Osler's Razor

I am devoting Wednesdays to profiling my classmates in the Yale Law Class of 1990, which has turned into a pretty fascinating task!

Richard M. Lucas came to Yale Law fresh from getting a business degree at Georgetown University. I think he was pretty rare in that-- you would have expected more people to come from business school but we were mostly a bunch of History, Philosophy, and English majors.

After school, he didn't mess around; he went straight to one of the nation's leading law firms, Arnold & Porter, where he made partner. He was there for 18 years, until 2008.

Then he made a big change-- something I see in a lot of my classmates. He moved over to the business side, first for Hilton Hotels and now with Walker & Dunlap, a big commercial real estate service and finance company, where he serves as the Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary (which frankly seems like a lot of jobs to do at the same time).

I've gotta think that commercial real estate would be a challenging business right now, with office space lying empty all over the place because of the pandemic. I'm hoping that the same lessons that sent us all in different directions are serving him well now.

Richard's daughter Kate has diabetes, and he has worked for years with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation as a board member, advocate, and fund-raiser. Like many of my other classmates, he picked a cause and stuck to it-- the best way to make a difference.