Looking Back at the Republican Veep Candidate’s Short-Lived Legal Career

After Donald Trump announced his running mate on the Republican Presidential Ticket will be Indiana Governor Mike Pence — a former congressman, radio show host, and yes, practicing lawyer — Big Law Business naturally turned its attention to his days as a member of the bar.

In 1986, Pence graduated from Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, and found himself a home at a small law firm.

“His office was around the corner from mine,” said Brian Tuohy, now a name partner at the 15-lawyer firm known as Doninger Tuohy & Bailey. “He was a very polite, pleasant, nice gentleman. I think he’d just gotten married to Karen around that time.”

Tuohy said the firm probably had about six partners and four associates, and Pence only stayed for a couple years.

Another name partner Patricia Bailey said she was a young partner at the time, but her husband had attended law school with Pence, and may have helped lure Pence to the firm.

“Philosophically, the firm took the approach that you do a little bit of everything” as an associate, she said, adding the work would have included contract disputes and negotiations, real estate transactions and landlord-tenant disputes.

A 1994 profile of Pence in the Indianapolis Business Journal described him as a corporate law specialist, but Tuohy said he wouldn’t characterize his firm as a corporate law firm. Nearly all the clients are local to Indianapolis or the state, and many are small, or privately held businesses.

He added that it’s nothing like a Big Law firm, like a Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom.

“This is like the difference between Mars and Earth,” said Tuohy. “It really is. We’ve had some dealings with those people and they’re fine lawyers. But for them to do a real estate contract, they’ll have three or four lawyers look at it. We’ll just have one. The scale is completely different.”

In 1988, Pence departed the firm to pursue a career in politics, Bailey said. He lost his first two campaigns and may have practiced at his own firm or in another small firm briefly before starting his own radio show. But she said the details were not clear to her.

As the Wall Street Journal Law Blog reported on Thursday, Pence has forsworn his law school experience. In the 1994 Indianapolis Business Journal profile, he commented, “No one I know likes law school. It was a bad experience. I wouldn’t wish it on a dog I didn’t like.”

“That does sound like him,” said Tuohy. “You’re talking to a lawyer who didn’t particularly like law school. And I’m sort of suspicious of a lawyer who said they did. How could you like that experience unless you’re Chief Justice John Roberts ... or someone of that intellectual acuity?”

We reached out to a few professors emeritus from Indiana University’s law school, but none could remember having Pence in one of their classes. “Virtually all of the professors who taught here in 1986 have retired,” assistant dean Jonna Kane MacDougall wrote in an email.

As to whether Tuohy will support a Trump ticket now that Pence has signed on, he was silent on the question.

“I’ve played one of his golf courses and they’re fine golf courses, but I don’t really have an opinion about him as a candidate,” said Tuohy. “I do know that Mike would have spent some time thinking about it.”

Bailey and her husband Mark have kept in touch with Pence and his wife, and their son interned for him when he was a congressman, seven or eight years ago. She said she would vote for a Trump-Pence ticket.

She added, “I have a great deal of confidence in Mike.”