business

Toni Halleen once whiled away her off hours with improvisational performances at local clubs and theaters. Then she translated her improv background into a growing sideline business that coaches attorneys to think on their feet.

Janet Coleman, whose interests started with abstract painting and morphed into a passion for abstract landscape photography, has traveled the globe in search of spectacular images she's bent on turning into a second career at age 62.

And Nancy Veronen spends three- and four-day weekends helping to run a northern Minnesota resort started by her parents and now co-owned with her brothers and sisters.

Then there are David Fisher and Gwen Lerner, who have collected enough community service gigs to keep an army of volunteers busy.

What these folks have in common is that they're all practicing attorneys affiliated with an uncommon law firm called General Counsel Ltd. (GCL), which offers corporate clients experienced part-time counsel while giving its lawyers a chance to work as many hours as their other interests allow.

"GCL is a lifestyle, not just a law practice," said Veronen, who spends part of her week as general counsel for Equus Computer Systems and teaching constitutional law at Globe University/Minnesota College of Business in the Twin Cities.

The firm is the brainstorm of Kent Larson, who envisioned a practice in which GCL attorneys would spend one to three days a week -- or more, if they choose -- at client headquarters in order to understand the business and be available to prevent small problems from escalating into major ones.

"Preventive law," he calls it, a model that grossed $1.2 million in 2007 and is on track to hit $1.5 million this year.

Here's the kicker: Ask Larson where his corporate headquarters is and he'll tell you, "cyberspace." Because its attorneys work at client facilities, GCL has no office and its only overhead is accounting, bookkeeping and marketing.

That means its fees run about half of what a conventional law firm charges, Larson said. All of which would seem to make it the ideal choice for small to midsized companies, the market on which Larson focused in the beginning.

"But we found that larger companies also saw us as a way to expand or reduce legal services as economic conditions dictated without affecting employee headcount," Larson said. Thus the current client roster includes the brawny likes of 3M, Wells Fargo and Honeywell, with ADC Telecommunications, Supervalu and Carlson Companies having adorned the list in the past.

In short, there's flexibility on both sides of the equation, which has led five of GCL's 10 attorneys (the others work nearly full time) down some fascinating paths. Consider:

• Halleen, former director of employment law at ADC Telecommunications, joined GCL in 2002 seeking time to write and produce a full-length musical called "Soulless Bloodsucking Lawyers," a plea for greater emphasis on good vs. money-grubbing. It was voted "best musical" at the 2003 Minnesota Fringe Festival and earned a three-month run at the Bryant-Lake Bowl.

Meanwhile, Halleen was applying her improv background to a sideline company dubbed "Fun With Law," which offers what she calls "think-on-the-spot" seminars for lawyers. That, plus a course she teaches at William Mitchell College of Law called "situational communication," has grown into a business that's grossing well into five figures, she said.

• Coleman, who joined GCL in 1987, began with abstract landscape paintings that she showed regularly at area studios and art crawls. She sold enough of them "to about pay for the oil paints," she said. In 2003 she shifted her interest in abstract art to the camera, producing offbeat images that catch the eye, but mask the identity of the subject.

There's a blazing sunset over the South African bush country, for example. And a late-afternoon sun that turns iron-rich sand dunes in Namibia into a luminous orange mound contrasting with the dark shadows nearby. And stark shapes of dead trees poking through a dry Namibian lakebed.

She's selling her photos both online and at local shows and "moving toward a second career," although she said her revenue so far is a long way from paying for her travel.

• Veronen, a native Minnesotan, built a legal career that included a stint as director of legal affairs at Texas-based Continental Airlines. She returned to Minnesota in 1990, she said, to be closer to her family and the lake resort her parents started in 1946 on Bad Medicine Lake near Itasca State Park.

Given her desire to be involved with the resort, the GCL flexibility "allowed me to reinvent my life," she said. Translation: Her work at Equus and teaching at Globe still leaves time to "carry on the legacy of our parents" at the resort.

• Lerner, who headed the employment law department at Control Data, joined GCL 20 years ago in order to spend more time with her first grandchild. She wound up spending more time on behalf of many more children than that.

She played a role in founding Hennepin County's Guardian Ad Litem program, which provides advocates who represent the best interests of abused and neglected children in court. She also helped start a children's law section of the Minnesota State Bar Association to focus on children's legal issues and was involved in starting the Children's Law Center as an advocate for children's health, education and protection issues.

"The experience has been richly rewarding," but also "very discouraging given the layers of socioeconomic challenges these children's families face," said Lerner, who also is a member of the Department of Corrections Advisory Task Force on Female Offenders.

• Fisher, a recent GCL recruit, brings a distinguished résumé to GCL: He was associate general counsel and vice president of international development at Pillsbury; general counsel at ADC Telecommunications and G&K Services, and Gov. Jesse Ventura's commissioner of administration.

His list of outside activities in recent years has been nearly as long: president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, member of Meet Minneapolis (formerly the Minneapolis Convention Bureau), chair of the Legislature's Regent's Candidate Advisory Council and treasurer of ClearWay Minnesota, which administers the $200 million award from the Big Tobacco lawsuit.

GCL not only allows him to pursue such activities, but also gives him time "for the struggle to master photography as an art form, for playing the banjo in bluegrass jam sessions and to help my 90-year-old mother through her difficult later years," Fisher said.

Oh yes, "and more time for dating my wife of 38 years."

Dick Youngblood • 612-673-4439 • yblood@startribune.com