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Inner Look, Forward Vision

By Dianne Molvig

If there's one message Steve Sorenson would like to leave behind a year from now, when he's wrapping up his term as State Bar president, it would be this: "Being a lawyer can be fun."

Such a statement may meet puzzled looks, even scoffs, in certain circles. Some of Sorenson's colleagues may write him off as naive, maybe even a little daft. But he couldn't be more serious and determined. And he thinks many of his colleagues are ready to hear what he has to say.

"Lawyers need a defender," Sorenson proclaims, as he sits in a State Bar conference room one spring morning. He's driven down from Ripon to Madison, as he's done countless times in recent months, to lay the groundwork for assuming the president's post on July 1. Later today he'll walk up to the Capitol to speak at the admissions ceremony for several dozen new Wisconsin Bar members.

"Lawyers are being beaten," he continues, "beaten by themselves. The desire to build the bottom line has gotten so all-encompassing that somebody has to stand up and say, 'Enough's enough.' Let's get off the myth; this isn't 'L.A. Law.' We don't have to be the richest profession. We have a purpose in life, and that's to help people. What's destroying the profession is not the desire to help people, but to make money."

You can be sure Sorenson will weave that philosophy into his admissions ceremony speech. He's also made it the basis for one of two key projects he hopes to accomplish during his term in office. Think of it as taking "an inner look at the Bar," he explains. "We're going to look at how the Bar can help its members, how we can make the practice of law more enjoyable, more rewarding."

The other of Sorenson's main missions during his presidency will be what he's dubbed "Project Vision," an effort to bring long-range strategic planning to the Bar. It will not be a top-down process, Sorenson emphasizes. "The way I've orchestrated this, it's grassroots strategic planning," he says. "Rather than the Board of Governors meeting on a weekend retreat and coming back with a plan for the Bar, what I'm asking is that every section, division, committee and ancillary group in the Bar do its own strategic plan. Then we'll take those plans, move them up to the task force level, and find out where the continuities are, where the discrepancies are. By the end of the year we'll go to the Board of Governors and say, 'Here is a distilled plan of all the Bar's constituencies.'"

That kind of grassroots approach to getting things done stems largely from Sorenson's background. Growing up in Chippewa Falls, he was the son of the executive director of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, which "had a lot of impact on me," he says. "Growing up with that liberal involvement, the people's movement, was part of my life. That and the church were my biggest influences."

As a Farmers Union youth, he became active in oratory and later debate in high school - the first seeds, perhaps, for a future law career. At Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, he earned degrees in business administration and political science, plus he was news director for the college radio station and news editor for the campus newspaper. In the latter capacity, he got to know the city newspapers' editor, who one day stopped by to tell Sorenson he was heading for Canada to canoe down a river for five months. He handed Sorenson the keys to the newspaper office. "I haven't told the publisher yet that I'm leaving," he told the young Sorenson. "Stop and see him."

Sorenson did. Not having many options under the circumstances, the publisher hired him as the new editor, while he was still a college student. The newspaper company published two dailies, one with a Republican bent, the other Democrat, so Sorenson got to exercise his skills as a former debater - and future lawyer. "What I loved," he recalls, "was that one day I'd write a liberal editorial, and then the next day a conservative one."

After graduation he worked as an admissions counselor for Luther College for two years. When the time came to move on, he looked at three options: journalism graduate school at UW-Milwaukee, an MBA program at UW-Whitewater or Marquette Law School. He was accepted at the first two, but the summer dragged on and he'd still not heard a word from Marquette.

He mentioned this to a fellow counselor at Badger Boys State (where Sorenson has now worked as a counselor for 23 years), who also happened to be Marquette's financial aid director. When he got back to his office, the director learned Marquette had lost Sorenson's application. "They would have denied me admission eventually," Sorenson says, "but he told them that wasn't acceptable. He brought me another application to fill out, and within a week I was admitted to Marquette. I think that's why I went to law school. This man had gone out of his way to help me get in."

Finishing law school in 1977 brought a move to Ripon, where Sorenson's wife was an admissions counselor at Ripon College. He went to work with a local sole practitioner, only to find out a few months later that his boss was moving across the state. He offered to sell Sorenson his law firm, a daunting prospect at first to a rookie lawyer - until someone laid a challenge at his feet. Another local attorney told Sorenson he'd never make it on his own, and he'd better leave town with his boss. That's all Sorenson needed to hear. "I bought the office," he says, "started running the practice by myself, and within six months I hired an associate."

Over the next 20 years, Sorenson built his firm to five lawyers, with two more offices in Berlin and Brandon. But then, he notes, "the story takes an interesting twist: I was elected president of the Bar." Because he's perceived as the firm's rainmaker, his partner and one associate have decided to move on. His five-person firm will shrink to three by the time he's sworn into office, and another associate has indicated a desire to leave by September. This could leave just two; one of those two will, of course, be Sorenson himself, who will be dedicating a sizable chunk of time to his duties as Bar president. To make matters worse, attorneys from other firms have already picked off four of his top seven clients by persuading them Sorenson won't have time for them anymore. He's not hiding the fact that it's shaping up to be a tough year for his practice.

"It's been one blow after another," he says. "You look at this and wonder why you're doing this to yourself. I'm beginning to feel that way as I drive down here (to Madison) some mornings. How am I going to make my mortgage payments on our house?

"But then I think, it doesn't really matter. I can start over. We can sell the house; it's just a piece of wood. How many times are you given the chance to serve 19,000 professional colleagues?"

Such comments seem to indicate that Sorenson walks his talk when he says lawyers need to cast off their obsession with the bottom line. And that lawyers need, first and foremost, to enjoy being lawyers. How does he envision furthering that message this coming year?

"First," he says, "we have to figure out what the problems are. We have to reach out to lawyers where they are, in their offices, their local bar associations. I told the Bar staff that during my presidency they'd better get new cars and new shoes, because they're going out. They're not staying in this building."

After identifying what lawyers see as impediments to enjoying their work, Sorenson sees the next step as education. For instance, lawyers might help other lawyers pinpoint the inefficiencies in their practices that drain time, energy and, ultimately, money. Educational programs could be designed specifically for senior lawyers, who need to stay up to speed on trends in their area of law but don't necessarily benefit from the same type of training given to younger lawyers. "We have a Young Lawyers Division," Sorenson notes, "but we don't have a senior lawyers division. We need to reach out to them, too."

He'd like to launch a volunteer program to help troubled lawyers climb out of addiction problems, such as drinking and gambling, while also helping them keep their practices intact. Another of his ideas is to turn the Bar's mid-winter convention into a "well lawyer" conference, focusing on what lawyers can do to be healthier and happier.

"We need," Sorenson sums up, "to help lawyers look at themselves. And the biggest thing we need to tell them is to not be afraid - of lawsuits, bankruptcy, the Board of Professional Responsibility, all the goblins in the lawyer's portfolio. We can do that with education, with one-on-one programs or self-help programs or conventions featuring wellness."

Some might argue that all this adds up to too much inner focus. Sorenson doesn't think so. "You'll hear less this year about delivering legal services to the poor," he says, "and a lot more about making happy lawyers. Because lawyers will deliver services to the poor or the middle class - if they're happy in their jobs."

As Sorenson is alluding to here, different Bar presidents do set different priorities during their tenures. While that brings in a fresh approach each year, it also breeds a lack of continuity. That's where Sorenson's "Project Vision" comes in. "One of the problems of our organization," he says, "is that it's start and stop, start and stop. Hopefully strategic planning [Project Vision] will do away with that. The concept I'm advocating is that we do three-year to five-year plans to give us a vision of where the Bar is going." If the plan is something people buy into - which is why Sorenson is so adamant about using a bottom-up process to create it - then he believes the plan will live on, no matter who's at the Bar's helm.

"Each president can ask, 'How can I tweak this plan for my year?'" he points out. "'How can I take one aspect of this plan and expand it during my year, while the other aspects of the plan continue to operate?' And yet you keep the same vision: to provide service to the public, to improve the administration of justice, to facilitate our members having an enjoyable, rewarding experience. If those are our major visions, they can expand and contract year to year. But as long as the vision continues, we keep moving toward those goals and objectives."

"It will be an advantage for any president," he adds, "to look at that plan and say, 'Where can I take my strengths?' My strength is as a country lawyer. I come from the grass roots. That's what I bring to this organization."

Wisconsin Lawyer