Lathrop Gage, fresh off bolstering its revitalized office in Los Angeles, has hired Robert Haupt as a partner in its headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri.

Haupt, who will be a member of the Am Law 200 firm's bankruptcy, restructuring and creditors' rights team, has a somewhat unusual legal background. He comes to Lathrop Gage after selling his stake in one of the largest consumer law firms in the country.

A former real estate executive, Haupt went to law school in his mid-30s following a divorce, he said in an interview this week. Haupt used his previous business expertise to develop a bankruptcy and litigation practice in Oklahoma City, where in 2008 he joined Phillips Murrah, one of the city's largest firms.

Robert Haupt.

“I've always wanted to take my practical business experience and translate it to clients to help them solve their problems and other issues,” said Haupt, who in private practice primarily advises midsize, closely held companies in distressed situations. “I'm like an estate planning lawyer, but for businesses. What happens if your business gets this disease and dies?”

At Phillips Murrah, Haupt helped the firm forge a partnership with another Oklahoma City-based shop in 2011. He left the combined outfit and his restructuring-oriented practice three years later to pursue an entrepreneurial endeavor. Prior to joining Lathrop Gage, Haupt served as a managing member and co-founder of the National Litigation Law Group (NLLG), which calls itself the largest consumer law firm in the country.

The NLLG, which grew rapidly in recent years from its base in Oklahoma City, specializes in low-cost, high-volume representation of clients with medical and consumer debt. The NLLG grew from five employees to more than 200 during Haupt's tenure. He formed the business in 2014 with fellow Oklahoma lawyer James Bryant before selling his stake last year to a group led by W. Lance Conn, an attorney and former president of Vulcan Capital, the investment arm of late Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen. (Bryant, now of counsel at Spencer Fane in Dallas and Kansas City, is still listed as a co-managing member of NLLG.)

Haupt said his experience at NLLG, which secured a contract with a national debt settlement company and backing from Silicon Valley, helped him appreciate the increased importance of technology in delivering legal services. He credited Lathrop Gage managing partner Cameron Garrison, who assumed leadership of the firm a year ago, with “enthusiastically embracing” technology to provide more cost-effective services to clients.

In August, Garrison reiterated Lathrop Gage's commitment to its Midwest roots following the closure of a small office in Springfield, Missouri. That move came shortly after the firm bolted on a four-lawyer boutique to expand its office in Los Angeles. Lathrop Gage then added a pair of intellectual property partners—Erica Van Loon and Andrew Choung—in the city in September.

While Lathrop Gage has no immediate plans to open an office in Oklahoma City, Haupt acknowledged some initial discussions about doing so. After the sale of his stake in NLLJ, Haupt set up his own firm in Oklahoma City before looking for a national platform that could best provide the flexibility he needed to rebuild his commercial law practice. (Haupt declined to discuss specific clients, noting they mostly want to remain anonymous given the difficult situations they're in as they seek to avoid bankruptcy court.)

Haupt and his wife moved to Kansas City for “personal, family reasons,” he said, and having now relocated fulltime to Lathrop Gage's hometown, he's looking forward to integrating his practice with the roughly 230-lawyer firm.

“You can tell a lot about an organization by the way it treats its people and about a law firm by the way it treats its nonlegal support staff,” Haupt said about Lathrop Gage, which last year became the latest large firm to drop the ampersand from its name. “They have a commitment here to technology and process flow, as well as transparency and the next wave of growth and development.”