Randy Lake publishes and teaches primarily in the areas of rhetorical theory and criticism, argumentation, minority discourse, social movements, and symbolic processes of social change. His work on Native American protest is particularly well-known. Currently, he is completing a book on Abigail Scott Duniway, a prominent 19th-century woman's rights advocate. His research has appeared in national and international journals including The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Monographs, Argumentation, Argumentation and Advocacy: The Journal of the American Forensic Association and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society as well as in books including Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent (Williams and Hazen, Alabama), The Ethical Nexus (Conrad, Ablex), and Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800-1925 (Campbell, Greenwood).

Lake has received the National Communication Association's Golden Anniversary Monograph Award, for the most outstanding article in the discipline, and the American Forensic Association's Daniel Rohrer Research Award, for the most outstanding essay in argumentation studies. Long ago and far away, his dissertation (completed at the University of Kansas in 1982) received the National Communication Association's Outstanding Dissertation Award. He was associate editor of Argument and the Post-Modern Challenge (Speech Communication Association) and book review editor of Argumentation and Advocacy: The Journal of the American Forensic Association. Currently he is the editor of Argumentation and Advocacy and serves on the editorial boards of Communication Theory and The Western Journal of Communication.

Lake has chaired the National Communication Association's Committee on International Discussion and Debate and the American Forensic Association's Publications Committee. He is a former President of the Western Forensic Association. He also is former director of the Trojan Debate Squad at U.S.C. and of the Annenberg doctoral program.

Lake and his wife, Dr. Colleen Keough, are owned and operated by a petting zoo in South Pasadena, comprising cocker spaniels and lop-eared rabbits.