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Photographs ©
Jonathan Kalstrom

Lawyers After Hours

By Jonathan Kalstrom

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." -- Origin unknown.

av|o-ca-tion (av’e ka’shen) n. 2 something one does in addition to a vocation or regular work, and usually for pleasure; hobby. -- Webster’s New World Dictionary.

Educated as an electrical engineer, Min (Amy) Xu went on to become a patent attorney with Merchant & Gould. When not in the air or in the office, she also runs marathons.

After a hectic day or week of filing briefs, meeting with clients, or arguing a subtle point in court, members of the bench and bar close briefcases, lay down gavels, and pick up their avocations. "Avocation" is a word taken seriously after hours in the legal profession. As the following five profiles attest, lawyers know not only how to work hard, but how to play hard as well -- and in a variety of pursuits they are passionate about.

Jonathan Kalstrom is a freelance writer and photographer based in Minneapolis. He has written on a variety of topics related to law and the legal profession for local and law school publications.

Min (Amy) Xu enjoys the eagle’s view that piloting a plane affords. "It’s just a great feeling of being up there, sitting in the cockpit and flying on your own," says Xu, who practices intellectual property law at the Minneapolis law firm of Merchant & Gould. Xu’s longtime interest in aviation came to life after she talked about it with a client who flies, who encouraged her to follow her aviation dreams. In August 1998, Xu enrolled in a flying program at the Crystal Airport to seek a pilot’s license, which she has since earned.

Her training of ground school and flying lessons included an exercise, overseen by an instructor, in which the engine is stalled in flight. "They want you to try stalls, see how you feel, and if you are freaking out, they would just say, ‘Probably you shouldn’t fly,’" she explains. "But I did okay, so he just said, ‘Let’s continue on.’" During training, Xu flew from two to three times a week. But after receiving her license, she has flown less, from one to two times a week, because of her work schedule. Flying can be a time-intensive hobby, including preflight checks before getting off the ground.

She currently holds a "visual flight rule" license, but is now in training for an "instrument flight rule" license, which would enable her to also fly by instruments, not just sight. "I don’t have to get that [license], but I’d like to learn the instrument practice too, because then I can go into the clouds, [and] with bad weather, know how to deal with it," she says. Xu plans to complete her training and get licensed to fly by instrument late this spring or early summer.

Xu is a native of Shanghai, China, and received her B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota (1991). She then joined Merchant & Gould as a staff engineer, working for a patent attorney. "And then [I] found out that there was a need for patent attorneys, so I went to law school at night," says Xu, who earned her J.D. from William Mitchell College of Law (1997) and her M.S. in electrical engineering from the U of M the same year. "What I like about [the practice] is the combination of engineering and the legal aspect of it, and to protect the innovation, the ideas people have," she says. Xu receives phone calls from inventors everyday with all types of inventions, and she finds great interest in looking at their innovations and serving them with her combined skills in law and engineering.

When not practicing law or in the pilot’s seat, Xu runs four to five miles nearly every day and competes in marathons a couple times each year. Xu and her husband, attorney Michael Schumann, also of Merchant & Gould, own a year-round resort with two partners in Northern Minnesota near Itasca State Park. And Xu’s passion for flying may come in handy for traveling to it. "Flying high in the sky," she says, "it just gives you an eagle’s view of things."

Mike Kelly put his singing interests on hold when he joined the firm of Faegre & Benson -- but in the past two years, he's performed in the chorus with the Minnesota Opera.

Singing has always played a considerable role in Mike Kelly’s life. He sang in childhood and continued through high school and college, in rock bands and jazz bands, in productions of "West Side Story" and "The Music Man." "But when I moved back to Minnesota and was starting out in the practice of law, I didn’t have a lot of free time, so I put it on the shelf for a while," says Kelly, an attorney at Faegre & Benson and general counsel for the Minnesota Vikings. "And then about five years ago, I started coming back to it."

He began to study opera, which he’d always enjoyed and appreciated, as well as classical vocal music. His first position: at the Basilica of St. Mary, in Minneapolis, where he is one of two singers who perform most tenor solos. Kelly, who’d been in the choir at the Basilica before auditioning to become a soloist, sings in the choir most Sundays and solos about once a month. "It’s a great building for what I like to do musically," he says. "I mean it’s a great building for classical music, acoustically, and for a more operatic style voice, because it’s so cavernous and open."

When Kelly returned to singing, he also wanted an opportunity to sing operatic pieces. "So last year -- and I didn’t have a whole lot of time -- I auditioned for The Minnesota Opera and was offered contracts to sing in the chorus in all four productions," he says. "I decided to sing in one, just to see what the time commitment was like." He sang in the chorus of "Faust", which he immensely enjoyed.

"It’s a terrific experience for someone who is coming into the music business late in the game to be able to appear on the Ordway stage in front of several sold-out houses with some of the most talented people in the opera industry, both on the production side and on the performing side," Kelly says.

Kelly became interested in opera while performing musical theater at his college and law school alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, where his first show was "Pippin". The experience in musical theater at Notre Dame, where he played many lead roles, heightened his appreciation "for more challenging roles to sing, musically."

Kelly auditioned this year for The Minnesota Opera, which again offered him contracts to appear in all four shows; but he chose not to do so because of an addition to his family: "I decided this year, that with a newborn baby, I wanted to see how much time I actually had [for] all the commitments I have to meet," he explains. Kelly’s wife, attorney Gretchen Gates Kelly, vice president of legal affairs at Express Scripts, in Bloomington, gave birth to their son, Connor, in late 1999. "I hope in the future not only to go back and sing with The Minnesota Opera," Kelly says, "but hopefully, to audition for some roles."

Third District Judge Joseph Chase's hobby combines two passions -- sports and drawing. His work has been commission by teams; two of his portraits of MSBA presidents have also appeared on the cover of Bench & Bar.

When a young man discovered drawing during his junior year at the University of Notre Dame, it marked the beginning of a rewarding avocation. "There was a course in the Art Department, I started it, enjoyed it a great deal, and found out that I was fairly good at it," recalls Minnesota District Court Judge Joseph Chase of the Third Judicial District. Since then, Chase has continued to put his pencils to sketch pads, and sometimes professionally: like the series of more than 20 commissioned sports-art drawings he created over a two-year period, as well as two portraits of MSBA presidents he has done for the cover of Bench & Bar.

The largest portion of Chase’s artistic work, though, has been for hobby. And his preferred subject matter is people, especially portraits and individuals engaged in sports. He has held a longtime interest in sports art, in part because there is a lot of great sports photography, and Chase generally works from photographs. "It's colorful and often it's the human form in very interesting positions," he adds. "And I love sports, so that's always been a big part of what I do."

Chase recently completed a drawing of a University of Minnesota Gopher crossing the goal line in the Penn State football game. "I was just moved to do it because it was a great moment in Gopher football," says Chase, who will hang the drawing in his conference room. "It was a great photo that I found on the cover of the Star Tribune and I was just taken by it."

One project Chase is particularly proud of is the three commemorative posters he drew each year that the boy’s high school football team, in his hometown of Chatfield, Minnesota, won the state championship (1994-96). The school sold prints of the drawings -- 500 of each drawing were reproduced -- as a fund-raiser. His next drawing will be a portrait of a U.S. Air Force general who also hails from Chatfield, which Chase will donate to the Chatfield Historical Society.

Chase pursues his hobby in spurts. "But I usually am working on a drawing," he notes. "If I’m really hot on something, I do it every day. But more likely, weekly, I’ll sit down and continue on with a drawing."

Chase, a University of Minnesota Law School graduate (1982), chose law in part because he excelled in reading and writing and enjoyed oral presentations. He also gravitated toward the life stories of some famous lawyers, including Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Darrow, and loved all the great lawyer movies. Prior to his judicial appointment in October 1999, Chase did trial work at the law firm of O’Brien, Ehrick, Wolf, Deaner & Maus (1982-99), in Rochester, and served as city attorney in Chatfield (1997-99).

Chase, his wife Sara, and their three children -- Gabriel Lincoln, 12; Rachel Mariah, 9; and Nathaniel Truman, 7 -- participate as a family in such outdoor hobbies as riding horseback and skiing. And Chase enjoys several additional favorite pursuits, including playing basketball and building stone walls at their home outside of Chatfield.

"We live out in the country, and I’ve always got a stone wall in progress as well as a drawing," he says. Chase became interested in building stone walls through his travels to such countries as England and Ireland and then checked out books from the public library on how to build dry walls, which are stone walls without mortar. "I’ve always been impressed by them," he says. "I just decided I wanted to try it."

"Reining" isn't the same as riding; it's a competitive sport with strictly prescribed maneuvers. For Dorsey & Whitney attorney Janice Symchych, it's also a passion that she shares with her children.

The spur for Janice Symchych’s equestrian avocation was an event several years ago at the Minnesota State Fair. Walking through the horse barns, she observed a man on a horse spinning 360 degrees on one of its back feet, and in a space not much bigger than a horse stall. Called a "turnaround," it is one of ten maneuvers in the competitive sport of reining -- which, when attempted in competition, requires a rider to completely pivot the horse four times. That maneuver carries special importance for Symchych, a trial attorney with the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney in its Minneapolis office: "That’s what got me fascinated with reining," she notes.

Reining, which recently became an Olympic discipline, comes out of the Old West. In order to chase cattle and precisely corral them, a cowboy needed an agile horse that could quickly stop, or spin around when the cattle turned the other direction. Reining uses essentially the same skills as the related sport of cutting, in which competitors move cattle around, but without the cattle. "And so in reining, you’re just doing the maneuvers, the sliding stops, the spins," Symchych explains. Another flashy maneuver is called a rollback. Here, "you’re galloping one direction and you turn on a dime, pivot the horse on the back foot, and go 180 degrees the other direction with a breath in between," she explains.

Symchych’s passion for horses started in her youth. "When I was a teenager, all I wanted to do was ride horses," she recalls. Symchych spent several summer vacations helping out at a stable, then worked as a trail guide, and later, as a riding counselor at a summer camp with more than two-dozen horses. Reining, though, is a more recent endeavor for Symchych, who three years ago bought her reining horse, a mare named Brandy, and began taking lessons in the sport.

Then last year, she began competing at horse shows overseen by the National Reining Horse Association. "It made me pay a lot more attention to doing all of these [maneuvers] very precisely and to appreciate how hard it is to do a sequence of all these maneuvers beautifully and well," she says. "When I saw the people that were in the professional class -- they call it ‘the open’ -- I saw what there was to aspire to." For Symchych, the most fun with reining, though, is the camaraderie at competitions in towns across the Midwest, where participants cheer each other on in their performances.

Before joining Dorsey & Whitney in 1989, where Symchych cochairs the firm’s white collar crime practice group, she served as a U.S. magistrate judge for the District of Minnesota (1985-89); an assistant U.S. attorney, (1981-85); and as an assistant Hennepin County attorney (1977-81). Symchych double-majored in American History and Journalism at the University of Minnesota (1973) and earned her J.D. at William Mitchell College of Law (1977).

Everyone rides horses in Symchych’s family: Her husband Peter, an industrial psychologist; Alison, 16; and Becca, 14. Sometimes the family spends Sunday afternoons riding on miles of sandy roads along the Crow River, through forests and prairie lands with wild flowers. "The kids know how much I love this, so last Mother’s Day we all went riding on a Sunday afternoon," she says.

"When I was a teenager, all I wanted to do was ride horses."

One-sixteenth of an inch can spoil a shot under the tight rules of competitive sporting clays. John Lunseth, an attorney with the firm or Rider, Bennett, Egan & Arundel, has made the All American team three times.

John Lunseth excels in sporting clays, a competitive sport of shooting clay targets of a half-dozen sizes that are released from a trap -- like the 90-millimeter target that tends to fly fast and maintain its speedy flight, or the 60-millimeter target which in flight looks about the size of an aspirin. Lunseth placed fifth in national competition (1995) and has competed four times in world championship competition. And now Lunseth, 51, in addition to competing in local events, is training for competition in the veteran world championship, a division for individuals of age 55 and over, for which he will be eligible in 2004.

Lunseth’s eyes are intense as he peers over the barrel of his shotgun at the Metro Gun Club, in Blaine. He also practices at home: a novel mechanical device, which Lunseth developed because of restrictions on his schedule, enables him to do so. The device is constructed out of a sewing machine motor, two slats of wood, pulleys, and an elastic rope. Lunseth places his target -- a piece of reflective tape -- on the rope, which runs in front of a wall, and fits a laser device in the bore of his gun during practice sessions. The device allows him to mount the gun and shoot the laser light at the reflective tape in repetitions.

"What you’re practicing is just to lift that gun up and get it exactly in the right spot every time," explains Lunseth, chair of the commercial litigation practice group at the law firm of Rider, Bennett, Egan & Arundel, in Minneapolis.

Sporting clays is a sport of precision. In world competitions, shooters are required to keep the gun below a line sewn on the shooting vest as they wait for a trap to release the sporting clays; and when mounting the gun to shoot, it is crucial for accuracy to consistently put it in the same place. "If you drop it a 16th of an inch or more below where you normally put it on your cheek back here, you’ll miss completely," he says.

One aspect of the sport he enjoys is the camaraderie and people he meets. "It’s a social sport, like golf is, because of the way it’s done," he explains. "You’ll be in a group of people, and you’ll all go out there and shoot one particular station, like you’d shoot a hole of golf. And then you walk to the next one."

Among other interests, Lunseth enjoys scuba diving and is a certified divemaster and an assistant instructor. Lunseth, who majored in international relations at the University of Minnesota (1974) and earned his J.D. there (1977), also likes singing, and played lead roles in professional and university musical theater productions prior to law school. In the U of M law library, Lunseth met Heidi Hoard, a fellow law student (1976) who would become his wife. She is general counsel at the Musicland Group, and the couple are raising two sons: John B. Lunseth III, age 18; and Steven, 11.

In sporting clays, Lunseth has made the All American Team three times (1992, 1995, and 1996). The criteria, at that time, involved hitting 80 percent of the targets in competition with a minimum of 1,000 targets, and each competition had about 100 targets. Lunseth shoots with an over-under double-barrel shotgun, with a stock made precisely to fit him. And he enjoys the feeling of hitting the targets. "It’s like the thrill of hitting a baseball with a bat," he says. "It’s a great feeling to do that."