Any time I hear a business executive say "It's not about the money," I automatically check my back pocket to make sure my wallet is still aboard.
But when Alan Carlson insists that the reason he started his own law firm was "more about challenges and having fun," I tend to believe him.
Carlson, 64, is a veteran trial lawyer who specializes in what I once regarded as a tedious, sleep-inducing corner of corporate law: patents, trademarks and copyrights.
Tedious, that is, until I met Carlson, who has had a briefcase-full of fun with a collection of downright fascinating legal battles that I began highlighting for you a dozen years ago.
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Included is the case that relieved Deere & Co. of the illusion that it owned the color green, another that won a $24 million judgment in a case involving patents on a block of concrete and a third that ended when a gent was arrested as he was packing to flee the country with 44 gigabytes of a Carlson client's proprietary data.
It might all be about the fun, but the money has nonetheless been piling up into comfortably tall stacks since Carlson and three younger colleagues left the Minneapolis intellectual property firm of Merchant & Gould in 2003 to start their own practice.
In the past two years, never mind the slumping economy, the firm of Carlson, Caspers, Vandenburgh & Lindquist has hoisted its annual gross by more than 50 percent -- from $8.8 million in 2007 to $12.8 million in '08 to a projected $13.5 million this year.
Carlson's partners include Phil Caspers, 48; Derek Vandenburgh, 45, and Tim Lindquist, 42, all of whom left Merchant, Gould to start a firm that focuses almost entirely on the fun stuff -- litigation.