About Lex Larson

My earliest encounter with the Workers' Compensation treatise came in 1952, when I was but twelve years old growing up in Ithaca, New York. My dad, Arthur Larson, was then a professor at Cornell Law School and was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript of what was to be a two-volume treatise. He had engaged my sister Anna and me to collate copies of the manuscript, for which we were paid ten cents an hour. (I presume this was at or above the minimum wage of the time!)

During my dad's years in high level posts with the Eisenhower Administration, I was studying at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. Looking back, I'll have to say that as a teenager I didn't pay adequate attention to the parade of cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, ambassadors, and other dignitaries who from time to time graced our home on Ordway Street.

I decided to go to Deep Springs College, a small unconventional college in eastern California. The headmaster and others at St. Albans were really upset with me, since I was turning down Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Cornell. Everybody called me into their offices and tried to get me to change my mind. From the point of view of coursework, Deep Springs did turn out to be a bit of a mixed bag, but as an experience it was unforgettable. I finished college at Haverford, graduating with a B.A. in mathematics in 1962, and went on to get my law degree from Harvard in 1965.

During the next fourteen years I married, had two fine sons, Ken and Mike, and practiced law with the Washington D.C. office of a major New York firm, first as an associate and later as a partner. In the late Seventies, severe upheavals in the office caused me to rethink my professional future, and prompted my move to teaching and writing. My dad had in the meantime written two more treatises (the Workers' Compensation Desk Edition, and Employment Discrimination), and was having a great deal of difficulty keeping them up. So I moved to Durham, North Carolina and plunged into the books, as well as joining the adjunct faculty of Duke Law School.

Since then I've remarried, to Kathy Myers, and had two more wonderful sons, Ben and Peter, for a total of four. In addition to working on my dad's books I wrote two treatises of my own, Unjust Dismissaland Employment Screening. I serve as President of Employment Law Research, Inc., which has a staff of seven full-time attorneys and which among other things contributes to the upkeep of the five treatises.

By 1991 I had officially assumed authorship of all the treatises, my dad being eighty years old at the time. Nonetheless, he continued to work actively on the workers'compensation sets until about a week before his deathin March 1993. He seemed to love these books almost as if they were his children. Many times in those last years he expressed his gratitude that the books would continue in the family.

More recently I've pursued an interest in mediation and other forms of alternative dispute resolution. Both my stint with law practice and my divorce experience left me disillusioned with the way our legal system traditionally handles disputes. So many times the lawyers made things worse rather than better. What pray tell is wrong with the idea, instead of fighting a battle, of trying to work things out? So I'm back in the world of litigation in a different role - that of peacemaker. I'm certified by the State of North Carolina as a mediator in the Superior Court program, and I do Industrial Commission mediations, volunteer mediations, and mediation training as well. In addition I've been a member of the Board of Directors of the Durham Dispute Settlement Center. I've moved from guitar lessons to old time banjo lessons again, and now and then I play some tennis. I am ever grateful for the diverse and interesting professional life which brings with it so many rewarding relationships with attorneys and others here in North Carolina and around the country.

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