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Vol. 72, No. 8, August 1999

Cops & Lawyers: Combining the careers
of law enforcement and the practice of law

Whatever the reasons to leave law enforcement to become lawyers, and vice versa, the people interviewed here agree that their knowledge and experience as both law enforcement officers and lawyers allow them to be more effective in the roles that they play in the justice system.

By Dianne Molvig

ops and lawyers rub each other the wrong way at times - at least, that's the story often played out in television and movie dramas. To a certain extent, fiction does mirror truth. "Cops and lawyers," says Eau Claire attorney Rick Pendergast, "can be like oil and water."

Pendergast has a unique perspective behind that statement. He's one of a small but steadily growing group of Wisconsinites who have personally mixed the two worlds. In Pendergast's case, he wore an Eau Claire police officer badge for seven years. Today he practices law in the same community. Others have switched in the opposite direction: They left law practice to take police jobs, or they've earned their law degrees but stayed in law enforcement.

Why have some people decided to make such career shifts? Do they see benefits from working in both worlds? We asked several Wisconsin lawyers and law enforcement officers about their experiences.

Double Duty

For three years Lauri Schwefel put in eight-hour shifts as a Milwaukee police officer, plus she made her daily jaunt to Madison to attend classes at U.W. Law School, where she graduated in 1995. She got by on three hours of sleep a day. "I wanted it bad," Schwefel says of her law degree.

The strong drive to become a lawyer had its roots in Schwefel's experience as a plaintiff in a sexual harassment suit against the Milwaukee Police Department. She'd become a police aide at age 17, a full-fledged officer at 21, and after several promotions ended up a sergeant by age 28, becoming the first women to attain that rank in the department's history. That's when the trouble began.

She also wanted to do for others what Quindel had done for her. Today Schwefel has a part-time law practice emphasizing sexual discrimination cases. The rest of her extremely full workday she fills with her full-time-plus duties as a police officer and the director of the Milwaukee Police Department's training bureau. She's in charge of the training program for 3,000 police and civilian employees, plus she teaches several classes herself - on sexual harassment among other topics. The department is "leaps and bounds from where we used to be," Schwefel notes.

Why do double duty as lawyer and cop? Schwefel says she's committed to at least fulfilling her 25-year obligation to the police department, of which she has five years remaining. And she might set her sights on becoming police chief someday. As for the concurrent sideline law practice, "I need to maintain a hands-on experience with the law," Schwefel says. "If I put it on the shelf for now, then I'll have five years of catching up to do. I want to have a feel for what's out there and what's coming up. I have to do both (jobs) right now."

These days her law enforcement experience and law degree blend into a new role, that of teacher. "When the police officers see me," she says, "they see a teacher. And they see a lawyer at the same time. Everybody knows I'm a lawyer ... I really don't see a distinction anymore. I believe I've pulled (those roles) together. I exist every day as both."

Seeing Through the Fog

If there's a theme running through his journeys into police work and then law it would be serendipity, says Milwaukee attorney Michael Guerin. When he was 21, driving a Pepsi truck for a living, a friend suggested they take the Milwaukee Police Department test together. Guerin describes his 10 years with the department as "a wonderful time of my life."

He left the police force to take a job as a special agent investigating organized crime and drug crimes for the Wisconsin Department of Justice. There Guerin became friends with Dan Hanley, the attorney general's press secretary, who encouraged him to pursue a law degree. "But for a foggy ride back from Madison with Dan Hanley," he says, "I would not have applied to law school."

Upon graduation, Guerin initially thought a job in the district attorney's office would be a logical progression from his police days. But he soon opted for a different direction. During law school, he'd worked with Frank Gimbel, who's currently one of Guerin's law firm partners. "He suggested I stay with him for a year or two," Guerin says, "to get some experience from the private bar side, with the idea that it would be part of further training to be a good district attorney. I never left."

Guerin now has been an attorney for nearly 25 years, handling mostly personal injury litigation. "I do a couple criminal cases a year," he says. "The ones I get the most notoriety for are when I represent police officers charged with crimes."

His police past still plays a part in his life in other ways, too, Guerin says. "There's something that comes with the experience on the street, working with law enforcement officers as brothers and sisters," he says. He taps into that experience when he teaches at police training programs, covering such topics as evidence and testifying in court, which he used to do every day as a patrol cop.

Now that he's president-elect of the Milwaukee Bar Association, Guerin says one message he hopes to convey is that lawyers should be proud they're lawyers. Cops, too, could use a dose of such thinking, he adds. Both "grind it out every day," Guerin says. "They think they're not making any impact on the world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Every time a cop smiles at a little kid, that makes a difference. Every time a lawyer helps somebody with a simple problem, it makes a difference in that person's life."

Using That 'Sixth Sense'

Eau Claire attorney Rick Pendergast says one thing he took with him after seven years as a cop was "a sixth sense about people," which can serve an attorney well, too. "You learn so much about folks," Pendergast says of his police experience. "And, maybe more important, you learn a lot about yourself. The skills in interviewing and investigating also are helpful. But I think the main thing is more at a gut level. You have more of an understanding about yourself and human nature."

Pendergast has been practicing law for 11 years, ever since graduating from Hamline University School of Law. "I'd had a long-standing interest in history, government, and politics, even when I was still on the police department," Pendergast says (he'd finished an undergraduate degree in political science while working as a policeman). "So I thought going to law school was a natural thing to do."

The move to law school got an extra push due to tragedy. When Pendergast was not yet 30, one of his fellow officers, about his own age, was shot and killed while on duty. "That jarred me," he recalls, "and I thought it was time to go."

Like Guerin, Pendergast figured district attorney work would be the logical next step once he had his law degree. But clerkships during law school changed his mind. "I was exposed to other areas of the law I'd never been exposed to," he says. "That sparked my interest, and that's how I went down that path."

Today, as an attorney, he focuses primarily on personal injury and divorce cases. "And because I'm a hometown boy," he adds, "I do lots of other things, too. I represent lots of folks I know and folks they know."

Pendergast is proud of his years as a cop, and he admits the shift to being a lawyer wasn't always smooth. "For a long time while practicing law I thought the best years of my work life had been with the police department," he says. "It's taken me years to feel that same confidence in practicing law. There were times when I wondered, did I make the right decision. Now I believe I have."

"Practicing law is hard work," Pendergast adds, noting that view comes from someone who was raised on a farm and has worked at building houses and cleaning barns, as well as being a police officer. "It takes a long time to build a practice and to get your feet under you. But once you do, it feels pretty good."

Seeing the Gaps

When Dane County Sheriff's Department lieutenant Brian Willison told his boss, Sheriff Rick Raemisch, that he was going to law school - which Raemisch himself had done years before while working as a narcotics detective - the latter's immediate response was, "You're nuts," Willison recalls. "But then he was supportive." For five years Willison's routine was to report for duty at 6 a.m., work until 2 p.m., drive into Madison from Deforest, where he's precinct commander, attend law school classes until 8:30 p.m., and study all weekend.

Besides his regular duties, Willison does law enforcement training and is on advisory committees for the state Department of Justice's board on law enforcement training standards. He's also become an expert witness on use-of-force issues and regulations. And he tracks state appeals and supreme court decisions to see how those affect the department's day-to-day operations. His law school background plays into everything he does, Willison says.

"It's so integrated," he explains. "I'm putting this knowledge base to use all the time, without thinking about it. You can't say, 'This is a law enforcement thing,' or 'This is a law thing.' There's just all this knowledge I now have about the law and how it comes into play so often."

As a lawyer and a cop he also notices educational gaps for each. As a case in point, he remembers a law school class discussion about search warrants. The professor relayed an example of a search-and-seizure case involving a hot dog vendor busted for selling drugs out of his cart right in front of the courthouse. How much easier could it have been, the professor emphasized, than for the police to walk into the courthouse to get a search warrant? "The impression was that you could just walk in and there was a pad there and you just tore off a search warrant," Willison says. "But getting a search warrant is a multi-hour process. Cops know that."

That's just one example illustrating how cops and lawyers often don't understand each others' jobs as well as they could, Willison points out. "If they had a better understanding of the process from the other player's perspective, I think things would go smoother," he says.

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