Kristin Mapel Bloomberg, Ph.D., Robins Kaplan LLP

Historian Kristin Mapel Bloomberg found there is life after a career in teaching and research at, of all places, a major law firm.

For two decades, the Hamline University professor emerita held an endowed chair in the humanities, taught womens and gender studies and served as an independent scholar and historian.

Bloomberg’s no stranger to law, having focused on 19^th-century women’s rights in the Midwest. She also collaborated with the legal studies department and taught legal studies classes.  

In a cost-cutting move, Hamline eliminated several programs in the humanities a few years ago, including the one where Bloomberg was mainly appointed. “After I accepted that I was no longer going to be able to be in higher education, I talked to my friends and my network to find out what’s out there,” she said. “Making the transition out of teaching into research and analysis was a good fit for me.”

She found life after the academy working as a senior research and business intelligence analyst at Robins Kaplan LLP, applying her archival research expertise in a new capacity since 2022. Bloomberg devised streamlined, repeatable systems to assist in cases.

For one case, Bloomberg matched hundreds of entities with National Provider Identifier numbers that pharmacies and physicians use to administer prescriptions. Bloomberg located public-facing lists of providers and built her own searchable archive.

Sometimes she has no idea what the legal dispute is about. “As a legal researcher, I get tasks from the attorneys, but I don’t always know which case it matches to. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It’s not a big deal,” Bloomberg said.

Typically, attorneys come to her with a research need and a few potential sources. Once Bloomberg puts on her historian researcher “hat,” her vision for finding information and data might expand to include government agencies and historical databases.

Careers change, as Bloomberg confirms. “I knew I was going to be either teaching or researching because those are two of my passions,” she said. “Essentially, what I’m doing now is a hybrid of all that stuff. And it’s something new every day.”