Hospital’s general counsel built healthy career

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Every woman lawyer who practiced in the 1980s has a humorous anecdote about making her way in the male-dominated world of law.

So says Catherine Mode Eastham, who recalls when a client of her medium-sized Milwaukee law firm passed her in the hallway and remarked to his male attorney, “Oh, you have those women lawyers! Do they do the same things that men do?”

Eastham, now vice-president/general counsel for Froedtert Hospital & Community Health Inc. in Milwaukee, says it took a lot of tenacity to succeed in that environment. A sense of humor was helpful, too.

Eastham started out in litigation, but soon gravitated toward employee benefits and later the burgeoning field of health law, because she found them to be two very complementary, regulation-driven practices.

Her former firm, von Briesen & Roper S.C., had a longstanding relationship with Froedtert Hospital. Eastham was a member of the team representing it on a variety of matters. The work soon consumed much of her practice, with Eastham eventually starting to keep office hours at both locations.

In 2002, when the hospital affiliated with Community Memorial, she came in-house with the new organization.

Eastham is accountable for all the legal activities of the organization, and she represents it in transactions. For example, she represents Froedtert & Community Health in the ongoing negotiations to form a partnership with Columbia St. Mary’s. Also, last year, she represented it when St. Joseph’s Hospital and West Bend Clinic joined the affiliation.

She enjoys the wide variety of practice areas her work encompasses, and being a generalist in the law.

“As often as possible, I provide the day-to-day counsel, and that’s one of the reasons I really like being in-house, Eastham says. “It’s closer to what’s going on, and the fulfillment of our mission. It’s a role that allows me to help put the pieces together to avoid problems, rather than dealing with them afterward, when people come in fighting.

And it’s something new and different, every day.”

She’s proud to say her department consists of two other women lawyers, and is generally amazed at the progress women in the law have made during her career. That having been said, challenges remain.

“I still think law, and other areas, aren’t blind to gender, and I wish they could be. There are many things women have worked hard for, like the ability to take off when a child is born and the possibility of part-time work afterward. But that’s not always equally available to men. It is unfair to the men and, in a sense, I feel that’s also ‘keeping the woman in her place,’” she says.

“Also, the whole concept of where power lies in law firms remains troubling to me. I think more and more women are drawn in-house because of the concern that they won’t become ‘powerful’ in law firms.”

— Jane Pribek