Harry's Gang: Law firm merger is another blow to hyper-local business

I read in the last Pine Knot News of 2019 that the Rudy Law firm merged with Fryberger in Duluth, and will now be known as Rudy, Gassert, Yetka, Pritchett, and Helwig, a Fryberger Law Firm Practice Group (although I bet they still answer the phone simply, “Rudy Law Firm”). I’m happy for them, as it’s getting harder and harder to attract quality attorneys to small-town practices, and none of the capital names at the Rudy firm are getting any younger. Joining the Duluth law firm will keep the Rudy firm viable for a long time.

But I’m a bit wistful, too. When I moved to town 20 years ago, there were two strong law firms in Cloquet, the Newby law office and the Rudy law office. The two principals, Butch Newby and Floyd Rudy, had been partners for a short while five decades ago before branching out. Back then, as now, there was also a healthy smattering of sole practitioners.

Today, there’s nothing left of the local firms but office space, computer screens and memories.

Well, that’s not exactly true. The Rudy firm will continue; it’s not as if they are all retiring. But the trend of merging local services with larger, outside companies shows no signs of slowing down.

It’s a bit of a risk. At the Newby law firm, David Lingren was the only lawyer left when he wanted to retire, so joining Hanft Fride in Duluth made some good sense. It allowed David to retire; it kept his staff — especially Cathy Guitare and Nancy Chartier — employed; and now the old firm’s clients are served in the same place, by good people like Jake Baler and Leah Fischer and others Hanft Fride sends to its Cloquet office regularly.

I suspect the same thing will happen at the Rudy law firm. Eventually, young associates from the Fryberger firm in Duluth will be rotated in and out of the Cloquet office to handle the lower-level work that young associates typically do: prosecuting misdemeanors for their municipal clients (such as Cloquet), entry-level real estate transactions, and the like. Certainly, some of them will like the benefits a small town offers to young lawyers, and they will want to stay here long after Frank Yetka, David Pritchett and Bill Helwig retire.

Let’s hope.

There are still quite a few independent law firms like mine (“sole practitioners,” we call them) which provide quality legal service, but there are just some things better handled by larger law firms. For example, a city the size of Cloquet, which contracts with the Rudy firm to provide municipal legal services that a sole practitioner can’t typically handle on its own, also needs some bigger firms to do what it is they do.

The risk is that the larger firms may decide, sometime in the future, that staffing a local office isn’t cost-effective. That situation, for example, spawned this very newspaper, when the Duluth-based paper closed its local office. It’s also my worry in the health care field: if Essentia, for example, cripples the local hospital and then moves back to Duluth, we’d lose our local health care. I’d hate to see the big firms in town close their offices and make everyone go to Duluth.

It’s not so far-fetched. I was in Two Harbors a few days ago and realized there’s no place to buy ordinary drugstore items anymore. Falk’s Drugstore has been gone for decades, the downtown retail is extinct, and Shopko — successor to Pamida, which put all those local places out of business years ago — closed its doors. It’s a trend that makes me a bit nervous.

Pete Radosevich is the publisher of the Pine Knot News community newspaper and an attorney in Esko who hosts the cable access talk show Harry’s Gang on CAT-7. His opinions are his own. Contact him at [email protected].