Law firm stood up for powerless workers

When Paul Sprenger was a young law student, he thought his bread would be "buttered with a regular payday from a large business law firm."

But Sprenger said representing business clients "left me kind of cold." So he created his own firm with two other lawyers in Minneapolis and quickly became a thorn in the side of corporate America. His practice, which eventually became Sprenger and Lang, took on 3M, Cargill, Control Data Corp. and other firms on behalf of workers -- and won.

In one of his most high-profile cases, he established the first ever sexual harassment class of women employees when miner Lois Jenson won her case against Eveleth Taconite Co. The landmark case was depicted in the movie "North Country." A character based on Sprenger was played by Woody Harrelson, though Sprenger said that, even at 69, he has more hair than Harrelson.

Now, Sprenger and Lang has closed its downtown Minneapolis office, though it will keep its Washington, D.C., office and maintain a partnership with a Chicago attorney.

Steve Sprenger, Paul's 47-year-old son who now owns the law firm and practices out of Washington, decided the Minneapolis office was too costly to operate. He wanted some of the Minneapolis attorneys in the firm to buy ownership stakes, or as Sprenger described it, "to share in the risk and reward." But none of the five attorneys chose to invest.

Supporters of the firm are saddened to see it vanish from the Twin Cities legal landscape.

"They were utterly fearless," said Minneapolis attorney Larry Schaefer, who leads his own firm and practiced with Sprenger and Lang for a dozen years until 2005.

Mara Thompson, who joined the firm 15 years ago, said she will be affiliated with Sprenger and Lang as she finishes work on one case, but she's job hunting now.

"You don't get a chance to do class-action employment litigation in most firms," she said. After about two years of negotiations with Morgan Stanley, Thompson recently helped Sprenger and Lang secure a $47 million settlement for employees who felt they'd not been compensated fairly.

"We recognize that there's a lot of risk with these cases, and we are pretty careful with what we end up taking," said Steve Sprenger. "We probably turn away 99 percent of the cases that come to us."

The firm takes cases on contingency, meaning it isn't paid until it wins, either in court or through a settlement. "We've always been persistent," Steve Sprenger said. "If we lose, we appeal. We don't go away until it truly is over."

Sprenger and Lang was founded 20 years ago with its main office in Washington, D.C. But earlier, Paul Sprenger practiced in two other firms in Minneapolis that carried his name -- Sprenger, Olson and Shutes in the 1970s and Sprenger and Associates in the 1980s.

"It was tremendously important to every academic employee in the country," Paul Sprenger recalled in a phone interview from his home in Washington. The new hiring practices that emerged from that case to promote equal opportunities for women were "adopted by many, many other universities," he said.

The Rajender case opened the floodgates for Paul Sprenger, and he spent most of his time as lead counsel in an assortment of cases against big companies or institutions.

Lisa Stratton, who directs the Workers' Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School, said Sprenger and Lang developed such a strong reputation in Minnesota that it was viewed as "the place to go" among workers, including women in small towns.

"The firm's dedication to Lois Jenson's class action sex discrimination case against Eveleth Mines made the firm a beacon for other women isolated in discriminatory work environments," Stratton said.

Sprenger's work also led him to his marriage.

"We worked on a couple of cases together, to see if we could," he joked. It turns out they could. They formed Sprenger and Lang in 1989 and married in 1990.

Now retired, Sprenger is still serving as lead counsel in cases involving age discrimination claims by television writers.

Steve Sprenger, who said he was raised "to have a commitment to civil rights and employment rights," will carry on the family's quest of "fighting the Fortune 500 companies, who are represented by the biggest law firms in the country."