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Life offers opportunities for personal growth

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//February 16, 2009//

Life offers opportunities for personal growth

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//February 16, 2009//

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Sandy Hupfer’s father once mused about her extended studies.

After an undergraduate degree in music, a law degree from the University of Wisconsin, and a practice with Stellpflug Law in DePere, he thought his 50-year-old daughter was done with school.

But course by course, taking just a class or two each year for the last eight years, Hupfer continued her education. She is now within reach of a master’s degree in Christian Studies from a divinity school in Illinois.

Did she get extra points at work for pursuing more education, her father wondered.

“No,” Hupfer said, “just extra life points.”

Hupfer, an attorney in the Green Bay area for 22 years, is not the kind of person to live her life by tally.

It just so happens that her passion for study, her willingness to work and her desire to help have led her down paths she might never have imagined, including on trips to Europe and Latin America for church missions and on one journey into an operating room, where she donated a kidney to a uncle enslaved by dialysis.

Hupfer’s route to the law also was circuitous.

“I was one of those kids who didn’t know what she wanted to be,” Hupfer said. “I wasn’t one of those people who grew up wanting to be a lawyer. I stumbled into it.”

Hupfer majored in music in college, detoured into a nursing program, then back to piano after realizing she’d probably rather be a doctor. Her one academic constant was a business minor. And a business law class led to her career in insurance and personal injury law.

Married for 16 years to Steve Hupfer, a construction contractor, Hupfer imagines their retirement — he building homes or schools, she teaching and doing administrative work.

Her goal is to mobilize people to make change themselves.

Perhaps she channeled that spirit when she chose in 2002 to donate a kidney to her uncle, Don Hoffman.

Uncle Don was 69, when he died in 2006 from a heart condition. But Hupfer’s kidney allowed him to live the last four years of his life away from dialysis, which he had needed three times each week before the transplant.

Hupfer also gained something from the operation.

“It makes you look at what your values are in life. What’s worth it? Everybody has their own line that they draw,” she said.

Looking back at her life, and occasionally through a bundle of tattered letters clients have sent over the years, Hupfer also has found her own way to define success, as a lawyer and as a person.

“If you say it’s just achieving, then what do you do when you get on top of the mountain?

The joy is in the journey. It’s who you become getting there, even if you don’t get there exactly.”

— Jessica Stephen

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