Q&A with G. Michael Schopmeyer of Kahn, Dees, Donovan & Kahn LLP
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowWith more than 40 years of experience, G. Michael Schopmeyer has spent his entire career as a business attorney at Kahn, Dees, Donovan & Kahn LLP. The 2022 and 2023 Indiana 250 honoree was a founding member of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana and the Evansville Regional Economic Partnership.
Schopmeyer is also a long-time advocate for the completion of I-69 and a founder of the Evansville Tree Advisory Board. He spoke with Inside INdiana Business about his “Boy Scout” endeavors and his skills in business, environmental, construction and property law.
Why did you become a business attorney?
I was always going to be a business lawyer from the time I was in high school. I was a finance major as an undergraduate, and I made it clear when I graduated from law school and interviewed, that’s what I wanted to do. I’m not like our four children. I knew pretty much what I wanted to do the minute I enrolled in college.
Your career spans over 40 years. What are you most proud of?
As a senior lawyer, one tends to look at what you think are your greatest successes for your clients. So it really comes down to what you have done for clients that helped build businesses that started from a few dollars to employing hundreds and growing to generate hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m proud of that. I’ve been a part of client successes that have provided jobs and built our community.
I’m also proud of my civic work. I’ve been a chairman of our regional Chamber of Commerce and economic development entities. I’m proud of my work on the Evansville Tree Advisory Board, Keep Evansville Beautiful, which is a Keep America Beautiful entity, just like Keep Indianapolis Beautiful. That’s the Boy Scout in me. I like preserving and planting trees and cleaning things up.
Some of my major successes in law have been in eminent domain cases where we recovered almost four times what the client was offered by governmental entities. And I’ve facilitated cleaning up over 100 Hoosier sites through growing our environmental law practice. There’s a picture on my bookcase above me that says, “Pollution: Is There a Solution?” It is from my fifth-grade science fair project.
As a law firm, we’ve assisted in remediating, literally, billions of dollars of sites. Indiana is a Rust Belt state. We got there because we built the hardware that won World War II for this country. Those rusty soils from those manufacturing facilities during that era are now largely remediated in no small part as a result of our creative and hard legal work.
Lastly, I am proud that we have helped bring major new industry to our region, including Toyota and what’s now known as Cleveland-Cliffs [formerly AK Steel]. They collectively employ nearly 10,000 families in southwest Indiana. While this region lost Whirlpool, for example, we’ve more than replaced it with Toyota.
Besides the many polymer-related firms we represent, we’re also a big metals producer in the Ohio Valley, mostly aluminum. Cleveland-Cliffs produces steels like the facilities we see in northern Indiana.
Tell me more about your roles with the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana and Evansville Regional Economic Partnership.
As a business attorney, I also like to think of myself as Chamber of Commerce or student council sort of person. I also serve our local convention and tourism commission. Like my mother, I like being civically involved. It’s inbred into my bloodline. My great-grandfather was a circuit-riding Methodist minister.
It makes me happy to bring people together to peacefully resolve issues, whether it’s for trees, small business or government. Democracy doesn’t work without strong civic participation.
Talk about your work with the Evansville Tree Advisory Board and your desire to create a Keep Indiana Beautiful statewide organization.
We’re working on that because we’re one of the few states that’s without such an entity. Tree boards are designed to make sure our public trees are planted and not destroyed. Evansville is blessed with Wesselman Woods and has a long history of high standards for trees. We have a pretty decent canopy because of that heritage.
Our charge now is to expand that tree canopy, which goes along with what global warming folks tell us is the best way to eradicate carbon emissions. Plus, it’s just beautiful, and it adds to our property values and quality of life. Who doesn’t like shade?
People perceive southern Indiana has the most trees because of the Hoosier National Forest, but we lack tree canopy along many of our roads, highways and in our cities. Our cities have a long way to go. This is why we need a statewide Keep Indiana Beautiful organization.
What about your advocacy for the completion of I-69 and the I-69 bridge between Evansville and Henderson, Kentucky?
I’m proud to say the Indiana side of the approach to completing the new I-69 Ohio River Bridge went to Traylor Bros., a substantial Evansville-based national bridge and tunnel construction contractor. For example, they did most of the work in New Orleans after the horrible hurricanes. It is great to see our decades of I-69 advocacy work will be soon completed by that local employer.
Traylor Brothers’ Chris Traylor is a friend. He once told me we could not finish I-69 in Indiana and Kentucky. Many years ago, he said, “Mike, you’re probably wasting your time. It is not going to happen in our lifetime. We build interstate bridges and tunnels all over the country. We lack the political moxy to do this in Indiana and Kentucky.”
I responded with something like, “Well, it will get done because finishing I-69 from Detroit to Houston serves the new growing international commercial demographic here in the Heartland of the USA.” And it is finally happening, which I remind Chris of often.
What challenges have you faced as a business attorney?
Land use planning for a business lawyer is the hardest. It’s a negotiation process involving many diverse groups. I believe I have developed a forte from doing charity work of being able to work in negotiating with groups. But in group negotiations, sometimes the other group just politically prevails.
We encounter the most injustices in this area of law, unfortunately. While “Lady Justice” prevails ultimately in most cases, land use cases are where I’ve suffered losses that I have thought we shouldn’t have lost. You just feel awful for that client in those situations. It’s like a doctor who loses someone in a routine surgery that they believe they should never have lost. It just happens.
What’s the state of business law today?
Indiana is a pro-business state, and so it’s healthy. On the innovation side, we could do better. We know that. Our private and public educational institutions are solid. Expanding freedom of choice school vouchers is going to be an investment that will have enormous educational and cultural return for Indiana 10 to 15 years from now, in my humble opinion.
What does the future look like for your firm?
We’re solid. There is an issue with recruiting talent. Talent remains the issue everywhere. While it is a more acute problem for the coasts, it looks like Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio are in a strong position to attract those departing higher crime and higher tax regions.
We’re affiliated globally through Meritas, which is a blessing for us. Meritas is for select boutique business law firms by invitation only in all major cities around the world. Meritas gives us benchmarks and allows us to compete with the larger firms of the world.
What does it mean to you to be named an Indiana 250 honoree?
It’s a high honor. The IBJ staff made a conscious decision in developing this program that they were not going to be only an Indianapolis business group, but they were also going to take a statewide business leadership focus.
They recognized those of us in the other Hoosier regional cities like South Bend, Evansville and Fort Wayne. Our other regional Hoosier cities harbor many business headquarters as well. Evansville is definitely a service center for law, medicine, banking and manufacturing. So it is good the 250 included many of us from these other vital Indiana geographies.