The Official Publication of the Hennepin County Bar Association
Since 1933, The Hennepin Lawyer has been a respected resource for articles about the legal profession and developments in the law—particularly as they relate to practice in Hennepin County, as well as providing news on the local legal community and bar association. The Hennepin Lawyer magazine is published six times per year. A subscription to the publication is included with HCBA membership.
Subject Matter Eligibility post Alice: A Boon Or A Bane For Tech Companies?
Erin E. Block & Eric Chadwick
Feb 04, 2020
Erin E. Block and Eric Chadwick of DeWitt discuss updates to subject matter eligibility for patent protection.
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Power Your Firm with Standard Operating Procedures (yes, really!)
Dec 30, 2019
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): Yeah that sounds BORING. But, instead of trying to remember what we did last time (or making it up as we go—again), we can refer to detailed, step-by-step workflows. It’s sort of an old-school approach, for sure, but sometimes the simplest answer is the best one.
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Modern Data Breach Litigation
Dec 30, 2019
Modern data breach litigation has emerged in the past few years, in large part following the data breach in November and December 2013 at Target Corporation, a flagship Minnesota company.
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Ethical Traps to Consider When Implementing AI
Dec 30, 2019
For all of the potential good it can do, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) also has potential for significant harm. The harm to which this article refers is that of bias and discrimination.
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So You Want to Be a Hemp Farmer?
Caitlin Houlton Kuntz and Kaleb E. Rumicho
Dec 30, 2019
Insights for the 21st-Century Hemp Producer – Many folks involved in the hemp business face obstacles and unpleasant encounters with the realities of the undefined (and unclarified) laws and regulations surrounding hemp.
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Dec 30, 2019
Madeline Buck's illustrated book Lake in Limbo focuses on the the Hennepin County debate about the name of Lake Calhoun, or in Dakota, Bde Maka Ska.
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Ayah Helmy and Joanna Woolman
Dec 30, 2019
Public debates, such as the one concerning the name of the lake popularly known as Lake Calhoun or the land at Historic Fort Snelling, are important measures of the zeitgeist. They force us to examine the language and symbols we take for granted, such as the name of a lake or the existence of a century-old statue.
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Here’s Looking at You, Kid
Dec 19, 2019
Eric Cooperstein's January 2020 Ethics Column for the Hennepin Lawyer
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10 Questions: Brent Robbins
Dec 19, 2019
10 Questions with Brent Robbins
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New Lawyers Spotlight: Ask-A-Lawyer
Dec 19, 2019
What’s something new or innovative you did in your job last year?
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Getting to Know Dan Willing: 2019-2020 New Lawyers Section chair
Dec 19, 2019
The best advice I ever received was to be patient. New attorneys can get very impatient, wishing things would happen faster than they do. Most of us are overachievers by nature, so the idea that it will take years of sustained effort before you see the returns of your hard work can be difficult to accept. That lesson took me years to understand.
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Dec 19, 2019
As we learn more, we must also set aside our old notions faster. It is our duty to learn how to learn, relearn, and learn again. If we fail to do so, we—and the law—will be sucked under in the coming knowledge tsunami.
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Putting Yourself Out There
Dec 18, 2019
Jeff Baill's January 2020 column for the Hennepin Lawyer magazine.
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Profiles in Practice: Amran Farah
Nov 01, 2019
It’s rare to meet an optimistic attorney. Most are known for, and indeed succeed by, worrying about everything that could go wrong and foreseeing every calamity. Amran Farah is not like most attorneys. “I never really get stressed out,” she laughed during our recent interview.
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Profiles in Practice: Christopher Fowlkes
Nov 01, 2019
Christopher Fowlkes is a seasoned attorney and litigation partner at Barnes & Thornburg in Minneapolis. When Fowlkes is not hard at work, he is on the sidelines of one of his three kids’ sports games cheering at the top of his lungs. Fowlkes lives by the principal “work hard, and play just as hard.”
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Profiles in Practice: Nadine Graves
Nov 01, 2019
Nadine Graves is living out her passion to advocate for individual and systematic changes in policies that contribute to the criminal justice gap.
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Profiles in Practice: Val Jensen
Nov 01, 2019
Whether she’s helping corporate managers develop a diversity plan, coaching employees about implicit bias, or teaching law students about race relations, Val Jensen’s message is clear: “To break down barriers, we need to get to know each other beyond the resume.”
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Profiles in Practice: Pharaoh Lewis
Nov 01, 2019
Be yourself; be authentic!” That is the advice Pharaoh Lewis wants to share with new attorneys. Lewis works in the product liability/mass tort and business litigation practice groups at Nilan Johnson Lewis.
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Profiles in Practice: John Medeiros
Nov 01, 2019
Only three days after being sworn in to the Minnesota bar, John Medeiros became a partner at the Myers Thompson law firm. He had earned it the hard way. “It was a long road to becoming a lawyer, but a very short road to becoming a partner,” said Medeiros. His journey was anything but traditional
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Profiles in Practice: Allyson Petersen
Oct 31, 2019
What do mid-distance sprinting and an interest in sociology have in common? If you ask Allyson Petersen, a labor and employment litigation attorney at Nilan Johnson Lewis in Minneapolis, both help a person prepare for a career in law.
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