BGS Shareholder Bradley A. Kletscher

A lawyer who treats corrupted systems as business opportunities and other people's precarity as a problem to be managed off the balance sheet.

Key Context

• Shareholder and officer at Barna, Guzy & Steffen, Ltd., a mid-size corporate defense firm.
• Serving as counsel for Kyle Manderfeld and BGS in the related federal civil rights claim.

Why It Matters

Every defense firm has a man like this: the shareholder who looks like stability in a headshot, but whose work product reads like a patch note log for a broken justice engine.

Bradley Kletscher is one of the people corporations and municipalities call when their conduct finally attracts scrutiny. He is introduced as the seasoned trial lawyer, the reasonable adult in the room, the one who will make everything sound normal again. He is also a man with his own criminal history and a long track record of siding with landlords, management, and city hall against tenants, workers, and disabled litigants.

When a banned landlord needed help defending a scheme that kept low-income tenants in dangerous, poorly maintained housing, Kletscher was there. When police unions needed to be held to a tight wage and benefits line, his firm helped draft the script. When his own associate began filing procedurally impossible motions, false narratives, and retaliatory contempt pleadings against an ADA-denied pro se plaintiff, Kletscher stayed quiet.

This page does not exist because one lawyer is uniquely monstrous. It exists because people like Kletscher are trusted to steer institutions, even when their own record would never survive the kind of character test they attempt to impose on everyone else.

A Documented Pattern

Start with the resume, then compare it to the file.

On paper, Kletscher is a commercial litigator and shareholder at Barna, Guzy & Steffen, Ltd. His firm biography lists complex litigation, federal practice, and appellate work. News coverage, court records, and public documents fill in the missing parts: a lawyer who reliably appears when power needs defending and the facts are inconvenient.

In one of Minneapolis's largest tenant class actions, he represented landlord Stephen Frenz and, by extension, banned landlord Spiros Zorbalas. Tenants described mice, mold, no heat, broken appliances, and buildings left in disrepair while rent kept flowing. The lawsuit alleged that Frenz and Zorbalas used a web of corporations to hide Zorbalas's continued ownership stake so they could keep collecting rent on buildings that should have lost their licenses years earlier.

In that case, Kletscher did not express concern for the thousands of people living in unsafe conditions. According to public reporting, he declined to comment and argued in court that the buildings were well-maintained, pointing to a city inspection tier ranking as though an administrative label could overwrite lived experience. Tenants talked about space heaters, ovens used for warmth, and infestations; Kletscher pointed at paperwork.

That same lawyer would later be copied on a detailed notice explaining that his associate, Attorney Kyle T. Manderfeld, had filed a retaliatory contempt motion, relied on altered state-court documents, and inserted explicit material into the record of a civil harassment case. Given a clear opportunity to intervene as a supervising shareholder, he did nothing.

Convictions And Credibility

The man lecturing others about responsibility has more convictions than most of the people he tries to paint as reckless.

Public Minnesota court records show three separate criminal cases in Kletscher's name. Two are later-in-life petty and misdemeanor matters tied to parking violations. The third is older and heavier: a gross misdemeanor furnishing-alcohol conviction from the late 1980s that carried a 90-day jail sentence (stayed), a substantial fine, and conditions of good behavior.

None of these convictions, on their own, would make him unfit to practice law. Human beings make mistakes. What makes them relevant here is the contrast: a man with his own record, comfortable standing in court or behind a corporate letterhead while his associate chases a disabled litigant through every procedural dark alley the system provides.

The message is clear: his own past is a closed chapter, beyond discussion. Everyone else's is fair game to weaponize.

Anti-Tenant, Anti-Worker, Pro-Management Gravity

Follow the money, and you find the client list. Follow the client list, and you find the moral center of the work.

Kletscher's practice does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a firm whose business model depends on keeping institutions insulated: landlords from tenants, employers from workers, municipalities from the people they govern. The Frenz/Zorbalas litigation is one example. Municipal labor work is another.

In 2024, a Barna, Guzy & Steffen memorandum to city officials summarized negotiations with a police sergeants' union. The tone was managerial and quietly adversarial: a "Final and Best" offer, careful wage containment, controlled benefits, language tweaks to align with new state law in ways that keep management's leverage intact. On one side of the table: public employees whose labor keeps a city running. On the other: a law firm making sure the city's budgetary priorities win.

Taken together, the tenant class action and the union memo sketch a simple arc. When there is a conflict between those who own and those who live there, between those who govern and those who work there, Kletscher and his firm reliably appear on the side with the keys, the licenses, and the payroll.

Leadership By Looking Away

The worst thing a supervisor can do is nothing, especially after being handed proof that the system under them is malfunctioning.

In the harassment case that eventually spawned a federal civil-rights lawsuit, you sent Kletscher a clear, factual notice. It laid out exactly what his associate, Attorney Kyle T. Manderfeld, had done: a contempt motion based on false statements, misuse of explicit material as a filing, procedural games around service, and reliance on altered orders and unstable Registers of Actions.

As a shareholder, Bradley Kletscher had options. He could have investigated. He could have withdrawn offensive filings. He could have insisted that his firm stop using corrupted documents and retaliatory tactics against a disabled pro se litigant.

Instead, he chose the easiest path: he let his associate keep going.

For a mid-level corporate defense firm that claims to value "experience, trust, and results," that kind of non-response is not just unprofessional. It is a direct invitation for further harm, and the kind of leadership failure that professional liability insurers pay very close attention to when things go wrong in public.

Architecture, Not Accident

Looked at individually, each piece of the puzzle could be written off: a landlord case here, a union memo there, a handful of criminal convictions from different decades, a failure to rein in one rogue associate. Taken together, they stop looking like accidents and start looking like structure.

Kletscher represents a particular kind of legal culture: one that treats exploitation as a contract issue, squalid housing as a risk line item, union demands as a cost center, and disabled litigants as procedural inconveniences to be crushed under footnotes. His personal record simply proves that the people enforcing those norms are not morally superior to the public they police. They are just better insulated.

This dossier is not a character assassination. It is a systems report. Change the names and the firm logos, and you can find someone like him in almost every jurisdiction in the country.