Overview
Randy Tietjen is a partner in the Business Litigation Group. In his thirty years as a lawyer, he has represented individuals and a variety of businesses and other organizations in an array of litigation matters, involving securities, antitrust laws, intellectual property, minority-shareholder claims, contracts, ERISA, fiduciary duties, trade secrets, and fraud claims, among other business-litigation torts. He has had clients in many areas of commerce, including banking, food and beverage, manufacturing, telecommunications, and healthcare. Randy has appeared in many federal and state trial courts and courts of appeal and he has handled international and domestic arbitrations and mediation. His practice also includes matters involving questions of professional responsibility for law firms and lawyers. For the past ten years he has served as the Ethics Partner for Robins Kaplan LLP.
Over the course of his career, Randy has devoted, on average, nearly two hundred hours a year to pro-bono matters, including civil-liberties cases and other matters raising constitutional issues. For many years, he organized and supervised lawyers at the firm who tried cases and argued appeals on behalf of (non-lawyer) guardians ad litem for children in the juvenile courts, usually involving parents who were potentially unable or unfit to care for their children. The lawyers tried cases in more than twenty counties in mostly outstate Minnesota, logging more than 25,000 pro-bono hours on behalf of children, for which the Minnesota Supreme Court gave an award to the law firm for recognition of its contributions to the welfare of so many children.
For twenty-some years, in his spare time, Randy searched in manuscript libraries and elsewhere for the letters of the legendary American lawyer Clarence Darrow (1857-1938). He located more than 2,200 of Darrow’s letters and annotated and published 500 of them to some acclaim under the title In the Clutches of the Law: Clarence Darrow’s Letters, with the University of California Press in 2013. Randy has contributed to other books, published several articles, and given many speeches and CLE lectures on a variety of subjects, including writing, constitutional issues, professional responsibility and legal ethics, intellectual property, and legal history.
In law school, Randy was the editor-in-chief of the law review and after law school he clerked for the Hon. C. Arlen Beam on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Randy is a member of the Minnesota and Hennepin County Bar Associations; PEN American Center (PEN); the American Civil Liberties Union; and, Scribes—American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects
Practices
Admissions
- Minnesota
- U.S. Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit
- U.S. Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit
- U.S. District Court, Minnesota
- U.S. Supreme Court
