A history of service

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Tom Cannon chooses his words carefully.

Often, he will take a moment to collect his thoughts and choose the best way to say what he is thinking.

That goes double when he speaks of advice-only clinics, which advocate for helping as many people as possible with legal services, even if only for a moment.

“To me, to give somebody advice only is, in many cases, worse than useless,” Cannon said. “Because that person, the client, is expected to go and either go and draft their own legal documents or go into the courtroom and try their own eviction or their own divorce. And that’s absurd.”

Cannon, who has served as executive director of the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee Inc. since 2005, announced at the end of 2013 that he would retire this September.

His departure will mark the end of nearly 43 years of being affiliated with Legal Aid in some form. It also will mean that Milwaukee’s small indigent services community will lose a powerful champion.

Cannon started as an attorney with the group in 1971 and served as its executive director between 1977 and 1981. He left that year, first working as a professor at Marquette University Law School and then as a partner at O’Neil, Cannon, Hollman, DeJong & Laing SC, but was on Legal Aid’s board from 1985 to 2003.

He retired for the first time in 2000, only to be coaxed back to work five years later. When he retires in September, Cannon said, he will continue to work on a memoir about his time in Vietnam, as well as write about Medieval Irish history, which long has been an interest.

Cannon’s history includes time spent as a Marine serving in Vietnam. His experiences there pushed him, he said, to, for most of his career, avoid working for a strictly for-profit law firm.

“It’s just random physics as to who dies and who lives,” Cannon said of Vietnam. “You see your friends being killed, maimed, burned, terribly wounded, and it causes you to think about your life, your future.”

Recounting moments that have made him proud, Cannon reflected on calling the White House in a 1974 plea to intervene when Milwaukee resident Michiah Shobek was going to be executed for a murder in the Bahamas. Also of note, he said, was opposing a 2010 Milwaukee County Board attempt to limit class action lawsuits against the county.

Not afraid to push for what he believes in, Cannon was behind former state Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske’s move to the bench. Geske, a professor at Marquette University, had previously worked at Legal Aid.

When she was debating whether to apply for a spot at the Milwaukee County Circuit Court when then-Judge Fred Kessler was leaving the bench, “he was the one that encouraged me to apply,” Geske said.

“I kept saying ‘I don’t know anybody. I don’t have any political connections,’” she said. “He picked up the phone and called [the Journal Sentinel] … and said ‘now you have to apply.’”

Though he’s ready for a second attempt at retirement, Cannon said he knows he’s leaving at a time when the money for civil legal services is not at its highest point. It has been tougher in recent years, he said, to raise money for the cause.

But when asked if he is tired of the struggle, the daily uphill battle that comes with advocating for indigent clients in 2014, Cannon needed no time to consider his answer: “No.”

“The needs are out there, and it’s our job to advocate for our client population,” he said. “If we don’t do it, nobody’s going to do it.”