Law as a second career

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By Paul Fletcher
Dolan Media Newswires

Some people earn a law degree, then go on to be famous in some other venue. But what about the flip side of that, people who are in the public eye, then go on to a legal career?

I can name three such lawyers, two from sports and the other from entertainment.

Alan Page was one of the Minnesota Vikings’ vaunted “Purple People Eaters” of the 1960s and ’70s. During that stretch, Minnesota made the Super Bowl four times, all losses. Page, a defensive tackle who played for Minnesota from 1967 to 1978, was an All-Pro nine times. After hanging up his spikes in 1981 (he spent his last few seasons as a member of the Chicago Bears), he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame seven years later.

That’s his football story. A Notre Dame alumnus, he envisioned a life after the gridiron. He attended law school at the University of Minnesota, earning his degree in 1978. He was an associate at a Minneapolis firm for a few years, then in 1985, he went to work for the attorney general’s office.

In 1992, he was elected to the Minnesota Supreme Court, the first African-American to serve on that bench. He was reelected three times, the last in 2010.

And one of the greatest golfers ever quit at the age of 28 to be a lawyer.

Who, you ask? Bobby Jones, who in 1930 became the only golfer ever to record a “Grand Slam” in a single year.

A native of Atlanta, Jones was a golf prodigy, winning his first tournament at age 6. He kept playing and winning. He earned an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, where he was on the golf team. He earned a degree from Harvard. He went to law school at Emory, then passed the Georgia bar exam after only one year of study.

He had a pretty good year in 1930, winning four of the sport’s major tournaments at the time — the U.S. Open, the U.S. Amateur, the British Open and the British Amateur — a feat tagged a Grand Slam.

Maybe he figured there was nowhere to go but down, so he quit to concentrate on his law practice in Atlanta. He continued to play in the Masters over in Augusta every year until 1948, when bad health caught up with him. He died in 1971 at the age of 69.

And anyone remember Josh Saviano?

OK, how about this: Remember Paul Pfieffer, the best friend and sidekick of Kevin Arnold, the lead kid in “The Wonder Years,” the TV series set in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

Saviano played Paul. He was 11 when the series debuted in 1988, and he and Fred Savage, who played Kevin, essentially grew up on-screen. The show concluded in 1993.

Saviano later attended Yale and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. He is a partner with the firm of Morrison Cohen LLP in New York City, where he practices corporate and IP law.

And who says life doesn’t mirror art? In the last episode of “The Wonder Years,” a grown-up Kevin recounts what happened to all the characters. Paul Pfeiffer, he reveals, ended up going to Harvard Law and was a successful attorney.