Power of Attorney

As the state’s chief legal counsel, Lori Swanson has tangled with corporate giants and targeted businesses that prey on the elderly. She has pushed for legislation that helps vets and disadvantaged kids, and she has declared herself a champion of “everyday people.” So why do so many lawyers think she’s destroying the Office of the Attorney General?

Photo by David Brinley (Illustration)

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On January 2, 2007, Lori Swanson was sworn in as Minnesota’s 29th attorney general, becoming the state’s most powerful lawyer. Standing before a small crowd gathered under the dome of the capitol in St. Paul, she took the oath of office from outgoing attorney general Mike Hatch and former attorney general and federal judge Miles Lord. She stepped behind a podium bearing the official seal of the State of Minnesota and delivered an address that quoted Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., and Clarence Darrow, pledging to use her muscle to champion the causes of mentally ill kids, veterans returning from war, and families victimized by predatory lenders. “My mission is for the attorney general’s office to fight for the rights of everyday people, and especially those without a voice,” she proclaimed.

Swanson moved quickly to fulfill such promises. Her first week in office, she filed suit against Allianz Life, charging the Minnesota-based insurance giant had sold senior citizens long-term annuities that often tied up their money beyond their life expectancies. She took action against other insurers, too, and the resulting settlements made more than 13,000 seniors eligible for refunds totaling approximately $700 million.

In 2007, Swanson successfully pushed lawmakers to pass a bill that protects consumers from unscrupulous lenders, requiring that a borrower’s ability to repay a loan be verified. She also sought passage of legislation that would allow members of the armed services to cancel cell-phone and satellite-TV contracts when called to duty and would aid them in finishing their college education when they returned from deployment. In the fall of 2007, she sued Sprint Nextel Corporation, alleging that the company extended cell-phone contracts without customer consent when people made small changes in their plans. (Sprint denied the charges but altered its practices.)

Such accomplishments deserve praise, say Swanson’s supporters. “The attorney general can do a lot of things for people that they can’t do for themselves,” says Warren Spannaus, who served as attorney general from 1971 to 1983. “Lori Swanson is doing a good job.”

But others believe Swanson’s accomplishments have come at significant cost to office morale. “She’s a pseudo populist,” says Susan Damon, who joined the office in 1991 and served an assistant attorney general in the health-licensing division until last June. “If she were a populist, she would empower her own staff instead of firing them, involuntarily transferring them, muzzling them, and retaliating against them.” Damon says she quit because she could no longer tolerate administrative practices she describes as “dishonest, unethical, and not in the public’s best interest.”

Damon is one of approximately 60 lawyers who have left the attorney general’s office since Swanson took charge. (The office employs more than 150 attorneys, including a management team of Swanson, a solicitor general, and four to five deputies.) The numbers have attracted notice at the capitol and elsewhere, but Swanson says such turnover is simply a changing-of-the guard, typical of any political transition. Others, however, worry the upheaval may have far-reaching and damaging effects, adversely impacting the very “everyday people” that Swanson once pledged she’d fight for.

Lori Swanson extends a hand as a visitor enters a sunny conference room on the 14th floor of the Bremer Tower in downtown St. Paul. (The attorney general’s personal office is at the capitol, but much of her staff is housed here.) Slender and standing roughly five-and-a-half feet tall, with short brown hair and sharp brown eyes, she looks younger than her 42 years. She jumps into a spontaneous description of that morning’s work, investigating a possible suit against health-insurance companies for improper use of patient data.

Swanson eventually sits and answers questions about herself—a little awkwardly. She loves taking walks with her 11-year-old golden retriever, Bailey, but when the weather is bad, she works out on the elliptical trainer in the basement of the Eagan home she shares with her husband, Gary Swanson, an insurance broker. She enjoys movies like Michael Moore’s Sicko and reads four newspapers daily (the Pioneer Press, Star Tribune, New York Times, and USA Today). On weekends, she enjoys shooting trap with her ’53 shotgun, and she devours books, mostly legal thrillers and books about American history. Occasionally, she brings homemade baked goods to work for her staff. “I make a really good blueberry bread,” she says with pride.

But many in the attorney general’s office don’t know such personal details. They describe their boss as introverted and private. She’s not one to chat in the halls or to crack jokes in meetings. Her closed-door management style makes her a stranger to most of her staff.

What the staff does know is her resumé. They know she grew up Lori Quinn in suburban Milwaukee, the youngest of three girls raised by a mechanical engineer and a homemaker. They know that she completed a double major at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in political science and journalism in 1989. That she graduated magna cum laude from William Mitchell College of Law in 1995. That her first job out of college was as an analyst for the Minnesota Department of Commerce, where Mike Hatch was commissioner. They also know her career path has closely followed his: She clerked at Hatch’s law firm while attending William Mitchell, then became a staff attorney. When Hatch became Minnesota’s attorney general in 1999, she worked for him as deputy attorney general and, later, as solicitor general. They know that Hatch remains her staunchest supporter, having hosted several fundraisers for her at his Burnsville home.

They also know Swanson is smart and diligent, famous for her 14-hour workdays. “She has one of the best legal minds I have worked with,” says Karen Olson, the deputy attorney general in Swanson’s office. “She has a passion that’s unstoppable.” Others tout her “ability to think on several planes.” They call her “phenomenally bright” and a “good lawyer.” Many want to see her succeed as the state’s first female attorney general.

Nonetheless, many employees say Swanson’s talents have been overshadowed by her management style. “She wants to do good work,” says one former assistant attorney general, who declined to speak on the record for fear of retribution. “But she has treated lots of people horribly.”

The trouble began almost immediately after Swanson took office. On the very day that she was sworn in as attorney general, Swanson announced that she had made her first official hire: Her old boss, Mike Hatch, who had failed in his bid to become governor, would oversee all complex litigation handled by the office. Attorneys in the powerful consumer-enforcement division were told that all matters must go through him. The result was confusion and chaos: Who was really in charge?

What’s more, Hatch’s return to the office had significant impact on staff morale. As attorney general from 1999 through 2006, the often-prickly Hatch had a reputation for being short-tempered and vengeful—getting even with anyone who crossed him. He fired nearly 50 attorneys in his first few months on the job, and an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty hung over the office, staffers say. When Swanson was elected to succeed him in November 2007, many staffers were skeptical that the mood in the office would change. With Hatch’s hiring, the pall over the office grew darker. (Hatch did not respond to Minnesota Monthly’s requests for an interview.)

Longtime staffers began to make their exit. In April 2007, Minnesota Lawyer blog editor Mark Cohen questioned why the media had barely noted the departures of two respected deputy attorneys general from Swanson’s office, Kris Eiden and Mike Vanselow. The observation touched off a bevy of anonymous website posts blasting the attorney general. In response, some former staffers believe, Swanson initiated an office campaign with several of her top lieutenants, including Hatch, soliciting favorable comments from staff attorneys to be posted on the Minnesota Lawyer blog. Some attorneys, like Chuck Roehrdanz and Peter Krieser, enthusiastically blogged their support for Swanson. Others did so begrudgingly, fearing the consequences of not complying with their superiors’ request. At least three, including Damon, flatly refused.

Additional information about the episode came to light last June when the Office of the Legislative Auditor issued a report about the matter. There were allegations that Hatch had gone so far as to ask one attorney in the office to sign his name to blog comments that Hatch himself had composed. The attorney said no, but Hatch posted the comments under the attorney’s name nonetheless. The attorney also testified that Hatch asked him to take vacation time retroactively to cover the time of the post so it would not appear to have been made on state time. The attorney refused and eventually quit, citing the incident as one reason for his departure.

Hatch resigned abruptly in May 2007. In his letter of resignation to Swanson, he wrote: “[I]t is apparent that changes I made during my administration are unfairly being attributed to you. It is not appropriate that you should become the target of complaints involving my administration…. Your administration has been fantastic.”

Some staffers saw Hatch’s comment as a reference to the high staff turnover. Others speculated that Hatch feared his bogus blogging would become public and he wanted to resign before he was forced out.

Hatch’s influence wasn’t the only reason for the low morale.

Staffers noticed that Swanson seemed particularly keen on securing favorable media coverage for her initiatives, and she continued Hatch’s practice of staging press conferences to showcase lawsuits. (Such promotion had not been common under his predecessors, Hubert “Skip” Humphrey III and Warren Spannaus.)

Attorneys working on such cases say that once media attention wanes, however, so does Swanson’s. The lawsuits are often quietly dropped or settled. There’s a running joke among assistant attorneys general that once the press conference is over so is the case. “It’s clearly about political gain and press coverage for her—everything else is irrelevant,” says a former assistant attorney general who left shortly after Swanson took office but asked to speak anonymously for fear of retaliation. “You’d work up a case, then they’d tell you to drop it after the press coverage was over. You had talked to the victims, found a claim, but you couldn’t help them. The sole concern was getting favorable press coverage.”

When asked about such comments, Swanson does not respond directly. Instead, she criticizes attorneys who objected to the requirements of responding to citizen mail: “There are some attorneys who have, in the past, taken the position, ‘We’re too good for that. We don’t ever want to write a letter back to a citizen.’ I just fundamentally disagree with that.”

But several attorneys say they simply questioned the allocation of their time and resources. Responding to citizen mail was given priority above other duties that many attorneys saw as more important. Brad Delapena, a former assistant attorney general in the tax-litigation division who left the office in April 2007 because he was put off by Swanson’s management style, says: “If a lawyer is working on a $200 million case and is being told to write letters to people complaining about coupons misrepresenting the price of melons at Cub Foods, you begin to wonder if their time is being used wisely.”

Many attorneys also resented the way their letters were edited, as often as four times, going up four levels of management. They would be asked to redo the letters, inserting a comma or capitalizing Office. “The level of micromanaging on little things feels Big Brotherish and shows a lack of trust,” says Stephanie Morgan, an assistant attorney general who exited the office in the fall of 2007. “If you can’t trust me to write a boilerplate letter, how can you trust me to do complex lawsuits or other legal work?”

Shortly after Swanson was elected, some of her staff met to discuss forming a union. Frustrated with the administration of the office under Hatch, they hoped to put in place a system that would provide more job security—something that would prevent attorneys from being fired without “cause.” They contacted Council 5 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a public-employees union that had endorsed Swanson during her campaign, and collected signatures on union cards from a majority of the assistant attorneys general. In May 2007, the union organizing committee asked to meet with Swanson, but the attorney general declined on the grounds that the state Public Employee Labor Relations Act does not apply to the attorney general’s office or its employees. “If she had met with us, it would’ve helped, but she missed an opportunity,” says Morgan, one of the union organizers. “I don’t understand why she’s fighting this so hard.”