jordan Reilly

Attorney at Law

The legal system can be bewildering, even to sophisticated business people. I like overcoming challenges, and I like helping people, and my work as a lawyer affords me opportunities to overcome challenges by helping people understand—and use—the legal system.

At Lucere Legal, I focus on business, transactional, and litigation practices, but I’ve focused on different areas of law at different periods in my career.

I earned my J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2008. After graduating, I began working at a law firm in a small town in Iowa. In some ways, the firm had a typical county-seat practice: the firm’s lawyers drafted wills and trust agreements, represented personal representatives in probate proceedings, helped people create and manage small businesses, helped people with real-estate transactions, and occasionally represented clients in litigation. But the firm was unusual in the sophistication of its estate-planning and tax practices.

The practice of law in Iowa differed from practice elsewhere in a way that was important to my professional development. Iowa is one of the last states—if not the last state—in which real-estate buyers typically rely on a lawyer’s title opinion instead of title insurance. While I practiced in Iowa, I wrote many title opinions, and, when I left Iowa, the areas of law in which I had the highest levels of competence were some subareas of real-estate law: conveyances, legal descriptions, and marketable-title laws.

In 2014, I left Iowa and moved to Chicago to go back to graduate school with the goal of becoming a professor. I completed a master’s degree in social science from the University of Chicago in 2015. The next year, I began Duke University’s political-science Ph.D. program. I enjoyed graduate school, but I was warned repeatedly about the difficulty of finding an academic job.

In spring of 2017, I moved back to Minneapolis to work for a Twin Cities firm that focuses on litigation. The firm handles commercial litigation, but it also has a niche business in representing people and businesses in disputes with the government, including in constitutional cases. At first, I planned to work for the firm for the summer before returning to Duke, but I took a leave of absence from Duke to work there for another year before withdrawing from my doctoral program.

Since then, I have worked for a few Minnesota law firms, and I am now very happy to be working at Lucere Legal where I have already had the opportunity to use my legal experience to help clients, and I am always looking forward to my next legal challenge.