SHEAREN CONTINUED FROM PAGE 22
“I’ve got three kids,” she explains, “and
at that time they were very young. Plus,
my husband is a surgeon. When he is in
an operation, he can’t just say to his nurse,
‘Close this patient. I’m going to pick up my
kids at daycare.’ This case was in trial for
two weeks. I came to understand that while
I could be good at trial law, it wouldn’t
work for me or for my family.”
By the fall of 1989, when Shearen
landed her first job—at Minneapolis’ Best &
Flanagan—she asked to join firm’s Private
Wealth group, focusing on wills, estates
and trusts.
At first glance, the choice seemed
an abrupt turn from the professional
experiences Shearen had built as a nurse,
but it soon became clear that the work
was a perfect fit for the sharp-witted,
hardworking young attorney.
“It’s intellectually challenging,” Shearen
says. “It’s the perfect amalgam of,” here she
ticks the points off on her fingers: “‘Do you
like people? Do you like numbers? Do you
like words?’ These are all areas that I’m good
at. And it’s really fun. One of the things I like
the best about my job is that I get to counsel
families for years and years and years. I
become their trusted adviser. And that’s the
most rewarding thing there can be.”
There are other rewarding things. Like
meeting your spouse at an early age and
just knowing.
“I met my husband in 10th grade,” she
says with a smile. The object of Shearen’s
affection, St. Paul thoracic surgeon John
Shearen, has been named a “Top Doc” by
Mpls.St. Paul Magazine. “After all these
years, I’m still nuts about him.”
The pair met when they were 15-year-
old students at White Bear Lake High
School. They graduated in 1971, a turning
point year, Shearen recalls, when the
world switched from the old ways of the
1960s to the freer attitudes of the 1970s.
Shearen felt caught on the divide.
“It was like there was a bright line that
went down the middle of the corridor,”
she recalls. “Everybody in the class of ’ 71
looked like the class ahead of them and
everybody from the class of ’ 72 looked like
everyone that came behind them. We wore
nylons and skirts to school. The younger
kids were much freer.”
Those lingering, old-school attitudes
meant that when Shearen enrolled at
the then-College of St. Catherine, she
chose the safer route for a young woman,
studying to be a nurse like her mother
instead of a lawyer like her father. And
though she went on to a successful
nursing career, Shearen, who married
and began her family while John was in
medical school, always dreamed of one day
becoming an attorney.
“They rely on her good advice, her
clear head and her compassion,” Walker
says. “She brings a nurturing soul to this
work, combined with the highest intellect
And Shearen does take her role
seriously, working hard to educate her
clients about the intricacies of estate law.
She wants to make the process of writing
a will or planning an estate as transparent
and painless as possible.
