Pines, Lester Oral History 07022025
Teresa Kobelt: Today is July 2nd, 2025, and this is Teresa Kobelt. I'm at the offices of Bartelt Grob in Middleton to interview Lester Pines as part of the Dane County Bar Association Oral History Project. This interview will be recorded and transcribed and made available for people interested in the evolution and development of the practice of law in Dane County. Lester, do I have your permission to record you and have a transcript prepared?
Lester Pines: You do.
Teresa Kobelt: Can you give us your full name and where you live right now?
Lester Pines: Yes. My name is Lester Abraham Pines. I live in Madison, Wisconsin.
Teresa Kobelt: And can you tell me a little bit about your family, your spouse, children, grandchildren?
Lester Pines: Yes. I have been married to Roberta Gassman since June 13th, 1971. We have two children, Anna Gassman-Pines, that's a hyphenated last name, and Jenny Gassman-Pines. Anna was born in 1977, which means she'll be 48 years old this year. And Jenny was born in 1980, so she'll be 45 this year. Anna is a professor of public policy, psychology and neuroscience and the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She's been at Duke since 2007. Jenny, a partner at Greene Espel PLLP is a trial lawyer in Minneapolis. She has been practicing law since she graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2006. We have three grandchildren.
Roberta and I had more or less parallel careers. Roberta was in government and I practiced aw. Roberta’s first government job was as an advisor to Governor Earl for Women's Affairs and Employment. She did that for four years, followed by a consulting business on those same issues. Then she was the chief of staff for Mayor Paul Soglin. She was in a similar position with county executive, Rick Phelps. After those positions, she worked for Home Savings doing community outreach work for the bank. In 2003 she joined Governor Jim Doyles cabinet as the Secretary of Workforce Development and stayed for two full terms. Her final government position was was in Washington in the Obama administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for Trading and Employment. On her return from D.C. she joined the faculty of UW Social Work School until she retired in 2019.
Roberta is the longest serving labor secretary in Wisconsin history. No one has ever lasted in the position for eight years.
Our family background is interesting. I won't go into it ingreat detail, but both of our families were from Lithuania, Jews in Lithuania. They were in towns about a half an hour apart. I don't know much about the maternal side of my families, (that's one of the problems with genealogy), but my paternal family immigrated first to the Virgin Islands and then to the Dominican Republic. And my father came to the United States and Roberta's family came to Boston. We ended up meeting each other at Neighborhood House on Mill Street in Madison in 1968. So that's sort of a short family history.
Teresa Kobelt: That's a good one.
Lester Pines: Yeah.
Teresa Kobelt: Interesting. And you've recently retired?
Lester Pines: Yes.
Teresa Kobelt: How are you keeping yourself busy?
Lester Pines: Well, I'm getting a lot of household things done.
Teresa Kobelt: The honey-do list.
Lester Pines: Hmm?
Teresa Kobelt: The honey-do list.
Lester Pines: The honey-do list. I found it's very easy to get a lot of errands done. I have been doing training. I did a training session for the Center for Immigration Legal Services. I'm doing some training for the firm. I stay in touch with some of the younger lawyers in the firm when they have questions. And I'm actively trying to do as much as I can to resist the initiatives of the Trump administration, which I consider to be a fascist administration. I was a history student here. I got my degree in history as an undergraduate. I studied a lot of 20th century European history, so I know way too much about how fascism develops.
Teresa Kobelt: And we are seeing that develop before our eyes.
Lester Pines: We are seeing its incipient development and we can stop it.
Teresa Kobelt: Where were you born?
Lester Pines: I was born in St. Louis, Missouri.
Teresa Kobelt: And when was that?
Lester Pines: June 5th, 1950.
Teresa Kobelt: I'm going through my list. And you talked about parents already and you went to college undergrad here in History?
Lester Pines: Yes, I did. My parents didn't have a lot of money to send me to college. I talked to a teacher I was close to in my senior year of high school, and I told her, “I'm just going to go to the University of Missouri 'cause that's what I can afford.” And she said, "No, you're not." She asked me where else I applied and I told her, and then she said, “You should go to Wisconsin.” So, I did.
Teresa Kobelt: Good for her.
Lester Pines: I talked to her 30-some-odd years later and found out that at the time we had that discussion when I was in high school, I was 17, she was 23.
Teresa Kobelt: Wow. Why did you choose law as a career?
Lester Pines: The story is that I was really a child of the civil rights movement. I grew up in that time. I was always very interested in politics and public affairs, and those topics were always talked about in my family. I was going to become a social worker.
I came to the University of Wisconsin from St. Louis with a scholarship from the St. Louis Jewish Community Center's Association. As a condition of the scholarship, I had to work with groups of children or teenagers (that’s why I was working at Neighborhood House). I could take the money for my first two years, with no obligation to the association. If I took the scholarship after that, would've sent me through graduate school, but then I would have to have worked for the St. Louis Jewish Community Center for a year, for every year that I took the scholarship. So they wanted me to be involved in Jewish communal service.
During my second year at Neighborhood House, I was unhappy with the way the board of directors was dealing with stuff. I was walking with Roberta up Park Street by the Humanities Building complaining about it. And I said, “I don't want to be bossed around by anybody when I'm working. I want to be independent.” She said, "Well, why don't you go to law school?" And I said, "Oh, okay." But it was the right choice for me for sure.
Teresa Kobelt: I concur.
Lester Pines: Yeah.
Teresa Kobelt: When did you enter law school?
Lester Pines: I entered law school in the summer of 1972 in a program that was called the Summer Program because there were so many applications in those years. The school had 300 spots to fill. Once they had filled 250 of them, they invited 200 people to come to the law school in the summer and take the regular first year civil procedure and torts classes. 100 would choose to attend. Of that group, half was going to be admitted depending on how well they did on the exams in those classes. So I decided to do that and I got in. But they didn't give us credit for those courses until we agitated the next year and got credit.
Teresa Kobelt: Interesting. I hadn't heard about that before.
Lester Pines: Yeah, there are some other lawyers who were in that class, that summer class with me, Matt Flynn was one, and Chuck Kahn. Chuck was a judge in Milwaukee for a long time. I don't remember the names of many other people who were in the program. Because we got those credits from that summer program, I graduated in five semesters instead of six. So, I graduated in December of '74 instead of June of ‘75.
Teresa Kobelt: Did you work during law school?
Lester Pines: Yes. I worked at the Wisconsin Council on Criminal Justice. I graduated as an undergraduate in seven semesters instead of eight, so that I could save a thousand dollars of tuition money. To do that, I took 20 credits a semester for three semesters. in January 1972 I was hired to be a staff member of Governor Lucy's Task Force on Offender Rehabilitation. After the task force report was finished, the Wisconsin Council and Criminal Justice was charged with attempting to implement the recommendations of the report by drafting legislation and lobbying for it. So I went to work there and stayed all the way through law school.
Teresa Kobelt: Did you have any children or were you married during law school?
Lester Pines: Roberta and I married in 1971 so I was married during law school. We didn't have children until we were married six years.
Teresa Kobelt: Do you have any particularly memorable classes other than this summer class or professors, classmates, any good law school stories?
Lester Pines: Well, one good law school story is, or two law school stories, really from the very beginning of law school when we agitated for our credits and I was selected, I don't remember how, the group said they wanted me to make a presentation to the faculty about it. And I made the presentation and professor, what was his name?
Teresa Kobelt: It'll come to you at 3:00 a.m.
Lester Pines: It was Walter Raushenbush. (He was married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's granddaughter.) Professor Raushenbush, "That was insolent." But the faculty voted to award us the credits.
` My most memorable courses in law school were the courses I took with Professor Jim Jones in Equal Employment and Labor Law. Those were really outstanding courses. And my courses in criminal law with Frank Remington, although it was hard to stay awake sometimes in his class because he spoke in a monotone, were also very influential courses for me.
Teresa Kobelt: What did you think of law school overall?
Lester Pines: It's funny that you asked that question. I've thought about that. I actually thought law school was pretty easy, and maybe part of the reason that it was easier for me than other people is I was not trying to be in a position to get a corporate law job. So, I wasn't as stressed as many other of my classmates. I used to study at the Helen White Library because the amount of anxiety that you could feel studying in the law library was overwhelming to me. So I would just get out of there.
Teresa Kobelt: Good for you.
Lester Pines: But I found it pretty easy. And I did graduate in the top quarter of my class, so it was okay.
Teresa Kobelt: I'd like you to give me just a general overarching view of your career and then we'll go into detail.
Lester Pines: My career started to a certain extent in law school when I was in the National Lawyers Guild chapter of the law school and my close friend, who I first became friends with in law school, Mark Frankel, was three semesters ahead of me. We were interested in post-conviction issues. After Mark graduated, in order to keep up this post-conviction work that we had sort of been working on, partially because of Frank's Remington Legal Assistance to Inmates program, which I was involved in, the Lawyers Guild chapter subsidized Mark's practice to the tune of a hundred dollars a month.
And then after, in November of '74, right before I graduated, Professor Jones and Professor Remington had set up interviews for me in Washington D.C. because Roberta and I wanted to move to Washington. We spend a week there. I interviewed at different places, the EEOC, the NLRB, HUD, and the US Attorney's Office where I had a great interview until the guy said to me, "Why do you want to be a prosecutor?" And I said, in total honesty, "I don't want to be a prosecutor. I want to be a trial lawyer, but I'm not interested in being a prosecutor per se." He said, "Thank you for your candor."
But I was offered a job at Housing Urban Development doing equal housing enforcement. The HUD interviewer said to me, "This is a civil service position. I'm going to hire you for one of the two positions. Put your application in at the civil service office. It'll come across my desk and call me in 10 days." I remember sitting in his office and thinking, “This isn't how the civil service system works in Wisconsin. But this is Washington.” So Roberta and I came back to Madison and told everybody we were moving to Washington. Eight days later, I pick up the early edition of the Capital Times and the headline says, “Hiring Scandal Rocks HUD.”
Teresa Kobelt: Oops.
Lester Pines: I looked at the first two paragraphs of the article and it’s exactly what I've just experienced. And so I called the guy, I said, "Hi, this is Lester Pines." And he said, "And who are you?" So I had to start over, looking for work.
In the meantime, two weeks later, Roberta got a job with an organization called the Wisconsin Feminist Project Fund, which had a grant to train all the job service workers in Wisconsin in moving women into non-traditional employment. She wanted to take that job which would require her to make a two-year commitment. So, we said, fine, we will stay here for a couple of years.
In the meantime, I was offered a couple of jobs here in Madison. One was to be the assistant director of Wisconsin County Boards Association because Bob Mortensen, who was the head of it, had seen my work lobbying on some of the offender rehabilitation recommendations within the Wisconsin Council of Criminal Justice. He offered me a job, which was a really good salary in 2011, $25,000 a year plus a car. And I thought, I can't take that job because I'll never really be a lawyer then. And then I had a chance to work at Legislative Council. I turned that down and I decided to join up with Mark Frankel. So, it was Mark Frankel and Harold Langhammer and me. We just started our own practice, and that was 50 years ago.
Teresa Kobelt: Wow.
Lester Pines: I should say that I carried into that practice, my interest in criminal defense, my interest in equal employment and general civil litigation.
Teresa Kobelt: How long did that firm last?
Lester Pines: Frankel, Langhammer & Pines for five years. Mark ran for judge, a newly created circuit court judgeship, and he won. Harold and I stayed together for four years after that as Langhammer & Pines.
And then I merged my practice in 1984 with Lee Cullen and Cheryl Weston. They had been Cullen & Weston, and then it became Cullen, Weston & Pines. In 1986, Steve Bach joined us and that firm became Cullen, Weston, Pines & Bach. Now its Pines Bach. So since 1984 I've been in the same firm.
Teresa Kobelt: And what kind of work were you doing there? The same thing?
Lester Pines: Same thing. My entire career... I should say, the first nine years of my career, I did everything. I did family law, criminal defense, personal injury, equal employment. In those days, we did title opinions. I did real estate closings, I did little commercial transactions. I helped Glenn Silber make his movie, The War at Home. I did an investment memorandum for that, private offering memorandum for people investing. I did everything for the first nine years.
After I joined up with Lee Cullen and Cheryl Weston, I focused solely on criminal defense, equal employment, personal injury, labor law and civil appeals, and then some commercial litigation and some other kinds of trials and hearings. But I didn't do any transactional matters after that.
Teresa Kobelt: Can you tell me a little bit about some of your involvement with professional organizations? We'll start with the State Bar. Were you active in the State Bar?
Lester Pines: I was not active in the State Bar. I was not active in the Dane County Bar Association. I was not active in the American Bar Association. I was active in the Inns of Court once I was invited to join and I was its president for five years. In 2005 I was inducted as a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. I have regularly attended, well, fairly regularly attended meetings, and I've been the chair of the Wisconsin state committee of ACTL Fellows for the last three years, but I really have not had much involvement with bar associations.
Teresa Kobelt: Have you done a lot of pro bono work?
Lester Pines: I've done a fair amount of pro bono work. I've done a fair amount of involuntary pro bono work, too.
Teresa Kobelt: As we all have. Can you tell me anything about your community involvement?
Lester Pines: Yes. First of all, I have to say that my focus starting in 1977, along with my wife, our focus was on our children. I made it a point, as did Roberta, to leave work at a normal hour. Then everything from when I picked them up at daycare or at school or whatever, until about 9:30 when they were done with their homework and everything, I started to work again and would work into the evening. They were the primary focus that I had, and that was equally important to me as my practice. They became outstanding students and just really, really great people and we're still very close to them. But that was a primary focus.
And then in terms of other community focus, I was a long-term member of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Federation of Madison, and I was on the board for a long time. I was one of the young people on the board when I started out. I stepped back a few years ago because I believe younger people should take over, but I was the president of the Federation for three years. That was my primary community activity. I would go to community events, but I wasn't on boards.
Teresa Kobelt: What did you enjoy most about being a lawyer or being in a practice?
Lester Pines: I enjoyed problem-solving and strategy. Those were the things that kept me going. And I also really liked trials and hearings. I enjoyed them immensely. I didn't like losing when I lost, but I liked the process a lot. I also really liked working with my colleagues. It was always engaging. That's probably the right word.
I had a real commitment to feminism, partially because I believed in it, partially because my wife was on that early wave of the second wave of the feminist movement, and we had two daughters. In 1970 when we talked about getting married, Roberta said, “I'm not changing my name." I'm like, "Okay.” It was fine with me. (Now when I see people who are 21 and 22, I'm like, “We got married when we were that young!”)
I've had women colleagues going back to 1980, starting with Cheryl Weston, who, was a leader in family law and involved in the reform of the divorce laws and so forth. Pines & Bach, the firm, is the largest woman-controlled law firm in the state of Wisconsin. There are nine partners, seven of the partners are women. And so that was always a great part of my legal practice. It wasn't just a bunch of guys. And I was very proud of that. And then I had very close relationships with my support staff, and we worked together for decades. It wouldn't be fair to call it a family. It wasn't a family. It was a business, but we all worked so closely together. That was fun. It was fun to go to work and be there.
Teresa Kobelt: Can you tell me about any memorable cases or some that pop into your head? You have a lot.
Lester Pines: I have a lot of memorable-
Teresa Kobelt: Probably more than anybody I've talked to.
Lester Pines: A lot of memorable cases. The very first case that I tried, it was a criminal case involving a guy who had been charged with assaulting a police officer in a demonstration following Karl Armstrong's sentencing. And supposedly he had hit a police officer over the head, and the police officers had helmets on, with a rebar, and he was a fugitive. He had been involved in this radical organization in California, and he was arrested there. And he was extradited to face these state charges in Wisconsin and they brought the federal charges to the Western district by agreement. It was my very first criminal trial and there were five eyewitnesses who were all police officers.
The most memorable part of it was that when we were picking the jury, I'd never picked a jury before, I had done a trial advocacy, so I knew how you pick a jury, supposedly. After doing the voir dire with the jury, the bailiff takes the sheet of paper over and gives it to the prosecutor. The prosecutor does whatever he does with it, and the bailiff brings it over to me. And I'm looking at the names. I'm looking at the names for a long time, and the bailiff leans in and says, "You have to scratch off a name." I said, "Oh, yeah, okay." But anyway, I got an acquittal in the case.
Teresa Kobelt: Wow.
Lester Pines: Yeah, 'cause I had a strategy to raise reasonable doubt and it worked. And so that was very memorable.
Shortly before that, David Fine's parents had hired me to represent him in his bail hearing after he had been a fugitive for six years and was arrested in California and brought back to Madison to face charges for the bombing of the Army Math Research Center or, as it has become known, the Sterling Hall bombing. The bombing was supposed to be of the Army Math Research Center, but they didn't really know what they were doing. It was a terrible tragedy.
The reason it is so memorable is that I got him released on bail, on conditions of release. There was nobody senior to me in the law firm to say, don't waste your time. You'll never get a person who's been a fugitive for six years out on bail. But I put together a plan and it worked. When I walked out of the courthouse. It was in the federal court in the Post Office, that’s now the Madison Municipal Building, to face this gaggle of reporters. And, then there I was on the front page of the newspaper and I'd been a lawyer for a year.
So I gained some notoriety from that, and people started to contact me about cases. I’ve reflected on that hearing and thought, “If I had a child who'd been a fugitive on a felony charge for six years, would I hire a lawyer who'd only been out of law school for a year to represent a person-
Teresa Kobelt: Do you have any idea why they found you?
Lester Pines: They found me because Mark Frankel was representing Karl Armstrong in a post-conviction effort to have his sentence reduced. So, Fine’s parents somehow got referred to me.
But Mark, Harold and I were smart enough to know that we couldn't handle David Fine's actual criminal case without help. So, we got in touch with Jim Shellow and Steve Glynn in Milwaukee. They were the leading criminal defense lawyers in the state, and they took the case. I don't know what their financial arrangements were with the family, but I don’t believe that they didn't take it pro bono. I got to work along with them on the case, and that was a significant part of my training about doing criminal defense work: just watching them and listening to them.
Interestingly, I recalled that the case had gone on for a year before David Fine pled guilty with a plea agreement. I recently talked to David, I hadn't talked to him in decades, and he said, "No, I was arrested in February and the case was over in June." It's just funny.
Teresa Kobelt: Wow.
Lester Pines: Yeah. But I think it's because of the significance of it to me in terms of my development, my recollection of the timing on it changed to conform with its significance to me.
I had a big case against the university, a sex discrimination case for a woman in the zoology department, which I did not win, but it was a big deal. we got to the Seventh Circuit, lost two to one there, but despite that, the case had impact on the university became more careful about dealing with tenure with female professors after that case because it had a lot of notoriety. I was very happy to have done that case, even though we didn't win. My client went on to have a fine career elsewhere, but that was a very memorable case. These are really old cases.
And then if I go forward to some of the newer cases, the case where we represented Talgo against the state about the trains following Walker's cancellation of the contract for the trains was a great case and quite interesting. And just the way it developed and how it ended up getting settled. I mean, we were in a mediation where the mediator in Chicago, this former US magistrate, had told everyone, "When you come to a mediation with me, you come with authority." We go down to Chicago, we get there, the state says we don't have any authority. And I thought the guy was going to blow a gasket, and he said, "I want to talk to you." They got Governor Walker on the phone. I wasn't in the room. And the magistrate said, "Listen, we're not fooling around here." Then they got authority, and we got the case settled, and it was great settlement for the client.
Teresa Kobelt: That's a really different area for you though, isn't it?
Lester Pines: Well, it was commercial, yeah, it was different. But by then I had already been trying cases for many years and did personal injury and some commercial cases all along I was doing personal injury cases. I settled some personal injury cases for substantial recoveries. That was just the sort of quiet work that lawyers do. They weren't all highly publicized.
In the meantime, the public policy cases that I did were very significant. One was Thompson v Craney where the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the legislature could not create a board of education and subordinate the Superintendent to it because that office was constitutionally required to be independent of gubernatorial or legislative intrusion into its power to oversee the public schools. Another significant case was Pritchard v Madison Metropolitan School District where the plaintiff challenged the MMSD’s agreement to provide domestic partner benefits to its teachers. When Tamara Packard joined our firm as an associate it was the first case that she worked on with me. We prevailed in the circuit court and court of appeal which upheld the school district right to provide such benefits. It was our first victory in defense of LQBTQ+ rights.
Later we were hired by Governor Jim Doyle to defend the domestic partners' law that the legislature was enacted to provide legal protections to same-sex couples following the 2006 the marriage amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution that stated: Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized in this state. The plaintiffs claimed that domestic partnerships were “substantially similar to marriage.” The then attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen, had refused to defend the law.
We won in the circuit court and in the court of appeals. It was before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Scott Walker was elected and Brian Hagedorn was his legal counsel. Brian called me and said, “Governor Walker is no longer going to defend the law and your representation of the state in the case is terminated.”
We had gotten intervenors aligned with us in the case because we anticipated if Walker was elected, we'd need them to carry on and they won. It was an important victory for Wisconsin’s LQBTQ+ community.
That was the favorite phone call of my entire career because I was fired from that case. I hung up the phone and I basically did a figurative happy dance in my office because now Governor Walker was a former client, so we could sue him. And we did, bringing the Voter ID, and the Act 10 challenges. Unfortunately, we did not win them in the Supreme Court, but they were fabulous cases to work on and our initial Act 10 victory in the circuit court helped to ensure that our client Madison Teachers, Inc had sufficient time to organize and remain strong.
In 2022, I was successful in the case of SEIU v Vos in convincing the Wisconsin Supreme Court to find the legislature’s attempt to control the executive branch by requiring the governor to submit any guidance documents or statements about the law to the legislature for review before making them public, to be facially unconstitutional.
Thompson v Craney & SEIU v Vos were my most significant public policy cases.
I had a medical malpractice case that involved a student who had ulcerative colitis, went to a family practitioner who also said he did homeopathic treatments, which were basically sugar pills and our client ended up with an, ileostomy. We started a lawsuit on his behalf, a malpractice case because his doctor was a board-certified family practitioner. The case initially was before a med-mal administrative panel, which had ruled that I had to prove my case by an expert homeopath because homeopathy is a separate school of medicine. So I tracked down homeopath, a 95-year-old guy in Fond du Lac, who gave me an excellent opinion and then did a terrible deposition. I needed to win before the panel so that I could then file an action in circuit court.
I learned something in that case, which is to listen very carefully to what your opposing counsel says and, generally, listen more than you speak. Here’s what happened.
We were in the middle of the hearing in the men's room, one of my opposing counsels said something to me, which I now recall as “I think we're going to finish up tomorrow morning.” From that innocuous statement, I realized they're going to make a motion to dismiss and would probably be successful because the record I had made was not strong enough. I went home and said to my wife, "There are just people who are smarter than me. I'm totally screwed." Then I got it together and I stayed up literally all night redoing my evidence, using some learned treatises that I had previously notified the defense about but had not intended to use. The motion to dismiss was denied. We ended up settling the case for a significant amount of money for that young man.
About 10 years later, I ran into the same lawyer and he said, "I have to ask you something. We were all set to get that med-mal case dismissed. Then you came in the next morning and it was like a completely different case." He said, "How'd that happen?" I said, "I don't know. I don't know." I didn't want to tell him that he tipped me off.
But another very significant case was when I represented the highest ranking African-American administrator at the university who was fired for alleged sexual harassment. We had a hearing before the academic staff appeals committee, and it was just a great hearing, and we just destroyed the case and ultimately got a good result for him. I will always remember an important statement in my closing. The complaining witness had said that my client had followed her down State St. and that he was wearing a white suit and a white hat. I said, “She’s not describing my client; she’s describing Rocky Rococo.”
And those are just ones that come, just pop into my head. But I'll tell you this one-
Teresa Kobelt: The ones where there was an individual that was at stake rather than a...
Lester Pines: Than a public... Yeah, the public policy cases were fun and the whole civil-
Teresa Kobelt: And significant.
Lester Pines: And significant, but it was the individual cases that really were-
Teresa Kobelt: They stay with you.
Lester Pines: They stay with you. Right. And what I was going to tell you is I did a PI case also very early in my career. I got up, I did a nice opening, and then the defense counsel got up, his tone of voice and diction changed the opening into a very persuasive statement. Really, it was an opening argument, but it wasn't objectionable because of the way that he structured his language and his tone of voice. And I remember sitting there thinking to myself, I am totally screwed. But I learned something from that case. I never made a vanilla opening statement again and a few years later, I was in a criminal case before Judge Torphy, who was really a great judge, and we were doing a jury instruction conference, and he said, "So Lester, you're going to wave your closing argument, aren't you?" I said, "Why would I do that?" He said, "You made it on your opening." So yeah, many memorable experiences.
Teresa Kobelt: Did you end up waving your closing?
Lester Pines: Absolutely not. And I won the case too. One other thing I want to say just generally about my criminal defense practice, three of us, Steve Hurley, me and Bruce Rosen, were the three Dane County lawyers from our generation who had the most prominent criminal defense practices. Steve seemed to get the murder cases. Bruce got the drug cases, and I got sexual assault cases. I don't know why, but that's just the way it worked.
I learned how to defend those cases, and I had success in a number of cases involving sexual assault, the most well-known of which was a teacher at La Follette High School, a woman who was 32 years old, and she had sexual intercourse with a 16-year-old student. It came to our office through Madison Teachers, which we represented. Lee Cullen got the complaint, read it and said, "Take a look at this. There's nothing we can do." I said, "Well, let me look at it."
I went into my office, I read it, went back into his office, I said, "She's not guilty." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "The definition of sexual intercourse for purposes of sexual assault is when the defendant penetrates the victim. In this case, the victim penetrated the defendant." And he said, "Oh, come on, you're not going to be able to win that." I said, "Just watch."
I said nothing to the prosecutors other than we were going to trial. They thought I was going for a jury nullification. At the close of the state's case, I moved to dismiss and Judge Torphy granted the motion. The courthouse and newspapers went wild and shortly thereafter the legislature changed the statutes about teacher/student sexual conduct.
Not many people remember this movie called The Summer of 42, which was about a young teenage boy who's on a beach in Long Island, and this is during World War II, and then this woman is widowed, a young woman, and he has this relationship with her.
Teresa Kobelt: With Cybill Shepherd, right?
Lester Pines: Yeah, something... Yeah, I think so. Anyway, there's the famous music from the Summer of ‘42. It was very well known at the time. Before that trial, I went to talk to the student who was working at a restaurant on Monona Drive, and I said, "I just want to talk to you. I'm going to ask you some questions. I just want to tell you that they're going to be..." And he said, "Well, after my shift is over." So I sat down at the table to wait for him, and the music from the Summer of 42 came on, and I remember sitting there thinking to myself, “This is the greatest job of all time.”
And then I had numerous other cases involving sexual assault, and I knew how to defend them and what not to do, and so I was successful in defending some of them. The ones that couldn't be defended, and we resolved with plea bargains.
Teresa Kobelt: What did you like least about the practice of law?
Lester Pines: Actually, keeping track of hours and billing is probably the thing and just trying to keep a small law firm running. I used to, in July of the year, start planning for the next year, where was the money going to come from to keep the place going? That was very stressful, but it worked out over time.
I'd never really been big on legal research. I did it, but I always prefer to have our more law review people in the firm do it. That just wasn't me. And that's why when years ago, Shirley Abrahamson and Ann Walsh Bradley talked with me about running for the Supreme Court, and I said how I was very flattered, but I couldn't do that job because that's not me. Reading transcripts and reading briefs would just kill me in two weeks.
I loved working with my colleagues. That was not stressful and was total fun, always.
Teresa Kobelt: What do you see as the most significant changes over the year, legal developments, judicial administration, technology, anything like that?
Lester Pines: When I started practicing in 1975, there was still common law pleading in Wisconsin. It changed, I think two years later. So there were no more demurrers. After that, we were basically using a somewhat revised version of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
In 1979, the criminal code changed and got rid of all of the laws involving sexual relations between people. It made all sexual relations between consenting adults in private legal, except for one class of citizens, married people, because they left bigamy and adultery as felonies.
When I started out there were county courts and circuit courts. The unified trial court system made a difference, made it easier. Having the court of appeals kind of made it easier.
A very big change in Dane County was the new courthouse, the new courthouse, because of the very tragic murder that took place in the old courthouse of Bud Chamberlain, the coroner, the new courthouse was built solely with security in mind. Consequently, and the way it's built, there aren't corridors, so you never see anybody in a courthouse. The judges are behind two locked doors, so there's no informal interaction with the assistant district attorneys or with the judges. Additionally, many, many things, most things in terms of scheduling are done by phone, and now by Zoom or Teams or whatever, but the biggest change that I've seen really in the last 15 years is there's very little interaction between people in the courthouse and the lawyers who have cases at the courthouse, and I think that's really not good.
Teresa Kobelt: In my conversations with judges, they hated that.
Lester Pines: Yeah. And then additionally, the technological change of moving from letters to emails sped up the practice of law, sped up everything, and then there was an expectation of immediate responses to everything. Get an email, you respond. So that sort of changed the pace. It took some getting used to, but that's okay. In some ways, it's way more efficient. It is much more efficient to get a document to a party, to a client, to another lawyer so that there's an efficiency part of the technology. The Zoom, Teams stuff, doing hearings and so on through using those mechanisms, I think is really bad for a very simple reason, which is you don't see the whole person. You're not in the room with the person and so forth. So taking a deposition, doing a hearing, it's really not a good idea to do it that way, but that's the future of it.
Teresa Kobelt: What do you think makes a good lawyer?
Lester Pines: A good lawyer is a person who is honest and tells the truth. That's the number one characteristic of a good lawyer. Kind of a corollary to that is if a lawyer makes a mistake, a good lawyer corrects the mistake as soon as possible. Third, civility in combination with honesty, makes for the best lawyers because it's not personal, it's business. Just like the line from the Godfather when they're about to take Tessio out and assassinate him, he says, "Tell Mikey it was only business." Practicing law is business. It's not personal.
And the third is you have to know the elements of your case and your goals. If you could have lawyers who have that combination of characteristics, that's really a good lawyer.
In terms of a good trial lawyer, I would say the primary thing is your ability to communicate orally, your knowledge and understanding of the elements of your case and your ability to do cross-examination. And a lot of lawyers struggle doing cross examination because they don't understand or have never been taught what cross-examination is about.
But the final thing is, is that “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Really good trial lawyers are always on top of what's going on in their case and always evaluating where they are to see what to do. I think that's a good summary.
Teresa Kobelt: Where do you see the practice of law going?
Lester Pines: Well, that's actually a very provocative question right now because of the nature of the US Supreme Court and the nature of the United States Department of Justice, which are very, very troubling, and I don't know anything about AI, although I'm going to take a CLE thing later this month. But assuming that we still have courts that are able to enforce the Constitution and enforce statutes, lawyers are going to be fundamental to the functioning of the democratic society, and there will continue to be a need for legal assistance to people. I think that more lawyers going into the profession are going to be migrating to medium-sized law firms rather than the biggest law firms. And I think that what the big law firms did this year in capitulating to demands from the Trump administration is going to sour an entire short generation of lawyers who are not going to want to be part of that. But we'll see.
Teresa Kobelt: What do you most want future lawyers to know? If you haven't already covered it, 'cause I think have-
Lester Pines: Well, no, what I want future lawyers to know is, and I said this in my retirement party, the whole idea is lawyers are fundamental to defending the rights of the citizenry and where there is a society without functioning lawyers to defend civil and constitutional rights, it’s an autocracy. And I hope that there's a generation of lawyers who are going to see that and are going to want to be part of that, because fundamentally, that's what lawyers are supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be helping people in their interactions with the government and interactions with other parties. Certainly, in family law, you're not interacting with the government. You're interacting with another party, and that's going to go on. Those things are going to go on and there's going to be a need for lawyers.
How they function with all the technology and stuff, I mean, I'm 75, I don't know. When I started out, I had a manual typewriter I used, so what, 50 years from now? I don't know what it's going to look like. I hope it'll be a more equitable society. We'll see.
Teresa Kobelt: Is there anything else that you want to tell me, anything that's popped up that we haven't covered?
Lester Pines: Well, I will say this, over the last 50 years, when I practiced for 50 years, the face of the judiciary has changed, and I don't think that we pay enough attention to that and how different it is. When I started out in practice, it was like six older white guys. They were the circuit court judges, or there were four of them, and there were two county judges and Angela Bartell got appointed as county judge. All of a sudden, there's a woman who's a county judge. There's just these older men, and that's what the legal profession looked like. In my law school class, there was probably about 10% women, maybe 20%. Now it's more women are becoming lawyers than men.
Also, they have a judiciary that is sort of multicultural. There are people of different races, there are people of different ethnicities, and that's a significant change that, it's sort of apparent if you look at people's pictures, but it has an impact when people are judges who've had different life experiences and have somewhat different points of view than just a patriarchy, and I think that's going to make a difference in the long run.
Now, what I think is fascinating too is people are saying, “Well, what, we're going to have maybe an all-woman Supreme Court? Now there's going to be six women on the Supreme Court. How can this be?” I was like, “Are you kidding me? Did you ever ask that when there weren't any women on the court?”
I mean, there is a pushback now. I mean, you've got these crazy right-wing influencers telling women they shouldn't go to college, or they should go to college to get a husband. Stuff like that. I mean, this is conversation now. I'm tempted to go to some event where people are saying that. I say, “oh, yeah, okay, so the women should stay home and just be homemakers, take care of the kids. Yeah. Well, what happens when the kids grow up? What happens when your husband's fooling around with other women and you want to get a divorce? What do you do then?”
One thing we didn't talk about was when I talk about the changes in the law, the divorce law and marital property, I'm sorry I didn't mention that. That is the biggest substantive change that occurred while I was practicing law, and now people take it for granted. But before 1973, a married woman couldn't get her own credit card. That's only what, 52 years ago. And now you have people saying, we want to go back to that. So there's a lot of stuff lawyers are going to have to pay attention to, and they're going to be necessary.
Teresa Kobelt: Thank you for taking the time and sharing your experiences with me and with future readers. We'll have a transcript prepared to this interview and send it to you for proofing before it becomes part of our oral history project. Unless you have something to add, I'll note that the time is now 10:04 and I'll be shutting off the recording.
Lester Pines: Okay.