Steve Goodrich didn’t just find his dream job when he returned to his native Iowa in September. He created it. And in the process, he helped to free the shareholders at the Davis law firm to chase more of their dreams in courtrooms and board rooms.

The path Goodrich took to the top management position at the firm – formally known as Davis, Brown, Koehn, Shors & Roberts P.C. – included a retrospective review of business strategies he learned at his implement-dealer father’s knee, a return to the classroom and even a couple of Hollywood moments.

Goodrich was a partner at the Davis firm until 1987, when he moved to Kansas City and, later, to Arizona to be closer to his aging parents. He had studied business as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa and maintained an interest in it in his business law practice. With a financial cushion created by modest winnings on the TV game show “Jeopardy,” he parlayed that interest into an M.B.A. with a focus on service-oriented businesses from Arizona State University. As part of the coursework, which he completed in May, Goodrich consulted frequently with his former colleagues at the Davis firm, marrying his legal and management interests in a strategic plan outline addressing some of the management conundrums that had been dogging Nick Roby, the president of the firm’s board of directors.

“I was sort of using him as a sounding board as a consultant on some strategic planning, and Steve was in need of real-life projects to complete his M.B.A.,” Roby said. “It helped us and it helped him.”

Roby said the outline sat on his desk for a few months until Goodrich “reminded me that I owed him a response.” That he hadn’t carved out time to more fully review Goodrich’s outline “epitomizes our problem,” Roby said.

“The president of the firm doesn’t have time to give the strategic plan outline the attention it needs. How do you fix that? In his skillful way of communication, he showed me that we needed someone who has experience in law and in management, and who could practice part time in each.”

The firm has grown to about 70 attorneys, making professional management all the more necessary, Roby said. In the two years that he has been president of the board of directors, Roby has been a victim of his own best intentions as he juggles management duties with the need to take client service, which Roby says is a hallmark of the Davis firm, to a higher level.

“It’s frustrating,” Roby said. “I can have the best intentions to work on long-term strategic planning, but walk into the office and have emergencies that have to be dealt with from Monday morning to Friday afternoon.”

“In a law practice, you can have fires that can turn into conflagrations, but lawyers are rightly focused on their practices rather than the business management side of the law firm,” Goodrich said. “Hopefully, this will free up people on the board of directors from spending so much time on routine management.”

Before Goodrich came on board, the law firm governed was by a board of directors composed senior shareholders who were rotated in and out of management positions. The system worked, but not particularly well, Roby said. Continuity suffered when leadership changes took place. By the time attorneys log enough years with the firm to be considered for management positions, their practices are thriving and they have a strong base of clients who have come to expect superior service and quick responses, he explained.

“You can delegate some of that, but you can’t hand over the whole client relationship to someone else,” Roby said.

Another common management approach among similarly sized law firms – an entrenched leader making decisions autonomously – had limitations as well. “There’s a failure to get involvement and input when you have someone very strong at the head of the firm, a managing partner calling the shots,” Roby said.

Goodrich’s new job “is intended to be a hybrid” of the management approaches most commonly used by large law firms, Roby said.

“He will be very involved in management and making decisions, yet he will not replace our managing board,” Roby said. “But we expect our managing board will spend significantly less time on management items.”

Roby said the firm’s decision-makers would have approached professional management with more trepidation if not for their previous association with Goodrich. “The great thing about Steve is that he has familiarity with how the firm worked – at least with how it worked a decade ago,” he said. “But for Steve’s prior experience with the firm, it would have been a lot more difficult to have made the decision.

“We know other folks who have struck out when they brought in someone without a legal background for management functions. Having someone who is a good lawyer like Steve, and who also has a strong interest in management and specialized training and education in managing service organizations, is a good fit.”

Goodrich’s move into the management position has been almost seamless, and Roby said there has been “no jealousy” directed toward him by lawyers who previously took turns attending to the duties that are now his. “We don’t fear we’re giving up some kind of power,” Roby said. “We’re just trying to prioritize all the many things he could be great at – and we’ve had to scale that back – everything from marketing to client service expectations to how things get communicated to clients.”

With Goodrich on board, the ideas that come out of retreats and other strategy sessions are more likely to be implemented, Roby said. “A complaint we get from attorneys after retreats is that they come up with great ideas they feel excited about, but implementation kind of falls by the wayside,” he said.

Goodrich grew up in Gilmore City in rural northwest Iowa, where his father was an International Harvester implement dealer. The senior Goodrich had built his business on an approach his son calls “PTQ”- price, timeliness and quality – that works well in all service industries.

The lessons he learned from his father provided a valuable foundation for business, but Goodrich was hungry for more formal training and that’s why he enrolled in the Arizona State M.B.A. program. “Almost all of the principles I learned in the M.B.A. program can be applied to the law firm,” he said. “The one thing that does not translate well is all-holds-barred advertising (advertising by law firm is closely regulated in Iowa).”

The joke around town is that Goodrich, a “brain bowl” sort who participated in various general-knowledge competitions as a high school and college student, earned the tuition money for his M.B.A. degree by appearing on “Jeopardy.” Goodrich said he regarded his winnings as “mad money,” but agreed the windfall made the goal of earning an M.B.A. more attainable. He auditioned for the program on a whim in 1999 when he learned the “Jeopardy” staff was in Phoenix, where he lived at the time, looking for contestants. He made the first cut and then the second. It was January 2001 before he was selected to appear on the program.

Well past his 40th birthday the day he sat in the green room on the “Jeopardy” set waiting to compete, he felt out of place among the more than a dozen twentysomethings who were his fellow contestants. “They appeared to be real bright, and I thought, ‘This may not be the smartest thing I have ever done,'” he said. “I made a deal with God – just don’t let me embarrass myself.”

He lost $1,100 on the Final Jeopardy question, but ended the first day with $8,800. The next day, however, “everything that could go wrong did wrong.” He bet the bank on a Double Jeopardy question and lost. He couldn’t redeem himself in Final Jeopardy, but neither could the other participants.

That day’s Final Jeopardy question concerned the origin of the quote, “I have seen the face of Agamemnon,” the leader of the Greek forces during the Trojan War.

The correct response: “Who is Heinrich Schliemann,” a 19th-century German archaeologist.

Goodrich thought the quotation so obscure that finding loopholes in long-standing legal statutes would have been an easier task thatn locating someone who knew its origin. The answer, though, was waiting for him in Des Moines. Kent Herink, one of the lawyers at the Davis firm, knew the answer immediately when the story of Goodrich’s “Jeopardy” appearance began circulate.