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We're declaring it "Lagerweek" here at The Striker. Today, we pick up where we left off on Monday. Garth Lagerwey is on his way out at MLS and on his way into law school.
Garth Lagerwey left MLS after five seasons, 51 starts, seven clean sheets and an all-time best record in running shootouts. Once the 2000 season ended, his time with the Miami Fusion did too. Lagerwey moved onto law school.
The Duke grad found a spot at Georgetown University, a prestigious private university in Washington, D.C., and graduated with his JD in 2004. He joined the Corporate Department of Latham & Watkins’ D.C. office as an associate.
If you’re like me, you might have heard of Latham & Watkins in passing. If you’re a lawyer, you’ve absolutely heard of Latham & Watkins. And if you’ve existed in the past 50-odd years or so, your life has likely been touched in some way by the actions of this comically massive law firm.
Latham & Watkins currently features nearly 3,000 attorneys across 28 offices and reportedly amassed nearly $5.5 billion in revenue in 2021. Not a bad year for the second-largest law firm in the world. But, as big as it is, I’m willing to bet that over the history of one of the world’s largest law firms that there’s never been another employee biding their time at Latham for a bit so they could get back to MLS.
“It was evident, that he was a Soccer Guy in a way that is different from someone like me,” Latham partner and fund formation lawyer Barton Clark said. “I like soccer and follow the sport reasonably closely, but Garth came to build skills to return to what I'll call ‘Soccerland’ and sort of knew that he didn't come to Latham thinking he would make partner and be the managing partner of the firm someday 20 years later. He was like, 'I'm here. There are skills that are of value and they will help me.'”
Lagerwey cites Clark as a key mentor during his return trip to Soccerland. The two bonded over the sport and the fact that Lagerwey came to Latham determined to use his success at the firm as a catalyst for success later on.
“Normally to me as a supervisor, that's a red flag," Clark noted. "Because I don't have time to train people that leave and do something else. Then I'm gonna roll that boulder up the hill again with the next person. People with that in mind tend to not be that focused or dedicated. And Garth was able to say, ‘Well, I'm not here forever, but I'm here for several years at least. And while I'm here, I'm giving you 110%, coach.’ He made it makes sense for me to invest in him even knowing he was never going to be long as a lawyer. And he was able to be pretty effective."
A good associate can be handed projects and clients without the folks in charge having to worry. If someone like Clark is getting a call from a client and saying, “Well, Garth looked over this, but do you mind taking a peek, too?” then things probably aren’t going too well. But that wasn't the case with Lagerwey.
In fact, the biggest question he might have received about Lagerwey at Latham came when Lagerwey left to take over Real Salt Lake’s general manager position.
“One person actually asked me, ‘Are you gonna find a new Garth?’ The answer is I'm not. Someone else will do it their way,” Clark said. “No client who's paying a law firm like ours for services builds that much affection just because someone is a nice guy or that they're funny. That's kind of a window dressing. You have to be effective and provide value for money.”
Lagerwey often proved his value while finding ways to build a bridge back to Soccerland. He moonlighted as a broadcaster with D.C. United and New England from time to time, but he’d also find ways to be involved with projects that fit within his goals for his next career move.
One of those projects led directly to that move. Dave Checketts, then the owner of Real Salt Lake and the NHL’s St. Louis Blues, had been looking to offload a portion of the Blues. A client interested in buying that portion went to Latham & Watkins to help facilitate the deal. Lagerwey, of course, found a way to get involved.
Through Lagerway’s interactions with Checketts during the deal, a relationship grew. When Lagerwey applied for RSL’s general manager position, Checketts already knew and trusted him. Of course, it helps that Lagerwey is a decent interview.
"I'm pleased to announce after more interviews than I've done with any position, and interviews with people literally around the world, we've selected the next (general) manager of Real Salt Lake," Checketts said at the time. Sounds familiar, right?
Lagerwey would soon take that RSL team to heights that seem hard to imagine these days. Even back then it came as a surprise. However, while at Latham, he’d already shown plenty of traits that lead to success.
“What we shared was the sense of if you're doing something, you invest the effort and you care about the quality," Clark said. "If you're being a lawyer for the paycheck, that's a long day. If you can't get any professional satisfaction out of ‘I've written this provision and it's tight, it works and if something goes wrong, I've anticipated a reaction for that’ and you're purely saying, ‘Well, they paid me X dollars to do that task,’ I don't know — I would find that pretty depressing. So I think he brought that kind of mentality with him. So maybe I was sort of instructive in saying, ‘Okay, in the context of the law, how do we actually implement that?’”
Lagerwey would soon implement all of those lessons he learned at Latham into creating a golden era for RSL and the most successful run of form for any club in MLS history at Seattle. Now, he’ll look to build on that in Atlanta. According to Clark, all of it, everything he did to return to Soccerland and what he did once he got back, is part of a desire to change the landscape of the sport for the better.
“That was sort of the meta goal behind the Garth career model," Clark recalled. "‘How do I give back to the sport and grow it? If we're not trying to win the World Cup, what are we doing?’ If you look at Garth's career ever since, that struck me as the real kind of force of gravity there. ‘How can I make these structures better?"
“No one has any idea which kid is going to turn into what we thought Freddy Adu would turn into, but you have to keep creating those opportunities and that kind of sense that you’re contributing to something bigger than yourself. And I think Garth is in Atlanta because he wants to see his head on soccer’s Mount Rushmore. He's still the kid from Illinois who's like, 'Let's do more for soccer. Let's make it a bigger thing.'”