July 1999
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July 1999 |
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Classifieds |
A Man for the Millennium |
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As Wood Foster, Jr. prepared to assume the MSBA presidency for the 1999-2000 term, Bench & Bar talked at length with him to learn more about his background, his interests, his outlook on his profession, his role in For the Record (the 150-year history of the legal profession in Minnesota), and his aspirations for the MSBA during his term. Here's part of the conversation. Q: Where was "home" when you were young? Where were you born, reared, educated, and so forth? A: I grew up in St. Paul. My father was a lawyer who started with the Oppenheimer law firm in about 1936. I have a copy of a letter that was written right around that time that one of my old partners pulled out of an old trust file, and my dad was the bottom name on a list of seven lawyers. He practiced with the Oppenheimer firm for his entire career. His name eventually appeared in the firm's name. When I was very young, we moved out to what was then the country; it's now Mendota Heights. We had a fair amount of land, because it was farmland then. I led sort of a golden life I confess to the silver spoon, because I had a very, very happy home situation: a close family, a good education at St. Paul Academy ("SPA"), a lot of close friends, and fun things to do. Q: So where did you get your college and legal education? A: I graduated from SPA in 1961, and went on to Amherst the next year. I majored in American Studies -- that's a cross-disciplinary major, largely for people who don't know what to major in. I was most interested in the social sciences -- history, political science, and the like. I suppose that played ultimately into the decision I made to go to law school -- although that was a decision I made late. Q: Late? A: I was looking at diplomacy as a career. I'm having a hard time remembering what steered me into law, but I think it was largely that I did not get into the Princeton school that you really want to go to if you want to get an advanced degree in diplomacy. I spent a year in Washington, D.C., between college and law school. From the fall of '65 to the spring of '66, I worked for Al Quie, then a Republican congressman from Minnesota -- doing the common sort of things young grunts do for congressmen. In June of 1966 I began the University of Michigan Law School. I was allowed to take classes year-round, so I graduated in two years, and it didn't slow me down any to spend the year in Washington. The law school experience was very pleasant, although those were turbulent times; it was a dramatic time to be in school. I went into Detroit with groups of law students to interview hundreds of prisoners after the riots there. That was my first closeup view of that sort of thing. |
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A: I had thought that Washington, D.C., would be the place. But by the time I finished law school, I had started a family, and suddenly Minneapolis looked an awful lot more inviting. I moved back and started my career with the firm that is now known as Gray, Plant, Mooty, Mooty & Bennett. After two years, I left and took a position as Assistant Hennepin County Public Defender for Misdemeanors, under C. Paul Jones. That job involved a fairly high level of burnout. You're dealing with tens of clients every day, and often two trials a day. Still, it was fabulous experience, as far as thinking on your feet. I lasted two-and-a-half years. I moved on to a firm that disbanded two or three years later, at which time I went out on my own. That was the beginning of my private commercial litigation practice. While I was solo -- for almost four years -- I did other kinds of legal work as well. Q: Where has your practice taken you since then? A: At the end of 1977, I joined my present firm -- Siegel, Brill, Greupner, Duffy & Foster. For the first 12 or 13 years, I was doing a general commercial litigation practice. I viewed myself very much as a generalist. In the late 1980s, a new partner joined the firm and brought with him a huge class action case involving worker's compensation price fixing. That led to a second, equally meritorious price-fixing case in Oklahoma. (Both settled for very large sums.) I was heavily involved in the discovery on both cases. That partner left our firm to join the Justice Department, and just about then I joined a lawyer in North Carolina to start cases in both Carolinas, Alabama, and Tennessee involving a conspiracy to fix the price of servicing the residual markets in worker's comp. Ultimately, we achieved very good settlements in Alabama and South Carolina, and Tennessee is still pending. Q: Did that lead you into specializing? A: I was spending a large portion of my time on class actions. Then a friend of mine, who's also a lawyer, approached me at a kids' soccer game and told me about a woman who had come to him and said that something funny was going on with the coinsurance at Minnesota Blue Cross/Blue Shield. That led to my meeting his client, who is one of the most phenomenal people you'd ever meet -- she has undergone 33 surgeries for Crohn's disease, but she has more spirit and spunk and joy of life than any three people you know put together. That began a very happy chapter of my career, not only because it was fun to work with her, but because it resulted in real benefits going back to people who had been shortchanged on their coinsurance calculations. It also led me to affiliations with lawyers in other states, where we found similar things were going on. So I have gotten involved in this kind of litigation in several other states. Largely through serendipity, my partner Jordan Lewis and I have developed a lucrative class action practice. It's a "lawyer's practice," in that it's intellectually challenging and the legal issues ultimately control the outcome. I've been very lucky. |
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A: I am the only lawyer in the family. I was the second of five -- four sons and a daughter, who was the youngest. All four brothers live in Minnesota, and my sister now plans to move back from New Hampshire. One of my brothers is director of studies at SPA; another is a mortgage banker; and the other is a microbiologist with the state health department. My father died in the early '90s -- at the very time I was trying a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against St. Paul legal institution John Cochrane. It was a difficult time. Q: What about the next generation? A: I have five children including my two stepchildren. My oldest, a son, works as director of special promotions for Orchestra Hall and sings with the Minnesota Opera. My number two son was a professional soccer player for seven years with the Minnesota Thunder; now he's a legal assistant with a solo practitioner, and he's getting ready to go to business school. I have a daughter who just graduated from Stanford -- she was captain of the soccer team out there. She's been on an internship at the American University in Cairo for the past year. She hasn't ruled out law. My stepson is deeply immersed in the music world of the Twin Cities -- he's sort of an up-and-comer, a very talented guitarist in the local punk rock scene. My younger stepchild, a seventh-grader, is also a talented musician -- she's been with the Greater Twin Cities Youth Orchestra for the past three years, moving up in their ranks as an oboist. Q: It sounds as if you have found a number of good things at soccer fields. Have you? A: I had a very wonderful experience coaching youth soccer. I started out coaching when my second son was about ten, for what was then a coed team in a Minneapolis park league. After my son moved on to a traveling team in St. Paul -- when my daughter was seven -- I started coaching under-ten girls. I coached girls from then on. When my daughter turned 11, the Minneapolis United ("MU") soccer club was formed, and we decided to have a tryout team. I stayed with my daughter as a coach until she was 16. Her MU teams played at the highest level. I don't think Minneapolis has seen another crop of girls that good since then. They played almost even with the Burnsville team that went on to win the national title. That was the only team that could consistently beat us. We went to tournaments around the country and did very well, and we won the USA Cup one year and came in second another year. Since my daughter turned 16, I haven't really coached. My son and I did some clinics for girls this year, but otherwise I don't coach anymore -- I play soccer. I have been playing pick-up soccer one or two nights a week. Last year, I started playing for the first time in a refereed league for over-40 players. That was the first time since college that I'd actually played in refereed games. I had learned soccer at Amherst, and played on the freshman team, but I did not continue in college. I just played intramural. Q: How did you get involved with Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, which you co-founded? A: A great deal of attention was being paid to human rights in the early '80s, mainly because of the atrocious things that were going on in Central America. I was involved in some study trips there. When I heard that there was a group of lawyers meeting, I got involved at the planning stage. I remember Don Fraser, Tom Johnson, Jim Dorsey, Bob Sands, Sam Heins and David Weissbrodt -- a lot of pretty big names, people who I knew could make things happen if they wanted to. And they did. We met, we formed, and it has just been phenomenally successful. It's an organization that in some ways is better known in other parts of the world than here at home. We've long had an important presence in Mexico (particularly in Chiapas) and in the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans area generally -- largely through our women's projects on domestic abuse. |
"I think the book is going to help lawyers feel good about what they do, and make other state bar associations think that they ought to do something like it." |
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A: Our focus is not as country oriented as it was before. The organization has been really blessed with good leadership, including David Weissbrodt at the university. When we were doing country studies or factfinding missions, he could tell us where other people weren't looking -- where we could go that we wouldn't be stepping on some other organization. Our study on international conflict prevention focused on Kosovo as an example, so we knew before the rest of the world what could happen there. Now we're focusing less and less on individual factfinding missions. We realized we needed to focus long-term in some areas -- a pro bono asylum project, a project to eliminate bias against immigrants, the death penalty project, the women's project, international human rights education in elementary and middle schools. Q: Are you still active with the organization? A: Yes, I'm still on the board. David Weissbrodt and I are the only two founders who are still on the board. As always, we're trying to raise money. Q: Earlier this decade, you headed the Hennepin County Bar Association. Were you involved in its judicial evaluation? And what are your thoughts on it? A: I was on the task force that recommended the program in the first place, and I chaired the group that put together the evaluation. Then I became president of the association. The only thing I'm not happy with [regarding] the HCBA's evaluation system is the agony that it gives to some judges, which surprises me. I'm an unrepentant proponent of judicial evaluation in a society that elects its judges. At the same time, as president of the MSBA, I do not intend to push that agenda, because I feel there is a great difference between an urban setting, with 20 or so judges up for election every time, and a rural setting in which you might have three. The burden of judicial evaluation falls on the lawyers, and I think it puts lawyers in the smaller towns and cities in a very awkward position relative to the judges before whom they practice constantly. Q: What issues do you plan to promote while president? A: The agenda is pretty simple: This is the millennium; I think that lawyers are going to be more willing to devote time to talk about the profession -- as a profession -- in the coming year than they are normally. I want to encourage and facilitate a dialogue about the future of the profession. The first phase of this was preparing the history of the first 150 years of the profession in Minnesota. Personally, I didn't know that much about our roots. We can't get a very good grasp of where we're going until we have some sort of a consensus on where we've been. Q: Which phases of the book production were you involved in? How do you feel it turned out? A: I was involved at every stage -- from conception to final editing. There is nothing in that book that I hadn't seen at least five times before publication. The book succeeded, in my view, beyond my best hopes. I think the book is going to help lawyers feel good about what they do, and make other state bar associations think that they ought to do something like it. I also think that this history demonstrates -- better than anything else I've ever seen -- the many areas in which Minnesota has really led the way. |
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A: I've already been meeting with groups of lawyers that I've invited to what amount to focus groups -- in Winona, Buffalo and Fergus Falls -- to see how this process is going to feel. I really like what I'm finding. Lawyers have a great deal to say, but it's hard for them to stand back and take in the broad picture. I hope we can identify the areas we need to focus on right now to keep the profession healthy. Trying to predict what is going to happen pretty far out -- say, 25 years -- is very difficult. I will be trying to reassure lawyers that there is nothing new about public disapproval of lawyers. What has changed, I think, is that camaraderie among lawyers themselves appears to have been lost. That gets down to the issues of just plain civility and quality of life. Q: Do you have particular plans about how many of these groups will convene, and where, and so on? A: Not really. I would like to see a lot of focus groups at which I am not present, and somehow pull together the best ideas and the concepts that are coming through -- as far as where we need to go, how we can do what we do better, and addressing the specific problems we have that can be addressed. Perhaps MSBA sections and special legal associations can host some of these colloquiums. Q: Where would you personally like to see the profession go? A: Where every lawyer would like to see it go: in a direction that makes us feel better about being lawyers, relative to the public -- and relative to one another. I think many lawyers agree that we have to go in the direction of alternative dispute resolution if we are to avoid these horrible bloodbath, scorched-earth types of suits that really give lawyers a black eye. We all know it's counterproductive and needlessly expensive. Q: Where do you see the profession going in Minnesota? A: The gap between the large corporate practice and the personal practice is growing. Meanwhile, fees keep escalating beyond the reach of more and more people needing personal legal services. As one participant in the Winona group described it, Minnesota practice is shaping up like a football -- with one tip at Rochester and the other at St. Cloud, with a big bulge in the middle. That's where all the big-money lawyers are, and all the rest are watching that from a distance and seeing a kind of practice develop there that has very little relevance to them. Perhaps we're headed toward an era where there are two different kinds of practice -- a bifurcation that will change the way we think about lawyering. It's almost impossible now for a lawyer to be a true generalist. And in the big-bucks category, we're going to see increasing pressure for lawyers to affiliate with specialists in other occupations. Q: What about the profession's use of technology? A: The MSBA has embarked on an effort to become a leader in that area. We've committed resources to a fulltime technology adviser -- to make sure every lawyer in Minnesota who wants assistance in bringing an office into line with current technology has the opportunity to get that assistance. We also want to try to anticipate the ways technology will change the practice so our members can stay ahead of the curve. We plan to roll out a new plan to assist lawyers in setting up individual Web sites. I hope that is just the beginning of a wave of technical services the organization can offer. And I don't know of any reason that Minnesota shouldn't have the best
Web site of any bar association in the country within a year or two. |
"Perhaps we're headed toward an era where there are two different kinds of practice -- a bifurcation that will change the way we think about lawyering." |
