Transcript of Oral History Interview of

EDWARD REISNER for Dane County Bar Association

Interviewer:  Theresa Kobelt

Date of Interview: October 18, 2018

MS. KOBELT:    Today is Thursday, October 18th, and this is Teresa Kobelt. I'm at the law offices of Bartel t Grob in Middleton to interview Ed Reisner 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. Ed, do I have your permission to record you and have a transcript prepared?

A: Yes, you do.

Q: All right. I'd just like to start with some background information, if you can give us your full name and where you live.

A: Edward John Reisner. I live in Madison, and I have basically since 1965 when I came up here to start school.

Q: Where did you come from?

A: Well, I grew up in the Milwaukee area. I was born in

Milwaukee. When I was 12, we moved to West Allis. I graduated from West Allis Hale High School in 1965. I started as an undergrad at university in 1965, and except for a few summers, I've been here ever since.

Q: So you said University. You meant Madison?

A: Correct.

Q: And just to get a few other details out of the way, are you married?

A: I am. I've been married for almost 40 years now.

Q: Terrific.

A: Two kids, two daughters, one granddaughter.

Q: And what do you like to do for fun?

A: Well, I've always been a woodworker. I tell people that when I was a child and I would get my 25—cent—a-week allowance, I would sometimes take it and go to the hardware store and buy a pound of nails. My father had a lot of scrap wood around, and 1 would pound nails into wood.

Q: Really. Wow. You really do have it in your blood.

A: Yes. After I retired in 2005, I started really doing woodworking more seriously. And I have a bandage on my thumb this morning because I hit my thumb with a sander.

Q: Ouch. 

A: So I'm not perfect as a woodworker. I’m still probably a better rough carpenter than a woodworker. But that's what I enjoy.

This is interesting and this is probably why this interview may be a bit of an anomaly. When I came to Madison I intended to major in physics. I can still remember this vividly: July 7, 1965, the first time I was ever on campus, I came up for advising and placement tests. The advisor that was helping me arrange my first semester schedule, when he heard that I wanted to be a physics major, he said, "Oh, that's a pretty tough program. I said that's what I want to do though. Only later did I discover that there were three different introductory physics courses, one for engineers, one for physics majors, and one for the those who just had to fill a science requirement. I got into the one for people with no intention of being a physicist. Well, as it turned out, that probably wasn't a bad thing because in order to be a physicist, you have to study advanced math. Unfortunately, I hit the wall in math at differential equations. To this day, I can't understand differential equations.

Q: I don't think you're alone in that field.

A: In my sophomore year, I was taking third-semester calculus, and an astrophysics course and discovered that my talents lie elsewhere. I really cast about for what I might want to do. Back in high school, I had done a little political campaigning through the Young Democrats, and I was interested in politics When I needed something to do in my junior and senior years, I started pursuing history and political science and economics, and I wound up majoring in American Institutions, which required you to get 40 credits, but they could be spread out in a lot of different fields. It fit my personality quite well. I had to do a senior thesis. It was a small program. There were only about a dozen of us in the major. But it led me into law school.

Another interesting thing is that, before I entered law school, I never knew a lawyer, never had met a lawyer. So many of the people that are interviewed for this Oral History Project have a lawyer in the family or a mentor who was a lawyer. Not true in my case. When I got into law school, that was the first time that I actually met lawyers, and I didn't really know what practicing law was probably until the summer between my second and third year when I took what was then called the General Practice Course. The very first week was creditor/ debtor rights, and a lawyer from Milwaukee named Dan Howard was our small section teacher. He was describing how he sometimes had the occasion to sue his own clients for nonpayment. I got to thinking this was not what I wanted to do with my career!

Well, it was the same summer that I had the opportunity to do a clinical placement in the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Commerce and Consumer Affairs. It was chaired by a representative from Milwaukee, named Harout Sanasarian. I got involved in a lot of things, including redistricting and gasoline price—fixing. It was all fascinating to me. I decided that I wanted to do something in the public sector. Fall came along, and there were on—campus interviews. I interviewed with the Federal Trade Commission. A woman lawyer interviewed me.

She was excited about what I had done in the summer, and she said, "I'11 bring you back to Washington, we'll interview you." That might have been in October. I stopped doing anything else.

I thought my future is set, I'm going to Washington. After Christmas it dawned on me that I hadn't heard from her. so eventually, I got on the phone to the Federal Trade Commission and learned that that lawyer was no longer with the Federal Trade Commission. I was once again adrift. At one point I actually considered moving back to the family farm in Clark County and opening a law office in Granton, Wisconsin Granton had about 300 people. But I also thought that I might take a run at the Assembly. Unfortunately, I knew the lawyer who then represented that area. It was FRANK NICOLET from Abbotsford. 1 admired him, and I knew I'd have to wait. I also looked at office space in West Allis and thought about opening an office there.

Then, it was probably late April or early May, I learned that there was a job opening as executive secretary of the State Judicial Council.

Q: So are we talking '68—'69?

A: This would be 1972.

Q: '72. Oh, that's right.

A: I started law school in 69 so '72. There was a position coming open with the Judicial Council. I interviewed.

incumbent in the position was JIM HOUGH, and he was going into private practice. I interviewed, and, apparently, I did quite well in the interview, but not well enough. But JIM HOUGH told me, "You aren't getting this job, but I understand there's a position available at the State Bar of Wisconsin." I called and I got an interview. I think I interviewed on a Saturday. On Monday or Tuesday, I got a call that said you have the job.

That was in May already, and graduation was coming up in June. So, my whole career began on a series of happenstances.

Q: So what were you doing at the State Bar?

A: I did two things to start with. I was a staff attorney with several committee assignments, and I was also lobbying. The committee responsibilities resulted in the first of the Wisconsin systems books. I worked with a lawyer from Murphy, Stolper, Brewster & Desmond, named BOB LEHMANN, and the two of us, over the course of a couple of years, put together a probate system.

Q: Standardizing it.

A: Exactly, yes.

Q: Wow. It's very effective, so thank you.

A: Meanwhile, I was also becoming a lobbyist. The principal lobbyist at the Bar was Dalton Menhall, and because I was the junior person and hadn't done any of this before, I got the minority party in the Assembly. I can remember meetings in the minority leader's office: the leadership consisted of Jon Wilcox, who became a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice; Tommy Thompson, who became, of course, governor; and a John Shabaz who became the federal judge here. Those were the three leaders. On the Democratic side, Tom Loftus was the majority leader. I did lobbying as a part—time thing for a couple of years. Then Dalton Menhall got a different position, and I became the chief lobbyist for the State Bar. It was an interesting time. Court reorganization was going on, so I got to lobby on court reorganization.

Q You mean like the creation of the court of appeals?

A: The court of appeals, right. Informal administration was introduced to make probate easier for people. I got to lobby on that. There were specific pieces of legislation that I scribbled out on a notepad and passed to a senator or an assemblyman and it got put into law, so it was a heady experience. At the end of each session, or coming up to the end of a session, there was a continuing resolution that was enacted that listed all the legislation that would be considered for the remainder of the session. I knew that my time as a lobbyist was coming to an end when I was informed by another lobbyist that if we wanted the State Bar's legislation to continue, there would be a required contribution the reelection campaign of one of the state legislators. And it was kind of like a slap in the face to learn that politics wasn't as pure as it was supposed to be.

Q: Boy. That blatant!

A: So this was 1975. I started looking for other positions I got an interview to be the head of judicial education in Idaho.

And another one of those things that stand out in your memory, I was out there in Boise, Idaho, and the person who had set up the interview revealed to me that — I was young, I was 26 or 27. He said you're going to have a bit of a problem as a young person here. When people, residents of Idaho, hit 18, they either move to California or they get married. I had that in mind. I also come from a family where family is really important, and I knew I would be leaving my family behind. While I considered that offer, I was sitting in my office at the Bar one day reading the Gargoyle, the publication of the Wisconsin Law Alumni Association, and Orrin Helstad, who was the interim dean, said he was looking for somebody to take over the Wisconsin Law Alumni Association. I thought, hmmm, that sounded kind of interesting. I gave him a call on Monday. I think I interviewed on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. By the end of the week, he had offered me the position. I moved to the law school in February of 1976, and I stayed there for 30 years. I served four different deans. My activities or responsibilities altered from time to time. For many of those years I was doing the alumni activities and doing career services. I claim some credit, while I was at the Law School, for raising about $45 million in contributions. At one point I was also the building manager. I was the building manager during the $15 million renovation and addition project, a very interesting time to be in the law school. But I retired in the end of September of 2005.

Q: All right. I'm just going pause this for a moment. All right. We are it looks like this might be part 2 of the interview of Ed Reisner. Ed, I want to back up a little bit and talk about your time at the State Bar. You described what your position was. How do you think that the State Bar has evolved since that time? Do you have any insight into what it was like then versus what we see today?

A: Well, just in terms of numbers, it's interesting to me. When I was hired, I was the sixth professional at the State Baro All six of us were lawyers. We had an office on West Wilson Street. There were a dozen committees and divisions. There was a small operation for continuing legal education which the Supreme Court had just made mandatory. Staff members were primarily generalists

Everybody did a variety of things. By the time I left, the professional staff had probably doubled. And I was there four years.     I look at the State Bar now in their new location, I would guess they probably have 30 or 40 professionals and at least that many other staff. Continuing legal education has become a major part of what they do. When I worked at the Bar, the budget was a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year. I know it's several million dollars a year now. Phil Habermann, who I consider a real mentor, kept costs down as much as he could. When the Board of Governors met, Phil Habermann would bring in a woman to prepare food, but he would bake a ham and baked beans and staff would all help serve it. It was a very different operation. The Bar had been integrated in 1957. The Supreme Court case is Lathrop v. Donohue. It grew incrementally I think from '57 on and certainly after the time I left there as the interpretation of what was permissible grew and grew. I was also at the Bar during one of numerous challenges to the integrated bar status. There was a certain protectionist feeling. The staff didn't want to lose their jobs and thought that the integrated bar had a real value to the profession. That fight continues. There are still challenges to the integrated bar.

Q: Okay. That was interesting.     I'm glad we went back and touched on that. Let's shift back again to your time at the law school. I knew you back then as being in the career services. I didn't know about being building manager, which I think is really interesting too.    So, well, let's start with maybe what was the student makeup when you first joined the law school?

A: Well, let's go back to when I entered law school in 1969. There were about 285 students. I think there were 20 or 22 women in my class. There were already some older students who were generally males coming back from Vietnam. And during the years that I was there as a student, the war in Vietnam was a major factor.  I recall sitting in the student lounge one evening (December 1, 1969) when the draft lottery was being implemented. It was all men because we were the only ones who were going to be drafted. On the radio, the voice would call out April 5th, Number 12, and that was your draft number that you were going to be

Q: Was April 5th your birthday, or

A: My birthday was, but they'd call out a date and a number, and if it hit, somebody would silently get up and walk out of the room. You knew that that person was going to go to the draft before you.

Q: Wow.

A: My own number turned out to be 112. Before the lottery and before I was in law school, I had a student deferment. When I graduated as an undergrad, my student deferment ended in June, and in July I was called for my pre—induction physical. I went down and met a lot of my high school classmates who were in the same situation. I failed my physical. I had high blood pressure. I still have high blood pressure. But you remained eligible because your physical condition could change.   I did watch the lottery, the draft lottery, and saw people get up and leave. As it turned out, I did not go. I think the statistic was that one out of seven draft—eligible men actually were drafted during that time.

Q: You mean within the law school or in the general population?

A: In the general population.

Q: Okay.

A: My last two years as an undergrad, I lived in a house with six other guys. Out of the seven of us, one in fact did go, was drafted and went to Vietnam. He came back. So…— but it was interesting.

After I came back to the law school in February of 1976, the size of classes had grown from about 280 up to about 325. The physical facility was inadequate. There wasn't enough space for what was going on. The number of women had started to increase. Within a few years by the early eighties, women were 40, 45 percent of the class. There were even a couple of classes in those years where women outnumbered men in the class. Over the course of the 30 years that I was there, again, staff size grew enormously. When I began as an assistant dean, there were two assistant deans, two associate deans, and one assistant to the dean.

Q: What's the difference between an assistant and an associate?

A: Associate deans are generally faculty members, and they would take on administrative responsibilities as at least part of their duties. Assistant deans were not faculty.

Q: Okay.

A: We didn't have tenure. We served at the pleasure of the dean. Sometimes we pleasured the deans and sometimes we didn't.

By the time I left there were, there were maybe four associate deans and five or six assistant deans. They were staff to do a lot of things. Go back to 1976 when I was doing career services, I think it was technically 60 percent of my job.   The Alumni Association was 40 percent. In that 40 percent of the job, I edited, wrote and produced the quarterly alumni magazine. We did banquets. We did regional meetings. I would set up events. I would travel to the events. I was executive director and secretary/ treasurer of the Wisconsin Law Alumni Association, so I handled the finances. I was bonded for that purpose. I always want to point that out. When I left 30 years later, there were several full-time people in career service. There was an editor for the alumni magazine. I was still executive director of the Alumni Association.  But that job was split after I left as well.  I like to tell people that it took six people to replace me.

I mentioned traveling to meet with alumni, often qualifying them as potential donors. I sometimes went by myself, more often with the dean or the development director or both. Those trips were so memorable because so many of the lawyer I met were remarkable people with remarkable stories to tell. I' 11 mention only a couple of the most memorable: simple country lawyers like Dale Clark in Ashland. We met Dale in his second—floor office across the street from the Douglas Co. Courthouse. He was probably in his 80's then and was very proud of the desk he used, the desk that had been his partners when he hired Dale. An old, battle scared desk but one that had witnessed hundreds, maybe thousands of client meetings.

On a trip to New Orleans, the three of us from the Law School were invited out to dinner at Commanders Palace by one of our graduates, Harold Jude 11. He was fascinating by himself (an FBI agent in South America during WWII, an oil company executive after the War). After dinner he led us through the restaurant's kitchen and then to a private home in the Garden District. He rang the bell and it was answered by US District Judge John Minor Wisdom, in his pajamas and slippers! Wisdom was a courageous judge who helped uphold Great Society legislation during the 1960s. He had been rewarded by having a box of rattlesnakes dumped in his front yard, the yard we had crossed to reach his front door.

But perhaps my most amazing encounter came when US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia visited the Law School to give a speech. For security reasons Scalia was isolated for about 20 minutes in an obscure room while the lecture hall was secured. I was asked to "baby sit" the Justice. His reputation was as a strict conservative and somewhat irascible. For me it was 20 minutes of one—on-one conversation with one of the most important lawyers in the nation.   I only regret that I was more than a little nervous. Scalia told me a joke but nerves prevented me from remembering it.

Q: Yeah, it sounds like an amazing time. You mentioned that you were also building manager at the Law School for a time.

A: When I started, the law librarian was Maurice Leon. He had been there for a long time. Maurice Leon was the building manager. When he retired, the Dean said, "Why don't you do it, Ed?" I thought, well, that doesn't seem like an onerous job. Then the building expansion came on, and for three years, things were just hectic and topsy— turvy. I got my first cell phone at that time. It started out as a bag phone. It looked about the size of an attaché case, but it did get smaller.

I was on the cell phone or available by cell phone for the various emergencies when the elevators stopped running or water was flowing into part of the building. It was a hectic time,    But I got a kick out of it. I guess my woodworking experience was broadened to include ironwork and cement and all different kinds of tradespeople that I was dealing with during that period.

Q: So you were wearing three very different hats?

A: Very different, yes. And that probably helped or was responsible for the fact that when I reached 30 years and my house was paid for and my kids were through college, I thought I needed to retire.     It was also at this time that I was doing "lemon law" auto arbitrations with AAA. But I thought I needed a break.

I left the law school on September 30, 2005. A week later my wife and I took our first extended vacation. We went to Europe. We came back, and winter descended on us. 1 realized that I missed people badly, that I had things that I could do, but I missed the social interaction. I decided I should get a part—time job. I live close to a Menards. I was a customer there. I bought a lot of wood and tools. I thought this is simple, I'll apply at Menards and I'11 work there part—time. They rejected me. Then I thought, well, Home Depot isn't far away.

Q: That was very unwise, but go ahead.

A: I applied at Home Depot, and same thing happened. They rejected me. My oldest daughter, who was probably in her late twenties at that time, said, "Dad, you have to dumb your resume down." I did and Sears hired me almost immediately. I worked there for about four years.    I don't think I was responsible for their bankruptcy that is occurring now, but I could see it coming. After four years, I had an opportunity to go to work for a high—end tool and supply store in Madison, and I've been there for seven years now. I enjoy it a great deal. It gives me the social outlet, it feeds my hobby, and it's been real satisfying for me.

Q: And I remember seeing you at Sears one time when I was there. That's good. I think it's wonderful to be able to find a job like that that is, you know, a perfect step after you step back from everything.

A: Now I'm in my early seventies, and my family and my friends keep asking me when I'm going to retire again.    1 suppose sometime I will have to do that. Physically, it's more challenging now. But, again, I look forward to going to work.     I look forward to working with customers. I'm in this position where they don't really care how much time you spend with a customer, as long as you're creating a bond with them. You know that they'11 come back.  If they don't buy anything today, they' 11 be back in the future. That's what I thought I was doing as a lawyer too, certainly as a lobbyist. You provided information. You let it    let people know that you were an honest dealer in information. I can recall instances where legislators came to me and said, "What should I do on this?" That was a very satisfying part of it. That's what I hoped that I would be doing as a lawyer.

Q: So when you were in the career services office, how do you think that evolved from when you started there and when you left as far as how things were conducted, the firms that would come in?

A: Well, it's kind of ironic that I was put into career services because I 'd had an atypical experience to begin my own career. I didn't interview with a lot of places. 1 did interview with a couple of law firms for summer positions, and I do recall one of them who questioned my activities in high school with the Young Democrats. As I'm sitting there, I'm looking behind the person interviewing me, and there's bookcases full of elephants, jade elephants and metallic elephants. Only later did I find out that this is one of the principal Republican law firms in Milwaukee, and my chances probably were low from the beginning and got lower as I went through the interview. The late seventies were a good time to be a law student graduating from law school. The profession was booming at that time. We had hundreds of employers, law firms, big and small, in—state, out—of—state, governmental agencies, accounting firms coming into the law school begging really for talented young lawyers to join them. In the years that I was doing it, we did hit downturns. But nothing like what happened in the early 2000s as the profession really started contracting, and big law firms in particular stopped recruiting completely.

The irony is that there were always jobs out there. But who wants to go to Abbotsford, Wisconsin for a very low salary when they've accumulated huge student debts? I had sympathy for the student who felt that the system was against them. They had paid a lot of money to become a lawyer, and now there were very few jobs that would provide a means of repaying that debt. After I left full—time career services this was in the early nineties there was a succession of people who came and went quickly as director of career services because it was a really tough job. In my years, I can think of only one student who became such a problem because he couldn't find a job that I had to consult with the University's legal office to find out what I should be doing. In the years after I was no longer doing that full-time, student dissatisfaction rose to such a level that the staff in the office turned over repeatedly. To this day, I think it's a very different market than it was in the seventies and eighties when I was responsible. I guess I happened to hit the good times.

Q: Just to see if there's any angle on this conversation, one of the things that I personally see coming down the road is that artificial intelligence is going to take the place of a lot of lawyers. And I'm just kind of wondering if law schools are adapting because I'm concerned that the students going into law school now may not have jobs in 20 years. So do you think that law schools —— I hate to put you in this position, and you can decline to answer — do you think they look out for themselves and the health of the institution, or do they put the    do they take that into consideration when they say, wow, we could bring in 500 law students, but in ten, 20 years, so many of them are going to be out of a job?

A: Yes. Most institutions are slow to change, and I think legal education is one of them that change very slowly. If you go back to the founding of the UW Law School, it was a supplemental way of becoming educated as a lawyer. At the very beginning, most of the students attended a few classes while they were working in law firms. They were basically apprenticing in law firms. Over the course of a half century, that began to change and finally reached the point where the law school was considered the primary way that you became a lawyer. But it took 40 or 50 years for that to happen.     I don't know now whether people in legal education are looking ahead 40 or 50 years in the future. I think something is going to have to get them out of the rut that they may be in and begin thinking about all the different ways that law is going to evolve in the future. I don't think it's going to come quickly, and it may not come from within legal education. It may come from outside.

Q: I was talking to a former dean, and he said that, you know, this contraction that they experienced I think especially after 2008, that part of the struggle was that they had so many faculty on tenure that you still have that same base of expense, and you don't have the number of students.   I think that was also a really big struggle to figure out what to do with that.

A: I was interested to learn that this year, there was a substantial rebound in enrollment, and it's back up over 200. had fallen to about 150 or 160 each class. But this year suddenly there were a lot more people who wanted to come to law school.

Q: Did you see any changes in technology affecting the law school or in the job market when you were there?

A: Sure. As a student and through most of my time at the law school as an assistant dean, people carried casebooks around and read casebooks and underlined. By the time I was leaving, electronic textbooks or electronic materials had started appearing. When the law school was remodeled and added to in the late nineties, internet connections were provided on each of the desks, the big lecture halls, and then ultimately Wi-Fi throughout the building. There was a clinical faculty member, Cheryl Rosen Weston, who ran a company that was into electronic materials. She and Frank Tuerkheimer began pushing for electronic materials. Frank Tuerkheimer had electronic materials for his Evidence class that I remember seeing demonstrated. As you were reading the materials online, you could hyperlink a federal rule of evidence, and it would take you to the appropriate text. I thought, boy, that is really slick, you don't even have to get a different book out and page through it. I think that's continuing. The cost of books had gotten to the point where it was becoming almost prohibitive to assign books. The more electronic materials that became available and still are becoming available, the easier it is for the students.

Q: I think it's, you know, easier for the industry as well because anytime there's an update, it's very easy to update the electronic materials rather than having to print an entirely new edition.

A: Or pocket parts.

Q: We love those pocket parts.

A: You read something in your book, but then to be careful, cautious, you would have to go to the pocket part and see whether another decision or a change of statutes had negated what you had just learned.

Q: Did you get to know the students very well?

A: I did. When I said that after I retired, I missed people, it's probably because for 30 years, every year there were 250 or so students coming in, and I would try to get to know them because if you wanted to help somebody find a position, the more you knew about them, the easier it was. Some students took advantage of that, and I got to be friends them. Some students, I never saw. I might have learned their name, I might have learned where they came from, but there were obviously differences in each class. After I'd been there for a while, incidents started occurring where an entering student would come up to me and say, "Mr. Reisner, my father said to say hello to you." And the father was one of my classmates. So multiple generations.

Peter Christianson, who graduated probably in the eighties, his family was a five—generation family. Tom Drought from Milwaukee had a daughter in law school, and she I think was a fifth generation. It was interesting then as I continued to work in alumni relations that I would see these people five or ten years after they graduated and get a sense of whether they were headed in the right direction when they left law school, whether their circumstances had changed. I got to see a lot of former students who became judges.   Seeing how they evolved was a very satisfying part of the job.

Q: Did you have any sense of watching them of which ones you thought would succeed or who was going to struggle or headed in the right direction now?

A: I could see some who went with large law firms who were making a mistake. I recall one student who went with a large Milwaukee law firm, and within five years I was not surprised to find that he had gone with a very small firm in a very small community, and he was very happy doing that. Sometimes I was surprised at how well people did. I didn't know that they had the ambition to do that.  It wasn't a question of talent. Anyone who gets admitted to law school and gets through law school by and large has the ability to do it.

Q: What do you think made somebody particularly a good student or a good lawyer?

A: Well, I wasn't a particularly good student. You know, I did very well on standardized tests and until I hit the wall in mathematics. I did well in mathematics and sciences. What I had to learn when I got into law school was how to argue multiple positions, or if somebody was on the affirmative and you had to argue the negative, you might not have been thinking negative up until that point. I think people who have lawyers in their background somewhere, their family or friends, who understood what lawyers did had a big jump on everybody else.

Q: I know I had another follow—up question that just escaped me. Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you. And again, I ^t m going to, you know, impose my own views to see if you have any thoughts on that. But it just seems that at some point lawyer compensation really changed and I thought that the practice of law really changed, that this used to be an honorable profession, you made a decent living, till all of a sudden there was this huge expectation of really big salaries. It kind of touched on what you said before about one of the students going with a big firm and realizing, you know what, I like the small firm. Do you have any views on that?

A: I think that that economic change occurred while I was there. When I graduated from law school, firms like Foley & Lardner had just matched Wall Street firm's salaries. They were paying $13, 000 a year. By the time I left the law school, $70, 000 and $80, 000 a year starting salaries were not uncommon. The object of the profession became less helping people and more generating income. There was a story about a lawyer involved in the IBM antitrust case who had to roll up as many billable hours as possible, and apparently, somebody discovered that if you got on a plane in New York and flew to California and you were working on the plane that you could bill more than 24 hours in one day. And it wasn't apocryphal.  It's actually reported that that occurred. But the expectation in a larger law firm, might have been 1,200 billable hours in the 1970s, and it rose to maybe 1,800 billable hours by the year 2000. It puts different pressures on people, makes it harder to have a family. And to some extent, I think it dehumanized the profession.

Q: I actually think that's a really good way of putting it. What would you want future attorneys to know?

A: I'd like them to know more about what lawyers have been in this country from the 1800s and the fact that it wasn't always the almighty dollar, that service to the — public service to the profession is a part of it. When one of the challenges to the integrated bar occurred, I remember hearing all the philosophical arguments about why people should be made to be members of a bar, and one member of a committee appointed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court came up with the idea that you should be required to be the member of a bar association, but not necessarily the bar association. I got to thinking the person who was very interested in child welfare, that if there was a bar organization for people who had similar interests that require you to be a member of something like that could be more beneficial to you than belonging to a group of people who didn't share your same interests.

Q: And just because we are making this a recording or a transcript for all eternity, I will bring up that you have done the yeoman' s share of work on digging back into the history of the Dane County Bar Association from pre—Civi1 War and have been writing a series of really, really excellent articles that I think are fascinating and extremely well done. And I hope that the rest of the local bar appreciates that.

A: I 'm not sure how I got into this, thinking back on it now. But when I left the law school, I still wanted to be recognized as a lawyer, and suddenly, I didn't have that opportunity.   Then along came the Dane County Bar and the History and Memorials Committee, and I was back with lawyers. I was back looking at history, which as you get older, I guess maybe becomes more important. But it's proven to be something that I really enjoy doing. 1 like finding those little nuggets that nobody else has chanced upon yet, recently finding the reason why the first dozen names in the roll of attorneys are all in the same handwriting. How did that happen? It's buried in a 40—page transcript, but it actually explained who did it and why. I like that. I like finding those nuggets.

Q: Yeah. You've done a really terrific job with that. Is there anything else that we should know that we haven't touched on?

A: Well, since I have a chance to edit this, I can always go back. But no.   I look back on all the happenstances that led me to where I am today, and I wouldn't trade them. I'm satisfied that I've done a reasonable job and look forward to continue doing it.

Q: Well, thank you. And thank you for taking the time and sharing your experience with me and with future readers. We will have a transcript prepared of this interview and send it to you for proofing, which you already know. And it will become part of our Oral History Project. And unless you have something to add, 1’ll just note that the time is now. I have no idea. 9:56. And 1 will shut off the recording. A Thank you.

Q Thank YOU, Ed. * * *

MS. KOBELT:    I'm going to go back on the record with Ed.This is going to be part 3 because after I turned off the recording, Ed remembered something that I think would be particularly interesting.     Ed, you just told me that you have been called as a legal expert on a few occasions.

A: An expert witness, basically, on legal economics.     I think it was three times. The first time was an auto accident where a lawyer was injured and it had an impact on her career, and I was called by now Judge Josann Reynolds and testified as to what a lawyer might expect for earnings. Another case involved Joseph Sensenbrenner, who was the mayor of Madison at one point, and I believe it was a son or daughter, and I don't actually recall what the issue was in that case. Oh, one other one. A woman lawyer in Milwaukee who felt that her ex—husband had libeled and slandered her and thereby reduced her earning capacity.

Q: That would be interesting.

A: Three times I was deposed, and twice I actually testified in court.I remember at the first deposition being very nervous about it and trying to think ahead and not saying something that I would regret later, and then appearing on the stand.  1 probably only testified for 45 minutes, but if you had asked me at the end of it how long I was on, I would have said four hours. I remember that I was trying to talk to the jury in that case. That was an interesting experience, something completely different.

I've always wanted to be on a jury too. I got called for jury duty a couple of times. The second time I actually got seated in the court for voir dire in a murder trial. The judge was asking questions, and he said, "Does anybody here know any of the attorneys or the parties?" I raised my hand. And the judge said, well, who do you know? And I said, "Well, I know the defense attorney, I know the prosecuting attorney, I know the judge, I know the court reporter. "He asked if that would prevent me from being impartial? I said, "No, I have a high opinion about all of them." Nevertheless, I got thrown off.

Q: Darn.

A: One other time I was called in an auto accident case, and I don't think I ever answered a question, but I was not put on the jury.

Q: I've always wanted to be on a jury too.

A: I know that Justice Abrahamson has served on a jury in Dane County. If she can be on a jury, I certainly would welcome the opportunity to do so myself.

Q: All right. Thank you.