Creating Change Through Law, Firefighting, and Community Service With Tom Lubnau
Tom Lubnau is the Owner of Lubnau Law Office, a Wyoming firm offering a spectrum of comprehensive legal services. Tom has practiced in almost every area of the law over his career, representing Fortune 500 companies as well as his neighbors. With over 35 years of legal experience, he focuses on health and hospital law but also engages in personal injury cases and business and estate planning, among others. He has been recognized for his contributions to his community, including his service as a state legislator and volunteer firefighter. Tom was also honored as National Fire Service Training Innovator of the Year for his contributions to firefighter safety.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [01:49] Tom Lubnau talks about why he decided to pursue a career in law
- [02:53] Cultural differences in legal practices across states
- [05:27] How mastering emotional and factual storytelling helps win over juries
- [06:22] Tom’s experience joining his father’s firm and leading it through challenges
- [09:49] The story behind Tom’s firefighting journey — and innovations in resource management
- [13:44] The importance of estate planning to prevent family disputes
- [21:00] Tom’s advice for young attorneys entering the legal profession
In this episode…
What drives someone to make a lasting impact in their community? Whether it’s through the courtroom, on the frontlines as a firefighter, or simply lending a hand to neighbors in need, true service often transcends job titles. How can one balance these roles and still find time to give back?
According to Tom Lubnau, a respected attorney and dedicated community leader, the key lies in staying focused on helping people solve problems. He emphasizes that whether it’s advocating for a client or innovating firefighter safety, success comes from understanding the needs and emotions of others. By blending his legal expertise with his passion for service, Tom has made a lasting impact in Wyoming, creating change that improves lives and strengthens the community.
In this episode of 15 Minutes, host Chad Franzen sits down with Tom Lubnau, Owner of Lubnau Law Office, to discuss how he’s built a career serving his community through his knowledge of the law and firefighting. Tom shares his experiences innovating firefighter training, his focus on estate planning, and his legislative work to solve real-world problems. He also offers advice for young attorneys on how to strike a balance between serving others and navigating the demands of a challenging profession.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
- Gladiator Law Marketing
- Tom Lubnau on LinkedIn
- Lubnau Law Office
- Crew Resource Management for the Fire Service by Randy Okray and Thomas Lubnau II
- American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys
Quotable Moments
- “I wanted to come back where I could represent my friends and neighbors.”
- “Litigation is a sport for younger people. It’s just so emotionally and physically taxing for an old guy like me.”
- “Understanding that about 70% of us make decisions based on emotions, and 30% based on facts.”
- “The law is a profession that you take home with you, and you can never get away with it unless you consciously decide to.”
- “If you’re confident in yourself and you really have a desire to help people, it’s a wonderful career.”
Action Steps
- Embrace community engagement: Participating in community roles can enhance leadership skills by fostering a sense of responsibility and connection with others.
- Set personal boundaries: Learning to set boundaries, especially when working with family, teaches leaders to manage personal and professional relationships effectively.
- Develop emotional intelligence: A leader who connects emotionally and factually with their team can motivate and guide them more effectively.
- Pursue continuous education: Staying updated with industry-specific education can help leaders make informed decisions and stay ahead of challenges.
- Innovate by adopting cross-disciplinary approaches: Leaders should explore and apply strategies from different fields to adapt to challenges in their own field.
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Gladiator Law Marketing, where we deliver tailor-made services to help you accomplish your objectives and maximize your growth potential.
To have a successful marketing campaign and make sure you’re getting the best ROI, your firm needs to have a better website and better content. At Gladiator Law Marketing, we use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decades of experience to outperform the competition.
To learn more, go to gladiatorlawmarketing.com or schedule a free marketing consultation. You can also send Adam an email.
Episode Transcript
Intro 00:01
You’re listening to 15 Minutes, where we feature community leaders sharing what the rest of us should know, but likely don’t.
Chad Franzen 00:13
Hi, Chad Franzen here, one of the hosts of Share Your Voice, where we talk with top notch law firms and lawyers about what it takes to grow a successful law practice. This episode is brought to you by Gladiator Law Marketing, delivering tailor made services to help you accomplish your objectives and maximize your growth potential. To have a successful marketing campaign and make sure you’re getting the best ROI, your firm needs to have a better website and better content. Gladiator Law Marketing uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decades of experience to outperform the competition. To learn more, go to gladiatorlawmarketing.com where you can schedule a free marketing consultation. My guest today is Tom Lubnau, Owner of Lubnau Law Office with locations in Gillette and Cheyenne, Wyoming. A true Wyoming native. Tom was born in Laramie and grew up in Gillette, where he now raises his own family with his wife, Rita. After graduating from the University of Wyoming with both his undergraduate and law degrees, Tom joined his father’s successful law firm and has since built an impressive legal career spanning over 35 years. Beyond his thriving practice focusing on health and hospital law, personal injury, business matters and more, Tom has dedicated himself to serving his community through roles like volunteer, firefighter, bar leadership, and state legislator. His numerous accolades, published works, and representative cases showcase his expertise, commitment to excellence, and deep Wyoming roots. Hey, Tom, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?
Tom Lubnau 01:34
Well, thanks for having me. I sure appreciate you. I appreciate the nice introduction.
Chad Franzen 01:39
Yeah, it’s great to have you. Great to have you. Thanks so much. Hey, tell me, how and when did you know that you wanted to become an attorney? I know your father was one. Or is one.
Tom Lubnau 01:49
It was sort of a function of not having anywhere to go. I was I had a degree in finance from the University of Wyoming and got offered a job for $13,500 a year at a bank and I said, well, for heaven’s sakes, I can go to work in a coal mine for $60,000 a year. And the bank officer said, well, how do I get that job? I’m the one who’d offered me the job. So, and not finding any jobs to my liking out of college, I decided to go to law school. Had offers with when I clerked with a big firm in Las Vegas, and then had offers with big firms and with my father in Gillette, and chose to come with my father to a small town law firm. The Las Vegas experience soured me on the big city practice of law. And so I wanted to come back where I could represent my friends and neighbors.
Chad Franzen 02:46
Would you say that you learned more from that experience? Would you say you learned more about what to do or what not to do, or both?
Tom Lubnau 02:53
It was just a culture thing. It wasn’t a to do or not to do thing. The California Nevada practice of law is very, very aggressive. They say Wyoming’s a small town with really, really long streets. You can do a sort of cheap, shoddy legal things to lawyers on the other side, knowing that you may never see them again in the big cities. In Wyoming, you can’t do that because you have to work for somebody with other people for your entire careers. And so it’s a more civil kind of nature. I didn’t like the adversarial 24 seven type of practice. It’s a tough business anyway, because half of us lose all the time when we litigate. And so. With a tough business you just don’t want. I just didn’t want to make it tougher. And since that early on. And found that to be true.
Chad Franzen 04:01
How did you enjoy law school at the University of Wyoming?
Tom Lubnau 04:07
I enjoyed it, it was a good school. Back then, the University of Wyoming was known for training great litigation attorneys, and there’s a generation of very talented trial attorneys that came out of the University of Wyoming during that period of time. The university has evolved a little bit into something else. It isn’t as much a trial school as it was back in the day. But learned learned some very useful skills that I’ve been using the rest of my life.
Chad Franzen 04:43
Would you consider litigation to be one of your strengths?
Tom Lubnau 04:48
Litigation is a sport for younger people. Well, when I was younger, it was one of my strengths. and I still do it. I just am very selective about the litigation cases I take. Because it’s just so emotionally and physically taxing for an old guy like me. I’ve got young partners that litigate and do a good job and and they just handle those kind of cases for the firm.
Chad Franzen 05:16
What would you say, based on your experience is like a a key to success, especially with connecting to connecting with a jury.
Tom Lubnau 05:27
Just understanding emotions, understanding that about 70% of us make decisions based on emotions, and 30% of us make decisions based on facts. And so to connect with the jury, you’ve got to connect both emotionally and factually. And so there’s an ethos component that you just have to master. Gerry Spence was the absolute master of ethos. I mean, and my father and Spence and a few other. My father was in the generation with Spence at all. And so before Spence was a famous trial attorney, he was a guy that I would see at University of Wyoming football games, smoking cigarettes and drinking with my dad. So. Wow.
Chad Franzen 06:18
How did it feel to to join your father’s firm after graduating then?
Tom Lubnau 06:22
It was interesting. It was. It was sort of a a an a an evolution. My father had two partners when he hired me. And by December of the year that I’d been hired, it was just my father in law, my father and I, which I never intended it to be. I wanted to work with other people other than my father. I found it to be sort of an evolution. My father was a great teacher and I learned a lot from him. I also learned that you have to set boundaries with your family, and that it’s an evolving role working with your family.
Chad Franzen 07:05
Did you have you just continued to work at that at that firm, or did you start your own firm?
Tom Lubnau 07:11
Well, my father passed away in 1990. So six years out of after I was out of law school, my father passed away. And so I took over the firm. It was sort of a frightening experience. One of the old sage attorneys came up to me and I said, look, I don’t know if I’m going to make this. I think I’m going to go bankrupt. And he said, you have work to do today. And I said, yeah. And he said, you have work to do tomorrow. I said, yeah. He said, work on the stuff you have to do today. And then a month later he came up and he said. Did you get that work done that you had to do today? I said, yeah. He said, have said, have you gotten to the work you had to do tomorrow? And I said, not yet. So and that was sort of a boost to morale. Sure.
Chad Franzen 08:00
What what did you learn from kind of taking over? You know, a lot of attorneys I talked to say they learn, you know, they know everything about law. But then when it comes to like, running a business, there was a lot of kind of big eye openers. Was there anything like that for you?
Tom Lubnau 08:16
No. I’ve kind of been running the business with with my father, and it was back in the days of 13 column pads, and we used to do manual time tickets and then file them and then type the statements out manually. And so evolving into that technology was probably the biggest development and embracing technology. And when I when I started, not everybody had fax machines and you could think about things, and things moved a lot slower and a lot more deliberately and, and a lot less nonsense paper that, that we have now.
Chad Franzen 09:02
So you, you know, you have a lot of you’ve done a lot of interesting things in your career, both regarding, you know, your, your legal services and your legal experience and just your personal hobbies. I know painting, painting, scenery of Wyoming. I’ve been to Wyoming several times. It’s beautiful state. How does that kind of enrich your life?
Tom Lubnau 09:21
Well, it it allows me to just get away and not think about anything law related. The law is a profession that you take home with you, and you can never get away with it unless you consciously decide to get away from it. And painting allows me to do that.
Chad Franzen 09:42
And then you’ve also served on the for the For the county fire department for 21 years. What motivated you to do that?
Tom Lubnau 09:49
Well, I had a house fire and did about $40,000 damage to the structure and about $7.50 to the contents. And I thought, well, if I can do that for somebody else, that’s a pretty impressive thing. And so just giving back to something that people gave to me.
Chad Franzen 10:12
And at one point, you were named National Fire Service Training Innovator of the year. What inspired you to do that and what can you explain what that is?
Tom Lubnau 10:20
Well, I got hurt in the fire in 1999. And I was laying in the hospital, and my wife came into the hospital and said, what were you trying to do, save a couch? And if you look at the pictures, the only thing in that room worth saving was a couch when the roof collapsed on me. And it hurt a lot. And that was right about the same time as the reports were coming out on the Storm King Mountain fire in Colorado. And. There was a guy by the name of Ted Putnam, and he wouldn’t sign the official report at Storm King Mountain. And he said, look, we keep blaming people and we don’t ever get to the root causes of firefighter injuries. And so we need to look at the human factors involved in our decision making. And why do we make stupid decisions? And I had made a stupid decision and I had gotten hurt. And so a friend of mine and I started researching aviation psychology because the aviation industry had figured out at the end of the 1970s and early 80s that their planes were mechanically reliable, but they were still crashing. And so they decided to research human factors. And there’s an amazing body of science on human factors in the aviation industry called crew resource management. And it’s into maybe its third generation now. And if you hear Sully Sullenberger talk, or the guy who took the airplane into Sioux City, they saluted crew resource management as the tool that allowed them to make those really catastrophic incidents survivable. And so my buddy and I researched it, wrote a book on it, and then trained for a while in the National Fire Service. Just recently, a firefighter in Japan has found the concept taking our book and rewritten his own book and his training hundreds of thousands of Japanese firefighters on the same topic. So it’s pretty exciting.
Chad Franzen 12:49
Yeah. That’s awesome.
Tom Lubnau 12:51
And so as a result of that research of taking a completely different paradigm and applying it to the fire service, my friend Randy and I got the award for the Fire Service Innovator of the year in 2005.
Chad Franzen 13:10
Nice. Very nice. That’s great.
Tom Lubnau 13:12
Probably is a lot of audacity in my on my part and Randy’s part, because neither one of us had training in any official way, in any psychological paradigm. But we did a lot of research and I think put together a pretty good product.
Chad Franzen 13:28
Yeah, absolutely. That’s that’s great. In terms of your your legal practice, you know, you’ve you’ve got experience in kind of a number of areas. What has kind of emerged as your top, you know, area of law. Your favorite area to practice in?
Tom Lubnau 13:44
Well, we’re doing a lot of estate planning now, and I like that because we’re preemptively helping people to avoid problems for their families later on down the road. And I think that that’s the, you know, there’s a lot of authors that say that lawyers provide no valuable service, that they’re a suck on the economy. That’s wrong. People come to lawyers because they have problems so big that they can’t solve them themselves. And our economic function is to help people solve those problems. Well, if we can prevent the problems, that’s an even better thing. And so we’ve evolved into a lot of estate planning. We also represent a lot of government entities. And then just because they’ve been around for 40 years, they just have a lot of friends and neighbors that I help with the things that happen in their lives as well.
Chad Franzen 14:42
Do you have like kind of a system or a specific approach to like a process that you use for estate planning?
Tom Lubnau 14:49
Yeah, we’re members of the American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys and follow their model. It requires us in Wyoming to have continuing to meet your continuing legal education requirements. You have to have about 15. You have to have 15 hours of continuing legal education and two hours of ethics a year with the Academy. It’s 36 hours of legal education in estate planning field. So it’s it’s a pretty high level commitment, but we’re finding that we’re helping a lot of people solve a lot of problems.
Chad Franzen 15:26
You’ve also been a representative. You spent ten years representing Campbell County in the Wyoming House, including as majority leader and speaker. What did you enjoy most about that?
Tom Lubnau 15:38
Same thing. Helping people. Helping people solve problems. Probably the the bill that I’m most known for is the 80 mile an hour speed limit in Wyoming. Although there are lots of really, really complicated and difficult things that are hard to explain that I accomplished, including working with a friend I went to high school with who was a Democratic senator in developing the nationwide paradigm for carbon sequestration.
Chad Franzen 16:12
So what was that? Going going back to the 80 mile per hour speed limit. What what was your argument for it? I mean, I, I certainly enjoyed it when I lived there. What what was your argument for it? And how did you overcome opposition.
Tom Lubnau 16:26
Well, it, it they had it in Texas and Utah and they’d done studies. And so I got those studies and what they found was that on those stretches of road that were 80 miles an hour, there were fewer accidents than there were when it was 75 or 70. And so that’s a pretty persuading factor. Even the Wyoming Highway Patrol couldn’t argue with that. And it’s only on certain stretches of road that are statistically safe that the speed limit is 80 miles an hour, so you don’t get to go 80 miles an hour everywhere. Now, two years after I was in the legislature on two lane roads, they passed the 70 mile an hour speed limit. And that’s 70 miles everywhere for two lane roads on the interstates. It’s 80 miles an hour, and only in those places where it’s safe to do that.
Chad Franzen 17:20
Do you have an explanation as to why it why there are less. You know, statistics indicate there are less accidents at higher speeds, you know, with a higher speed limit.
Tom Lubnau 17:31
Because people are paying attention more is, you know, and it’s been 12 years since I ran those bills. But I can say to you, to the studies, I guess, if I dug for a long time, but that was the theory behind it, was that the traveling distance or the traveling time was shorter and people were more alert because they were traveling faster.
Chad Franzen 17:58
You all have also published a number of works. Which one has the most significance to you or has had the most significance in general, would you say?
Tom Lubnau 18:07
I think the book on firefighting, probably because it saved some lives. Legally, I’ve written just a well, a lot of articles, most of them healthcare related, to help people avoid pitfalls of, for example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act has a lot of privacy requirements, but it also has security requirements. And there are entities that can fall afoul of not maintaining the security and get themselves in trouble. So that was a nice article. And then I’ve written an article on physician recruitment that just talked about if somebody has a personality defect and you think you can fix it, you really can’t.
Chad Franzen 19:00
Interesting. Hey, in terms of the cases that you’ve you’ve been a part of, is there one that maybe stands out among the others as like a particularly memorable experience?
Tom Lubnau 19:13
You know, all of the ones where I help people and they all fall into the same category. Those are the ones that I really, really like. There’s one where a nice lady was hurt in a car accident and was unable to work for the rest of her life because she had some pretty severe lower leg injuries and getting her enough money to live. Was one another one. A friend of mine fell over in a hotel and got a traumatic brain injury, and being able to take care of his wife and make sure that she had a place to live because she’d lost everything caring for him before he died. And so she was destitute and lost all of her property, caring for him and being able to help her get a place to live and be secure for the rest of her life. And that’s important as well.
Chad Franzen 20:13
Well that’s great. I have one more question for you, but just tell me how people can find out more about the alumni law office.
Tom Lubnau 20:22
Just go to www.lubnaulaw.com. That’s our website. Site and everything that everything that you know about me and everything I know about me is on that website as well.
Chad Franzen 20:37
Last question for you. So let’s say, you know, somebody, a young person, maybe a recent University of Wyoming grad came to you and said, you know, I’m, I’m I think becoming an attorney is my thing. You know, you have over 30 years of experience. What what could you tell them that they that you’ve learned long since going to law school, that they would never have known unless they’ve walked in your shoes?
Tom Lubnau 21:00
This is a really, really hard job. Being a firefighter is a really, really easy job. And one of the closely guarded secrets of the fire service is that no matter what you do, the fire eventually goes out. And then people bring you cookies the next day. As a lawyer, it’s very, very difficult. There’s somebody always on the other side, trying to point out all your mistakes, and you might follow the rabbit completely out of the hat, and your client will be sad that they have to pay you for that because they thought the rabbit should have come out. Come out of the hat anyway. So you need to be if you need the kind of positive stroke that firefighting gives you, don’t be a lawyer. But if you’re confident in yourself and you really have a desire to help people, it’s a wonderful career.
Chad Franzen 22:03
Okay. That’s great stuff. Very interesting. Hey, Tom, it’s been great to talk to you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and all of your insights. Thank you.
Tom Lubnau 22:10
All right. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your time too.
Chad Franzen 22:13
So long everybody.
Outro 22:14
Thanks for listening to 15 Minutes. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll see you next time.
