Looking Backward?

In the course of piling up a $50 million fortune, Ohio Businessman Edward Lamb has drifted farther and farther away from his first profession--the law. Last week, in a speech at the Harvard Business School, Lamb offered an explanation of sorts: "The importance and influence of the legal profession in the United States and elsewhere is rap idly declining." The lawyer, said sometime-Lawyer Lamb, is being supplanted in power and influence by the professional manager. "In my opinion, the American and international leaders of the future will come increasingly from our schools of business administration and less and less from the historical patterns of the law schools."

As an attorney, Lamb specialized in representing labor against management; he handled an occasional no-fee civil liberties case, and likes to say that he had "the largest nonpaying law practice in the U.S." But fact is, he made law pay well, earning as much as $200,000 a year. During the Depression of the '30s he invested in distress-priced stocks and real estate, and he prospered on the price recovery of the '40s. Finding that business was "less work and a lot more fun" than law, Lamb decided that "the way to build up a big fortune is to get control of companies." He now controls two dozen of them in such assorted industries as rubber tires and sugar-cane-harvesting equipment. For all his wealth, Lamb leans toward the left. At Harvard last week he urged admission of Red China into the U.N. and a "new look" at U.S. relations with Cuba.

Lawyers, Lamb told his audience, tend to spend too much time looking backward. "The complex problems of our technological society of today are being resolved by men who make decisions quickly based on facts and data quickly assembled. Last year's figures are of only historical importance as we set up profit planning against future targets. Professional managers, therefore, look forward.

"Lawyers, on the other hand, are precedent-gatherers. When a dispute comes into a lawyer's office, what does he do? He rushes to the law books and tries to find a similar case; he looks for a set of facts of a similar nature to the present issue. He then tries to persuade a modern court that it too should rely on the doctrine of stare decisis [stand by past decisions] in settling a modern, complex problem, because a judicial precedent, which may have been established a decade or a century before, has been settled in a particular way. Why should anyone attempt to guide a society by looking backwards through a rearview mirror?"

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