Patrick Lamb

By Patrick J. Lamb

As a kid, my dad used to take me to watch tradesmen work. Bricklayers, finish and rough carpenters, tile setters, electricians, and others. The point was to pick up pointers, to learn from those with more expertise than my dad could share. I was hooked at that young age on the value of learning from those with the skill and wisdom I did not have. I carry this interest with me to this day.

As the father of young kids with an interest in music, I began reading business books at the bookstore near the store where music lessons were taught. I met many people—interestingly, never any lawyers—and I read a lot of business books. I remember learning about Six Sigma in a book about Jack Welch at GE, for example. I learned about marketing and consultative selling—the idea that if you worked with a customer to solve the customer’s problem, you might end up with a lifelong friend as well as a customer, but only if what you were selling was the best solution to the customer’s problem. I found these and many other business topics fascinating, and I pondered why these approaches that worked so well in business did not apply to the business of law.

Some years later, when I bought Apple computers for my kids as they reached the appropriate age, I became fascinated with the design elegance of Apple products. And Steve Jobs became something of an icon, particularly his “make a dent in the universe comment.” As we built Valorem from a start-up and radically new model firm to a highly respected innovative company and leader in the NewLaw/NextLaw movement, my colleagues and I were inspired to make a dent, if only in the legal universe.

Science teaches us that all things evolve. Or they end. While Valorem was highly successful and had developed extraordinary brand awareness, we knew that we could never scale it. My diagnosis was that we would never have the resources and the technology to grow it sufficiently to make the dent I was interested in making. It took a while to come to terms with that limitation, and I realized I could never really accept it. At the same time, the role of a lawyer was evolving from trusted advisor to solution designer and solutions provider. The latter of these roles required scale too.

Which leads us to Elevate. Elevate Services has a brand very similar to Valorem’s—great people, a believer in the power of technology, but it also had the brand of delivering great solutions. But most of all, we saw our place in the world through the same lens: Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. Like Elevate, we were inspired to see ourselves as the young Apple of law. So we figured out how we could work together seamlessly.

And that leads us to where I am now. Still blessed with the greatest partner ever—Nicole Auerbach. Working with Liam Brown and the wonderful team at Elevate. Working together on, among many things, Jeff Carr’s moonshot—reducing the legal spend at Univar, Inc. by 50%. Combining the power of design and process improvement and project management with the tools we bring—the power of After Action Assessments, Early Case Assessments, 10 years of successfully using alternative fee arrangements, and our skills acquired as successful litigators and the builders of a champion brand, Valorem.

This leads me back to the lesson I learned from my dad—learn from others. Take what you see successful people do—in our case, successful business people, and apply those lessons daily. Business relies on solutions design, great engineering, great processes, and on careful management of work so the right things are done the right way at the right time. Applying those and other key business lessons to the delivery of legal services is precisely what ElevateNext is about.