Andrew Meacham
The complications of life, its ambiguities, the borders between overlapping subjects, regulations or laws — the kinds of things that frighten most of us — pulsed through Paul Lambert like an eternal spring. The former staff counsel to Sen. Dempsey Barron and several state licensing boards, who founded the National Association of Chiropractic Attorneys in 1978, absorbed history books and law journals throughout his career.
He served up his expertise freely in popular lectures on health law, psychology law and administrative law but equally — and in almost as much detail — over lunch, on the plane, or at home along with his famous paella.
Lambert, a legal luminary whose oversight strengthened chiropractors in Florida and nationwide, died Jan. 9 after an illness. He was 76.
“People used to get frustrated with Paul, as did I,” said Sandy Lambert, his wife of 56 years. “Because you’d ask a simple question and an hour later, you’d have the history of whatever it was. Because he always wanted to research everything to the ultimate degree.”
That hunger for the context behind fact rendered her husband a perfectionist, she said, but also the “smartest man I ever met in my life.”
“Many people come through our lives and they pass through quickly,” said Stephen Winn, the Florida Osteopathic Medical Association’s executive director. “Others make a deep impression and stay for a while. Paul will live on in the hearts and minds of those individuals who he so greatly helped during his career.”
His interest in health law proved a timely one for chiropractors, who were seeing unprecedented growth in the 1970s, both in the number of licensed practitioners and insurance reimbursement.
He worked in health law in the Attorney General’s Office, then went into private practice in 1977. He began representing the Florida Chiropractic Association that same year. Other alternative health professions would follow, including podiatrists, dental hygienists and massage therapists.
He founded the National Association of Chiropractic Attorneys in 1978, helping its physicians meet standards in a heavily regulated industry.
Launched in 1895, the field had come a long way from the days when some chiropractic practitioners were jailed simply for performing it. But skepticism persisted throughout the 20th century from traditional medicine, even as evidence accumulated that chiropractors were helping relieve chronic pain allopathic physicians might dismiss, particularly lower back pain.
“Chiropractic finds its voice exactly where biomedicine becomes inarticulate,” a Journal of the American Medical Association paper noted in 1998. Lambert served both as the Florida Chiropractic Association’s chief lawyer and its lobbyist.
He worked with and against some of the same people for decades, and with equanimity. Paul Jess hashed out many an issue while serving as General Counsel of the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers (now the Florida Justice Association).
“There are a lot of lawyers in this world who fly by the seat of their pants,” said Jess, now the association’s executive director. “They want to get by with the force of their personality or their reputation. They don’t really take the time to do research and study the law. Paul was somebody who did that.”
As a result, Jess said, “He made very reasonable, cogent arguments.”
In lobbying or the law, Lambert was a tough fighter who never lost his cool or even raised his voice, according to multiple colleagues.
“Whether you were on the same side as Paul or you were taking a position against Paul, he was always somebody you were happy to meet,” Jess said. “And he was always a gentleman.”
Paul Watson Lambert was born Sept. 27, 1946, in Santurce, Puerto Rico, the son of a restless entrepreneur and a homemaker. He was a toddler when the family moved to Miami. He soaked up English without really trying, and a dozen years later stumbled on the love of his life.
“First day of school at Miami High,” recalled his wife, whose name then was Sandy Close. “He sat in front of me in an advanced algebra class.”
Lambert, then a junior, turned around and said, “Did you hear we might have some sophomores in our class?”
“I was one of those he was looking down his nose at,” Sandy said.
They married in 1966, while both were undergraduates at Florida State University. Lambert graduated from FSU’s law school in 1971 and went to work in the Capitol.
He maintained long-running camaraderie with neighbors in a tree-lined Tallahassee suburb. The “Mimosa Drive Group” was made up of “super-tight friends, like neighborhoods used to be,” said Allison Carvajal, who met Lambert in that neighborhood at age 10.
Carvajal later worked for years around Lambert as a lobbyist, who taught her much about health regulation.
“He wouldn’t necessarily give you the answer,” she said. “He’d make you go find it yourself.”
She remembers him for his graciousness, the gumbo he made for guests and his habit of killing time before committee meetings with a history book, often jotting notes in the margins.
“We would all be like, “Paul, you’re never going to read that again, why are you making notes?’” Carvajal said. “And he would say, ‘Oh, I’ll look back at this.’”
As his own consulting practice expanded, his wife was undergoing a metamorphosis. A teacher for 10 years, Sandy Lambert went back to school to study communications, then sought job opportunities. She eventually became the director of the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, a position she held for 17 years.
Around the house, Lambert did “all the typical male things” outside while his wife cooked. That division of labor lasted 25 years.
“Then one Saturday I was getting ready to go to the grocery store and he was getting ready to mow the grass,” Sandy Lambert said. “I said, ‘I don’t want to go,’ and he said, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ And we switched roles that day.”
After that, “He did all the cooking. And then after a few weeks I hired a yard man.”
A daughter, Sally, grew up and married. Paul and Sandy traveled extensively. Their travel options shrank with the onset of COVID-19, particularly in light of his history of lung disease.
Sandy responded by creating a bubble they could live in. In 2020, she bought a small motorhome. Now they just needed to pick a destination.
“I said, ‘Okay, where do you want to go?’” Sandy recalled. “He said, ‘I want to go to the Badlands.’ Five weeks later we had seen the west.”
She threw in a cowboy hat and an antique cap pistol, reminiscent of his childhood.
The website of the National Association of Chiropractic Attorneys, for which he had served as president from 1985 until his death, still lists Paul Lambert as its point of contact for Florida. Symbolically, at least, he still is.
He is survived by his wife, Sandy; daughter, Sally Turner and her husband, Shawn; brother Bruce Lambert and his wife, Florence; sister Phrieda Lambert Tuten and her husband, Richard; and numerous nieces, nephews and cousins. A funeral service starts at 11 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 22 (visitation 10 a.m.) at Bevis Funeral Home, 200 John Knox Road, Tallahassee.
