Fall 2008 Contents

In this issue…

Strength in Numbers Empirical studies bring new understanding of the day-to-day work of lawyers company.

In the Boardroom A roundtable discussion on some of the top issues and trends facing the legal profession today.

The Vanishing Trial What’s driving the trend toward negotiated settlements—and how will it affect the training of tomorrow’s lawyers?

Back to the Future: The Class of ’88 Lots of people promise to keep in touch after graduation. This group of William Mitchell grads has kept true to that vow—and kept themselves healthy and connected in the process.

Lifetime Connection Whether he’s teaching, coaching, or funding scholarships, Jim Baker ’03 relishes the chance to give back.

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©2008 William Mitchell College of Law

Fall 2008

Strength in Numbers

» Center for the Empirical Study
of Legal Practice on the Web

Empirical studies bring new understanding of the day-to-day work of lawyers

by Mary Lahr Schier

Consider the lawyer’s contingency conundrum:
How will the settlement in each case affect the relationship with his client, his reputation as a lawyer, and his bank balance?

Or, imagine this choice:
A new client calls with a small legal issue that needs attention. It’s barely worth the attorney’s time. Will she take it? If she’s a smart lawyer, she might. After decades of digging through case files, camping out in lawyers’ offices, and collecting information about what typical lawyers do and why, Bert Kritzer can paint a picture with numbers about the legal profession and the often complex calculations lawyers make about how to handle individual clients and cases.

“Numbers speak only when asked,” says Kritzer, a professor of law and the director of William Mitchell’s new Center for the Empirical Study of Legal Practice. But as Kritzer is quick to add, if you know the right questions, numbers can also reveal much about how justice works and how it isdistributed in society.

In the Boardroom

A roundtable discussion on some of the top issues and trends facing the legal profession today

by Phil Bolsta

What are the top issues that law firms are dealing with today? Is it the impact of technology? Associate turnover at the five-year mark? Or perhaps the ever-present need for work-life balance? For answers to these and other questions, we put together a virtual roundtable of Twin Cities-area lawyers-all of whom are either William Mitchell graduates or have close ties to the college.

• Jamie Forman ’85 of Oberman Thompson & Segal, a small Minneapolis law firm primarily representing businesses in the areas of labor and employment law and commercial litigation.
• Anh Kremer ’01 of Holstein Kremer, a small women owned and minority-owned Minneapolis law firm specializing in complex commercial disputes and employment law.
• Martin Lueck ’84 and Steve Schumeister ’76 of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, a large Minneapolis law firm specializing in trial related litigation.
• Steven Lundberg ’82 of Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, a medium-sized Minneapolis law firm providing intellectual property services to high-tech companies, universities, and individual inventors nationwide.
• Tom Tinkham (William Mitchell board member for the past four years) of Dorsey & Whitney, a large, full-service Minneapolis law firm.

The Vanishing Trial

What’s driving the trend toward negotiated settlements—and how will it affect the training of tomorrow’s lawyers?

by Kevin Featherly

Twenty-five years ago, William Mitchell College of Law Adjunct Family Law Professor Andrea Niemi ‘79 was a young assistant prosecutor in the office of Scott County Attorney Kathleen Morris. She hated it. “The prosecutor I worked for was very aggressive,” Niemi recalls. “I know in my own practice I felt guilty for not being more aggressive. But I tried.”

Morris’ doggedness was, of course, her undoing. She prosecuted the infamous Jordan, Minn., child sex-abuse case in the early 1980s, which ultimately indicted 21 townspeople. After several years of relentlessly pursuing the case, the whole thing blew up when Morris’ star witness—a child molester himself— recanted and admitted he had falsely implicated others in hopes of getting a reduced sentence.

Back to the Future: The Class of ‘88

Lots of people promise to keep in touch after graduation. This group of William Mitchell grads has kept true to that vow—and kept themselves healthy and connected in the process

by Phil Bolsta

It’s a festive scene at the downtown Minneapolis Buca: As many as 20 law school classmates are laughing, bantering, teasing, and telling stories while passing heaping plates of Italian food. The hour is late but no one gives a second thought to class work or exams—and hasn’t for two decades.

Welcome to a tight-knit group from the William Mitchell class of ‘88. Now in their late 40s and early-to-mid 50s, these former classmates and lifelong friends continue to deepen and strengthen the bonds that first linked them together in their 4:20 pm first-year class in 1984. All were part-time students who worked during the day and attended law school at night.

Along with Denny Unger, Dan Beck, and Kelly Everhart, Tim Mahoney, at 48, was only 24 when he started at William Mitchell. “At that time, we were the younger ones in the group,” says Mahoney, executive director for Special Counsel (formerly known as The Esquire Group), a full-service legal search and staffing company in Minneapolis. “Now we’re all old!”

Lifetime Connection

Whether he’s teaching, coaching, or funding scholarships, Jim Baker ’03 relishes the chance to give back

by Erin Peterson

Creativity has always been one of Jim Baker’s strong suits. During his career as an engineer for such companies as 3M and Samsung Electronics, he gained more than 70 U.S. patents for his inventions. So when he decided to shift his career focus from engineering to law, it might not come as a surprise that he sidestepped more traditional law schools. “William Mitchell was the only school in the region that actually gave me the ability to work and make a living and still go to law school in the evenings,” he says.