Nestled in the heart of downtown Seattle, on a very steep street that runs downhill to the waterfront, is a nondescript three-story building that houses the main offices of ABC Legal Services, arguably the largest company of its kind in the United States if not the world. When combined with its 4 branch offices, in Tacoma, Everett, Olympia, and Bellevue, Washington, it has an eye-popping workforce of almost 300 employees and independent contractors, all of whom are engaged primarily in the movement of paper-an incredible volume of paper.
I recently visited ABC's office with UIHJ officials who wanted to observe first hand how ABC was implementing its new DOJ contract for the service of incoming foreign documents under the Hague Service Convention (see Sue Collins' report in this issue). I interviewed ABC President Andy Carrigan and the two men he has put in charge of implementing the contract-his son Steve Carrigan and long-time employee Reid McNair, who has played a major role in establishing ABC as the leader in the acquisition of child support contracts. Two other senior employees, Rick Hamilton and Amber Switzer, head up the day to day work of the process forwarding department. Both are NAPPS members. Ron Belec, also a NAPPS member, is in charge of the investigation department.
More than 50% of ABC's work involves some form of messenger delivery of documents in the 4 counties surrounding Washington's Puget Sound area, which includes court filings and records retrieval of legal documents and other documents. LMI Couriers, an ABC subsidiary, acts as freight forwarders in the movement of virtually all paperwork that comes into Seattle by plane or ship.
The other major category is process serving. While the number of papers served was not revealed, it is known that ABC is one of only a handful of companies that serve more than 10,000 papers a month.
At the heart of this legal services giant is an unassuming, hard-driving ex-football player who was a jack-of-all trades before finding a target upon which to focus his boundless energies. Andy Carrigan grew up on a cattle ranch in Orting, Wash., a little town east of Tacoma. A star football player in high school, he was awarded a full scholarship to play football for Stanford University. He was ferocious linebacker and in his Sophomore year made 27 tackles in a game against the University of Washington Huskies, which set a PAC-10 record for most tackles in a single game.
Peter Lazetich, a NAPPS member who also played football for Stanford (he was a freshman when Carrigan was a senior), has seen Carrigan in action. "Andy wasn't all that big, like some of the players today, but he was the full package and he came to play," said Lazetich. "He marched to a different drummer and he never gave up. He was absolutely intense when it came to athletics. He played hard and he trained hard." After graduation, he considered several pro football offers but chose instead to sign with the Seattle Rangers of the Continental League. A year later he was a deckhand on a crab boat out of Newport, Ore. and then on to Kodiak, Alaska, where he fished for King Crab. He also spent brief periods as a fruit picker in California and a scrap iron dealer in Long Beach, Wash. "I had a college degree," Carrigan remarked, "but I never spent a day working at any job that required it."
Carrigan was driven in virtually everything he did, from selling encyclopedias (he wanted to set a record for number sold) to sneaking on golf courses in the middle of the night to scuba dive for lost golf balls. Lazetich recalls that Carrigan at one time had recovered over 17,000 golf balls and had them all in the trunk of his car. He was going to sell them for 20 cents each. To earn money at Stanford, Carrigan would do a variety of jobs, from cleaning up the stadium to ground work. There was no kind of work he wouldn't do, and nothing deterred him from getting it done. He worked day and night, rain or shine, according to Lazetich.
It was in 1973 when Carrigan eventually landed a job in Seattle as a process server and general handyman with a small legal services company that had 17 clients and a gross income of $5,000 a month.
The company was ABC Legal Messengers, and the three principals in the company had owned it for about a year or so. It had four employees-a manager, a secretary, a messenger and Andy Carrigan. It wasn't long before Carrigan realized the company was in dire financial straits. Every Friday his paycheck consisted of one-half of what he had earned and the remainder in promises. He subsequently discovered there were IRS and other liens against the company totaling about $10,000. Realizing that he would have to take affirmative action if he were ever to get the $3,500 in back pay he was owed, Carrigan talked the three owners into going with him to the IRS and working out a settlement.
At the end of the meeting, after agreeing to pay all back taxes owed by the company, Andy Carrigan was the new owner of ABC Legal Messengers. In 1975, after two years of 18-hour days wearing the hat of messenger, process server and billing clerk, the debt was paid off. The following year, when all Americans were engaged in the nation's 200 Centennial, Carrigan was having a different celebration; his company had just cracked $6,000 in a single month. And he was ecstatic. He was on the launching pad to build a bigger and better company.
By 1984, after acquiring several smaller companies and building up a clientele of Seattle law firms, the company was grossing just under $140,000 a month. But Carrigan ran into a problem. He found himself in a price war with Legal Messengers, Inc. (LMI), a company with four offices and about three times as large as ABC. LMI had three owners-Vic Spino, a founding member of NAPPS, Ed Hein and Jim Morris. In June 1984 ABC consummated the purchase of LMI, which gave the new company,. ABC Legal Messengers, Inc. a mixture of major services-regular route messengers to pick up and file court documents, special delivery messengers, process servers, and investigators.
By 1993 the dynamics of the company had begun to change. The impetus was the successful acquisition of child support enforcement contracts from various states and counties throughout the nation. This gave birth to Process Forwarding International (PFI), a subsidiary formed to handle the increase in forwarding its out-of-state work. Its forwarding department has grown from three people to 13 and it serves more child support papers than any other company. This strength in serving child support papers no doubt was a major factor in ABC being awarded the DOJ contract for the service of some 7,500 documents from foreign countries previously handled by the DOJ under the Hague Service Convention and the Inter-American Convention.
Other major bidders for that contract were APS International of Minneapolis and NAPPS, which had conceived the project in 1995 and eventually succeeded in convincing the DOJ to privatize this bureaucratic function.
Andy Carrigan has much in common with some other owners of major companies in this industry; they started out with nothing and got to the top by ingenuity and hard work. Carrigan's the genuine article and he's likely to be around for a long time. At age 57 he is rock hard from years of exercise and weightlifting (he works out 6 days a week for exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes) and he's goal-oriented to make his company bigger and better.
