Erin Ness, Winthrop & Weinstine

Erin Ness recalls when her mother told her about an employment advertisement in a newspaper for a project assistant job with the multifamily developer Dominium.

She got the position and found a career. After working for Dominium for seven years, she joined Carlson Real Estate as a legal assistant, working closely with their in-house counsel. “I learned about reading leases and commercial real estate law, and I liked working for an attorney,” Ness said. “I thought, well, this is a good path for me.”

And it has been. Ness reached out to Winthrop & Weinstine, who represented Dominium, and the law firm hired her. “I’d known them forever, and they were very welcoming,” she said.

Ness supports Winthrop & Weinstine’s Real Estate and Tax Credit Financing and Syndication practice, a group of more than 50 attorneys that has helped clients build hundreds of thousands of units of affordable housing. As a senior paralegal, she works with around eight attorneys and helps coordinate purchase agreements involving many financing documents and signatures.

“The biggest part of my job is identifying what the problems are going to be and figuring out how to solve those problems in advance,” Ness said. “My job is making sure nothing goes wrong.”

In 2025, Ness assisted a client selling eight multifamily projects located in Mississippi, Minnesota, Texas, Georgia and Colorado. She also worked with attorneys on facilitating client acquisitions of partnership interests in transactions in Minnesota, Indiana and Wisconsin.

It’s the complexity of transactions and the firm’s people that appeal to Ness. “I would say that the best part about being a paralegal is that the daily challenges are different,” she said. “I also respect all the people that I work with here every day.”

Ness mentors new paralegals and legal assistants, while also helping new associates and summer interns, particularly in learning the intricacies of multifamily tax credit real estate law.

Outside the firm, she raises two young children who experience a familial day care provided by her parents who “are hugely instrumental in my life and my kids’ lives, and it feels great being able to drop them off with people that they love and care about every day,” Ness said.