Hitting the Mark

About 30 years ago, after Stephen Hilger granted his 5-year-old son Andy’s Christmas wish of a youth bow, he took the boy to the archery range to teach him how to shoot. That’s when he made a happy discovery. 

“There, on the wall,” Hilger recalls, “hung the same type of bow that I shot when I was in college.”

Discovering archery as a freshman at the University of Florida had been “a happy accident,” recalls Hilger, who has tried more than 300 cases as a construction litigator at Hilger Hammond. Taking the class simply because he needed another P.E. credit, Hilger scored so high that his instructor thought it must be a mistake. But after observing his technique, the impressed teacher insisted he join the school’s archery team. 

“They had all these really fancy, cool bows and arrows and stabilizers and sights, and I was immediately hooked,” he says. “But the cost of the bow and arrows alone was almost equivalent to my annual budget to go to college, and I didn’t have the money to pursue it.”

At the range with his preschooler in early 1995, he saw his second chance. Within a few months, he’d shot his first perfect archery score, “and then it was off to the races,” he says. Two years later, he made his first finals appearance at the USA Archery U.S. Open. He now holds nine national records, two world records, competes on the U.S. Archery Team, and has participated in two Olympic trials. 

So what’s his target-piercing secret? “I’ve been trying to figure that out for 40 years,” he says. “It’s not something you do. It’s something you are.”

Hilger’s streak as an overachiever can be traced to several factors, including a lifelong entrepreneurial bent. Then there was his first day as a lawyer in 1982, when “one of the senior partners dropped a file on my desk and said, ‘Good luck.’” Hilger won the case. “The next thing I knew, I was a construction lawyer.”

Embracing challenge is in his DNA. His grandfather, a prominent defense attorney in Germany, refused to side with the Hitler regime’s war criminals in court. “And he won all the cases [against them], which was something that earned him a year and a half in prison,” Hilger says. That’s when the war ended, and he started a criminal defense practice in Berlin.

As if his archery habit weren’t enough, he sings, writes and plays guitar in the Steve Hilger Band, a blues ensemble that performs at clubs and festivals. (He has a jazz group, too, but he’s phasing it out.) His ear for music surfaced in eighth grade, when he started playing Peter, Paul and Mary-style folk tunes on guitar. 

The trumpet he played in high school band is now a lamp in his living room, mouthpiece facing skyward—a tribute to leaner days and the hours spent mowing grass to buy it at a garage sale for $50 before teaching himself how to play. “It was the ugliest of ugly ducklings,” he admits. “Everybody else had these beautiful, polished, wonderful trumpets. But it was a symbol to me: I did this myself.”

Altogether, the Steve Hilger Band has produced five albums. Of his role in the group, he jokes, “If you have a six-pack, I’m the plastic thing that holds it together.”

He also enjoys photography—a pastime that started in high school and paid his way through college and law school—and relishes capturing shots of birds and other wildlife with his Nikon Z9 and Z8. “This morning, I was photographing nested eagles that are about to fledge,” he says. “Alligators, you name it—any time I can witness animal behavior, I’m interested in photographing it.”

Hilger, who has scaled back his law practice ahead of retirement and these days primarily handles alternative dispute resolution matters, pursues all three hobbies daily. But archery is still his foremost passion, one that he shares with Andy, now a three-time national champion who practices at Hilger Hammond.

“It has impacted [my law practice] in a monumental way, which is why I encourage a lot of lawyers to get involved in sports activities, especially trial lawyers,” Hilger says. “What separates the top is the mental game. I knew what it was like to shoot for gold. I’ve done it many times. That’s no different than when you’re standing in front of a jury or a judge. You have to have a certain level of confidence and preparedness.”