Minnesota Lawyer
With his academic background in philosophy, the decision to go into the law was a natural one for Ike Messmore. When he enrolled at the University of Minnesota Law School, Messmore explains, he realized he had a leg up on some classmates when it came to putting together a coherent argument.
“For a lot of people, it was completely new and weird to write persuasive briefs. For me, it was almost the same as what I used to do for philosophy papers,” says Messmore, who wound up graduating magna cum laude in 2012.
Now an associate at Bowman and Brooke (where he was a summer intern in 2011), Messmore “is one of the best young lawyers I’ve had the privilege to work with,” according to George Soule, a former Bowman partner and still an informal mentor. Soule, who praises Messmore’s “powerful and adventuresome intellect,” says he was particularly impressed by Messmore’s brief for the Minnesota Supreme Court in Seagate v. Western Digital, a high-stakes trade secret misappropriation case in which Bowman successfully defended the individual scientist accused of the pilfering.
For his part, Messmore highlights his role in crafting the defense brief in litigation arising from a power plant explosion. “We were able to cap an $11 million claim at $1 million through a motion to judgment on the pleadings, so that was something I was very proud of,” he says.
Along with cultural interests in literary classics, music and film, Messmore is a motorcycle buff — an enthusiasm that has taken him from Sturgis, South Dakota, to Death Valley to the Swiss Alps.
