Michael Lutgring was less than two years out of law school in 1998 when Amedisys, his employer at the time, faced bankruptcy after a drastic change to the Medicare reimbursement rules.
Founder Bill Borne convinced the company’s board that Amedisys needed to shed its other services and become a volume provider of home health care. As general counsel, Lutgring was responsible for more than 30 acquisitions and divestitures that would move the company in that new direction.
“It was baptism by fire,” he says. “It was a very steep learning curve, but I did not have time not to know. I didn’t have the benefit of being able to go out and hire outside counsel a lot of times. It was exciting; it was also scary at times. But you adapt and you learn and you do whatever it takes.”
Lutgring did have outside counsel and advisers he could lean on for the first several months with the company, but it was often his job to find the answers. One early lesson: chaos in an industry creates opportunities.
“It was a big bite to take,” he says. “It was very hard a lot of times, and there was obviously a lot of self-doubt. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world, and I’m extremely grateful that Bill took a chance on me.”
Lutgring left Amedisys in 2002 to focus on his private practice, but says he missed being part of a corporate culture; this year, he took over as corporate counsel for Albemarle.
“When you’re outside counsel, you’re obviously pulling in the same direction as your client, but you’re not a part of it. You’re not living it,” he says. “There’s something to be said about being on the team. You’re not coming in as a free agent to kick field goals at the end of the season and then go to another team … A lot of times with outside counsel, it’s ‘Yes, you can do it’ or ‘No, you can’t do it.’ When you get in a corporate environment, it’s ‘OK, how are we going to do it?’”
Age: 39
What was your first job?
“I cut grass for Big Jim’s Mobile Homes in Lafayette when I was 13 years old.”
Click here for the complete list of 2008's Forty Under 40 winners.
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