Klein finds dream job helping Reinhart clients with retirement plans

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Amanda Klein’s initial plan was to go to law school.

But after spending a brief time working at a small family law firm where two attorneys were not getting paid particularly well to take on some at-times unsavory cases, she quickly lost that ambition. Still, when she graduated from college in 2009, she knew her days as a part-time bartender would soon have to come to an end.

Her next opportunity came when she took a position as a legal assistant at Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren. She quickly began helping clients with retirement plans.

This brush with the legal profession, she said, proved far more congenial than her first.

“For one thing, I typically don’t have to give much bad news,” she said. “This field of law is not very confrontational.”

That’s not to say her work is easy.

“This is a constantly changing field of law,” Klein said. “This year has been nuts. But I feel grateful for that. Never, even though I might be going crazy keeping up with things, do I feel like we’re going to be running out of work anytime soon. I just don’t see that happening.”

John Mossberg, a Reinhart shareholder who works closely with Klein, said Klein goes beyond merely trying to fulfill clients’ requests and tries to think about ways to improve their retirement plans.

“She’s also been very helpful in improving our internal policies and the movement of our paper documents to a virtual format,” he said. “She’s spearheaded that change and helped move us into the 21st century.”

Klein said she’s often amazed by how difficult it can be to carry out seemingly simple changes in retirement plans.

“Clients might decide that within their 401(K) options, they want to allow Roth IRA contributions,” she said. “There is a ton of documentation that goes along with that. So that keeps me very busy, just making sure they are compliant with the law.”