New attorney joins Jensen, Scott, Grunewald and Shiffler

Jensen, Scott, Grunewald and Shiffler law firm of Medford and Abbotsford welcomes new associate attorney Trevor Passmore.

Passmore is a 2024 graduate of UW-Madison Law School and began working with the firm on July 1. Jensen, Scott, Grunewald and Shiffler is a general practice law firm that has served the region for more than 75 years.

“We are happy to have Trevor join our firm. He has the skill and dedication to serve our clients and a passion for the law that is a requirement to work for our firm,” said attorney Bill Grunewald.

Passmore was born in Minnesota but has spent much of his life in Hawaii where his family owns a bowling alley in Lihue on the island of Kauai.

“We moved there when I was about 12 and I worked at the bowling alley the whole time, up until I went to college,” Passmore said. After high school he moved from the tropical paradise of Hawaii to attend Yale University in Connecticut.

Passmore didn’t know what he wanted to do when he entered college.

“I went into college very open-minded and wanting to explore professional fields,” he said. He initially started with classes for a pre-med course, reasoning that it would be the difficult to switch into later if he decided to go that route.

He did internships each summer while in school and his first summer was in a psychiatrist’s office. His second summer internship was in the circuit court in Hawaii. This is where he developed a love for the law.

“It is from the second summer that I knew I’d be going into law,” he said.

Passmore said he was drawn to the law because of the variety of problem solving that needs to take place.

“It is really wide the variety of problem solving that you get to see a lot of unique issues and it felt like an area where I was well suited to provide value for people,” he said. “I always really enjoyed games and puzzles and trying to figure out the best solution to any problem that was presented,” he said, which helps with working with clients and meeting their needs.

Passmore graduated from Yale in 2021, like many college graduates during the COVID-era, Passmore missed out on having an in-person graduation and in-person classes. He spent the pandemic living at home in Hawaii and attending classes on-line.

He said while Hawaii is not the worst place to be stuck during COVID, he was disappointed to miss out on a graduation ceremony and the many friends he was not anticipating seeing again as they went on to life after college.

One of the unique challenges with attending online classes at Yale while living on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was dealing with the time difference.

“I was 6 hours behind. My class is like at 3 AM and I'm like this sucks,” he said. He said he also missed out on doing an in-person research project having to pivot to it being more theoretical.

As he looked for law schools, Passmore said he wanted to come back to the upper midwest to complete his education.

“I still have family nearby,” he said of his reasons for wanting to come back to the region. He said he applied to schools in Iowa and Minnesota as well as UW-Madison. He said he ultimately chose UW-Madison because it was the best value of the law schools.

While at UW-Madison, Passmore participated in Rural Entrepreneurship Program. The Rural Entrepreneurship Program is an initiative intended to support entrepreneurship outside of Madison and Milwaukee. The goal of the program is two-fold: to support entrepreneurs through direct action and support for policy initiatives that create opportunity for entrepreneurs in rural Wisconsin and to support law students interested in practicing in rural communities.

“You’re effectively working as a no-cost law firm along with other students and you are supervised by a licensed attorney,” Passmore said.

As part of the program, he said they would go to small towns around the state and answer questions for people who are looking to start small businesses.With his family’s first-hand experience in running a small business, he had an interest in the role businesses play in communities. “It certainly gives me some perspective and interest in small business. I have seen the court of community interaction that stems from the way small businesses within the community are tied together and have that opportunity for symbiosis,” he said.

He said he knew he wanted to serve in a general practice firm in a smaller community. He noted that just because there are not as many attorneys, there isn’t much specialization. “You do a bit of whatever comes through the door,” he said.

Passmore said the area of law he is most passionate about is in transactional and business-related law. He said it was helped in law school by his favorite professors teaching those classes.

Last summer, Passmore gained more first-hand experience in practicing law in a small town through an internship with a law firm in Princeton, Wis. a community in Green Lake county with about 1,200 residents. He said his time working there was valuable in knowing what to expect in terms of workload and procedures working at a small firm in a rural area.

Passmore learned of the opportunity to come to Jensen, Scott, Grunewald and Shiffler when attorneys Bill Grunewald and Mike Shiffler came to UW-Madison to hold campus interviews to recruit to fill an attorney position. Passmore explained that this is an opportunity for firms to have open slots for law school students to come and interview with them.

“His interests fit our community and we are confident he will fit in well,” Grunewald said.

Passmore said he signed up and submitted his resume and met them for the first time. As it worked out, the attorney he worked under at the law firm in Princeton had been a roommate of Grunewald’s when the two were in law school. Following their first meeting, Passmore was invited up to Medford to see the office and community.

While on that visit, Passmore said he was excited about what Medford had to offer and began making plans to come here.

Passmore recently moved to an apartment in Medford. “It is certainly nicer than where I had been living in Madison through school,” Passmore said, praising the local apartment options.

While not working, Passmore said his biggest hobby is tabletop games and playing a lot of trading card games such as Magic the Gathering and Pokemon and just about any type of tabletop strategy games. He said he is excited by Medford having Tea and Tee Card and Hobby nearby on Main Street and that he is looking forward to becoming involved with what they have going on.

In addition, to spending time with his girlfriend, Abby, who works remotely in IT, Passmore is excited to explore the outdoors in the area and go camping and hiking.