The
Whistleblower ’s
Best Friend
BY DAN HEILMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD FLEISCHMAN
Clayton D. Halunen aims to afflict the
comfortable and comfort the afflicted
CLAYTON D. HALUNEN GREW UP IN
Virginia, Minnesota, the son of working
parents: His father was an electrician for
a railroad, and his mother taught and
worked for St. Louis County.
Both dealt with workplace issues:
Halunen’s father faced pressure to
quit after a 42-year career, while his
mother was repeatedly passed over for
promotions that went to less-qualified
male colleagues. Those experiences
made an impression on Halunen, who
eventually set aside his ambitions to be
an architect to follow his brother-in-law
into the law. Once he graduated, his
dad’s case was the first one he took, and
he later represented his mom as well.
The experience taught him to
think twice about representing family
members—“It’s too emotional,” he
says—but Halunen was also struck by the
gratifying feeling of helping plaintiffs in
employment issues. Following a stint in-
house at a U.S. Steel facility near where
he grew up, he formed his own one-horse
employment firm in 1998. (A Chicago
office, run by Halunen’s brother-in-law,
opened in 2006.)
Now Halunen Law, which plans to
ramp up to 15 attorneys by the end of
the year, gains recoveries for its clients
in approximately 95 percent of its
cases, racking up more than $2 billion
in total recoveries.
“I realized very quickly that I wasn’t
meant to work on the management side,”
he says. “In mining, it’s labor against
management. It’s like they’re enemies.
My sympathies were much more with
labor and trying to improve their working
conditions rather than trying to help
“Clayton is tenacious but not
overbearing,” says one of Halunen’s most
famous clients, former Minnesota Vikings
punter Chris Kluwe. “He has a good idea
of how he wants to achieve his goals, yet
he welcomes input from his clients.”
The Kluwe case was signature Halunen
work. Kluwe threatened to sue the Vikings
in 2014, claiming discrimination on
the grounds of human rights, religion,
defamation and “tortious interference for
contractual relations.” In short: Kluwe
maintained that the team had cut him in
part because of his activism on behalf of
same-sex rights.
Working alongside attorney Susan
M. Coler and law clerk Nathaniel
Smith, Halunen brokered a settlement
stipulating that the team would donate
to five charities benefitting LGBT and
anti-hate groups, and sponsor a national
symposium on LGBT issues. Kluwe took
no money from the settlement.
From an employment law perspective,
the Kluwe matter might have seemed
to some like a standard case of a hostile
work environment. The venue, of course—
not to mention Kluwe’s spicy Jan. 2, 2014
article about the situation on Deadspin.
com—garnered headlines.
“A lot of people said he was just a
washed-up punter who had an ax to
grind because he got cut,” Halunen says,