BY: Rachel Emendorfer
This week Minnesota Law Alum, Suzanne Spellacy, spoke with Minnesota Law Sports Law Association. Spellacy has had an illustrious career following graduation, working for the commercial law firm Winthrop & Weinstine for eight years before leaving the Twin Cities to work for Taylor Corporation in Mankato, Minnesota. Spellacy worked on a wide range of legal issues for Taylor and worked her way up to general counsel. She then became general counsel at Jack Link’s Protein Snacks in Minneapolis. In the summer of 2021, Spellacy became general counsel for the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx organization.
Spellacy spoke about various types of legal practice her role entails and what a usual workday for her looks like (the best workdays are the ones ending in a Timberwolves win). Her advice to students was to keep an open mind about the path you take working for legal counsel in a sports organization. She encouraged students to focus on types of law most needed within sports organizations: Employment law, Contract law, Litigation and Dispute Resolution, etc. Her other piece of advice was to investigate legal positions for entities owned by sports organizations: restaurants, stadiums, and media entities.
Carter Allen (1L) said this of Spellacy’s talk, “Ms. Spellacy gave us some great insight into her day-to-day responsibilities and some of the primary issues at the forefront of sports law today. Her main piece of advice for all of us: Focus less on breaking into sports specifically, and more on becoming the best, most well-rounded attorneys we can be.”
Overall, it was a great experience for the Minnesota Sports Law Association, and we are very thankful to Ms. Spellacy for volunteering her time with us.
Rachel Emendorfer is a 1L at the University of Minnesota Law School. Prior to law school, she attended the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where she captained the Pioneer women’s basketball team. She can be found on twitter (@_rachel_15) and on LinkedIn under her name.
Suzanne Spellacy, Minnesota Law ‘92
