John S. Swimmer

Listen to this article

Leadership runs in the family of John Swimmer, who practices Indian law at Godfrey & Kahn, S.C., both in the legal community, and the Indian community.

Swimmer’s father attended law school on a Bureau of Indian Affairs scholarship, handled many American Indian land claims, and was vice-chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Swimmer also received a BIA scholarship.

Swimmer’s brother also practiced Indian law, was chief of the Cherokee Nation for 10 years, and served as the Assistant Secretary of the Interior during the Reagan Administration.

Swimmer himself, along with fellow Godfrey & Kahn attorney Brian C. Pierson, comprises the core of the firm’s Indian Nations Law Team, the only such team in the upper Midwest.

An attorney at Godfrey & Kahn since 2006, Swimmer has represented all 11 tribes in Wisconsin, and has been retained by tribes throughout the country, on a wide variety of legal issues, including public finance and gaming.

Before that, Swimmer served as the chief legal counsel for the Mille Lacs Chippewa Tribe in Minnesota, and as a tribal attorney for the Ho-Chunk Nation Department of Justice in Black River Falls.

Swimmer and the Indian Nations Law Team also established a pro bono assistance program for American Indians, providing free legal services to tribe members wishing to start their own businesses.

While Indian gaming has provided a much-needed economic engine for tribes in recent decades, many tribes still lack entrepreneurship and a solid economic infrastructure.

Swimmer, Pierson, and 10 other attorneys assist tribe members in forming the corporations that will provide that economic base. The program is available to all tribes in Wisconsin.

Unlike most corporate practices, Swimmer’s entails a variety of legal issues not part of the standard corporate law curriculum, things like getting property put into land trusts.

And since the clients are not garden-variety corporations, but sovereign nations, thorny jurisdictional issues are ever-present, as well.

“You never know what you’re going to do,” he says.

All corporations have environmental law issues to deal with these days, but representing tribes sometimes puts the attorney on the other side, as tribes with TAS (treatment as state) status may pass their own environmental laws, and can set their own water and air standards.

Swimmer compares his practice to a cross between corporate counsel and a government attorney:

“You have to get creative to arrange public financing and preserve the tribe’s sovereign immunity.”