Willamette Lawyer | Fall 2004 • Vol. IV, No. 2

Lisa Murkowski - An Advocate for Alaska: U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski JD’85 demonstrates she can stand the heat in the Senate’s pressure cooker.

Fall 2004 A L U M N I P R O F I L E S : L AW I N T H E C O U RT R O O M L O N G - D I S TA N C E L AW Y E R T im Lamb JD’83 was born in Seattle during his family’s brief break from Alaska, but was brought to Anchorage while he was still an infant. So, except for a few months in Seattle (that he doesn’t remember at all) and three years he spent at Willamette Law (that he remembers quite fondly), Lamb is a lifelong Alaskan. He is a partner in the Anchorage firm of Delaney Wiles Hayes Gerety Ellis & Young, specializing in civil litigation defending medical malpractice cases, as well as the ski industry and occasionally the State of Alaska. But when he isn’t in the office or in a courtroom, he’s on a bicycle. “When the trials are out of town, I’ll take my bike with me,” says Lamb. “For the fire trial*, it was really long so I actually took my elliptical trainer and put it in a separate motel room with a big fan. It was really fun.” The multi-day road races he participates in (such as the Denali Classic, which he’s won 13 times), Lamb likens to chess games or trials on wheels. “They are somewhat like trials,” he says. “You prepare, you prepare, you prepare, and then you have a very short period in which you do it, and there’s strategy.” Lamb has had a sports-law connection since he was a teenager competing in ski racing when his coach was the husband of Mary Hughes JD’74, a principal of *The February-April 2003 trial in the Millers Reach class action suit against Alaska’s Division of Forestry, which the defense won. the firm Hughes Thorsness Gantz Powell & Brundin. Other family friends were lawyers and judges and when Lamb began soliciting opinions on law schools, Willamette was the name most mentioned. “A lot of people whom I thought highly of spoke real well of Willamette, and particularly the litigation program there, the trial program, the moot court,” he says. But of course the bike-friendly environment of Salem figured prominently in his decision: “I wanted somewhere I could ride bikes and not get run over. We’d go toward Portland, take the ferry across the river, come back the other side of the river and into town over the main bridge. Or we’d go south into the farmlands, do a big loop and come back on the road by the park.” Lamb is married to Sabrina HillLamb, whom he met while he was competing as a ski racer for the University of Alaska at Anchorage. His wife is also a bike rider. Their two sons, aged five and 12, are both avid skiers. Lamb says his passion for sports and fitness serves him well in his work as a trial lawyer. “It actually takes physical endurance to make it through a six- to 10week trial.” As with bicycle road racing, not just anybody can go the distance. – Susan G. Hauser 32 Did you know … • Alaska has been inhabited by human beings • In 1964, Anchorage suffered a 9.2 quake • The four-foot diameter pipe of the Trans for at least 30,000 years. (larger than San Francisco’s 1906 quake) in which the earth heaved for a full five minutes, creating 10-foot drops in soil level at the epicenter and leaving 100 people dead and 4,000 homeless. Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), carries crude oil 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, crossing the Brooks, Alaska and Chugach mountain ranges and 34 major rivers and streams and nearly 500 others.