to subject themselves to our American healthcare system, which can be tough at times. I always like to look at it from a leader perspective, a business perspective, and everything else. It’s like, “How do I best serve the patient?” As long as you view the world that way, you can usually find yourself in the right way from a regulatory and a legal perspective as well.
It’s so true. I can’t help but think that the lawyers can do even more to put themselves in the shoes of the patient. They walk in and get an iPad with nineteen pages of documents to sign in order to be seen by the doctor as a patient and as a father of daughters. A couple of them are of legal age, where they’re going and signing their own documents. You start to think, “How can we make this fairer and hospitable to our patients?” We’re in a position where we could do that rather than continuing the status quo. Any thoughts on that?
The state of California, God love them, is a very difficult state to operate any business. From a regulatory perspective, you balance that same thing with, “I have 25 requirements that I have to put in the intake of paperwork. Otherwise, I can’t collect the amount of money that we’re going to charge them for it.” The system does not lend itself to being easy for the patient in any way, and it’s not easy for the doctor to be in the middle.
That’s why being in an MSO, to me, is such a great place because we can allow the physicians not to deal with this stuff. They’re used to going out and saying, “How much money am I owed? Is this MA unhappy? What’s going on?” We can manage all of that stuff for them and let them do their work. We can manage all of that stuff and manage all of the disruptive patients or the other problems that they may have. We can take that stress off of them for them to be able to continue to provide great care to the patients.
That’s well said. It’s enough for us to deal with that stuff. I can’t imagine anybody who went to medical school with the hope of spending a lot of time doing reimbursement.
See the reimbursement rates over the last couple of years. In independent physician practice, the rate is steadily decreasing. Every year, you have to pay your staff more, you’re getting cuts from Medicare, and you have to pay for increased rent and everything else. It’s more difficult now than any other time to be in an independent model than it is to go work for one of the big players, like Kaiser, UCSD, or something, because you don’t ever have to deal with it. You get your paycheck and go home. Being an independent practice is difficult.
With that squeeze that you’re describing, what’s the way out?
I’m going to put my business development hat on. I would say to join a practice that can help you. A platform like ours is a larger group of physicians who join together. We get better contract rates. That’s not the only reason to do it, but when you have the resources to be able to get pulled off of you and share some of those legal, RCM, and all the other expenses that those physicians have across 100 people, it becomes a little bit cheaper than doing it on your own. My view is that unless you’re going to join a larger practice, it’s very difficult to do it on your own.
Especially with all the changes in technology and the investments necessary to take advantage of what’s coming down the pike, AI and otherwise.
When we get into these small physician practices, they’ve never had a lawyer. If they ever needed a lawyer, it was, “Go negotiate this payer contract or deal with the sale of my practice.” They’re not talking to them on a regular basis. Their paperwork doesn’t comply with state law. Their thought process doesn’t comply with federal law. The business of healthcare is so complex that doing it on your own is practically impossible. I was going to say something to your point about AI.
That’s where I was going to go next.
Why Every GC Should Use GC AI
The other one that’s been helping me a lot is a business called GC AI. I was on LinkedIn one day and saw a message from Ashton Kutcher that said, “If you’re a general counsel, everybody should be using this platform.” I thought to myself, “What does Ashton Kutcher know about becoming a general counsel in any fashion? Why would I listen to him?” I clicked on the button anyway.
It gives you a free seven-day trial. I tried it, and I tried it in weird ways. I was like, “Tell me something about California law that was very specific,” and the answer was pretty good. I’ve been using it for six months. It’s not perfect. You can’t say, “Take these 5 contracts and blend them into 1.” It’s not going to get you to that level yet, but you can use it for the day-to-day, “Draft this letter.” You can add in the document and say, “Send a termination letter for this,” and it will draft it for you. You can copy and paste it into Word and get it out. The simplicity of it cuts out probably 5 or 6 hours a week for me.
It’s crazy. Not that this is going to be a commercial for GC AI, but I use it as well. I’m familiar with it. It’s a real game-changer with what you referred to earlier, when you’re coming up in your career and you’re expected to know something about everything. How do you become a super learner in that regard? I see tools like GC AI helping the human who’s using it get up to speed quickly, not as a replacement, but as a tool. I think it’s got a lot of potential.
I agree with you. I hope that the law firm model adopts it at some point in the near future, and it becomes more efficient to send things outside. As you’re aware, there are things from a regulatory perspective of me as a GC saying it’s fine or I think it’s fine is not going to hold weight if it’s ever looked at. You have to go to your outside counsel and get an opinion about this. They’re still spending the same amount of time, doing the same amount of research, and drafting a ten-page letter, versus being able to use that platform and a platform similar to that as a starting point to be able to speed up that process. I haven’t seen that adoption from people.
We’re using it at my firm. We act as outside GCs to healthcare companies. We have the same incentives as you do in your role of doing that more efficiently, making sure we’re not missing something. In the hands of an experienced practitioner, it provides great leverage.
I 100% agree.
Getting To Know Your Business People Better
That’s great. I would say you’re mid-career, right?
I’m hoping end of career.
My point is, you still have a lot of potential to go, but here you are. Looking back, if you could talk to a younger Bart Peach when you’re at the law firm, looking to move in-house, and someday wanting to be a GC, what advice would you give yourself?
“Get to know your business people better. If you’re at a law firm and you can do it for free, go sit in the business offices and understand what everybody in that C-Suite does. Go interview your business. Until you understand what they do, you can’t give them good advice.” In my opinion, that process leads to you understanding the business better, which will suit you very well in going into that role.
In an interview, to be able to get it, you can’t just say, “I’m great at being a lawyer.” Everybody could say that. In an ideal world, everybody could say that. You can’t say, “I understand how this role interacts with finance. I understand how the finances of your business work. Let me tell you how I can help you on that front.” Those are the things that, from my personal experience, have changed the way that interviewers look at me in taking new jobs.
To your point, I’m a little younger than most people I know. You started this very young as well. They tend to discount you when you don’t have as many gray hairs as some other candidates. It’s great to have that level of experience and to understand the business better than others. You may get in when you otherwise wouldn’t.
What Bart Loves To Do Outside Work
That’s great advice. What do you like to do when you’re not a GC?
I chase a toddler around most days. That’s pretty much my full-time role. I used to play a lot of golf, do a lot of hiking, and try to get out and enjoy nature, but these days, it’s mostly doing whatever he wants to do. It’s a lot of painting and a lot of cleaning up.
Are you in Orange County?
I’m in LA. I’m in Redondo Beach.
Achieving True Work-Life Balance As A GC
South Bay. That’s a great place to be. What are you most looking forward to?
For me, professionally, what I want to do is get into a role where I can go help the businesses that haven’t had a GC before and help organize them. Doing this more than a few times, there are so many things that you can fast-track to organize your business and help cut out 50% or 70% of the risks that small businesses that don’t have a GC have. My goal is eventually to get into a consulting role or get into something similar to what you do. I want to come in and help out with high-level risk issues, and then, hopefully, if they do decide that they want their first general counsel, get them organized.
I’ve walked into a bunch of dumpster fires. It would be nice to have one where they go, “Here’s where all the contracts are, and here’s the software that we use to manage them.” It would be nice to have that baseline when you walk in. From a transition perspective, the value to any business would be so much more than what it would cost you to create that system up front and have it ready for the GC. It will bring their stress levels down by half over the first nine months of the role.
That’s super interesting. I have a lot of desire to have a follow-up conversation with you about our checklists and continue to build that out. I share that. That’s what GeneralCounselWest is about for companies that don’t yet have a GC. When they hire their first GC, somebody is inheriting something rather than creating it from scratch.
I don’t want to give away the special sauce too much, but I do something called a Future Sale Roadmap. I say, “If your sale is 3 to 5 years from now, here’s the process.” Most people don’t understand what that process looks like. It’s like, “You have to do this, and then you go to HSR, and then you have to go through OCA in California.” People don’t understand what that does.
What that does is, upfront, it lets them know what their risks are when the sale happens at some point down the road around communication, document tracking, all your HR records, and everything else. It gets your entire C-Suite and your organization aligned with, “At some point, we’re going to have to organize all of this stuff and present it to the buyer.” For me, it has been hugely helpful in the last couple of roles.
I think it was Gandhi, but we probably think of a certain CEO at a certain dialysis company who would always hammer home, “Begin with the end in mind.” It’s true in so many ways.
It’s hard to do. It’s so difficult for anybody in an organization. I look at the people on my team. They come in, and you’re trying to learn the business. There are 1,000 things coming on your plate and 100 emails a day. It’s so easy to get caught up in chasing cars every day versus sticking your head up and saying, “How am I going to move this business forward? What is valuable to the business long-term for me to be able to do?” Setting clear goals has been something that I learned at DaVita and was forced to do, which has been so unbelievably helpful for me when I’m in a GC role by myself.
That was the drumbeat. How are you being proactive? Are you carving out time on your calendar for that? If you’re not, you’re never going to get to it.
You can work 24 hours a day, you can work 12 hours a day, or you can work 8 or 9 efficient hours a day and be okay. For most people, it becomes overwhelming, especially when you get into a new GC role, because there’s so much. It’s very easy to work 10 to 12-hour days. If you have a family like I do, it’s practically impossible. You cannot keep up with twelve-hour days and keep your family happy at home. You can’t do it.
Not for very long.
I had an opportunity come up. The CEO told me, “It’s going to be like a seven-year slog, but there’s a huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Right now, we’re working 80 to 100 hours a week, and I’m seeing my kids for 4 hours on the weekends.” I’m like, “I like money. Everybody likes to be comfortable from a financial perspective, but it’s not worth what that would do to my family for that amount of money. I’ll make it in other ways.” It’s prioritizing yourself, your health, your family, your faith, and everything else. It’s extremely important for you to show up in an authentic way at work as well.
Prioritize yourself, your health, your family, your faith, and everything else. It is extremely important for any leader to show up at work in an authentic way. Share on XWe’re very like-minded. I appreciate your sharing that. More people need to read it. Being a high-performing GC in an important role does not mean that you have to sacrifice. Everything else should not mean that you have to sacrifice anything else. If it does, you’re doing it wrong.
What you have always heard from law firm folks that come in-house is, “I’m working too hard. I’m doing too much. I want to go in-house and take an easier job.” I can tell you it’s as busy in-house if you allow it to be. It’s as busy in-house as it is being a law firm lawyer. Understanding how to become efficient and how to manage your role in the right way upfront will save you years of gray hairs.
Unintentionally, you’re putting a plug in for my Inside Counsel Academy business. That’s exactly what we try to do. We try to help people be more effective and efficient in that role because I’ve seen it can take over your whole life. If you aren’t paying attention, years can pass, and you’re not where you want to be. Beginning with the end in mind and all those good things is super important in the in-house context. It is not something we’re trained for in law school, a law firm, or otherwise. Thank you for that. It’s been a real pleasure having you on. Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me on. This is great.
‐‐‐
Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed our time with Bart Peach. I know I did. A few key things I’ll take from this episode are, number one, embrace change and efficiency. Be open to leveraging new technologies like AI to help support the quality of your work as well as your own sustainability. Number two, only work for people you trust. That’s important in any role, but especially when you’re serving as someone’s general counsel.
Number three, until you understand your client’s motivations, their fears, and their business, you can’t provide world-class advice. Be willing to invest the time with them so you truly understand. Until next time, this is the show. For more tips on accelerating your path to becoming a world-class general counsel, subscribe to my newsletter at InsideCounselAcademy.com and connect with me directly on LinkedIn. Thank you.
Important Links
About Bart Peach
Bart Peach serves as General Counsel at Unio Health Partners, bringing almost 20 years of experience in the healthcare services industry. Bart brings deep experience in contracting and contract management, structuring acquisitions, litigation and dispute management, compliance program development and implementation, as well as general legal department leadership and management in complex organizations.
Prior to joining Unio in February 2024, Bart served as legal counsel for several other organizations including DaVita, Veyo, and Epiphany Dermatology after spending his primary years solving regulatory and transactional issues in healthcare-focused law firms.