Mitchell on Law
Spring 2007WILLIAM MITCHELL COLLEGE OF LAW MAGAZINE SAINT PAUL | MINNESOTA
Ask people about Attorney General Lori Swanson ’95, and you’ll hear descriptions like brilliant, hard working, capable, accomplished, tough. In fact, she seemingly has just one limitation: the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day.
In conversation, she is cordial and straightforward but rushed, as you might expect, considering that the attorney general’s office receives 500 to 700 calls and about 100 letters daily. Thousands of complaints are mediated, investigated, or prosecuted by the office every year.
“The hardest part of my job is prosecutorial discretion,” said Swanson. “I want to be personally engaged, but I can’t overpromise — I’ve got to be realistic.”
Swanson was appointed deputy attorney general in 1999 by her predecessor, Mike Hatch, and advanced to solicitor general in 2003. As deputy attorney general, Swanson made the attorney general’s office more accessible to the public by dumping the automated answering system so that incoming calls were taken by real people — multilingual consumer advocates, no less. She also added a toll-free number listed in phone books throughout the state, having discovered that the attorney general’s office wasn’t included in directories outside the metro area. “People should know that if they are harmed, the attorney general’s office will listen and try to help,” she said. “And if we can’t, we’ll try to direct them to someone who can.”
Hatch credits her with being a driving force during his tenure, instrumental in a suit against U.S. Bancorp for selling private consumer information to telemarketers and an investigation of major health care organizations that revealed exorbitant profits and lavish perks. She was also recruited to join the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Advisory Council, after members were impressed with a speech she made lambasting the Office of the Controller of Currency for failing to protect depositors. The board named her its chair in 2006.
Swanson’s interest in public service started in childhood. “I feel passionate about standing up for people,” she said. While still in high school, she decided to act on that instinct by becoming a lawyer. Along the way, she earned a journalism and political science degree, graduating with distinction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Swanson worked full time while attending William Mitchell at night. Her day job would have been awfully hard to give up: clerking for the Minneapolis law firm Hatch, Eiden & Pihlstrom, writing briefs for major insurance claim cases before she’d even earned her J.D.
Just after Swanson graduated magna cum laude from law school, Hatch gave her a case involving insurance coverage of bone marrow transplant as a cancer treatment. The firm had built a reputation for winning such cases on behalf of breast cancer patients, but this patient had a rare disease without legal precedent for coverage, and the case was considered “unwinnable.” Swanson won.
It’s not easy to impress Mike Hatch, but that was one of many occasions when Swanson did. “It was a tragic, life-and-death case. She was phenomenal,” he said.
Since then, Hatch has had plenty of opportunity to see Swanson at work. “Lori reads the law like a laser, and she’s the hardest working person I ever met,” he said. Hatch also cited their shared philosophy of looking out for the average person, and taking a tough stance when it’s needed.
Swanson has said many times that a successful attorney general has to be a good lawyer. Those who have worked with her think she’s more than qualified. “A lot of attorney generals are politicians,” said Hatch, who added he’s probably in that category himself, after years in public office. “Lori is a lawyer’s lawyer.”