Chief Operating Officer, Hale & Mercer LLP · Former U.S. Army logistics officer · Team Rubicon volunteer
Chicago · Hale & Mercer LLP · 911+ connections
I keep Hale & Mercer running on time, on budget, and without drama. A promise to a client is a logistics problem: I make sure we can keep it. That means the people, the space, the systems and the client portal all show up every day, the way 4,000 soldiers' supplies once had to.
Bridgeport born, union electrician's son, Purdue engineer, Kellogg MBA, two deployments as a logistics officer. I delivered the firm's 2022 office move on a Friday night so that not one client meeting was cancelled.
Off duty: a 1972 Chevrolet C10 that was a rust bucket in 2016, Shaker furniture in the garage (every conference table in the firm is mine), and a book a week on military logistics, which I admit is a niche.
September same-day callback rate: 99.4%. Every client who called the firm heard back from their lawyer the same day, except during one snowstorm in Duluth, which I am counting as an act of God and Elena is counting as an excuse.
The client portal now handles document upload, e-signature, invoices and appointments, and every click writes an audit entry. We built it because 'the client should always be able to reach us' is not a slogan, it's a systems requirement. Four years in, 94% of our clients use it monthly.
And every invoice in it shows the name of the person who did the work. That was the whole point.
Audit entry on every click is the right design. Says the IP lawyer who reviews the logs.
Spent my vacation week with Team Rubicon mucking out basements in Vermont after the floods. Logistics is logistics: who needs what, where, by when. Grateful to work for a firm that treats those days as the point, not the exception.
The firm is grateful to have someone who can run a flood response and a copier contract with the same calm.
Operations, technology, facilities, the client portal programme, and the same-day callback metric. 62 people, one office, zero cancelled meetings during the 2022 move.
Took a 200-person firm through two office moves and one systems migration. Learned that lawyers are easier to move than their files.
Two deployments. 4,000 people needed what they needed every single day. They got it.
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, M.B.A., 2014
Purdue University, B.S. Industrial Engineering, 2003
It's an excuse. 99.4 is still the best number in the city.