John Koneck uses the adjectives “kind” and “decent” when describing three generations of women in his family, but those also are qualities he personifies as well as values in fellow attorneys at the Fredrikson law firm.

The son of a liquor salesman, he grew up in Brooklyn Center and St. Anthony Village and never dreamed that he’d become a lawyer, much less graduate from Yale Law School.

“I’m an oddity, because I loved every part of law school,” Koneck confessed in a TCB interview on the 15th floor of Fredrikson’s offices in a downtown Minneapolis office tower.

Fredrikson has been Koneck’s professional home since 1979, when the firm employed only 38 lawyers. Koneck not only loved practicing law, but he moved into firm leadership roles early in his career.

He became the firm’s president—the equivalent to CEO of a business—in 2004 and passed the presidential baton to Melodie Rose in 2023.

Koneck more than doubled the number of attorneys during his tenure as president, making Fredrikson the largest law firm in Minnesota. There were under 170 lawyers when Koneck was elected president and over 375 attorneys when he left the top role.

“I’m the luckiest person in the world,” Koneck says. “I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. I was going to be a social worker.” Just as he was finishing up a bachelor’s degree in social work at North Dakota State University in Fargo, one of Koneck’s professors encouraged him to think more broadly and go to law school.

“Neither of my parents came from money, and my dad worked hard,” he said, and he understood that many Americans struggled to meet their daily needs. Becoming a lawyer was a path to professional advocacy.

Koneck had an excellent LSAT score and was accepted to Yale’s law school. “I started law school in 1975, and Watergate had just happened, and [President] Richard Nixon had just stepped down,” Koneck recalled. “At most law schools, you just talk about cases and case law. Yale taught us to think about public policy, how the law developed, and how it should develop. Every class was like that.”

Because of his fascination with his law courses, Koneck discloses he didn’t have much of a social life in law school. “I threw myself into it 100%,” he says. But luck that he credits for recurring throughout his life quickly surfaced at Fredrikson. He met his future wife, Debie, just a few days after she started working at the firm.

After finding his life partner and a compatible culture at Fredrikson, Koneck concentrated on building his law practice and his impact within the firm.

He soon became an expert in real estate law. “When I’m in the hunt, I focus,” he says. “I would take books home every night and read them and drive my wife nuts.” When the farm crisis hit in the early 1980s, Koneck already had a deep understanding of the relevant laws. He also was prepared when he says the real estate world went into recession from 1987 to about 1992. He could adeptly help his clients resolve conflicts.

After becoming a firm shareholder in 1985, Koneck took on two important leadership positions in the late 1980s. He became an ethics and conflicts counsel, and he was elected to the firm’s compensation committee, where he served for 30 years.

“John’s just instinctively a fair guy. He wants everybody to succeed,” says Warren Mack, a former Fredrikson president who joined the firm in 1969 and still practices law there.

“Many people care about their compensation deeply,” Koneck says, and the compensation committee sets the compensation for all shareholders and officers of Fredrikson. “If somebody is unhappy with their compensation, maybe for a year or two they’ll take it,” Koneck says. “But over the long haul, they won’t.” Striving to pay lawyers fairly for their performances was the right thing to do, Koneck says, and it helped Fredrikson retain good lawyers.

“He managed the people as well as he managed the firm.”

—Warren Mack, former president, Fredrikson law firm

Koneck’s reputation for honesty, integrity, and respectful listening was built while helping attorneys with potential conflicts and ensuring that everybody was paid appropriately. His track record as someone who supported colleagues fostered his selection to other key roles—membership on the executive committee and board of directors.

He is humble about claiming credit for Fredrikson’s explosive growth during his nearly two-decade tenure as president. “He never approached it like, ‘I’m the man on the white horse with the great vision,’ ” says Ann Ladd, a Fredrikson shareholder who served with Koneck on the board of directors.

Instead, Ladd says, Koneck viewed himself as “leading leaders,” who were “smart, independent people” with choices about where they want to practice law. “You need to listen to them and provide the kind of support they need,” Ladd says. “If you disagree with them, you need to be honest and talk to them. John is excellent at that sort of thing, building people up and giving them confidence.”

Koneck says that he followed the example of former president Mack and the firm’s founders in encouraging lawyers to be entrepreneurial. By allowing lawyers to practice in areas that appeal to them and championing their work in expanding legal areas, he says that Fredrikson saw healthy growth. “The job of the law firm is to support those lawyers,” he says, so he expanded marketing budgets, specialized training, and resources to grow beyond the Twin Cities. Fredrikson attorneys are now based in eight Midwestern offices in the U.S. as well as offices in Mexico and China.

“We’re really good at getting new clients and more work from existing clients, and we need more lawyers to do all that work,” Koneck says. That increased demand translated into Fredrikson hiring many young lawyers, as well as mid-career and veteran attorneys who fit the firm’s culture.

Koneck likes the firm’s slogan—“Where law and business meet”—because he wants to employ attorneys who can offer practical, creative, and customized advice that helps clients make business decisions. To be a shareholder at the firm, he says, someone must be an “excellent lawyer,” a “good person,” and their own “center of economic activity.”

Relationships are paramount at Fredrikson. “We don’t tolerate disrespectful behavior,” Koneck says. That means everyone in the firm—lawyers and non-lawyers as well as new hires and veterans—is expected to listen to and support each other.

That approach is something that Koneck modeled, Mack says. He notes that Koneck spent considerable time talking with lawyers about their practices, as well as challenges they faced in their personal lives.

“He managed the people as well as he managed the firm,” Mack says. “That was an incredible advantage over other law firms.”

Koneck is now in a full-time role as Fredrikson’s pro bono counsel. His work includes immigration and asylum cases. He also supervises younger lawyers and advocates for pro bono involvement on a firmwide basis. “I’ve never had more fun,” he says.

In the early 2000s, Koneck was pro bono general counsel for the Riverview Economic Development Association (REDA) in St. Paul when Mike DeTomaso was executive director. The organization promoted commercial development and hosted a large Cinco de Mayo festival.

“When you’re in front of John, you have his undivided attention,” DeTomaso says.

Koneck served as a mentor to DeTomaso, now a St. Paul police sergeant on assignment for the Ramsey County attorney. In 2025, the two men are still in touch and Koneck recently met with DeTomaso at work.

He wanted Koneck’s help for wage-theft victims who are undocumented workers or come from other underprivileged populations. “He walks the talk,” DeTomaso says. “He genuinely cares about people, and he genuinely cares about the greater good.”

See the other 2025 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame inductees.