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| MSBA PRESIDENT 2005-06 MSBA’s
new president works in by Amy Lindgren The term Renaissance Man is usually applied to a gentleman of such varied tastes and skills that he could as easily design a house, argue a legal case, or clean a string of fish he’d just caught. Brian Gaviglio, litigation management attorney for the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust, believes the term fits as well for his wife, Sue Holden, as for anyone he’s ever met. As the incoming president of
the Minnesota State Bar Association, Holden is already well-known
for he So it’s indisputable that she
can argue a legal case. But design a house? Field-dress
a deer? All that and more, according to Gaviglio.
“She’s a pretty amazing person,” he says. “People who meet he Holden first learned to tackle
any project by working summers at her parents’ lake resort as a teenager
(see sidebar). From there, it was on to college at Harry Sieben
remembers the newly graduated Holden very well. “I hired her,” he
says. “She had supersta For her part, Holden loves everything about the field of litigation and her products liability work. “I like the clients,” she says. “People are in some pretty tragic circumstances and we have the opportunity to help them provide for their futures. Trying cases is hard work but fun, and winning is a real highlight because it is so important for my clients.” One of the qualities Sieben particularly appreciates about his partner is her ability to make technical cases easy to understand. “Part of the reason she’s successful is that practical approach to complex problems,” he says. “She’s able to boil things down into terms that people can understand. A lot of lawyers make simple problems complicated, but she can make complicated problems simple.” That will be an exceptionally handy skill this year as Holden takes the reins just as the Bar embarks on its first nontransitional year with a newly reorganized governance structure. As she says, this is the year the rubber meets the road, when two years of preparation gives way to the real thing. Managing the new governance structure will be challenging, but it’s only a backdrop to Holden’s real agenda for the year. Included in the initiatives for her presidency are a new look at the issue of diversity in the practice of law, a renewed emphasis on enhancing and protecting the image of the legal profession, and a continuation of the effort to create a grass roots infrastructure of attorneys statewide who can be mobilized quickly for legislative action. Although these seem like very
different topics, when Holden looks at each of these issues she sees
facets of the same problem: strengthening and defending the legal
profession. Diversity she reads in terms not confined to race, but
including age and gender as well. Her concern is finding ways to make
the face of the profession reflect the population it serves. This
will mean, she says, helping “The culture of law can be changed, over time, over generations,” she says. “There’s no question about it. I’m proof of that. I have all the opportunity I was able to grab onto and go after. That’s because of women lawyers who have gone before me and blazed the trail.” Holden’s second initiative, protecting and enhancing the image of lawyers, hearkens back to an effort she initiated during her 1999-2000 presidency of the Hennepin County Bar Association, when she started the Fair Comment Committee. The committee’s task is to respond on behalf of judges, if they give permission, when their reputations are unfairly maligned in the public eye. In this presidency, Holden anticipates the Bar may need to step forward to ensure the public receives accurate information about the legal system, lawyers and judges, and to deflect unfair criticism. Logistically speaking, the
grass roots initiative will probably be the most challenging of Holden’s
goals for the year. In this effort, she is continuing a drive begun
by several of her predecessors to organize Bar
leaders and members in every Bar district in the state. When that
happens, Holden says, the Bar will be able to respond quickly and
effectively to legislative issues by activating all o One of the challenges of the grass roots initiative is that the network of people involved statewide is constantly changing, and those within the network need to be consistently nurtured and informed if they are to be effective. Those facts alone make it a daunting task. Still, if anyone is going to be able to keep this project moving, Larry Buxbaum is convinced it will be Holden. Buxbaum, executive director of the Hennepin County Bar Association, worked with Holden when she served as president of that organization. In that collaboration he saw qualities in Holden that he feels will help her meet her goals for the State Bar. “One of Sue’s great strengths is building consensus,” Buxbaum says. “She was able to draw on the best of the ideas that others brought forward and build consensus that mattered.” Buxbaum also praises Holden’s ability to plan. “She’s strategic,” he notes, “both in terms of her presidency and in terms of the outside environment. She sees several steps ahead. The combination of being able to do that, and the modesty to see that the culmination of your efforts may not be recognized
fo That’s not to say that assuming a Bar presidency is a thankless job. But just in case, it’s good to have other motives for taking on the role. In Holden’s case, she swears that she serves because she likes to, and because she enjoys the company of lawyers. “Oh, this would be a miserable job if I didn’t like lawyers,” she laughs. “Why would you sit for hundreds of hours a year at Bar meetings and doing Bar activities if you didn’t like lawyers, or care about the profession? It’d make for a miserable existence.” Indeed, Holden cares so much
about lawyers and the future of the profession that she gives some
of her extremely limited spare time to a mentoring program for law
students managed by her friend Lisa Brabbit
who is assistant dean for external relations and programs at the “She mentored me in the skills
area, in personal and professional life balance, and in Bar work,”
Brabbit says. “She is quick on her feet and that is part of
what makes he Incredibly, although Holden
juggles 100 to 180 litigation files at a time in her law practice,
she sees the dozens or more hours a week of Bar-related duties as
an antidote to burnout. For Stowman, the incident provided an insight into Holden’s character: “I thought at that moment, ‘She’s ready to go that extra mile.’ It was one of those epiphany moments,” he says. So did she get her man? Ironically, no, and yes. He wasn’t in his office as they had hoped, but it wasn’t his fate to escape so easily. When it was time to return home, Holden discovered that her assigned seatmate was none other than the elusive Representative. She got her access after all. If Stowman delights in telling that story, he really enjoys talking about the side trip he and Holden took to be sworn in before the United States Supreme Court. The honor, which required considerable preparation on both their parts, fades in significance next to the spontaneous tour they took of the Supreme Court building, thanks to a clerk of court they both know. Besides seeing the green room for attorneys and the dining room used by the justices, Holden and Stowman were invited to the very top floor, which serves as a gym. The punchline? Stowman says, “We were shooting hoops in the highest court in the land.” The joke may be a groaner,
but the point is well-taken: Even the most demanding jobs, such as
leading a state bar association, have room
for fun. At least, that had better be true. Because
even as the president-elect, Holden has had to give up many of the
pleasures of free time. Although she doesn’t really mind the
small things — like doing her own manicures because she’s never had
time to sit in a salon — some of the othe According to Holden’s husband
Brian Gaviglio, two-week vacations have also been lost to the demands
of their combined litigation schedules. And, although Gaviglio recently moved to a more vacation-friendly management
position, he doesn’t expect Holden’s Bar
presidency to be kind to their personal lives. Nevertheless, they
do manage to get away on shorter trips and, in lieu of the longer
vacations, they spend frequent weekends at their cabin in Backus,
next door to the resort property Holden’s parents used to own. They
also visit frequently with Holden’s large, extended family in excursions
as varied as flying in to fish in Holden’s brother Joel, who
now works as a forestry technician for the dnr
in Wadena, says he is amazed at how well his younge Gaviglio,
who also grew up in rural To get an insight into how
simple it is to entertain Holden, one has only to talk to Joel about
their childhood years in the small town of For Sue, living in a small town had its advantages. For one thing, an enterprising teen could join just about any activity the high school offered. With only 30 kids in her class, Joel jokes that Sue being valedictorian was “kind of a relative award,” but there’s no doubt she was smart. She took advanced level science courses, captained her basketball and softball teams, played in the band, edited the newspaper, edited the yearbook, and was even voted homecoming queen. As she puts it, “I got the most out of my high school experience.” That habit of getting the most
from something will serve her well in the coming year. And her accumulation
of talents and skills is likely to serve the Bar well. If that’s true, it’s lucky
for the lawyers of Something to Fall Back On. If lawyering ever falls through for Sue Holden, she won’t have to worry about finding a side job. She can just dust off her resume and pick up a different career trail. Let’s see, she’s had experience cleaning boats, selling bait, delivering newspapers, building log homes, baking donuts, training motorcycle riders … and oh yes, law clerking. Funny how the legal job sticks out on that list. Like many kids who grew up in a rural area, Holden learned
to do whatever kind of work came her way. As a teenager, both she
and her brother Joel, who is a year older, worked at their family’s
lake resort in Joel remembers early entrepreneurial efforts at digging
for worms to sell the guests, but at ten cents a dozen, it was a slow
way to build wealth. When they hit on the idea to resell the crickets
and other bait left by departing vacationers, wealth accumulated more
quickly. By his recollection, they were able to deposit $43 in the
bank after a summer’s work, but he can’t remember if that was his
share, or the take for both of them. In either
case, it wasn’t encouraging enough to prod either of them into self-employment
as adults. Joel is now a forestry technician for the dnr in And, for her part, Sue can’t understand why anyone would go to a Krispy Kreme store to watch donuts roll off the assembly line. Having worked a summer preparing glazed rolls in a small-town bakery, she doesn’t care if she ever eats a donut again. As she says, “It really isn’t too appetizing after you’ve worked in that environment. Great experience, glad I did it, but one summer was plenty.” After the donuts and resort work came waitressing in the Brainerd supper clubs, where the real money was in tips. And then a relative opened up a log home business and Sue learned to do everything from peeling pine logs with a draw knife to honing logs on a lathe to moving prepackaged home kits with a forklift. She also learned to work from blueprints to see the various log dimensions and then cut out the entire house. Even though she got good at the work, Holden says, she never considered staying on or making it a way of life. “I was fairly well-convinced by the time I graduated from high school that there were not adequate economic opportunities in that area,” she says. “And I knew that I wanted a professional degree. It was either practice law or medicine. I wasn’t into blood, so law won out.” But first, there were more jobs to work at while she finished
her degree at As work-study positions go, this was probably one of the
more interesting options available. And one of the best connected.
It was this job that led Holden to an acquaintance with professors
in the department, which led her to take classes in traffic engineering
and accident reconstruction. The next link in the chain led to a professor
who consulted for a personal injury firm in The rest is history. Holden turned in her draw knife and
waitress shoes, sold her motorcycle, and moved to the Twin Cities
to start law school and her job in the law firm. And that’s when she
really got to work. Sue Holden in Brief Personal: Education:
Areas of practice: personal injury, product liability,
dram shop liability, auto accident / insurance litigation Bar Admissions: Honors & Distinctions: Minnesota State Bar Service: Hennepin County Bar Service: Other Organizations Served: Other Interests: |
