C-Falls alumna looking forward to law career

Danielle Vukonich can’t remember exactly how it all started, but she’s always wanted to become a lawyer.

“My mother’s sister was an attorney in California,” she said last week. “I liked reading about the law, and I liked watching courtroom dramas on TV, like Boston Legal. I also followed some high profile cases, like the JonBenét Ramsey and Laci Peterson cases.”

That long interest served Vukonich well, as she stayed focused on her school work over the years. This spring, she’ll graduate from Arizona Summit Law School, a private law school founded in Phoenix in 2005.

Vukonich interned with the Johnson, Berg and Saxby law firm in Kalispell last year and is currently working with the Lester Norton Brozina law firm in Phoenix, but she still needs to pass the Arizona Bar Exam.

“I’m signed up for a bar exam course in June and July,” she said. “It’s eight hours a day, seven days a week.”

Vukonich has always stayed busy. She graduated with high honors from Columbia Falls High School in 2007, where she played volleyball, basketball and track, played the trombone in the band, and was active with the Key Club and Peer Allies, both high school service groups.

She graduated from the University of Montana-Missoula with a bachelor’s in English in 2011 and went straight to law school, which proved to be a different kind of animal.

“The first year was really tough. They used the Socratic method, just like in the movie ‘The Paper Chase,’” she said. “I remember calling my mother once crying and wanting to quit.”

Vukonich credited high school sports for helping her get through law school — learning life’s lessons, dealing with bad games and hard coaches, sticking it out even if things don’t go your way, and balancing sports with home work.

“They say about law school that they scare you to death the first year, work you to death the second year, and bore you to death the third year,” she said. “But when I got my grades back, I saw I did OK, and that helped.”

Vukonich also credits the moral and financial support she got from her parents, Russ and Robin Vukonich.

“That helped get me very serious in high school,” she said.

Vukonich says she enjoyed her time in high school and developed friends through sports and band. Her boyfriend, JD Fields, graduated from Columbia Falls High School in 2005, where he played on the state champion Wildcat basketball team.

JD is finishing up a doctorate in physical therapy at a school in Phoenix, where he’s at the top of his class, she said. He’ll be doing his clinical this summer with the Cleveland Indians professional baseball team. Both want to return to the Flathead some day.

“He’d find work a little easier than me,” she said.

Vukonich is currently representing companies involved in workmen’s compensation cases, but down the line she might want to work as a prosecutor or even a judge.

“It would really be amazing to become a judge,” she said. “The answer is to work hard. A lot of things in the present look like fun, but you need to look to the future.”