Mark down Eric Lockridge as a supporter of women’s rights. “I’m doing my part to equalize in the battle of the sexes,” he says. “For many years, women have followed men for higher-paying jobs. My wife came here for a lower-paying job.”
Lockridge followed from Texas four years ago when his wife, Lee Ann, became an LSU law professor. Himself a commercial-litigation attorney, Eric Lockridge joined Kean Miller, narrowing his focus to bankruptcy and becoming a partner in January.
He says the corporate culture here has been like “night and day” compared with Dallas, where he watched colleagues come and go for a few extra thousand dollars or in order to join a more prestigiously perceived firm.
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“It’s like a revolving door,” he says. “Looking at Kean Miller, that just didn’t exist. The guys at the top of the food chain can only make more money if the firm makes more money. It drives the culture down below. You don’t have a lot of the egos and turf wars that you see in other professional service firms.”
On his way to bayou country, the Texas native studied at Emory University and earned a juris doctor from the University of Texas, in between serving as assistant press secretary for U.S. Sen. Paul Coverdell, a Georgia Republican. That gave Lockridge an opportunity to hone his writing ability for a politician whom he believed in but who “was as exciting as watching the grass grow,” he says. “He was an absolute technocrat. The antithesis of a Kip Holden.”
Outside of practicing law, Lockridge joined the board of directors for the Louisiana School for the Deaf Foundation near his home in the Riverbend area, where he and Lee Ann live with their 2 1/2-year-old twin girls, Eva and Sofia. He also serves on the board of Youth Oasis, which provides shelter for homeless and runaway youths and a training program for young adults.
“It teaches them how to integrate into society,” Lockridge says. “Things that I took for granted: This is how you keep an apartment, this is how you clean your sink, this is how you buy groceries. I grew up in a two-parent household; these kids don’t have that.”
Age: 36
If you could have any job other than your own, what would it be? “Rock star.”
Click here for the complete list of 2009's Forty Under 40 winners.
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