Cannon’s career comes full circle

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Since Thomas G. Cannon retired from private practice in 2000, he has been catching up with his past. Or perhaps his past has been catching up with him.

After an honorable discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1969, Cannon attended the University of Wisconsin Law School and joined the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee after graduation.

He spent a decade with Legal Aid – the last four as executive director (1977-81) – before leaving to teach at Marquette Law School (1981-85). From there he went into private practice for 15 years at O’Neil Cannon Hollman DeJong, S.C., in Milwaukee.

Now Cannon, 61, is back at Legal Aid, having been lured out of retirement to return as executive director in 2005. In addition to seeing his professional career come full-circle, Cannon’s personal life has found symmetry as well.

His son, Niall is a lieutenant in the Marines and is returning for Thanksgiving, having concluded his tour in Iraq. Cannon plans to join his son in Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard for a 10-day trip to Camp Pendleton in California.

Prior to his departure, Cannon took time to sit down with Wisconsin Law Journal reporter Jack Zemlicka on Oct. 23 to discuss his most unusual case, the challenges facing Legal Aid and his interest in 12th century Irish politics.

Wisconsin Law Journal: You began your work with the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee in 1971. How did you become involved with the organization?

Tom Cannon: Right after I graduated from law school, this was my first job and what I wanted to do. It was a very idealistic generation of young lawyers who went to school in the 1960s and we saw law as an agent for social change. I think we also thought that law could be used for wider social justice issues, rather than simply a job or a way to make a living. I found that to be very much the case working with Legal Aid.

WLJ: Was it difficult to step away in 1981 and make the transition to being a law school professor and then a private practitioner?

Cannon: They were all natural changes. After 10 years at Legal Aid, the opportunity came to teach at Marquette and I actually had been offered a job in 1980 to teach trial law and advocacy. I turned them down, but they came back the following year and asked me to teach constitutional law and that was my intellectual passion in the legal field, so I accepted. I got involved in the DeRance Foundation litigation in my fourth year and realized it was such a huge and complex case that it required not only full-time work by me, but by an army of lawyers and that I would have to either choose to teach, or do that. That occupied me in one form or another for 15 years.

WLJ: How has the job of executive director evolved since you first held it almost 30 years ago?

Cannon: The job has changed in the sense that, in the 1970s, Legal Aid only had three sources of income. We had a contract with the county for the Public Defender Program, we had a United Way grant and then we raised a small amount of money from the Milwaukee Bar [Association]. Now it is much more complex and we probably have 50 sources of money. It’s a much more full-time job of fundraising than was the case 30 years ago.

WLJ: Was it a difficult choice to come back to Legal Aid as its executive director after five years of retirement?

Cannon: It really wasn’t. The president of the board called me and asked me if I would consider coming back. I thought I’d be willing to do it for a few years. There were some financial difficulties that Legal Aid had found itself in back in 2005 and we needed to really become more aggressive in fundraising and expand our fundraising horizons. We didn’t have a Web site, we didn’t have an endowment fund and we needed to upgrade salaries. So there was a lot to be done here and I thought that I would be able to spend a few years coming out of retirement to make some significant changes here and I think we have been able to do that.

WLJ: What is the biggest challenge facing Legal Aid today?

Cannon: Number one of course is representing the client community better. The problem there is that the client community is growing by leaps and bounds. When I was here in the ‘70s, approximately one out of seven people in Milwaukee were classified as below the federal poverty guideline. That number has almost doubled to more than one in four, so the increase in poverty is one big change. Finding the resources to provide lawyers to fight for justice for this growing population is the number one challenge that we face.

WLJ: Are there types of cases which are contributing to that rise?

Cannon: The rise of predatory lenders has contributed to that with payday lenders, income tax refund anticipation lenders and mortgage scams. That was never the case when I was a lawyer here in the ’70s because of the usury law – you couldn’t charge more than 8 percent interest unless there was some very specific exception. In fact my very first case as a Legal Aid lawyer involved a defense raised by the usury statute.

It used to be if you couldn’t get a conventional loan, the only other way was the mafia. They charged 100 percent interest and that was considered criminal. Now that is nothing compared to what these predatory lenders are charging – 300 hundred or 1,000 percent. In effect, they’ve put the mafia out of business because there is no need to have criminal loan sharking when the law makes it legal to charge an astronomical percentage.

WLJ: You have always been heavily involved with organizations and interests beyond your professional obligations. How are you able to maintain that balance?

Cannon: It can be difficult. There are times where I will be working on an article about 12th century Irish politics and I literally am so engaged in it that I will stay up all night and suddenly see the sun coming up and realize, gosh, I have to go to work. It can be a chore especially after lunch of that following day when you are really starting to drag because you spent the entire evening, which seemed like five minutes to me, reading and pursuing some obscure point of 12th century Irish politics. It’s an odd thing, but to me that’s fascinating.

WLJ: One of the things Gov. Doyle included in the budget was $1 million in state aid for legal services for the poor. What kind of an impact do you see that having in Milwaukee?

Cannon: It is a statewide program for civil legal services for the poor. Approximately one-third of that should come to Milwaukee and that’s about $300,000-plus that we don’t have now, so it will be very welcome money. Comparatively speaking, Wisconsin is far behind neighboring states. Some Midwest states provide $12 or $14 million dollars and we are hopeful that allocation from the Legislature will grow over the years to match what other states are doing.

WLJ: What is the most unusual case you have ever handled?

Cannon: I would have to say it was the DeRance Foundation litigation (Southern Cross, Inc. v. John, 1995 and John v. John, 1990). It was inter
esting on so many levels. The human drama of a husband and wife suing for this foundation, but of course, ending the marriage as well was fascinating. Harry John, the heir to the Miller Brewing fortune, was a very unique individual and some of his associates were eccentric, if not bizarre.

We hired lawyers in from all around the world from Texas to Rome to try and get on top of the complex legal issues. The trial itself was the longest in Milwaukee County history at five-and-a-half months and it was the first time in American legal history that the founding donor of a private foundation was removed by court. When my daughter was a student at the University of Chicago Law School, she took a course in non-profit law and the DeRance case was in her case book. It’s a precedent-setting case on the fiduciary standards that non-profit organizations are held accountable to. No case will ever top that in my book.

WLJ: Did your military background have any influence on your pursuit of a legal career?

Cannon: I think it did in a sense that I knew I didn’t want to live outdoors like an animal 12 months of the year. I didn’t like being shot at, I didn’t like seeing my friends burned and maimed and I didn’t like being ordered around to do some pretty nasty jobs, so I always thought that no matter how bad things were in the legal profession, that they weren’t was bad as they were in the Marines.

WLJ: If you had not chosen to become a lawyer, what career path might you have embarked on?

Cannon: I would have been a historian. When I was a senior at Marquette I thought very seriously about going to graduate school and getting a Ph.D., in history. I also thought about law school and I remember trying to make a decision between the two and I’m glad that I chose the legal profession because it allowed me to pursue both my interests. If I had become a full-time historian, I couldn’t have been a part-time lawyer. As a lawyer though, I could be a part-time historian more easily.

WLJ: Having had the Legal Aid Society’s Equal Justice Medals named in your honor, does that provide a sense of symmetry to your career?

Cannon: I don’t exactly know what to make of it, but in some way there is the full-circle aspect of doing a job I had 30 years ago, but it’s a different job. There is that kind of resonance with the past and it’s really more home to me with (my son) Niall’s serving in the Marines and going off to war and coming back. It’s like another strand from my past that is in my present and kind of experiencing war, not as a warrior, but as the parent of a warrior. So I’ve got these two strands of my life that have come full-circle. I guess the lesson is you can’t leave your past behind.

WLJ: Any thoughts on how long your second go-around as executive director will last?

Cannon: I always thought of this as a short-term commitment and I think that I will stay as long as I feel useful. I wouldn’t be looking at this as a 10-year job, but as long as I can contribute to the cause, I’ll stick around.