Law School Mourns the Passing of Dick Lareau ’52
Richard G. “Dick” Lareau ’52, a longtime leader in the Twin Cities’ legal and business communities, died Feb. 22 at his home in Fort Myers, Florida. He was 91.
Lareau was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and raised on a dairy farm in Vermont. In 1949, the year he received his bachelor’s degree from St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, he won the state championship in table tennis. After earning his J.D. at the Law School, he served in the U.S. Air Force for four years, after which he returned to the Twin Cities and joined the St. Paul firm of Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly (which merged with Fox Rothschild in 2016). Lareau was named a partner at Oppenheimer in 1960 and helped to build and lead the firm for more than a half century.
One of the most significant cases of Lareau’s career was an antitrust action brought by Control Data Corp. against IBM. It was a massive undertaking, ultimately involving 30 attorneys and 125 paralegals, and by the time it reached a multimillion-dollar settlement, in 1973, Oppenheimer had become a nationally recognized firm and Lareau and his partners had been dubbed “superlawyers.”
Lareau’s personal connection to the Law School remained strong throughout his life, and he was a consistent and loyal donor through the years. His first wife, the late Dorothy M. Oerting Lareau, was a fellow member of the class of 1952. She went on to become the Law School’s first woman faculty member, teaching legal writing, and served as assistant dean during the late 1950s. Dick and Dorothy’s son, Alan, later created the Dorothy Lareau Legal Writing Fund in her memory.
Lareau’s business acumen led to seats on numerous corporate boards, including Control Data (later Ceridian), Merrill Corp., Nash Finch, Avecor, Bio-Medicus, and Northern Technologies. He also served as corporate secretary to several publicly traded companies. When not working, Lareau enjoyed travel, poker, reading, and especially boating and fishing. His obituary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune concluded, “Dick will be missed by colleagues, friends, and family. (But not by fish.)”
