Steven A. Bach Interview July 22, 2025

Tom Glowacki:  Okay. Today is July 22, 2025, and we're in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm here with Attorney Steve Bach as part of the Dane County Bar Association Oral History Project. This interview is being recorded and will be transcribed and made available for people interested in the evolution and development of the practice of law in Dane County, as if you and I have anything to help them with that. Steve, do I have your permission to record you and have a transcript prepared?

Steve Bach:  Yes, you do.

Tom Glowacki:  Okay. Could you give us your full name?

Steve Bach: Full name is Steven, middle initial A., Bach.

Tom Glowacki:  And where do you live now?

Steve Bach: Right now I live in Madison, Wisconsin.

Tom Glowacki:  What's your family situation?

Steve Bach:   Family situation is not currently married. I have three adult children and four grandchildren, all of whom are also living in Madison.

Tom Glowacki:  You currently working or are you retired?

Steve Bach:  Probably no to both of those. I am not formally or fully retired. I'm doing very little work, basically involved with one case that I had some years ago that's still going on and for which I'm doing observations, consulting and very little actual legal work.

Tom Glowacki:  Where were you born?

Steve Bach:  Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 1947.

Tom Glowacki:  Where'd you go to grade school?

Steve Bach:   Went to grade school at St. Mary’s grade school in Waukesha. Went to high school at the Catholic Memorial High School at also Waukesha.

Tom Glowacki:   An old rival of mine.

Steve Bach:  Yep. Class of '65 for Catholic Memorial.

Tom Glowacki:  Where'd you do your undergrad work?

Steve Bach:  Went to St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, for undergrad. Graduated from there with a bachelor of arts degree in sociology in 1969. From there, I was in the Peace Corps for about a year and a half. I served in Montevideo, Uruguay for that time and then moved back to Wisconsin in December of '70 or January of '71.

Tom Glowacki:  Why did you decide to go into law?

Steve Bach:   Good question. It was a weird time back then. Graduating in '69, I was obviously, I guess, eligible to be drafted at that point. I'm probably making this more complicated than it needs to be. I had tried to get a job in social work upon graduation because that would have, I believe, resulted in an occupational deferment. The Waukesha Draft Board was quite conservative then. And the deal was that I couldn't get the deferment unless I had a job, and I couldn't get the job unless I had a deferment. So there was that catch 22 going on.

At the time, I got married shortly after graduating from college. And my then-wife and I had discussed the Peace Corps and around then got accepted to the Peace Corps, which then resulted in a deferment to avoid getting drafted. That led, I guess, to more time and opportunity to consider other options. And as part of that experience, I mean as part of growing up during those years, the idea of being a lawyer was attractive as a way to, in a constructive way, help those less fortunate deal with the system. And I explored it a little bit, started learning about it a little bit more. Ultimately, took my law school admission test in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and did well enough on that to apply for, then get accepted to law school at the University of Wisconsin.

Tom Glowacki:  And you came here because of residency tuition, right?

Steve Bach:  Residency tuition for sure and, of course, family living there and all of that, but those are… Residency tuition is a very good reason, as well as, fortunately it’s a good school.

Tom Glowacki:  Good for me too.

Steve Bach:  Yep, yep.

Tom Glowacki:  Okay. Did you work while you were in law school?

Steve Bach:   I did. For two-plus years, I was a clerk at the Attorney General's Office of Consumer Protections. It turned out to be a very good learning experience, and it may be one of the highlights because of the people I met in the workplace there.

Tom Glowacki:  While you were in law school, you had a family you were just starting to raise?

Steve Bach:  Got married and my first child was born during the second semester of my last year in law school. So obviously, there's a pregnancy to deal with in there. Of course, all the pressure for the need to get a job, right?  I would say must've been pressure filled times in some ways.

Tom Glowacki:  What was your first job out of law school? 

Steve Bach:  First job out of law school was, as you may well know, actually I don't know, I don't remember exactly your experience, but then, as maybe now too, the jobs were tight, or at least it seemed that way. And so I interviewed a number of places. I interviewed for a job or two here in Madison. I interviewed for a couple jobs in Milwaukee or the Milwaukee area and had an opportunity to continue to work for the Attorney General's Office as an assistant attorney general in consumer protection in Milwaukee. But I had an opportunity or an offer to practice in Richland Center, Wisconsin. I was offered the job by a guy named Malcolm Gissen, who was a few years older than I. Also a graduate of UW but originally from New York. So it was an unusual experience in a small town that I had I don't think ever heard of. But for some reason it seemed to be the thing to do.

And so I took a job with Mal in Richland Center and stayed there for a year. But looking back on it, I always look back on that as, I don't call it the highlight of a long career, but it was one of the best jobs that I ever had in any capacity. It was super interesting. He was a great guy. I still have contact with him. And we're, I guess because of the nature of practice then, you got to do all kinds of different areas of law, which was just interesting, exposed to a lot of things and give you a basis for deciding what direction you want to go from there.

Tom Glowacki:  Where did you apply for jobs in the Madison area then after your year in Richland Center?

Steve Bach:   I can't piece that together entirely, but as it turned out, my then-wife was in law school. When we were in Richland Center with a little baby, she began law school that year also, so she was commuting back and forth a few days a week, needed child care. That really forced the issue to come back to Madison. Not that that was a bad thing but really made it more necessary than would otherwise have been the case. As it turns out, Mal Gissen was law school classmates with an attorney named Chuck Center. Chuck was involved in a practice in Madison at the time, with the firm of Novick, Wendel and Center.

Steve Bach:  As I recall, there was that contact, and those three were... Actually, David Novick primarily retired then too. And associate Dan Lipman, they were willing to take someone else on on kind of a commission basis, and it worked out. I went there, worked with them for five years and then went to work with a firm, Walsh, Walsh and Sweeney. It was John Walsh, David Walsh, and Tim Sweeney were the main partners with some other lawyers as well. And I worked with them for five years and then became part of an actual, at that point Walsh, Walsh, Sweeney and Whitney were merged with Foley & Lardner.

And at that time, Foley did not have a family law practice. Now that changed later, but at that time they did not. And so I did not go to Foley. I then joined up with Lee Cullen and Cheryl Weston and Lester Pines, which became then Cullen, Weston, Pines and Bach. And then had been there ever since.

Tom Glowacki:  Okay. So I'm tying two things together here. You're being exposed to a number of areas in a small town practice and probably having picked up Spanish with the Peace Corps, because I remember you doing some public defender work.

Steve Bach:  Right.

Tom Glowacki:  Especially with Spanish speaking defendants.

Steve Bach:  I did. There was a time, and I have to go back and reconstruct it a little bit. I think it was in the late '70s, early '80s, that there were, maybe you remember the Mariel Boat lift, so many, many people from Cuba were sent to or came to Wisconsin, a number of whom landed in Madison and a number of whom didn't do all that well in Cuba and caused trouble, were in jail there. And they sent them here and no big surprise that someone from a different country without speaking English very well and maybe a less than great background would get in trouble in Madison. And they did. So as a private attorney, the public defender office hires private attorneys to do work when there's a conflict or need for it. And I was at that point still fairly fluent in Spanish, and so I did get appointed to represent a number of the Cuban guys who got in trouble.

Tom Glowacki:  But then you gradually, then the family law is your main source of practice?

Steve Bach:  Yeah. In Richland Center, as in I'm sure many small counties around the state, I mean there wasn't any that specialized in family law at that time. I think you had your personal injury lawyers and you had your insurance company, certainly probate, things like that, but I don't remember any, frankly, lawyers who specialized in family law. And so there was a need to do everything, a different variety. And then yeah, after a while coming back here, start getting more and more active in that area. And it gets to a point, as you know, where all of a sudden you're doing enough of that so that you're not keeping up with what you need to in the other areas. And so you stop doing the criminal defense work, the complicated probate or real estate or personal injury stuff, and end up doing primarily exclusively just the one thing.

Tom Glowacki:  And so going back to those early days, you were under Chapter 247 then.

Steve Bach:  Chapter 247, wow. Yes. Until, I'm not sure when that... Well, yes, that was the family code that we grew up with, quite different then than it is today. As I'm thinking about that, some major changes that came to be from then until now, certainly the grounds for divorce or just no-fault divorce. Back then, there weren't any child support standards, and so I remember so many and maybe every case involved in child support, it was always a discussion and a contest over need and ability to pay. And so you're examining the budget of the person, of both people. Do you really need that much to spend on clothing or entertainment? And are you over-withholding here or doing that? So it'd be a fair amount of time spent on trying to find every available dollar for child support.

But now we have the standards that eliminate the need for that. And the presumptions for property division and maintenance were very different then. Property division, gosh, back in the beginning there, if I remember correctly, the presumption was that the woman would get one-third of the marriage property, with the guy getting two-thirds.

Steve Bach:  I think it was one-third, so this was the standard thing in every case law that said now there must be appropriate allocation for the woman. And maintenance, then called alimony, was nowhere near as liberally provided as in later years, and there weren't any presumptions like we are dealing with now for that. So the finances were certainly tilted favorably to the male, the husband in the divorce, whereas the custody allocation for kids leaning the other way.

Tom Glowacki:  You talked about the need to get into incomes and expenses and all that. Wasn't there also an issue with some commissioners, some judges would be inclined one way and others would be inclined the other way, and you got to be careful who you were arguing what in front of?

Steve Bach:  Absolutely. And probably up to and including today, it's always helpful to know who's going to be making the decision in whatever kind of situation you're in, whether it's a temporary order hearing or the trial itself or a post-judgment, because people have their different, I guess, preferences or things they look for, which is huge. Going back to Richland Center, the practice there involved not only Richland County but the counties surrounding it, Sauk County, Grant County, Iowa County, Vernon County perhaps, some like that. And so there's a lot more bouncing around like that to the different counties than I certainly did after I came to Madison.

And we always worried that we would get maybe in front of a judge who, say, doesn't like out-of-town attorneys but is more inclined to lean toward a local attorney if that were on the side of a case. So you had to pick and choose, knowing who you're in front of and what their, I guess, final advice is the right word, but what their preferences are and try to work with them as best we can.

Tom Glowacki: Compared to the prior support statute, it always seemed to me there was less room for that concern. You could still be before an unfamiliar judge, but you had the statutory presumption.

Steve Bach:  I think that's true certainly with regard to child support. You've got your child support standards.  And I never really delved into the research as to how they were developed, but apparently, there was some substantial research about cost of kids and how much people spent on their kids. And so that certainly made that part of things easier if you're dealing with a presumption of 25% of gross income for two kids, and that did. And then you got the presumption of an equal division of property. That's rarely deviated from unless you've got property that's not subject to division, but it makes that part of it easier.

And I guess in maintenance, maintenance, there are more room maybe for arguing whether it's a long enough marriage to have indefinite term maintenance, whether an income should be divided equally. And so I think maybe biases pop up more then. It's been a long time since I did a contested custody case, so I don't know the extent to which preference for mom or a preference for equal placement beyond legal custody exists as for the variance of it from judge to judge.

Tom Glowacki:  In fact, the property division, there's also the fact that retirements were pretty much ignored back then, weren't they?

Steve Bach:  Yeah. Actually, you mentioned that in a different conversation we had or something, and I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, I don't remember ever taking into account, certainly not getting someone to value a pension plan. It would be income at some point if there was still a minor child involved and maybe if there was alimony. But it wasn't until, and I don't remember the name of the case, maybe you do, Rintelma or something like that, that established, that came out and said that a pension or retirement plan is an asset subject to property division. And if you look back at it, it's kind of funny that we didn't always assume that back then.

Steve Bach:  One more thing that I notice- ... in terms of differences. The paternity cases, I mean back when we first started, we had paternity because people would deny that they were the father of a child, and you would have trials on it. My very first jury trial was a paternity case, and there wasn't DNA testing then. I don't think there was even blood tests then. Because what I remember is that there was a presumption that if a child was born on a certain date, the presumption was is that that child was conceived, I don't know, 30 days before or 30 days back 9 months before the birth. There was a 60-day period of time.

Tom Glowacki:  My recollection was nine months back plus or minus 30 days.

Steve Bach: Was that? Okay.

Tom Glowacki:  Yeah.

Steve Bach:  And so it came down to whether or not a person had sexual relations with the mother during that period of time, not, again, no blood tests, no DNA. People fought about it and disagreed, and the person was able to have a jury trial on that issue. And so that has changed dramatically. I guess I can't remember the last time we even heard about there being a paternity trial.

Tom Glowacki:  My recollection is we had the HLA test for paternity, a blood test which for practical use could, on a good day, eliminate 25% of the male population as a potential father, which puts 75% of males up for grabs.

Steve Bach:  Yeah. It's totally different now. I don't remember hearing anybody with a paternity dispute now.

Tom Glowacki:  Yeah. I always wonder about how many men were adjudicated as the father of some child when they weren't, and there was no DNA at that point.

Steve Bach:  I'm sure there were a lot because that was a pretty... Because people did the best they could, but that was certainly nowhere near as scientific.

Tom Glowacki:  I guess the other question I have about all this is, so we have all these standards we didn't have back in the day. Judge or the court commissioner have to pay attention to them, but in the long run, has it reduced conflict in divorce at all?

Steve Bach:  In a lot of ways, I think the conflict has probably shifted to other areas. If people want to fight, they're going to find something to fight about. It's nice to eliminate some of the areas, so you don't... People can find ways to fight about child support. Yes, we have our standards, but obviously, they're absolute, but there's some variation depending on how much time you have for the kids. And so people fight for extra days of placement, which used to be called visitation, extra days of placement, which will affect the child support amount.

There is even, I think, in the child support guidelines or standards now, there's a provision for what they call overnight equivalent. So if you have the child for a certain portion of the day, the day but not an overnight, then they can argue that it should be countable to an overnight. And so I guess it really comes, there are things you can almost always find to fight about. I think these standards and things that we have make it much better, but still, it doesn't eliminate it at all.

Tom Glowacki:  The overnight is already the battleground. Returning the kid at 9:00 PM, maybe it's not overnight if you're on one side of it, and the other side was arguing that I can take the school in the morning, that'll be an overnight.

Steve Bach:  Right, yeah. Unfortunately. And I guess that, people who are getting divorced obviously are many times, certainly not always, but many times not in the best frame of mind with respect to their spouse. And sometimes people want to fight, not everybody, but a lot of people do. And I think one maybe significant change but really major change that has occurred during our careers is the use and availability of mediation. I mean, I remember when that first was, I guess, developed or announced or came into possibility, a lot of people had to be convinced that that was an okay thing and that that was a good thing for helping the divorcing couples to resolve their issues. A lot of people didn't want to give up that right to go to court to fight about things.

The alternative dispute resolution, which is now part of the statutes, provides some real decent ways to avoid the courtroom and to help people reach agreements rather than to fight it out in front of a judge. That I think has helped make the practice, anyway, I don't know what else to call it, you can always inflate if you want, but that's certainly a real positive change.

Tom Glowacki:  And collaborative divorce is almost a subset of alternative dispute resolution.

Steve Bach: Yes, yeah. Frankly, I'm surprised that that has not developed more than it has. Started, what, about 25 years ago, something like that, and I remember when it was first a concept. Greg Herman from Milwaukee was in town. I think it was a state bar convention in Madison around that time, and I had breakfast with Greg and Tom Sleik from Lacrosse. And Greg was pitching this collaborative divorce concept, and it was new. You kind of wondered about it a little bit. He was very enthusiastic about it, and then it started becoming a thing. I almost thought that it could be potentially, really a game changer for a lot of people, and I think probably for a lot it has.

Again, there's a lot of, I think, maybe, don't know what the word is, you get fixed in your ways as a lawyer and you practice in certain ways and you're skeptical about how things are going to work or whether it's better than the current way and educating and maybe dragging people into it. At least in Wisconsin, I don't think it has ever taken off like I thought it would. And maybe it still will, but I'm unaware of it being any kind of booming thing.

Tom Glowacki:  It's always seemed to me a little bit too formalistic, too structured, and that would necessarily drive up costs.

Steve Bach, Interviewee:  There was always concern about the cost because of the process involving independent financial experts or child care coordinators, things like that. And it's certainly something to be aware of. It was probably always going to be less expensive than a trial is, but you've got mediation as an alternative. It's not either collaborative or trial, some interim steps that people can use. I think there's always a reluctance, and change is hard or that doesn't always come easy for a lot of things. But remember when advertising became a thing, I mean for years it was unethical to advertise. You couldn't do it, and then it became okay. And I think it was huge in this space, maybe more of the older lawyers, the reluctance to do that. And advertising is a cheap thing.

I guess I often thought back then that I didn't think it was going to make a lot of difference because as soon as you could have a yellow page ad, everyone's going to have a yellow page ad, and it won't really make any difference anyway. There was that and other changes. That one, I think it ended before I started and probably before you started also, the mandatory fee schedule-

Tom Glowacki:  I remember that.

Steve Bach:  ... where you couldn't charge less than a certain amount. And I think there are a lot of old school lawyers who didn't like it when that changed.

Tom Glowacki:  I remember my partner, Harry Hill, he had a state bar binder with all the nice pages telling you what you could charge for a will or probate or whatever. Yeah, that was it.

Steve Bach:  And not less than that. I mean-

Tom Glowacki:  Right. I was never going to charge less.

Steve Bach:  Right. So think about it, a lot of changes, and I don't know what's coming next. But I think there is more specialization now than was when we first started, for good or for bad, I don't know. But it's probably necessary for you to keep on top of it.

Tom Glowacki: I just want to circle back to a parent coordinator you brought up. How has that worked out in your experience?

Steve Bach:  Well, honestly, I can't comment a lot on it simply because it's been a long time since I've done contested custody stuff. One smart move I made some years ago, I don't know, it's been at least 10 or 15 that I did not take any contested custody cases. That really takes a lot out of you, as you know. And no matter what side you're on, it can really weigh you down so often that both people come out unhappy. And the worst ones I thought were permission to leave the state with the child. Those were the really gut-wrenching cases, and I just decided that there were other people that could do it and do it better than I was going to. I just could not continue, though, to go through that.

Tom Glowacki:  Well, looking back through your experience and comparing the lawyers, the older lawyers back then when you were just a baby lawyer and with lawyers in later years of your practice, how do you think lawyers have changed their approach to family law?

Steve Bach, Interviewee:  It's a very good question. I think that back, well, certainly in the beginning because there wasn't things like mediation or collaborative divorce, if there was a dispute, the judge or the family court commissioner. So it was a trial a lot, not always. Certainly, people settled cases by negotiating, but I think that back then, I think the bar in general maybe was more aggressive, litigious than it is now, although I'm not sure if that's fair or not, not having been actively involved in recent years. Was that your experience, too, the older guys were-

Tom Glowacki:  Exactly my experience, yeah. I always used to refer to them as the World War II generation.

Steve Bach:  Good point.

Tom Glowacki:  Yeah. Those guys were, what, they're about their forties, early fifties at the time. And yeah, that was my experience. There was a lot of stuff that went to trial that really didn't need to.

Steve Bach:  No.

Tom Glowacki:  But that was the ethic, we're going to do it all the hard way.

Steve Bach:  Yeah. And the older people knew the judges back then, probably had reason to believe that they were going to be able to do better in front of this judge with whom they'd worked for years than this new kid. Often true. I felt a couple of times when I didn't get the result that maybe should've been just because of a longtime relationship between the other lawyer and the judge. I don't know, maybe that's wrong and sour grapes, but I certainly have felt that way once in a while.

Tom Glowacki:  Well, it sure is sour grapes if it is. But you have practiced almost exclusively in Dane County. I went to have a look in your CCAP and you had a few excursions into Columbia County, but very few.

Steve Bach, Interviewee:  Yeah, a long time ago. I'm not sure how far back CCAP goes.

Tom Glowacki:  Early '90s.

Steve Bach:   Really? Yeah, I think maybe one or two in Jefferson County occasionally and Rock. Every now and then there was someone in Rock County I can remember, but not frequently. Not knowing the system, not knowing the judges, the court commissioners, you work your client to be able to present the case in a way that's going to be most favorably received, but you don't know. Client's kind of missing out on that.

Tom Glowacki:  Speaking of judges, do you have a different approach with the new judges on the bench who come undoubtedly from some state agency and don't know family law?

Steve Bach, Interviewee:  Yeah. That certainly was an issue. Again, my courtroom experience is now a few years old, and maybe it was more with the commissioners since I've had more contact there. But new judges, yeah, I mean there was information in recent years to the team that didn't like to do family law and made that pretty clear that they didn't and I don't think had the patience or whatever that it takes to be a good family law judge. And so that's kind of troubling if you're representing someone in front of someone who doesn't want to hear their problems.

Other judges who were experienced and all that, I don't know, it's like any other profession, I guess. You're going to get X number who are different and maybe you don't see eye to eye with as well as others. Not answering that question very clearly, but it's hard to be specific, I think, without naming names, which-

Tom Glowacki:  Let's not go there.

Steve Bach: No.

Tom Glowacki:  So getting back to your family, your daughter, Elisabeth, is a lawyer, correct?

Steve Bach: She is. Elisabeth's a lawyer. She went to the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, and she's been practicing now for somewhere between 15 and 20 years, I think. She's been with my firm, with Pines Bach, for, I should know, but I don't know how long. But it's probably been a dozen or more years. She's doing exclusively family law work, recently became a partner in the firm, so she's involved with all of the big mind that that involves, the personnel and budgets and things like that. So she is practicing, like I said, exclusively family law. She's good at it. She's got a very good style, and just the feedback that I get from others, I think the feedback is that she really cares about her clients and the best interests of them. So she'll receive a lot of good feedback and ultimately referrals for her.

Tom Glowacki:  So how did you think of it once you got the news that she was going to law school?

Steve Bach, Interviewee:  Right. Actually, Elisabeth's mom is also a lawyer. She was in law school and that. She's also Elisabeth's mom, so it wasn't a total surprise that she did it. I don't know that I... She majored in Greek or something else in undergrad, so don't know if it was a surprise or not, but thought nice. I didn't know that it would be a good idea for her to practice in my office or not, and I stayed out of that decision-making process. So I think it was Alison TenBruggencate was in charge of hiring and that offer or said that we should offer her a job. So it was good. So had to be careful not to get too involved in her stuff as you would be with someone not your child.

Tom Glowacki: Watching her change your perspective at all about the law?

Steve Bach, Tell me more about that. I'm not sure.

Tom Glowacki:  Okay. So you're a guy going through this with her. She's a woman lawyer. She maybe sees things differently than you did. You've had problems, you're her dad. You've avoided some of them or took ones that she could maybe provide a woman that-

Steve Bach, Interviewee: Yeah. I think that there is some of that, the male/female thing, and bullying is too strong. I don't mean that, but kind of trying to, because it's a woman you're dealing with and, at least for a number of years, a young lawyer, kind of push them around to some extent. And as we know, there are some women on that receiving end who don't respond very well to that and come out swinging more than usual, but she's handled it well.

Tom Glowacki: Well, Steve, thank you for taking the time and sharing your experiences with me and whatever future readers. I'll have a transcript prepared of this interview and send it to you for proofreading before it becomes part of the oral history project.

Steve Bach, Great.

Tom Glowacki: Unless you have something to add, I'll note that the time is now 12:27, and I'll shut off the recording.

 Steve Bach, Interviewee:  Sounds good. Thanks, Tom.