Month: February 2014

For Colleen Meloy, success in the courtroom is both nature and nurture.

Like her father and grandfather, Gary and Don Meloy, respectively, she is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School. So to some degree, law is in her blood.

But she also has been the beneficiary of phenomenal mentoring, she said.

Her good fortune began when she was hired as a 2L law clerk and occasionally assisted Madison lawyer Barrett Corneille with his medical-malpractice defense cases. A few years later, after Corneille had started a boutique civil-litigation defense law firm, Meloy was helping him with a med mal case when she asked, “Can I do just this?”

To her happy surprise, he said yes.

A partnership was born, with Corneille as lead counsel and Meloy second-chairing him. All of their cases involve complex science, damages alleged in the multi-millions, and clients potentially losing their professional reputations.

The stress occasionally is off the charts, Meloy said, but she cannot think of a better focus for her career.

“I think I love medicine even more than I love the law. Maybe I didn’t choose the right path,” she said with a laugh. “Being in medical negligence, I’m able to learn different medicine with every case. That keeps it interesting.”

She also enjoys her work with physicians and nurses.

“They’ve gone into their careers to help people,” Meloy said. “They’ve had a bad outcome with a patient. They’re devastated by that. And now they have to face litigation.”

She and Corneille have proven themselves a winning team for their clients.

Consider, for example, a 2008 no-negligence jury verdict they obtained for a maternal fetal medicine specialist after a two-week trial in Dane County. Plaintiffs argued that delays during delivery cause the child’s cerebral palsy.

The defense successfully moved the court for blood testing in addition to an IME. Those blood-test results were critical to their client’s persuasive causation defense. Meloy said she considers the case a career highlight.

Her colleague, Gina Meierbachtol, said Meloy has certain strengths in the courtroom that complement the work of Corneille.

“Colleen’s great at preparing witnesses,” Meierbachtol, who counts Meloy as her principal mentor, said. “She’s incredibly detail oriented and organized. She’s got more charts than anyone I’ve ever seen.

“And she’s very comfortable and confident in what she does.”

Meticulous attention to detail drew Timothy Radelet into law and, in a couple of ways, into state procedure.

Radelet primarily grew up in East Lansing, Mich., where he stayed for an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture from Michigan State. His graduate work at the University of Wisconsin was sidetracked by an interest in the legal side of development and subsequent enrollment in law school.

“I became really interested in figuring out why subdivisions look the same,” he said. “No matter where you go, houses look the same, roads look the same and there’s basically all of this urban repetition after World War II.”

After graduating in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin Law School, Radelet began his first stint at what is now known as the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority, and soon was elevated to the role of general counsel.

Three years later, Radelet moved to the private side of real estate and development law in practice at Foley & Lardner LLP. It was there that some of Radelet’s self-mapped forms became the norm.

A nearly 12-page property funding lease he created is now basically the template to apply to the Wisconsin Council for Affordable and Rural Housing. And his methods of financing packages lend themselves to both broad use and more tangled applications, such as on the YWCA in downtown Madison.

Of course Radelet would be known for creating complex boilerplates, Joe Shumow, who worked with him at WHEDA and Foley, said.

“Tim harkens back to the 1800’s style of law,” he said. “It’s intensive, one-on-one; he thoroughly explains everything.”

Shumow, of Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren SC, chuckled as he remembered Radelet, in his early days at WHEDA, taking time to give him a 20-minute rundown on the “essence of an easement.”

“[He is] naturally a teacher,” Shumow said; something Radelet attributes to his father, a professor, and mother, a teacher.

Radelet, who returned to WHEDA four years ago, said he never lost the drive to be part of a consistent, detailed approach to improve housing in Wisconsin.

“Each time we do a mortgage loan [or] make a grant … hopefully I’m able to work on it and make it better than the time we did it before so the resources WHEDA can offer are the most successful for everyone,” Radelet said. “It all translates into a better housing product for the whole state.”

Michael Green’s legal work underpins a very public development underway in Madison: redevelopment of The Edgewater Hotel.

But some of his greatest lessons come from projects never to be seen.

Green is chairman of the transactional practice group at Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, where his work centers on real estate. He credits The Edgewater as one of the most layered and rewarding projects of his career, partly because it’s intertwined with the city where he lives with his wife, Ann, and their three teenage sons. However, he attributes a comprehensive awareness of projects’ legal intricacies to his two-year stint away from Michael Best working at a development firm that collapsed on the precipice of the recession.

Before the firm went under, Green said, he gained a wider view of “what worked and what didn’t” through small victories and more than a few failures as development interest and dollars dried up for projects in the Midwest and Florida in the late 2000s.

“You truly see everything from the client’s perspective,” he said, “and in real estate, you can really boil it down to that essential dollar-and-cents question.”

Keeping a full, reasoned view of client needs is a strength that Green’s colleague Mary Turke said she has come to expect from him. Turke said she regularly hands off real estate portions of her client’s work to Green because she appreciates his “calm and persistent” interactions, especially when up against “aggressive and challenging” clients, as found in the recent sale of an older property in Madison.

“I turn things over and [Michael] will keep me informed, but I never worry about it,” Turke said. “They’re all our clients, but he handles it as he would his own people.”

Through his private developer efforts bookended by time at Michael Best & Friedrich, Green said he’s learned being an attorney ultimately means he is “in a position to help others,” an element that’s reflected in his pro bono efforts with his parish, St. Maria Goretti, as well as a group that supports the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center.

“Don’t get me wrong, we get paid well to… be attorneys,” he said. “But there’s a reward to just being helpful.”

When Vicki Margolis left private practice in 2007, she found the grass wasn’t immediately greener.

At first, she said, transitioning from working at a law firm to serving as in-house counsel for Kimberly-Clark Corp. was daunting. But she quickly grew to appreciate the role’s new challenges.

Margolis previously worked as co-chairwoman of the intellectual property litigation group at Washington, D.C.-based Venable LLP, where she focused on IP litigation and enforcement across a broad spectrum of technologies and industries.

She decided to change course, she said, because she was eager for something new after years spent working as a trial attorney and focusing primarily on patents and trademarks.

“I kind of wanted an opportunity and a challenge where maybe I could have an impact a little earlier on in the process,” Margolis said.

By helping to develop strategies earlier in the process, she said she hoped to, when possible, avoid court proceedings altogether.

Through the years, Margolis said she has been fortunate to work with people who gave her opportunities to help her get where she is today. She now aims to return the favor by volunteering her time to help other women succeed.

“My philosophy is that everyone should be able to have an equal opportunity to succeed and fail,” she said.

Margolis said she wants to help women build professional confidence. Women often look at the 10 qualifications listed for a job opportunity and focus on the ones they don’t have, she said, instead of the five they do possess.

It’s important, she said, that “women and girls know they can make that leap.”

Since 2009, Margolis has served on the board for the Women’s Fund for the Fox Valley Region Inc., and since 2012 she has been executive sponsor of Kimberly-Clark’s Neenah Women’s Interactive Network. While living in Maryland, Margolis also worked with Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Lillie Conrad, senior counsel at Kimberly-Clark, said Margolis sets a strong example for those around her.

“Vicki is an accomplished and brilliant attorney and she has been a huge supporter of women,” Conrad said. “In my work with Vicki, both through our legal work and employee resource group work, specifically the women’s network, I have appreciated her perspective and insight.”

As far as the future is concerned, Margolis said she plans to stay at Kimberly-Clark as long as they will have her.

“My plans and goals are always to keep learning,” she said, “and challenging myself.”

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.”

When Debra Tuttle became the chief mediator for the Milwaukee Foreclosure Mediation Program, she didn’t see a long future ahead.

“We started foreclosure mediation in 2009,” Tuttle said, “and I can tell you that we never imagined that in 2014 there would still be such a significance and need for this service”

In the midst of the foreclosure crisis, the services provided by the Milwaukee Foreclosure Mediation Program — administered by Tuttle’s alma mater, Marquette University Law School — proved valuable for affected parties in the Milwaukee area. As the crisis continued to linger, the need became apparent for such a program statewide.

Developing such a network was no easy task.

“We had to be creative about how to replicate the [Milwaukee Foreclosure] Mediation Program throughout the state,” Tuttle said. “We first brought together stakeholders, people who would be impacted by this kind of a system — lenders, attorneys, the individual servicers, housing counselors — to get their viewpoint about what the working parts of a good process would look like.”

Once a framework was developed, Tuttle helped form the Wisconsin Foreclosure Mediation Network with the support of Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and the Wisconsin Department of Justice. The state network and the Milwaukee program both operate through Metro Milwaukee Mediation Services Inc.

She then went to work gathering support from circuit court judges throughout the state. From the judges, Tuttle asked that it be required — via court order, judicial directive or local court rule — that homeowners be notified of the availability of mediation services in the case of a foreclosure.

The statewide model of foreclosure mediation improved upon the Milwaukee model with the inclusion of set time frames for the exchange of information as well as the integration of online tools for case management.

“Mediation doesn’t end until you get to an end point,” Tuttle said. “Either yes, your mortgage can be modified and you can stay in your home or no, you don’t qualify and here’s exactly why.”

Although the process of getting members of both sides of a foreclosure proceeding to work together has been daunting, Tuttle said she continues to see improvement.

“I have seen a culture develop over the past four years, of collaboration,” Tuttle said, “in an environment where you would never expect it.”

Green Bay attorney Gregory Conway credits his family legal pedigree for an extra edge in the confidence department.

Conway’s father, Byron, was a circuit court judge in Wisconsin Rapids. When he retired, Conway’s older brother, Dennis, an established attorney, took his father’s seat on the bench.

Conway gravitated to the courtroom, as well, establishing himself as a trial attorney after graduating from Marquette University Law School in 1970.

“I was never intimidated in terms of doing what lawyers did,” Conway said.

Five years into practice, he got a call from a social services agency in the Green Bay area. A recent Vietnamese immigrant, Duong Bich Van, had given her child over to the U.S. military during the fall of Saigon in what came to be known as “Operation Babylift.” The woman now needed help regaining custody of the child.

Confident he could help, Conway sought the assistance of two Marquette University Law School friends. With local donations to cover their trial travel costs, the trio took on the case pro bono. Within a year, they had reunited mother and child.

“That first day I thought, somewhat naively, that we’d get the kid back after a few phone calls,” said Conway, who until recently still received Christmas cards from the woman he called “Ms. Van.”

The next year, Conway and a partner established the Green Bay firm that today is the Law Firm of Conway, Olejniczak & Jerry SC. As the firm’s reputation for handling business and transactional law cases grew during the ‘80s, Conway’s stature rose, as well.

In 1985, a colleague urged him to run for president of the State Bar of Wisconsin. The campaign brought Conway in touch with lawyers across the state and, upon winning, made him the youngest bar president and a rare choice from outside Milwaukee or Madison.

His firm’s administrator, Scott Heintz, a 17-year employee, said Conway’s credibility has been instrumental in backing projects at Marquette University Law School and around Brown County, as well as in supporting attorneys around the state.

“The connections he’s made over the years have given the firm a foundation to build on,” Heintz said. “And it’s given so many opportunities for other legal professionals, working here or who’ve moved on.”

Today, the firm has about 20 attorneys and a familial vibe that stems, in part, from staff members’ confidence in Conway as one of its leaders.

On the wall behind John Ebbott’s desk is a picture of him and Martin Luther King Jr., taken when the iconic figure was in Madison in the 1960s.

Ebbott, then a student at the University of Wisconsin, said King — as well as the tenor of the era — did a lot to inform how he thinks today, and pushed him toward a career helping poor people find legal representation.

“I was a conservative Republican my first two years of college there,” Ebbott said, describing his move into progressive politics. “But it was in the middle of the anti-Vietnam War activism and the middle of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Now, after 24 years as executive director of Legal Action of Wisconsin Inc., he plans to step down in June. In his time overseeing the nonprofit — which serves 39 counties in Wisconsin — Ebbott has positioned himself as a giant in the small legal community dedicated to helping indigent clients.

“Throughout the time I’ve known him,” Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Mary Triggiano, who worked for Legal Action before taking the bench, said, “he has really pursued access to justice in different ways.”

As Ebbott’s time with Legal Action comes to a close, a number of projects he has worked on — including a second attempt to try a civil Gideon program in Wisconsin — remain unfinished.

“People keep thinking the needs have changed,” he said. “But people still keep getting evicted, are still losing their kids, they’re still getting their cars repossessed.”

But he said he is confident that someone else will carry on the cause and is quick to point out the many attorneys and staff members that keep Legal Action afloat.

Still, he said, Legal Action “isn’t going to be easy to give up.”

Ebbott, who has been with the organization for the better part of 44 years, said he plans to use his retirement to write a book on Legal Action’s history, as well as work on a novel about Chief Black Hawk.

He started his career in 1970 as a staff attorney at Freedom Through Equality Inc., a law reform legal services firm in Milwaukee. That firm later merged with Milwaukee Legal Services to form Legal Action.

Ebbott later spent time as litigation director for the Migrant Legal Action Project in Washington, D.C.

As he tells stories about his work in the 1970s — from protecting welfare recipients during a protest of Boston Store to arguing for inmates’ rights — Ebbott refers to those as the “golden days.” But he said he is still as fired up now as he was back then; maybe even more so.

“When my colleagues and I began this work in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, we thought that we would be able to use the law as a critical force in the larger movement to eliminate poverty in the country and to secure equal justice under law,” he said in an emailed follow-up to an interview. “Now, more people than ever are poor, and there is a larger income and wealth gap than ever, so we were not successful in achieving these goals.”

Ebbott knows he is leaving at a time where the need for indigent representation is far from being met. There also is an ongoing debate creating factions that favor attorneys for everybody — albeit in a limited manner — and those who believe in quality representation for as many as possible.

Ebbott is firmly in the latter camp. And that mindset has not changed much in 44 years.

“When rich people go to Foley [& Lardner LLP], they expect the lawyer to take their case and represent them,” Ebbott said. “They don’t want to be the lawyer … that’s what I wanted to do at Legal Action.”

Bringing a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice onto the team at Gonzalez Saggio & Harlan LLP was not a universally popular idea.

“I was against it,” partner Joseph Fasi II admitted. “I thought a guy who’s been on the Supreme Court, who’s never worked in the real world — because he was a public defender, then city judge, then a circuit court judge, and then a [state] Supreme Court justice — I had him pegged as a government lifer, who didn’t know what working was all about.

“Thank goodness no one listened to me because he has become such a bright spot for our firm, and he’s become a close friend.”

It helped, Fasi said, that Louis B. Butler Jr. approached the opportunity with humility.

“He came … knowing that he didn’t know anything about private practice, had never had to keep a time sheet or prepare a bill or deal with clients,” Fasi said. “He didn’t know any of that stuff, but he was very open to learn. He never pulls the rank of, ‘Well, I was a judge. I was a justice.’”

That’s partly because, Butler said, for him, the job never has been about the title. And he knew when he joined the firm in August 2011 that he was in uncharted territory.

“It’s a learning experience for me, the business part of law,” he said. “I’ve never really treated law as a business before. It was always, ‘Give me the most difficult case you’ve got.’”

More than two years into the experience, Butler said, he has found comfort in developing a nationwide appellate practice.

“Right now,” he said, “I’m at home.”

Butler said he is content to simply look back on his public service and his places in history, including being: the first public defender in Wisconsin history to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court; the first African-American to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court; and nominated by President Barack Obama to be a U.S. District Court Judge for the Western District of Wisconsin.

But he’s also not content to stop any time soon.

“I sit back and laugh because a number of people I went to law school with are retiring, and I’m starting a new career,” Butler said. “I’m not done yet, but what can I do; it’s a matter of when and how and to what degree.”

Christopher Krimmer said he grew up introverted and shy, with low self-esteem.

Now, the openly gay family law attorney owns who he is, and the community of which he is part.

“What drives me now is that connection with other people, educating and learning from them, even making changes in their lives,” Krimmer said. “It drives me to do more, especially if I can do anything to open up people’s eyes about the gay and lesbian community.”

Krimmer spent his first few years as an attorney running his own “little-bit-of-everything” law practice before joining the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, where he established a client legal rights program. He joined the Madison firm Balisle & Roberson SC in 2003 after answering a flier he found while helping an intern apply for legal careers.

Now a partner with the firm, Krimmer is a whirlwind of activity. In addition to his caseload in the past year, he’s presented on a dozen topics pertaining to same-sex couples and families; written a legal guidebook on the practice area; led a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights and finance seminar in Madison; and taught a popular Sexual Orientation in the Law course at Marquette University.

He helps his same-sex clients understand they have certain federal rights, even as residents of Wisconsin, which is not one of the growing number of states that allow same-sex marriages.

When applicable, Krimmer said, he makes his sexual orientation known. To be certain, he said, it’s not pertinent with every family law case he takes on. But, he said, the legal community and growing case law both can benefit by such openness, countering “ridiculous” perceptions and the “shocking” lack of practicing attorneys who are openly gay.

Andrea Gage, public relations coordinator at the State Bar of Wisconsin, took a family law course of Krimmer’s at Marquette, where she said he provided a welcome, real-world angle on the ins and outs of an actual case.

Gage now counts Krimmer as a friend and said his stream of published articles and CLE sessions give the state a tireless, respected voice on emerging areas of the law.

“In the legal community, there are plenty of people who are good attorneys, who are good friends to their fellow attorneys or are really involved in the community,” she said. “Rarely do you find someone who does such a good job at all three, like Chris.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdpNsxoGHFg

Randal Brotherhood takes his work wherever he goes.

“I don’t start at 9 and go home at 5,” he said. “I work at client locations. And, I almost hate to say it, but the closest I come to vacation is moving it down to half days; then I can walk out my office door in the woods and I can do the things my kids like to do.”

That intense availability for his business clients is made possible by Brotherhood’s arsenal of technology, including: his laptop, iPad, iPhone, home server, and a smattering of printers and scanners, just in case.

“I use technology aggressively,” said Brotherhood, a partner for almost 25 years at Meissner Tierney Fisher & Nichols SC, Milwaukee.

It allows him to keep in touch 24-7 with clients including tax-exempt organizations and national associations, while still spending time with his wife and five sons.

“It’s a challenge,” Brotherhood said. “I try to be an active dad, and there are only so many hours in the day.

“And to be in private practice and do it properly, it’s just time consuming. It presupposes a certain amount of ambition.”

Ambition, it seems, is something Brotherhood certainly has, or at least a lot of energy, since he starts his workdays at 6 a.m., even on Saturdays.

He’s served as chairman of boards for the Wauwatosa Library Board and American Heart Association. And he’s currently an officer of the State Bar of Wisconsin’s’ Business Law section.

Yet, Brotherhood always makes time for others, said Josh Welsh, a fellow shareholder, who joined the firm in 2003.

“Randy Brotherhood is, quite simply, the nicest person you might ever meet,” Welsh said. “He’s just one of those guys who is kind of warm and inviting. I see why clients are drawn to him.

“You can tell there’s no personal agenda. He just really cares about people and lives to do the right things by them.”

That means remaining committed to his family and his clients.

“The thing I like about transactional law, working with clients and dealing with transactions, is it’s more collaborative,” Brotherhood said. “Some of my clients, I started representing years ago when they were just starting out.

Some of them, I’ve even worked with them to sell their businesses and exit.

“We’ve grown together. It’s one of the things I like most about what I do.”

A litigator for the past 46 years, Bruce O’Neill shows no sign of slowing down.

“I don’t know what I would do if I retired,” the shareholder at Fox, O’Neill & Shannon SC, said. “I’m so lucky I found a profession that I really love and am excited still every Monday morning to get into the office.”

O’Neill has a full load of civil commercial and complex family law cases, and he works on each of them with the same passion.

“My son, when he was younger, once asked me which case was my most important and I said, honestly, ‘they all are,’” O’Neill said. “Every case is important to that client. It may be the difference between a business that stays open or closes or the difference between a family staying together or not. If it matters to my clients, it matters to me.”

After nearly five decades, O’Neill has witnessed many changes, the biggest being an increase in alternate dispute resolution and mediation.

“There are fewer cases going to trial, but for me, there’s nothing more exciting and nerve-wracking than a jury trial,” he said. “There’s always drama and you always learn something by going through the process.”

Diane Slomowitz, who has worked with O’Neill for 32 years, said he’s the best litigator in the state – if not the country.

“I have seen firsthand Bruce’s consistently accurate case analyses, which begin with his intuitive grasp of the legal and factual issues, themselves always confirmed by my research,” she said. “I have heard countless times, ‘I know there’s a case …’ and each time, he’s right. It’s uncanny.”

While O’Neill has a broad range of experience, he’s perhaps best noted for his efforts on the state’s Fair Dealership Law litigation. He won one of the first published decisions under the law in 1979 and continues to litigate the statute.

“It was a big case, but I’m invested in all my cases,” O’Neill said. “I want to get in there and do the best job possible for my clients.”

And despite a heavy caseload, O’Neill still makes time to mentor younger attorneys at the firm and work on pro bono cases.

“You don’t have to look too hard for the pro bono cases, they come to you,” he said. “To me, it just feels right to give back and help. It’s just part of who I am.”