Adam U.
Lindgren

Principal & Executive Committee Member

TEL:

916.556.1525

EMAIL:

alindgren@meyersnave.com

OFFICE:

Sacramento

LANGUAGES:

English

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Clients of all types rely on Adam’s three decades inside government and public policy to make complex decisions and build iconic projects.

Government entities and private businesses turn to Adam for their most complex projects, their toughest governance challenges, and the decisions they cannot afford to get wrong. Decades as general counsel and city attorney make him fluent in how public decisions actually get made, and private developers, investors, and institutions building and supplying California come to him for the same reason. Adam leads Meyers Nave’s government and public policy lawyers, runs the Sacramento office, and helps shape the firm’s direction as a member of the Executive Committee.

His land use and environmental practice builds great projects and communities. He moves ambitious projects and critical agency plans through California’s approvals process, securing entitlements, and steering major plan updates, annexations, subdivision maps, and large-scale development agreements. From his decades of general counsel experience, he has the skills and judgment to sort out the adjacent conflicts, transparency, and political issues that often accompany them.

Adam works increasingly on projects confronting the effects of climate change on land use regulations, including wildfire prevention and recovery, flood control, sea-level rise, and landslide mitigation. Because he sees issues and opportunities from both the agency’s and the applicant’s sides, the same lawyer who helps a city shape its general plan can identify how to expedite a major data center for a national investor, or walk a working ranch through complex permitting and wildfire mitigation process.

Adam has been general counsel and city attorney for most of his career, and he has the instincts and long view to show for it. He has counseled one city since the day it incorporated, watching it grow from an ambitious idea into a thriving community, and shepherding its most important projects, partnerships, and advances. Years in those chairs taught him that governance is about much more than statutes and policies. It is about how the law intersects with people, politics, real-world pressures, and opportunities. It’s also about helping a room full of elected officials get to a decision they can understand, support, and defend.

Adam has a clear-eyed read on how political and legal fights actually unfold, and a conviction that the best time to win one is before it starts. He builds the record early, long before a decision takes shape, so the choice a board or council makes today still looks right under scrutiny decades from now. When a challenge comes anyway, he stands with the firm’s deep bench of litigators to defend a position he often designed from the first conversation to survive a courtroom, a hearing, or a front page.

When he isn’t practicing, Adam is often teaching. He is managing co-editor and an update author of California Land Use Practice, the field’s leading treatise, and he wrote the League of California Cities’ handbook on municipal legal ethics. He came to the law from politics, beginning his career as a legislative aide in the U.S. House of Representatives. Then, as a talented and ambitious young associate, he came to Meyers Nave in its early years.

In his personal time, Adam is a hiker and an unapologetic car enthusiast, as content on a long climb as he is under the hood. He and his wife, Dede, have been married more than twenty-five years, are parents of two, and are fixtures at their local food bank and community farm.