Published in 2024 Minnesota Super Lawyers magazine
By Katie Dohman on July 9, 2024
Johanna Clyborne’s single-spaced, seven-page curriculum vitae is a dizzying tour of awards and accomplishments: a two-star general in the U.S. Army who was born under, and even served in, a time when women were not authorized to serve in battle. A Bronze Star recipient in 2009. The commissioner and chief information officer for the State of Minnesota who hauled Real ID over the finish line, under budget, after a previous attempt under a different commissioner failed. A partner at Brekke, Clyborne & Ribich with a rock-solid reputation in family law, particularly when it comes to veterans’ benefits and rights. A co-writer of the 2015 Uniform Deployed Parents Custody and Visitation Act for service members, which helps protect them from losing custody of their kids when they’re deployed. A Red Cross board member and a Veterans Court mentor. A marathon runner, scuba diver and Disney fanatic.
Just a fact-check: Clyborne has as many hours in the day as anyone else. She doesn’t even drink coffee. But she’s also a realist.
“I’m a Super Lawyer, a super mom, a super soldier, a super Red Cross board member, but you can’t be super all the time,” she says from Mexico via Zoom, where she’s attending a conference for the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, of which she is a fellow. “We are, especially as women, taught we can have it all. Truth is, we can’t. Some days, I’m a Super Lawyer and super mom and a crappy super soldier and forget all about Red Cross and board commitments. Sometimes I’m a super soldier and suck as a mom.
“And sometimes I’m on top of the world and it all seems to gel.”
Clyborne’s early education didn’t necessarily portend her incredible career. Born of an American serviceman and a Dutch mother who had a second-grade education, she had a bilingual upbringing, mostly in European schools, and struggled early on with language. The schools sorted students into educational tracks based on performance. Clyborne’s teachers put her into the “homemaker school” category.
“If anyone knows anything about me, it’s that I am closer to Ronald McDonald than Betty Crocker,” she says, laughing. Her mother put her foot down, and Clyborne was placed on the university track. Eventually her language skills caught up, and Clyborne’s education took flight.
By the time she was 13, her father had been stationed in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where the family relocated, and owing to the Netherlands’ year-round school schedule, she graduated high school by 16 and started college. Less than three weeks after her 17th birthday, she had enlisted in the Missouri National Guard as a private.
Growing up, Clyborne had sworn she’d never go into the military or marry someone in the military, but she did both. Captain Andrea Tsuchiya, with whom she served in Iraq, says Clyborne’s husband, Duncan, is “the best thing since pockets.” Clyborne calls him her “ride or die,” who has supported her through every twist and turn and been a crucial support behind her success.
By 2001, she was a married mother of a preschool-age child, Keira. Clyborne enrolled at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, because she wanted an advanced degree and felt it gave her the best options to differentiate herself in the marketplace.
She met two women on her first day—Barbara Weckman Brekke and Rebecca Ribich. They felt an immediate connection, in part because they were all embarking on a second or third career, unlike most of their fellow students. By their second year of school, they were consulting each other in class and presenting as though they were already a team. By year three, fellow students were encouraging them to open a firm together.
They didn’t waste any time. On Oct. 31, 2005, the three were sworn in. On Nov. 1, they hung their shingle in Shakopee. In the early days, Clyborne took on some criminal cases, but increasingly felt pulled toward family law. She was really finding her groove in 2008 when the notice came: She was being called up for a deployment to Iraq.
“My partners being the amazing women they are, they never once complained or batted an eye,” she says. She was buoyed overseas by their care packages and knowing she had family, career, and friends waiting for her at home.
While stationed in Basrah, she served as the deputy intelligence officer for the 34th Infantry Division, which was responsible to the 13 southern provinces of Iraq. Clyborne says the job routinely required 14 to 18 hours a day. “I went out on the wire occasionally, but not routinely,” she says, noting many people lost their lives on the battlefield.
After a year, she came home, took a little time to reacclimate to civilian and family life, then returned to the firm with her perspective on veterans’ rights even more in focus. In the ensuing years, her reputation grew, particularly when it came to complex family law matters. She wanted to protect veterans and their family members’ rights when it came to child custody and making sure veterans are treated justly, leading her to focus on divorces and custody proceedings.
She’s now a nationally recognized expert in military family issues and has served as both a neutral and an expert in military pension division, military benefits, and Federal Employee Retirement System benefits across the United States.
“I’ve been the child in a military family. I know what it’s like to have a parent leave, to be left behind, while they’re on duty. I know what it’s like to move from installation to installation and find employment or be asked to do unpaid labor for the military. I know what it’s like when [ a spouse] leaves and all the appliances break and everything goes wrong,” she says. “I also know what it’s like to pick up my rucksack and leave my husband and daughter behind and leave the letter that says ‘In the event you’re reading this, know Mom loves you very much.’”
That perspective draws in not only clients, but fellow attorneys, who often consult with Clyborne. Tsuchiya jokes that she has advised others not to bother hiring other attorneys when they can have Clyborne’s direct expertise and advice.
“I’m not just an advocate for my client, but I’m also this compass for them to help walk this path together,” Clyborne says. “It is a hard line to make sure I don’t absorb their angst and trauma. But I’m also able to relate to where they are and provide that guidance for them.”
“Johanna Clyborne is one of the hardest working people I know,” says Weckman Brekke. “Every day, Jo goes out of her way to help others. She often drops everything she is doing to take a phone call from another attorney to answer their questions or talk them through a situation. Jo makes me a better lawyer.”
Says Ribich, “If I had to come up with a word to describe Jo, it would be ‘fierce,’ in the very best sense of that word. She approaches everything in her life with a heartfelt and powerful intensity. This is true in what kind of friend and law partner she is, what type of wife and mother she is, and how she interacts with her clients and colleagues in her professional lives—both law and military. When Jo takes on a case or a cause, she is all in and 100 percent committed to doing the very best she possibly can.”
Watching loving, caring service members lose custody over their children because of deployments or mental health issues resulting from combat led Clyborne to help write the Uniform Deployed Parents Custody and Visitation Act, which she says “is meant to be a shield, not a sword.”
She also advocates for spouses who have put in the work of running a family while a service member is away, which isn’t always popular with the service members themselves.
“I ask them: ‘Who took care of the kids when you packed up your ruck and left? Who moved every time you had a new duty station and packed up your stuff?’ I know that was me when my husband got moved—I packed and established the new household. The military family serves just as much,” she says.
Along the way, she was also being tapped for increasingly prestigious roles: Attending resident war college, for example, which would have been “a big deal” to refuse—and which would have effectively ended her soaring career in the armed forces. When Brekke and Ribich learned of the stakes, Clyborne says, “they threatened to kick my butt if I didn’t go.” So she temporarily relocated with her family to Boston to complete the courses at Tufts School of Law and Diplomacy.
Not for nothing, she also ran the Boston Marathon in 2013, the year of the bombing. “I remember thinking, ‘I survive a year in Iraq and now some ass is trying to bomb me off the course? Really?’” She returned the following year to run it again.
As her caseload continued to balloon, Clyborne felt she was living three lives: military officer, attorney, family woman. “I don’t know how I survived those years, to be honest,” she says, noting that while people saw her accomplishments, they didn’t see the 3:30 a.m. wake-ups or the 9 p.m. meltdowns. And then she was put in the running to become a general.
She not only became the first woman to become brigadier general in the Minnesota Army National Guard in 2016, she also became the first woman to obtain the rank of major general in the Minnesota National Guard in 2019. But Clyborne’s first thoughts were of the responsibility the ranks placed on her: “What is the path to follow so there aren’t any more firsts? I’ve gotta super-perform because every eyeball is on me.”
She adds: “We’re given rank to serve, not be served, and it’s important we don’t forget that. It’s really important to remember where you came from.”
Tsuchiya says that genuine sentiment appears in Clyborne’s conversations with friends and colleagues, who all know that she’s silently cheering them on.
One of her longtime close friends and running partners, Katie Mahannah, says Clyborne always shows up. “She will barely be in town and still makes time to meet up for a run, sometimes to the detriment of her own sleep,” she says. “When I’m having a particularly bad day, am sick, or competing in my first triathlon, she always shows up. Sometimes I forget that she’s an Army general and a successful attorney because she doesn’t focus on herself. She focuses on me.”
Or on strangers. “Sometimes we’ve been running a race, and we’ll come up on someone who is clearly struggling,” Mahannah says. “She’ll encourage them that they’ve made it this far, they can do this. We can do this. We will run with them for awhile, too—sometimes to the detriment of our race time. She lifts everyone around her.”
“The military gave me the sense I can accomplish things even when they are hard,” Clyborne says of her frequently punishing schedule. “Whether rightfully or wrongfully placed, there’s a level of confidence that I can get through whatever the crucible is I am facing. … When bullets are flying or rockets are coming in, you make decisions and learn to triage decision-making. It also helps in trial, when something happens you don’t anticipate, or your client does something you don’t think they should do.”
She laughs. “And it also helps with raising kids.”
No matter the circumstances she’s thrust into, Clyborne thinks of herself as “an incredibly positive person, because the alternative is too damn depressing.” Scuba diving, regular trips to Disney, cranking the radio and dancing, running, and being with her family bring the balance that her professions demand.
“Many people will tell you what they are like,” Tsuchiya says. “She shows you. Her actions demonstrate servant leadership.”
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