Whether your desire to practice law was due in part to a familial connection with another attorney or was an after-thought after college, earning that J.D., then becoming licensed to practice law took tremendous effort, time and financial investment.
However, despite the commitment it took to become lawyers, there are attorneys for whom practicing law is simply not challenging enough. In the case of Dr. Richard Lavely, becoming an attorney came later in life after he enjoyed more than two decades practicing emergency medicine. If there ever was a person who epitomized the successful juggling of different careers, that person is Lavely.
By the time he turned 45, he had successfully earned an MD, a JD, a MPH (Masters in Public Health) and an MBA. Harvard and Yale were among the educational institutions from which he graduated, so his intellectual pursuits were not cakewalks. Lavely trained to be an orthopedic surgeon and was fortunate to be chosen for a prestigious post at Yale Medical School.
He was selected to work in the up-and-coming field of Emergency Medicine, an opportunity he found challenging and incredibly enjoyable. Still, he says he was frustrated with how patients received their medical care. After two decades working at Yale’s ER, Lavely quit.
He says his Yale professors and others had told him a busy, stress-filled ER was not the place for a doctor once they reached 50, and that milestone was creeping up on him. “When I turned 48, I started to see they were right. You get sued a lot, there is a lot of walking and a lot of pressure,” he says.
Lavely left to open an urgent care facility in downtown New Haven that competed directly with Yale’s emergency room. “Through my MBA training, I learned how to run a small business,” he says. That endeavor proved incredibly successful because Lavely developed a system for servicing patients accurately and efficiently. His clinic saw what he calls “the walking wounded” as well as people with workmans compensation and Social Security Disability claims.
When an employee inflicted a wound on herself but blamed Lavely, he decided he needed a legal education to combat such scenarios. Fortunately, the woman’s claims were disproved without criminal charges being filed against Lavely, although the scenario took a few years to finally conclude. He told very few people he had been attending law school at the University of Connecticut, he says explaining he would just leave the clinic to attend classes and no one was the wiser.
He took and passed the Connecticut bar in 1995, which he called “the hardest test I ever took.” One day, he received a phone call that would change his life. An ER physician contacted Lavely to tell him he had created a website, then known as EMedicine.com, that overflowed with information relating to emergency medicine. That doctor sought Lavely’s assistance to further the depth and reach of the site and Lavely agreed.
The turning point of the site was 9/11. Soon after those deadly terrorist attacks, the scare of anthrax had Americans horrified. According to Lavely, CNN placed a ticker tape at the bottom of their screen advising viewers to surf to EMedicine.com for further information about anthrax. Not surprisingly, traffic to the site exploded.
Although visits dipped in early 2002, suddenly the site’s numbers were off the charts. People came to the site to research all types of medical conditions, and the site’s popularity grew. In 2006, Lavely and his business partner sold the site to WebMD for $25 million.
Despite his riches, Lavely continued to make waves in various sectors of society. He became counsel for an ER doc who claimed he was subject to a hostile work environment because he uncovered drug trafficking on a nearby Indian reservation. Not only was Lavely’s representation of Dr. Peter Plasse successful, the discovery led to a full-blown investigation in the U.S. Senate in 2010.
As a professional who has toiled in business, medicine and law, Lavely says it is other lawyers who have expressed skepticism about his ability to succeed in both law and other careers. In general, he says, lawyers seem to think no one can do the work they do. However, he says he didn’t feel that same animosity from other medical professionals.
Since 2013, Lavely has been president of The Tom Dooley Foundation, an organization whose mission is to provide medical services to Third World countries. He is also hard at work creating what he calls an “EMedicine-on-steroids” website that will allow users to tap into Artificial Intelligence to diagnose and treat various medical ailments. “Ninety percent of people who go to ER don’t need to go there,” he says.
Tami Kamin Meyer is an Ohio attorney and writer who is also Chair of the Marketing Committee of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.