Also aggravating Ryan’s financial unease was the troubling reality that private retainers, as he sought to balance out his practice with independent clients, came straight from the hands of criminals, and his clients—especially the Derek Greens of the world—committed crimes precisely because they were poor. We wondered, often, where the money to pay Ryan for his legal services had circulated before dropping anchor in the rock bottom of our hands.
Dirty money was the mother’s milk that sustained Ulrich Law Office from early on. Ryan referred to the dirty money in slang, as in “bones,” “simoleons,” maybe “Benjamins” on a good day, all in lighthearted denial. The cash payments replenishing his empty wallet were laced with the sad and sordid stories of his defendants’ lives. If scientists can link thousands of micro-organisms on dollar bills to gastric ulcers, staph infections, and acne, the money we used to pay for diapers, breastfeeding bras, a lifetime supply of Dole fruit cups, winter boots and replacement mittens, school supplies, library fines, and out-of-pocket expenses at the pediatrician’s office could be linked to thefts, batteries, burglaries, heroin deals, and worse.
The origin of our money was an ongoing joke, like when a “dancer” paid Ryan three hundred dollars entirely in singles. Another time, on the eve of a preliminary hearing, a client charged with armed robbery delivered a three-thousand-dollar cash wad, rolled into the kind of greenback boutonniere one might find instructions for on Pinterest. Ryan tucked it into his shirt pocket and wore it to parent-teacher conferences. Afterward, when he purchased a few books at the Scholastic Book Fair, we joked about laundering our dirty banknotes, passing them into the PTO’s hands, cotton-blossom clean.
Many of Ryan’s clients “did not have a pot to piss in,” as he liked to say, and they paid for legal representation in excuses, bartering their services—housecleaning, painting, auto repairs. Some scofflaws sacrificed their most prized possessions, like an autographed Green Bay Packers helmet and a pair of two-carat diamond earrings, while others offered fresh produce, donuts, and handmade key chains as unsolicited trade-ins for discounts unheard of elsewhere in the legal community. Ryan wondered if he spent more time chasing clients for money than any doing real legal work, relying upon the most destitute people to make their payments. If only the wealthy committed these kinds of conspicuous crimes. Every deposit at our bank was a sacrilege, and I wondered, how much did we forgive the burglars, thieves, and addicts we came to know as a way to exonerate ourselves from the crimes that helped to finance our family as we teetered on the threshold of a middle-class existence?
Maybe we offered up forgiveness because the state didn’t. One of many ways Ryan justified his daily grind in criminal defense was to consider it a reformist effort. “In a courtroom, the only people less respected than criminal-defense attorneys,” Ryan said, “are my clients.” The district attorney’s office, on behalf of the state, sometimes sought higher penalties for crimes, without rhyme or reason, or to a degree that seemed malicious to Ryan and his clients. One of Ryan’s roles was to mitigate oftentimes disproportionate sentences. As a repeat player in the judicial game, he tried advocating for fairness, comparing sentences for defendants from diverse socioeconomic and racial groups accused of similar crimes. The system was neither class-blind nor color-blind. Once, a judge lost his temper, threw up his fists, and called the entire system racist. That day, by his own words, he gave Ryan’s black defendant “the white man’s deal.”
Ryan’s give-a-shit meter pointed to full in his first years. He was youthful, doused in freckles, still, sort of, a boy. “You my lawyer?” his clients asked, expecting the overweight, aged version of an attorney Ryan would later become. Calls to action for social and criminal justice vied with less exalted and more practical concerns for his energy and attention, often winning out. However, like so many undercompensated defense attorneys in Wisconsin, Ryan spent much of his brain power testing algorithms for family sustenance, desperate to earn a steady and reliable paycheck and to prevent our homelessness.
Before becoming a criminal-defense attorney, Ryan appeared regularly in Milwaukee County Small Claims Court suing uninsured motorists. He marveled at the picket fence separating paupers in the gallery from lawyers in the well, their newspapers and Victor Allen’s coffee sleeves murmuring secrets. Ryan could barely work magic of our funds, but thanks to his education, he flashed a courtroom VIP pass. How on earth, he wondered, could these defendants, on the wrong side of the bar, scrounge up enough scratch to pay? He found himself balancing the duties of his job to get as much money as possible for the insurance companies, his rich clients, while making sure poorer defendants might still provide for their families.
“I’d make a shitty businessman,” he said. He was more minister than attorney, and sadly but truly, his social awareness and bleeding-heart compassion were incompatible with the detached attitude he’d ultimately need to adopt in order to run Ulrich Law Office like a business instead of an outreach program.
Our beloved Badger State was no help. With limited funds to provide constitutionally guaranteed representation to poor defendants, Wisconsin paid its freelance attorneys erratically, anywhere from two weeks to several months after a case was completed. To make matters worse, the biennial allotment to the State Public Defender’s Assigned Counsel Division experienced regular shortfalls. One year, when he billed the state in January,
