Firm mirrors city’s economic history
Foley & Lardner has played role in growth for many local companies
Before foundries and engine makers began making Milwaukee the “machine shop of the world,” before Harnischfeger and Allis-Chalmers, before Schlitz and Pabst — before Wisconsin even became a state — two lawyers named Asahel Finch and William Pitt Lynde opened an office on the unpaved streets of the growing frontier settlement.
The year was 1842. Over time, the law firm of Finch & Lynde would end up advising all those entities, sometimes helping run them as well, with a client roster that spanned telegraphs and railroads all the way to Major League Baseball, the Milwaukee Brewers, Aurora Health Care and entrepreneurs creating tomorrow’s biomedical breakthroughs and selfdriving cars.
The Milwaukee-based partnership, which turns 175 years old this month, today ranks as the largest and oldest law firm in Wisconsin and almost certainly remains its most politically connected.
Its name, following successive generations of partners: Foley & Lardner LLP.
As much as Foley’s timeline mirrors the economic history of the state, the firm’s chairman and CEO, Jay Rothman, understands that the future is not driven by steam engines and rail yards. If Foley wants to continue advising the movers and shakers, its barristers must navigate a constantly shifting landscape of law, risk and regulation.
Consider, Rothman says, genetics-based innovations that have the potential to revolutionize medicine and even change the course of human evolution, to name one example that’s particularly relevant in Madison’s biotech economy.
“What if I want my kid to be 6-8 and a great athlete?” postulates Rothman. “Who owns the genetics? What are the policy and moral and ethical standards? Can you patent any of this stuff?
“Our folks are working on this stuff right now, on behalf of our clients across the country.”
Foley also advises auto industry suppliers — Rothman, of course, won’t divulge which ones — that are facing a new world of unresolved policy and legal issues dealing with cars that can drive themselves.
What will be the speed limits on driverless cars: 120 mph? Or 30? In what instances? Will software companies be the next auto giants? Who’s going to write the inevitable reams of federal and state transportation regulations?
“Am I even going to own a car that I need to park? Who’s going to own the dashboard?”
And at a time when hacking scandals are ubiquitous, Foley’s teams are moving into cybersecurity — expertise they’ve added to a portfolio that runs the gamut from health care to environmental regulation to intellectual property. For trade and patent cases, they have partners and affiliates in Europe and Asia.
Technology also is forcing changes at Foley’s headquarters, with its lakefront views from the 35th through 40th floors of the U.S. Bank tower.
There, computers scour gigabytes of electronic documents, combing through reams of emails and other electronic documents in search of keywords and phrases. Algorithms employing artificial intelligence become smarter over time and generate “decision trees” that help guide legal investigations.
It’s called “electronic discovery.” It’s not yet universally used in the legal trade, but Rothman calls Foley an early adopter.
Foley, which has over 800 attorneys practicing around the nation, is too expensive to represent Joe Sixpack, unless Joe has a brilliant idea for a startup. But the firm has retained the considerable political clout that came with its inception.
“They’re a mix of legal know-how, Midwestern charm and political clout,” said Einar Tangen, a formerly Milwaukeebased lawyer and economic development activist now based in Beijing. “They get things done, they know all the right people, they sit on all the right boards.
“They are a like a submarine. You don’t see them. People don’t know the depths at which they operate. But if you connect all their dots to all the corporations, it’d be a massive web.”
Lynde began building that web in the firm’s earliest days, serving as attorney general of the Wisconsin Territory in 1844 and becoming one of the state’s first two members of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1848. He was mayor of Milwaukee for two years in 1860 and returned to the U.S. House in 1875.
Bipartisanship
Between them, Finch (a Whig and later Republican) and Lynde (a Democrat) covered both sides of the political aisle, a characteristic that carries on today.
Former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle works in the firm’s Madison office. Former Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold has worked at Foley, which acquired a Chicago firm where Barack Obama once held a job.
On the conservative side, former Foley chairman Michael Grebe served as Republican National Committeeman for Wisconsin as well as president of the conservative Bradley Foundation. For its lobbying division, Foley hired a team of top Wisconsin Republicans, including former U.S. Rep. Scott Klug.
Another Foley practice that hasn’t changed from the early days: Its attorneys occasionally still take equity stakes in companies through the Foley Ventures funds.
Foley’s history stretches so far back that its founding predates the archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which only began to keep a record of new business incorporations in 1848, the year Wisconsin became a state.
“There was almost no early enterprise in southeastern Wisconsin that they weren’t a part of in some way — incorporating it, investing in it, leading it,” said Ellen Langill, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who wrote a 1992 history of Foley & Lardner.
When the dots and dashes of a telegraph represented cutting-edge communication, Western Union was a Finch & Lynde client. When streets became gas-lighted, Finch & Lynde incorporated the Milwaukee Gas Co. and served on its board. When Schlitz surpassed Pabst as the nation’s biggest brewery in 1901, both were clients.
Perhaps the firm’s single biggest contribution to the state’s economic growth was the railroad. Finch helped found Wisconsin’s first railroad, the Milwaukee & Mississippi, which later grew into the Milwaukee Road, one of the largest railroads in the nation in the last century. One of the first locomotives in the state was named after Finch, who served for years as the railroad’s director.
In 1969, the firm took
the names of Leon Foley and Lynford Lardner Jr., the partners credited with launching a national expansion.
About that name
If the name Lynde sounds familiar, it’s because William Pitt Lynde’s grandson Lynde Bradley co-founded the Allen-Bradley Co., which exists today as Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation. The same family founded the Bradley Foundation and built the Bradley Center, longtime home of the Milwaukee Bucks.
Rothman, 57, grew up in Wausau, the Wisconsin River town that was powered in the last century by paper mills and printing plants, old industries that have been shrinking in the digital age.
Rothman concedes the state’s economy is in the throes of a long-term restructuring. “It takes a long time to adjust,” he said.
But he’s more bullish than the data, which consistently show that Wisconsin job creation and business startups lag the national average.
“I refuse to accept the premise that we’re going to be stuck in slow growth,” Rothman said, noting that the state has a long roster of standardbearers like Rockwell and Harley-Davidson that percolate new innovations.
Growth also will come from the kind of pioneering spirit exemplified by Finch and Lynde, says veteran Foley attorney Bruce Keyes.
In his 20 years at the firm, many of them spent on urban redevelopment, Keyes has retraced the steps of the founding partners, working on plans to revitalize the city’s rail yards, shipping ports and oldest industrial districts — although it wasn’t planned that way.
Keyes helped launch redevelopment efforts in Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley, a cradle of heavy industry in the buggy whip days and home at one time to vast rail yards that rivaled Chicago’s. More recently, Keyes spearheaded revitalization plans for the city’s Harbor District, where the city once “shipped more wheat than any place in the world.”
In his spare time, he’s founder and board member at the Bublr Bikes bike-sharing service.
“My career has literally followed the shipping and rail lines of Milwaukee,” said Keyes, adding, “It’s a real coincidence that I am doing it from the Finch & Lynde firm.”
According to Keyes, Foley has revamped its billing and pricing models so entrepreneurs and innovators can afford its services, as long as Foley wants to take their cases.
“We are more back to the grounded roots of serving the aspiring businesses as well as the established businesses,” Keyes said. “And I think that’s a lot of where our roots were.”