On the Right Track

While Xavier Martine now leads a team of eight lawyers who handle criminal defense and family law matters across Minnesota, his journey to the law wasn’t a direct one. That path needed to be paved by a few key life experiences. 

In that way, he’s similar to his father, who pivoted to law school from banking while in his 40s. The joy the law brought him made an impression on his young son. “He was the inspiration,” Martine says. “He loved law school and he loved his practice.”

A second factor was the U.S. Navy, which St. Paul native Martine joined a week after graduating high school in Birmingham, Alabama. Working as an electronics technician and nuclear engineer on the recently commissioned USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, Martine picked up a lot more than just technical knowledge.

“The Navy taught me how to study,” Martine says. “I learned how many brilliant people there are in the world. By the time I got to college, I found it much easier than if I hadn’t been in the Navy first.”

The third crucial element of Martine’s journey was getting sober. After years of alcohol abuse, he eventually realized there was nowhere to go but up, and methodically set about straightening himself out. “There was a time when my alcoholism led me to homeless shelters, put me in and out of hospitals, and took me near death and some of the darkest chapters of my life,” he says. “But through the grace of God, I am now married to the love of my life and have the family that I once only dreamed of.”

This meant that, like his dad, Martine entered law school a bit later in life than most. He eventually followed up a degree in economics from Hamline University with a degree from the university’s law school.

During and after his pursuit of that degree, a rejuvenated Martine hit the ground running. Over a four-year period in the 2010s, he interned at the Carver County Courthouse and clerked for the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office, the Ramsey County Public Defender, and Waseca County Judge Carol M. Hanks. He followed that up by externing with U.S. District Court Judge Tony Leung; then spent six months working for a St. Paul immigration law firm. 

With all that experience under his belt, Martine made the big leap of founding his own firm in March 2019 at age 38.

“I had worked for a lot of firms before I was licensed,” Martine recalls. “I worked in Big Law in Chicago, and for some smaller firms. I saw how firms can be run. That inspired me to try to start a firm and run it in a way that made sense to me.

He adds: “We try to run the firm like a business. Most firms ask their attorneys to wear lots of different hats; we don’t do that. I try to put a minimum of three people on every case we take in.”

Part of the drive that propelled Martine into his own practice was a love of adversarial competition, which made him a natural for the courtroom. “I grew up playing tournament chess, so I decided that I wanted to play chess in some form for the rest of my life,” he says. “That meant I wanted to be in court as much as possible.”

In his first trial, Martine defended a Black client in a felony aggravated robbery case in Stearns County before an all-white jury.

“It was a tough, high-profile case, but what I really remember is how fun it was,” says Martine. “Luckily, I’d had lots of good mentors, and I was able to take all that training and apply it to that first jury trial. … We told the jury we were guilty of the misdemeanors and fought like crazy to get the felony aggravated robbery first-degree count dismissed.” 

The firm is just six years old, but its early successes have Martine considering expansion. “In Minnesota we’re close to being about the right size,” he says. “We just got all our certificates approved and should be up and running by next week in Charlotte, North Carolina.”

Away from work, Martine and his wife, Christine, enjoy struggling at golf (“We’re awful—we have so much fun and we never keep score,” he says) and cheering for the Minnesota United soccer club. They live in Delwood with their 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.

Also, he says, “We’re both big into recovery. That drives my goals when it comes to the firm. It’s a blessing to be able to do this, and it’s all due to my sobriety. I have lots of gratitude.”