Daniel J. French pursued a winding path from high school in Cassopolis to his new law career in Dowagiac.

French, whose father, Daniel H. French, practiced law in Cassopolis with former Dowagiac school board member Bill Lawrence, is coming back to Cass County from Grand Rapids after earning his law degree in 2007 from Cooley Law School in Lansing.

He practiced law in both cities.

On Monday, French joined Dennis M. Tushla at O’Connor and Tushla on Gray Street, on the corner two blocks north of E. Division Street and within walking distance of Dan’s home at Villamere.

The building Tushla converted to professional offices for himself and others had been a church, Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall.

French is not alone in his status as a second-generation attorney, although his dad retired in the spring of 2004, a few months before his son began law school that August.

Dan H., who married Dowagiac graduate Karen Dickson, now teaches in Florida.

Robert LaBre, admitted to the Bar in 2010,  practices with his father, Cass County Republican Chairman William LaBre at Bill’s office in Edwardsburg.

Dan’s “been sworn in for three years,” Tushla chuckled. “Now he’s getting sworn at.”

“I grew up in Cassopolis, right on O’Keefe Street,” French said Wednesday afternoon. “I graduated from Ross Beatty High School with the Class of 1993. I played football. At that time, we were the first team to win a playoff game. Jim Sergent (who went on to USA Today and settled in Virginia with his wife and two sons) was writing for the Vigilant back then. I remember (the former Dowagiac resident) driving around with a stuffed orangutan in his car.”

From high school, French attended Southwestern Michigan College, graduating in 1995 and transferring to Indiana University in Bloomington, graduating in 1997.

“I worked in banking and real estate and lived in Boston,” he said. “I did Internet sales during the dot.com explosion — then the implosion came right after.

“I worked at Harvard Business School and for Lockheed-Martin in Indianapolis. We did a lot of stuff with 9/11. I had just started” before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“One of his references spoke highly about the software program he set up for a FAQ (frequently asked questions) site right after 9/11 for people calling the Government Services Administration,” Tushla said.

“That was in all the phone books, 1-800-FED-INFO,” French said. “As people watched all the stuff on TV, we got a lot of tips that came in right after. Information was coming in and the FBI didn’t have time to set up its toll-free number for a day or two. People were calling the government. Most of the time it’s for passports or immigration, but 9/11 was the big watershed. I was there for four years. We did the Justice Department and the 9/11 victims fund. Mostly family. They set it up to avoid lawsuits to the airlines, like what they’re doing now with the BP oil spill, all the fishermen calling in for claims. We administered that, the telephone side of it, and then they had centers where people could walk in. The State Department, when the Iraq war kicked off, there was a number people could call for anyone traveling abroad: ‘My son’s in Venezuela and a bomb went off. Is he okay?’ We’d get them to the right  people. It’s really detail-oriented and people who cover the phones have to be able to find information fast, access it and get it to the right people.”

Besides his father, he has uncles and cousins who are lawyers, “but it was really working with the government that piqued my interest more” in attending law school.

“I didn’t necessarily plan to go to Washington, but just the idea of the role the legislative process plays. State, federal and local government regulations are pervasive,” said French, who majored in English at SMC.

Ironically, Tushla also majored in English rather than political science, history or engineering and science.

“(English) was my first love and I excelled in research and writing at Cooley,” French said. “At Cooley, you get a lot of people pursuing second careers. There was an anesthesiologist who’d already been through medical school. I thought about teaching,” like Dan H., a history major. “The love of knowledge and teaching are in his blood.”

French’s role as Tushla’s associate in a general practice will be to do “whatever he gives me. Whatever he doesn’t want to do. Family law, real estate, probate, estate planning.”

Tushla has been practicing law for almost 40 years, since February 1971.

He was still in law school when he started clerking for Jerry O’Connor.

He graduated in the spring of 1972, passed the Bar that December and stayed with the former prosecutor until he died in 1982.

He moved his practice to Dowagiac, where he lives, from Cassopolis in 1990.

Tushla has been a sole practitioner for 17 years, but at one time he practiced law with Jennifer Jewell Kitzmiller.

She left in 1993 for Berrien County.

Before Lawrence, the elder Dan French practiced law with another former prosecutor prior to Michael Dodge, Herm Saitz, who retired as a judge in Las Vegas.