____________________________________________________________________________ Rob
Naudin | Primoris Services
Business leaders take a lot of risks every day because that is how business works. We cannot stop every conceivable risk. Any lawyer who tries to stop business leaders from taking risks is not doing their job
Risk and reality
If military service taught Rob about responsibility, criminal law taught him about consequences. As both prosecutor and defense counsel, he handled cases where preparation was not a professional preference but a necessity. Cases involved real people, real outcomes, and little room for complacency. Success depended on preparation, communication, and the ability to adapt when situations did not fit neatly into established frameworks.“ Preparation was extraordinarily important. If I did not do a good job, someone would face those consequences. Communication is key because there are no cookie-cutter cases. Each case must be taken seriously, and sometimes creativity plays a big part.”
Commercial litigation gave Rob a front-row seat to the long-term consequences of business decisions. By the time a dispute reached a courtroom, he was often looking back at choices made years earlier, contracts negotiated under pressure, project decisions that seemed reasonable at the time, or risks that were never fully understood until they became costly problems. That experience fundamentally changed how he thinks about legal value.“ I can see contract problems very early on. I have had contracts we have taken to the supreme court, where if a single sentence had been changed years earlier, the case would never have gone to trial. You do your best to influence the decision-making process early and try to prevent unnecessary disputes.”
At Primoris, he operates upstream, helping leaders assess risk before it becomes litigation. Yet he is quick to point out that the goal is not to eliminate risk. The same lesson that applied to military operations applies to business growth. Leaders cannot make progress if every risk becomes a reason to stop.“ Business leaders take a lot of risks every day because that is how business works. We cannot stop every conceivable risk. Any lawyer who tries to stop business leaders from taking risks is not doing their job. We must continue advancing intelligently and make informed decisions.”
The lesson he carried from the military and litigation is straightforward: risk is unavoidable, but unmanaged risk is not. Primoris operates across utility, energy, communications, industrial, and infrastructure markets, sectors where growth opportunities often require balancing commercial objectives against operational, contractual, and regulatory considerations. Rob’ s role is not to remove uncertainty from those decisions. It is to help leaders understand it.
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