Member Spotlight

April, 2014Article
The Primerus

For eight years in the 1980s and 1990s, Lee Dresie was the only practicing lawyer also working as an NCAA basketball coach. Looking back on it, this lifelong basketball enthusiast credits the experience with fulfilling a dream as well as making him a better lawyer. Dresie, a litigator at Primerus member firm Greenberg Glusker in Los Angeles, California, worked from 1985 to 1994 as the junior varsity and assistant varsity basketball coach at Claremont McKenna College, a highly selective liberal arts college just outside of Los Angeles. When he started coaching at Claremont, he was a junior attorney in his third year at Greenberg Glusker.  “Coaching helped me as a lawyer,” said Dresie. “As a litigator, I need to get up and persuade people. I found that having to coach 12 intelligent 20-year-olds every day in practice and in games essentially was a public speaking class day after day. I found that going into court and arguing a motion to a judge or a case to a jury was much easier. The fear of public speaking that we all have when we start in this job totally disappeared.”