The Crag Team
We at Crag have been celebrating a lot of victories lately, and it’s got me thinking about the keys to our success. Over the summer, I read the July/August issue of The Atlantic magazine, which focused on creativity. As part of the series, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s article, The Power of Two, outlined the power of creative partnerships. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, to name a few, are famous creative pairs whose individual work was made greater by the collaborative process.
At Crag, the most fundamental iteration of teamwork is the pairing power of Chris Winter and Ralph Bloemers, our co-founders and co-Executive Directors. Each of them brings different skills and strengths to the table. They may not always have the same ideas, but together, they have created the formidable, winning team that is Crag Law Center.
On a day-to-day basis, we benefit from the partnerships we form. We partner with our clients, not in the formal business sense, but in the collection of information, research, and decision-making that goes into the development and execution of complex environmental litigation. And we rely on partnership between attorneys working together on a case, as was the case when Maura Fahey and I put our heads together to win back-to-back land use challenges for the protection of the Columbia River and the Rogue Valley. Individually, we are hard working, strong legal thinkers. Together, we can rise above our selves to create something greater. Working as part of a team is not always easy, and sometimes it may be simpler to go it alone. But the communication, competition, and collaboration of teamwork very often results in something more compelling for the decision-makers, more meaningful for our clients, and more significant for the wild spaces we work to protect.