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  • InsideTrack
  • April 01, 2015

    ‘Be Courageous’: Helen Madsen, Pioneer in Medical Center Law, Celebrates 50 Years in the Profession

    While she didn’t aim to practice as a lawyer, Helen Madsen’s career encompassed pioneering changes in health law in her position as an attorney with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    Shannon Green

    April 1, 2015 – During her decades-long career as a lawyer, Helen Madsen had a say in the treatment of AIDS patients, in securing electronic medical records, and in decisions on the funding of health programs at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.

    But when she entered law school, working as a lawyer really wasn’t her aim. She intended to use her law degree as a gateway to government administration work.

    “My father had worked for the federal government for a number of years,” Madsen said. “He said lawyers are very respected doing government contract law.”

    In the early 1960s, Madsen was one of the handful of women pursuing a legal career. At Cornell Law School in Ithaca, N.Y., she was one of two women among 125 students in her graduating class of 1965. The experience was, for the most part, very positive, although not always easy. She was pleased at the opportunity to pursue her profession.

    “The professors were great – they were very welcoming of women, but some of the classmates made snide comments,” Madsen said. “We women felt we were different, and we were breaking some new ground.”

    Finding Her Way

    After graduation, Madsen followed her husband to Washington, D.C., where she worked for the U.S. Department of Navy, doing government and contract law.

    “I learned some basic skills, and had good opportunities to advise contracting officers,” she said. “It was an interesting job.”

    With her husband in post doctorate work as a physicist, she followed him in his positions and practiced at small firms in Athens, Ohio; River Falls, Wis.; and Lumberton, N.C.

    Those small firms provided her with good experience in research and litigation.

    In July 1976, Madsen, with her husband Ernest and two small boys, moved to Madison. Her husband became a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is now emeritus professor of medical physics. His research centered on developing tissue-mimicking devices used for medical ultrasound quality assurance and for development of new ultrasound imaging machines.

    She was hired to be the in-house attorney in the office of the chancellor of UW-Madison, the first woman attorney for the university.

    “I felt very fortunate. I’d come to Madison … and got what turned out to be an absolutely wonderful and interesting job. It was, because I stayed in it for 28 years!” Madsen said.

    The University Lawyer

    At UW-Madison, Madsen’s clients were faculty, deans and other administrators. During her first years in her position, she focused on employment and student matters, and offered advice to any U.W. employee in need of legal advice. She practiced any type of law that was asked for.

    “Someone commented that university law is kind of like the Mississippi: It’s an inch deep but very, very wide,” Madsen said. “You have to be willing to jump into new areas of the law and research them.”

    Shannon Green is communications writer for the State Bar of Wisconsin, Madison. She can be reached by email or by phone at (608) 250-6135.

    The office expanded, more attorneys were hired, and each attorney’s position became specialized. Madsen’s focus at that time was environmental law – where she dealt with a polluting smoke stack on Charter Street. She began work in the area of health law beginning in 1982, and stayed in the field until her retirement in 2004.

    Health law covers a wide variety of topics, including regulation, ethics, claims against physicians, the treatment of human subjects in research, and patient care and procedures.

    “We developed a policy on treating people with AIDS,” Madsen said. “Ultimately we had a number of front-line ethics issues that the university had to face” such as regulations on research involving stem cells.

    “The university was a leader in developing stem cells and stem cell research, and still is,” Madsen said.

    Once health care records were kept electronically, Madsen worked with university and hospital officials to develop their HIPAA regulations and procedures to keep secure patient information.

    “It was an interesting job all the way around. Everybody in the office had unique and interesting questions. So you were challenged constantly. I was privileged to work on legal projects which were in a sense pioneering,” Madsen said.

    She was part of a team that worked three years to separate the U.W. Hospital from UW-Madison, a “very complex legal and administrative task,” Madsen said.

    When Blue Cross in Wisconsin decided to become a for-profit corporation and give the benefits it had saved over many years as a nonprofit tax-exempt corporation to the two Wisconsin medical schools, Madsen worked on the project involving several parties to determine how the U.W. Medical School would invest and use the new funds it received to help improve the public health of Wisconsin citizens.

    “That was a really fascinating project and very worthwhile,” Madsen said.

    The funds were used for translational research – research that soon benefits all patients. Madsen guided this and other large, ground-breaking projects during her long career – endeavors she found rewarding.

    “Medical center law is a legal specialty. I basically started out and learned it from the ground up,” Madsen said.

    Get Your Feet Wet

    Would she go into law again? Absolutely yes, she said.

    “I met and worked with so many good-hearted, generous people who give of themselves regularly to help others,” Madsen said.

    Fellow lawyers, she learned over the years, are “always gracious and gave freely of their time” when she needed assistance in unfamiliar areas of law.

    The assistance of other lawyers was invaluable. 

    “This opportunity of consultation is probably one important reason why I ‘swam’ and did not ‘sink’ in my early years of practice for U.W.!” she said.

    The practice of law a great profession, and there are many things you can do with a law degree.

    “Law is a service profession,” Madsen said. You take the law as it exists and develop cases on behalf of your clients, and you have an opportunity to be an ethical voice for what’s right and what should be done. Being a lawyer sometimes means telling your client “no” because what they propose is illegal, she said. It’s a message that clients sometimes won’t want to hear.

    “So you have to be courageous at times,” Madsen said.

    She’s seen the profession grow and become more diverse. While she entered the profession at a time when women were rare, times have changed.

    “We’ve made a lot of progress,” Madsen said.

    She has some words of advice for new lawyers: don’t be afraid to work in small firms.

    “Don’t be afraid to go on in and get your feet wet,” Madsen said.


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