Features Region: Midwest

Imagine you just started working in the sales department of a fast-growing company. You’re about to embark on a week-long trip to San Francisco to meet with potential clients and one question in particular has been nagging you to no end: “What if they want to see our contract?” At your last job, you’d need […]

Brad Riley has pets—two cats and a dog—and he considers them to be family. These days, we all do. As Riley stresses, once that distinction is made, how we treat and feed our pets becomes a huge consideration. It’s such a consideration for the nearly 70 percent of American pet owners, in fact, that 3D […]

The deal seems too good to be true: a brand new Apple laptop charger for $12.99—far below what you’d pay on the company’s website. When you open the package the next day, the item looks just as advertised: white, sleek and perfectly packaged, right down to the clear protective stickers. Six months later, you notice […]

Jasmani Francis has never been one to fall into a routine or slip neatly into a stereotype. A native of inner-city Miami, Florida and an Illinois transplant, he is a lawyer, an entrepreneur, a sports memorabilia appraiser, a student of history and philosophy, a writer. Certainly he’s a reader. Recently, he’s picked up Frederic Bastiat’s […]

It’s a question he’s often asked, and one that Joel Stern seems to enjoy every time it’s posed—how he, a 60-year-old, heterosexual white man—was selected in 2014 as chief executive officer of NAMWOLF, the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms. “You’ve just called out the elephant in the room,” Stern says with […]

A $3.3 billion transaction is never simple, and exponentially more challenging when the fine print has got to be acceptable to all sides in a matter of hours. Which describes the scenario that Jeannette Knudsen and Adam Ekonomon faced in the summer of 2008, in their respective roles as in-house corporate counsel for The J.M. […]

Ask Deb Steiner what inspired her to become a lawyer, and you’ll get a response quite different from the range of clichéd answers you’re used to hearing. In fact, she was initially turned off by the idea; a devout Anabaptist, the career path felt contrary to the values she espoused. But she couldn’t shake the […]

On a September morning in 2014, Zachary Peterson came into his office at Evans Landscaping and nearly had a panic attack. A few weeks before, the company had purchased a pair of specialized excavators at auction for $1 million—a steal, given the competitive advantage the equipment would afford. There was just one problem: Because the […]

It started out as a favor for a colleague in academia. R. Mark McCareins certainly wasn’t seeking out the opportunity to instruct a law course at one of the world’s leading graduate business schools; he’d had one previous stint standing up in front of a class full of law students—and, well, let’s say it wasn’t […]

For years, every time Karla Jones-Wilson visited the 19,500-seat Kemper Arena, whether for a college basketball game or Disney On Ice with her kids, she couldn’t help but think she was enjoying the Kansas City landmark for the last time. By 2015, the arena—like many built in the 1970s—had fallen on hard times, precipitated by […]