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We were proud to sponsor and attend the 2024 Mayors Challenge fundraiser in honor of The Minnesota Urban Debate League (MNUDL) last week. Since 2012, the Mayors Challenge event has brought together education advocates from across the Twin Cities to celebrate and empower debate students. The event raised an impressive $162,087 in celebration of the MNUDL’s 20th anniversary.

The program featured an informative showcase debate discussing issues related to AI, the 2024-25 policy debate topic. Experts in AI and intellectual property rights served on the VIP panel. Other notable speakers included Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

The keynote speaker was First Lady of Minnesota, MNUDL Board Member, and former speech & debate coach Gwen Walz. She shared:

“What educators and coaches work at, and dream of, is the possibility of transformation – for students to find their voices, to articulate their ideas, and to challenge, most of all, themselves. What we know about debate is that it does just that for students, and for all of us . . .

If ever there was a time to research and discuss and engage one another, it is now. If ever there was a time to support ideas with real information and real facts and real evidence, it is now.

Our hope is that our democracy looks much more like a debate team.”

LGN has been a longtime supporter of the Minnesota Urban Debate League. LGN partner Gregg Fishbein is a founding member of the Advisory Board, and LGN partner Kate Baxter-Kauf currently serves as incoming Vice Chair of the Advisory Board and volunteers at St. Paul Central. LGN attorneys Karen Hanson Riebel and Arielle Wagner, as well as state government relations specialist Jess Lindeen, also attended the event.

LGN is proud to announce that associate Laura M. Matson has been named a 2024 Up & Coming Attorneys honoree by Minnesota Lawyer. Each year, Minnesota Lawyer recognizes a group of new attorneys off to a fast start in their legal careers and legal professionals making impacts within the companies and communities they serve. All the Up & Coming Attorneys honorees are in their first decade of practice.

The honorees will be celebrated at an awards luncheon later this month. You can see the full list of honorees here: https://minnlawyer.com/event/up-coming-attorneys-and-unsung-legal-heroes/.

About Laura M. Matson

Dr. Laura M. Matson, JD, PhD, joined Lockridge Grindal Nauen as an associate in 2020, and practices in the firm’s environmental, political, business, antitrust, employment, mediation, government representation, and complex litigation practice groups, representing numerous public entities, businesses, tribal governments, and individual plaintiffs in complex litigation and transactional matters in state and federal court.

Dr. Matson has been particularly active in the last several years representing tribal, governmental, and private clients in environmental matters and consulting on regulatory issues,  including work for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, representing the City of Minneapolis in litigation related to environmental review, and representing a small independent flower farmer in an environmental action.

In addition, Laura has been at the forefront of technology-related cases at LGN and represents plaintiffs in complex and class action cases on the cutting edge of the next generation of litigation. She is actively involved in antitrust litigation related to data privacy against a major social networking site, has helped to establish and leads LGN’s new Generative AI litigation practice, which includes various cases representing artists and authors whose copyrighted works were infringed to train generative AI models, and has also been developing a practice related to copyright and entertainment law negotiating options for book rights and music licensing. In addition to her busy litigation practice, Dr. Matson is an active professional and community volunteer, currently serving as a Council Member for the Minnesota State Bar Association, Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law Section.  She previously served on the board of directors of Frank Theater and was an adjunct professor for the International Law Moot Court at the University of Minnesota Law School from 2018-2020. She is a popular speaker and writer and has written articles on environmental and tribal issues, as well as a three-part series in Attorney at Law Magazine about the career of the Honorable John R. Tunheim, former Chief Judge of the District of Minnesota.