Minnesota Attorney Patrick K. Oden

A Brief Autobiography

I was born in Minneapolis and raised in Shoreview, which is a small-ish suburb north of Saint Paul. I went to elementary and middle school at Saint Odilia. I attended high school at Totino-Grace in Fridley. And then I earned a B.A. from Saint John's University in central Minnesota.

After college, I continued studying for a couple of masters degrees. In the mean time, I worked a few jobs that ranged from retail clerk, to congressman's staffer, to law firm administrator. The law firm was the Minneapolis City Attorney's Office.

I only spent a year with the City Attorney, but in that time I realized where my life would be heading. My decision was cemented during a legal fight between some of my close family and some of my distant family. The fight was over, of all things, a cow barn. Nobody came out the winner of that contest.

I decided to go to law school.

Doing so would mean abandoning the work I had already accomplished in the masters programs, which was a year and a half at that point. That gave me some pause, but not much. I knew that a law degree could get me, at a minimum, the same kinds of jobs that the masters degrees could, and in fact the law degree could land me much better jobs. The decision was easy, really.

My law alma mater is the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. I decided to go to Pitt because, well, to be perfectly frank, they gave me a bunch of money to go there. Too much to pass up, especially compared to the offers at other schools.

The memories of more than three years in Pittsburgh are some of the best of my life. I made great friends and had a lot of fun times (and a lot of stressful times and a whole bunch of hard work).

In law school, I earned high marks and cultivated many valuable experiences. In addition to my scholarship, I was awarded a fellowship to work in public interest law. I was also involved in a public interest student organization, a council on environmental law, and an elder law clinic. It was during my time working for the elder law clinic that I developed an interest in probate law and guardianship and conservatorship law.

After law school, I went to work for West Publishing as an editor. The experience was terrific, at least from a writing and researching point of view. It was rotten, from a legal practice point of view.

I wasn't content. I wanted to practice law instead of just publish law-related information. So, I decided to set out on my own. (This is the simplified version of things; the actual events took a long time to come to pass and involved a fair share of uncertainty and anguish.)

Since leaving West, I now practice as a solo attorney, I work as an editor for the MSBA, and I write, produce, and publish materials on a wide variety of legal and non-legal topics.