About Ross Pfund
Ross Pfund is the managing editor of Super Lawyers. He is the editor of the Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts, Louisiana and Southwest magazines. An award-winning editor and writer with more than 20 years of experience, he has a journalism degree from the University of Minnesota. His work has also appeared in the Star Tribune and the Norman County Index. As a child, he knew he was cut out for a career in journalism because he never once stuck his hand into his father’s printing press.
Articles written by Ross Pfund
Q&A With James Knauer
Over the course of his career, James Knauer of Kroger, Gardis & Regas has served as federal receiver in four Ponzi scheme cases, and helped about 200,000 former employees of Walmart reach a class action settlement with the retail giant.What inspired you to become a lawyer? I really didn’t intend on practicing law. I just got a law degree because I intended on entering the world of finance and I thought a law degree would be a nice thing to have. I started working for a judge at a court of small claims, a municipal court, during the first semester of law school and I really fell in love with being a lawyer, and it changed my focus. Any specific memories of your experience there? That was the beginning, back in the …
Q&A: William Massey
Memphis-based Bill Massey of Massey McCluskey is one of Tennessee’s top criminal defense and death penalty attorneys, but he still makes time to teach young lawyersWhat inspired you to become a lawyer? I like the idea of working with a jury to resolve conflicts between a citizen and the government. When I got out of law school those citizens became real people that would sit across my desk, and I would get to know them and their families, and it became much more real instead of abstract. What draws you to high-stakes death penalty cases? It’s really just a follow-up of what attracted me to criminal defense work initially. It’s just that the …
Q&A With Paul Sugarman
The co-founder of Sugarman & Sugarman with his brother Neil, Paul Sugarman has, over the course of a 50-year legal career, scored victories over General Motors and Eli Lilly in personal injury cases and has championed court reform.At what age did you go to law school? I was pretty young. I started law school when I was 19. At the time that I went to law school, it was the last year that you could enroll after two years of college and that’s what I did. That was in ’51. So I was a little younger than most people entering law school even then. Did you find that your young age gave you any advantage? You learn pretty quickly! At that time, we had a lot of returning World War II veterans that were in the class. So …
Download This Story
John Browning sticks up for the average guy against the recording industryIn August 2005, David Greubel, a father of four from Arlington, discovered that the Recording Industry Association of America was suing him. His crime? Allegedly illegally downloading and sharing 600 songs, including pop-rocker Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi,” on his family’s computer. It looked like Greubel would have to pay up to a $9,000 settlement. Then his fortunes changed when his 15-year-old daughter Elisa e-mailed rapper MC Lars saying she could relate to his song “Download …
He Oughta Be an English Teacher
There's a kid in Columbus who wants to implement a law deeming himself Supreme Ruler of the World. His first order of business? Exterminate all Michigan residents and make Michigan Stadium the national sewer. The student proposed his idea as part of the Ohio State Bar Association’s Law Day “There Ought to Be a Law” essay contest, open to grades seven through 12. Columbus attorney Peter Hahn read this student’s essay during the second round of judging, and “When I read the first …
Mr. Wagoner Goes to Columbus
Mark Wagoner has been interested in public service ever since he was a student at Ottawa Hills High School in Toledo. So when he saw that the 46th House District’s incumbent state representative had reached his term limit in the lead-up to the 2004 election, Wagoner decided it was now or never. “It was time to throw my hat into the ring,” says the Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick litigation attorney. So he hit the campaign trail in early October, more than a year before the election. …
The Soul of a Poet
How he became a lawyer is stranger than fictionAs an English major at the University of Michigan, Lee Atkinson developed his writing skills. He had authored a couple of novels and hired an agent to see if he could get them published. “I got a phone call, and it turns out my agent was a fraud,” Atkinson says. “He was selling other people’s manuscripts as his own, and he was prosecuted. This was during the very time I was trying to decide what to do with my life.” It’s not surprising, then, that he ended up becoming a lawyer. …
Fishing for Dollars
The Bilzin Sumberg trial attorney put his passion to good useMitch Widom knows a thing or two about fishing. After getting hooked on the sport at age 16, he has been casting his line ever since. For over a decade, he’s organized fishing trips for a group of close friends to such exotic locales as Brazil, Costa Rica, remote Alaska and Guatemala. “It’s a passion,” Widom says, “though my wife would probably say it’s an obsession!” But when he and his wife, Alicia, learned in 2004 that their oldest daughter, Taylor, had Crohn’s disease, a …
Who Wants to be Dan Blonsky?
He gave Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? a shotDan Blonsky has always been great at remembering what he calls “formerly useless information.” So when he saw an article in the Miami Herald about how to apply to be on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in January 2000, he decided to give it a shot. “The show went on the air in late ’99 and got a lot of attention and publicity,” Blonsky says. “I’d seen it a couple of times, and it seemed like they were just giving away $32,000” because of the ease of the first questions a …
Fever Pitcher
David T. Mitrou is no stranger to the excitement of baseball. He’s played the sport all his life: as an undergrad at Ithaca College and as a five-time all-star with the Revere Rockies who were then of the Boston Baseball League, which fields the area’s top amateur competition. But nothing could have prepared him for the rush he felt when he stepped onto the Fenway Park pitcher’s mound in front of 30,000 screaming Red Sox fans. “You got the sense of what it’s like to be a …
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