Rising Stars

Team Player
Patrick Gallagher uses what he learned as a kid on the playing fields every day

Baseball. Soccer. Softball. Hockey. Football. Lacrosse. There's hardly a sport Patrick Gallagher hasn't played. And there's hardly a lesson he says he hasn't learned from playing them.

Gallagher, an intellectual property lawyer at Fulbright & Jaworski who played college soccer, says sports taught him the value of competitiveness, training and teamwork. The teamwork part especially.

The "team approach makes all the difference, whether it's to obtain the victory in a courtroom or to successfully register the trademark at the patent office or to resolve a dispute favorably for your client," he says.

He still plays hockey in adult leagues in St. Paul—"we all have day jobs to go to but you see that competitive aspect"—and takes pride in getting up early to hit the gym before work.

Gallagher stumbled into the IP field almost accidentally, having been assigned to a trademark case as a paralegal early in his career. His success in the field, however, is no accident. Again, he credits "that team mentality," which he also expresses in his commitment to mentoring and teaching. As a mentor at the firm, and in seminars that he teaches at William Mitchell, he tries to "set an example for how to conduct yourself when you're practicing as a lawyer. Everybody has a role and everybody is important," he says.

Outside the courtroom, Gallagher spends most of his time coaching. Since his oldest, now 13, was young, he has been coaching his kids' teams in some capacity. (He and his wife have four kids.) He has coached baseball and soccer but "the big ones now are hockey and lacrosse." Whatever the sport, though, the lessons are the same: competition, training and teamwork. They worked for him.

—Jimmy Osterholt

Brothers in Law
The Siebens carry on a family tradition

Jeffrey and Thomas Sieben are sitting across from each another at a large conference table. "This is the first time we've spoken in years," Tom says. They look at each other, burst out laughing and Jeff shakes his head. "We live across the street from each other," he says.

The brothers are close, and not just because of the proximity of their homes. Jeff, two years older than his brother, recently became a father for the first time; he named his son Benjamin Thomas.

Jeff, a personal injury lawyer with Sieben, Grose, Von Holtum & Carey, and Tom, a criminal defense lawyer at Sieben Law Office, are third-generation attorneys, preceded by their grandfather Harry and their father Harry Jr. And there are even more lawyers in the Sieben family, too, including three uncles who practice personal injury law. "We had a very unique upbringing," says Tom. "We were around law all the time. It really gave us an advantage." When the brothers would have a day off from school, their father would often bring them to the office. There was plenty of shop talk at the dinner table.

However, they were never pushed to be lawyers. "We came to it on our own," says Jeff. But not before exploring other career options first. Though Tom went to law school, he did so with plans of becoming a politician. When it came time to run for office, however, he was already working as a criminal defense lawyer and didn't want to stop. "Being a lawyer is my primary passion," he says.

Jeff had a similarly twisty path to the law. After graduating from St. John's University, he taught English to seventh- through 11th-graders in Bucaramanga, Colombia. "I respected [my father's career], but I wanted to try other options," he says. "I studied government, but I enjoyed teaching."

For both brothers, the motivation to work in government, teach and ultimately become lawyers stems from a desire to help people. "But it's important to make some time to get out from behind the desk" and out into nature, says Tom. "We [recently] canoed down the Big Fork River. I was in the back paddling and my brother was in the front hunting for deer on shore."

As for the newest Sieben, Jeff isn't worried about Benjamin becoming a lawyer. "I'm going to provide the chance at other options," he says, "like I got when I was growing up."

—Courtney Mault

The Translator
Language whiz Mark Vavreck on volcanoes, earthquakes and sleeping under the stars

It was Mark Vavreck's last day of Arctic Soldier Training, a mere week after arriving at Fort Richardson, just outside of Anchorage, Alaska. He was sleeping outside. In the snow. "The Army has to prove to us their equipment works so there's no tent-I had an arctic sleeping bag," he says. So what was that like? "I didn't die," he says with a chuckle. "It was difficult to get to sleep, as you could imagine, but when I finally did, we all woke up to an earthquake."

That wasn't the only run-in he had with Mother Nature. A week after his Alaskan campout, Mount Redoubt erupted 110 miles from the Army base. "The sky turned black on the horizon-not like storm clouds; I mean black," he says. "After it was over, there was about three inches of ash on everything."

As a boy, Vavreck idolized his uncle, former Minneapolis assistant city attorney Edward Vavreck. "He was a very well-liked and respected man," explains Vavreck, who now practices consumer, personal injury and employment law with Scrimshire, Martineau, Gonko & Vavreck in Minneapolis. It was his mom, however, who encouraged him to enroll in the Army. "I visited a recruiter at the behest of my mother two weeks before my senior year in high school," he says. He had three years of Spanish under his belt, so decided to take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, which tests a person's ability to learn languages. "The recruiter said everyone fails that test," says Vavreck. But he passed.

After high school, Vavreck went on to the Defense Language Institute in California and began studying Russian. After graduating, he spent the next two years as a voice interceptor and Russian translator, as well as part of a four-man team that trained to go behind enemy lines. "But we never had to actually do so, as Russians do not have positions on Alaskan soil," he says.

Vavreck finished his service in June 1992. By that fall he had enrolled at the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, where he signed up for a Russian-language class. "I ended up having a conversation in Russian with the professor on the first day," he says. "All the other students were like, ‘Oh, man, there goes the grading curve.'"

These days, Vavreck is no longer jonesing to fight the bad guys. In addition to his practice, he teaches a negotiation competition course at William Mitchell-last year his team of students placed fifth in a national competition in Los Angeles. Vavreck is clearly proud of the accomplishment, pointing out a plaque on his shelf. While he was in California, he took a photo of a beach at sunset. Pointing to it, he says, "It was just paradise."

No arctic sleeping bags necessary.

—Courtney Mault